Toastmaster Speeches

Here are some of the speeches I’ve delivered in the past and would love to deliver again.

• The Champagne Taste/Beer Budget Cookbook—Thirty humorous minutes on developing recipes and learning the lessons that fill the pages of my cookbook. Sixty minutes with a delicious demonstration of featured recipes.

• Dead Astronauts—On interstellar travel and alien visitors with readings from the novel.

· Green Math—A cold, hard look at the economics of exploiting renewable energy sources.

· The Stinky Flower—A visit to the corpse flower Amorphophalis titanum.

· A Bird’s Eye View—Birds see in the ultraviolet. They see things we can only imagine…or maybe we can’t image them at all.

· The Great Colonial Hurricane—A Category 3 hurricane hit the Massachusetts colony in 1635. That was only the beginning: the curse on the colony continued. Many settlers wanted to go back to England.

· The Chicken Gun—A visit to a gun that launches chickens to test bird impacts on airplanes.

· Heddy Lamar—Any girl can look glamorous, you just stand still and look stupid, Heddy Lamar said. The “most glamorous woman in the world” mastered the art. Her inventions guided torpedoes and led to today’s cell phone networks.

· Arithmetic Power Tools—A tour from the abacus to the modern computer.

· Ethanol as fuel—The fuel ethanol from corn fiasco: it consumes more energy and pollutes more than the petroleum it’s meant to replace.

· Twenty thousand feet under the sea—The story of the Confederate submarine Hunley, the first to sink an enemy ship in combat.

· Use Only as Directed—Germs evolve drug resistance when you don’t take all the antibiotics prescribed.

· Recycle water—Tap water, even bottled water, was recycled by everyone upstream first. San Diego shouldn’t just dump its used water in the ocean. We must reuse it.

· Alien places—A tour of the submarine caverns off La Jolla.

· Explore the Abyss—It’s time to explore the oceans.

· Exoplanets—Three hundred planets around nearby stars—and counting. All hot Jupiters, gas giants orbiting too close to their host stars. Does that mean the are no earthlike planets out there? No.

· Space Warfare—Orbiting debris endangers space missions. Weapons being developed for war in space could ground human space flight for centuries.

· The Lakes of Antarctica—One third of the world’s liquid fresh water lies in the lakes of Antarctica—lakes and rivers flowing under miles of ice at the bottom of the world.

· G.I.G.O.—Garbage In Gospel Out. Canceling the Boeing SST, a story of putting too much faith in computer predictions.

· The Car of Tomorrow—What’s in the lab and on the test track soon to show up in your garage?

· The Toastmaster’s Edge—How Toastmasters can help you find a job, keep a job, and even win a promotion.

· Alternate Energy Gradually—An engineer’s look says go slow in incorporating alternative energy sources into today’s energy infrastructure.

· In Defense of CO₂—Many scientists—including me—don’t agree with the Global Warming hysteria promulgated by the popular press. Rash efforts to regulate uses of fossil fuels may do more harm than good.

· Grassoline—A survey of progress toward plant waste derived alternatives to petroleum fuels.

• Charles Darwin—A tribute to Charles Darwin delivered on the 150^th anniversary of the publication of his book On the Origin of Species…, the most important biology book ever published.

• Fort Caroline—The French settled in North America forty-five years before the first English settlement. Their ill-fated attempts are described.

• Ghostbuster—an icebreaker speech about my work in chemical warfare and my namesake, Woodrow Wilson, who got the US into WWI with its chemical warfare.

I’m working on some new ones. Contact me if you are interested in hearing any of these.