As we wind down the last week of 2015 and writers across the globe struggle to tie it all together, readers have two choices: look back and rank order the things that happened last year or look forward and make some guesses on what’s going to happen in 2016. This is the first of those… a look back—perhaps with a sprinkling of the latter.

As I’ve indicated a few times here, I have a lot of disparate interests. This is one of the few posts that attempts to tie them all together. We’ll see how it goes. And now, without