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There are some things in life that everybody just knows, like where the Eiffel Tower is, or why it’s okay to catch a butterfly with your hands, but not a bee. These are examples of the kind of knowledge that is so basic, you just pick it up naturally throughout your life and couldn’t possibly [...]

Celebrating TopTenz.net’s 1,000th list, coming up on August 3, 2012, here is our 4th list this week about the number 1,000. “What will the world will be like in 1,000 years” seems like an absurd question to even ask, especially since the degree to which the world changes in 100 years is overly ambitious enough [...]

As everyone knows, homeschooling just doesn’t work.  While you might end up smart, the lack of developed social skills will surely cripple you for life.  While all you crazy and proud “homeschool graduates” out there might count people like the founder of the Human Genome Project and the youngest MIT professor ever among your ranks, [...]

The first commercially screened movie was Workers Leaving the Factory, and it was… workers leaving a factory. With competition like that, and in the notoriously repressive nature of Elizabethan times, you probably expect the early movies to all be dull and predictable. Don’t you believe it. In the days before censors, focus groups, or rules [...]

We all believe things to be true that are, in fact, quite wrong. Many of these “facts” we learned in school, while some of them we picked up from friends or on TV—or just “heard somewhere.” Whatever their source, however, they have subsequently proven to be erroneous, demonstrating once again that just because something is [...]

How to determine who the greatest inventors in history were is often a passionate and, at times, even a heated debate. Many men can lay claim to having invented or, at very least, perfecting someone else’s obscure invention, making such a listing problematic at best. Fortunately, I don’t maintain any personal favorites, which will hopefully [...]

Some of the most influential and beloved horror films came from an era before gory special effects, prosthetic limbs designed to be torn off actors, and meager shock scares.  These were the silent horror films.  Even today, while many silent films have disappeared from popular consciousness, silent horror films still maintain a widespread audience.  Whether [...]

A format war occurs when two incompatible versions of a similar technology begin to compete against one another in the market.  In almost every case, one of the two formats wins out in the end, either because of a better marketing strategy or a superior product, leaving groups of unlucky consumers with an obsolete technology [...]

History books will often lead you to believe that the world’s great inventions and discoveries were the work of a single person with a flash of genius, but the reality is rarely that simple. In most cases, it was only after years of work and input from countless inventors that something was finally created. Still, [...]