Author: Eric Yosomono

Pirates have fascinated the masses for hundreds of years. Romanticized in fiction, the image of a pirate has crystallized into a bearded, peg-legged man, with a funny hat and possibly a parrot on his shoulder. The pirate was almost relegated to a quaint decades-old obsession until Disney revived the swashbucklers by rebooting a Disneyland ride…

Large predators are feared because they’re so efficient at killing. Humans think they’re the apex of the food chain, but even in today’s tame world there are still man-eaters. When you think of things that stalk and kill our fellow man, the biggest dangers that come to mind are sharks and lions. After the Japanese…

History is awash with decisions that if they happened differently could have changed the world. Atari founder Noland Bushnell was asked to be a key investor in the early days of Apple Inc. Now he says “I was so smart, I said no. It’s kind of fun to think about that, when I’m not crying.”…

While Spielberg guaranteed that the world would remember Oskar Schindler, there were others who also saw the plight of the European Jews and went the extra mile to save as many as possible.  While TopTenz has already mentioned Raoul Wallenberg and Chiune Sugihara there were others who rose to the challenge, taking incredible risks and…

Prison populations are a huge problem throughout the world. Prisons are expensive to run and can turn into “How to be a better criminal 101,” yet some of those who are incarcerated are among the most evil and vicious people of our societies. Do we try and rehabilitate inmates or punish them? With overcrowding it…

The study of etymology can lead to some surprising results. Between English’s mixed Latin, Germanic and French origins, explorers traveling the world and borrowing words, and Britain’s time as a worldwide empire, many English words have bizarre and muddled origins. The journeys of these ten words from their original meaning to their modern definition are…

If one were able to stop Hitler and his rise to power, millions of lives could have been saved and just about all of World War II could have been prevented. There were multiple incidents throughout Hitler’s life that could have ended his reign, oftentimes before it even started, but Hitler’s unpredictability, paranoia, and plain old dumb…

In Darwin’s evolution organisms fight and adapt into an evolutionary niche that they can then thrive to breed and multiple.  The American economy is much the same way.  New immigrants and American minorities find their own economic niche that they then thrive in and pass on to their families and communities.  Some stick to what…

As we’ve already talked about Poland wasn’t actually that nice of a country before it was crushed under German blitzkrieg but that is no reason to erase Poland’s contribution to WWII.  Known as the spark that ignited World War II the country is widely regarded as just a speed bump and minor inconvenience to the…

Museums and libraries are human treasures, but they aren’t eternal. All it takes is one well-timed disaster, man-made or otherwise, and the entire thing could go up in flames. Today, we focus on the man-made disasters, those cases where people actively, and successfully, destroyed human knowledge and delayed our advancement as a species.

According to the American government, their involvement in the Vietnam War started on November 1, 1955, and lasted until the Americans pulled out in early March 1973. The War, and the protest movement it created, defined the baby boomer generation. Decades later, this war is still shrouded in myths, either from the propaganda during the…

Fresh water on this planet is a looming crisis that is slowly sneaking up on an apathetic world. Less than 1% of water on this planet is for us humans, and about 2% of that is locked up in ice that is slowly melting, uselessly, into the oceans. Salt water abounds in our seas, but…

For the last 100 years, women’s rights have been undergoing a struggle, resulting in women clawing their way up the equality scale with men. While the West still has a ways to go, Western women can look to the developing world to see just how bad things were. Yet not all of these regions are…

One of the sad truths about our little human race is that, far too often, we just don’t like each other.  This goes for the little guy and heads of state equally.  Of course when the latter don’t like each other, war is often the result. We all know the famous battles glorified by history…

Some actors are so good in their roles, that the viewing public forgets they’re watching a fictional movie.  The performance draws them into the character and film until they think it’s real.  This creates awkward situations for the actor who can be, at best, typecast into a particular role.  At worst, they become universally despised…

Enlisting in the United States Marines Corps is not an afternoon of miniature golf and dinner at Cracker Barrel.  Enlisting in the USMC is heavy.  When one walks into the recruiting office, you already know that this is going to be drastically life changing, and you are about to enter a completely new world.  In…

Don’t worry, we’re not talking about some diamond-encrusted Barbie or a mini-Lamborghini.  No, these toys are somewhere in a closet and, quite possibly, you might have played with them in your childhood.  They are hard-to-find toys and collectibles that, for whatever reason, are holy grails in the collecting world.  Right now they could be sitting in your…

Mother Nature isn’t dependable, so for those who need to ride the wave even when the water is flat as glass, we have a list of the top ten ways you can surf without those undependable ocean waves.  Surfs Up! 10. Ride A Tsunami Created By A Collapsing Glacier Professional surfers Garrett McNamara and Kealii…

Some countries like Germany, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Iran just have a bad reputation.  There are, of course, others I won’t get into (I’m looking at you North Korea).  But other countries like Holland, Canada and most of Scandinavia are looked at as the good side of our small, orbiting pile of rock.  Yet these nations aren’t…