It’s easy to take hearing for granted. We hear a thousand things every day and much of it fades into the background. The hum of your refrigerator, cars on the road, wind in the leaves, and so much more. It is the wordless song of the modern world and it has too many verses to…
Author: Ian Fortey
The world is full of terrifying and dangerous beasts ranging from lions to great white sharks to black mambas. Nature is designed for killing, one way or another. So it’s a relief to know that a lot of creatures are innocent and harmless and even friendly, right? Sure it is. Except for when those seemingly…
The most inescapable part of life is death. Despite that, science keeps coming closer and closer to ways to reverse death, undo death, or just ignore it entirely. Not that we’re really making zombies or resurrecting anyone yet, but you never know what the future holds. 10. Dead Pigs Have Had Organ Function Restored In…
America has often been described as a litigious country and there’s no shortage of examples of lawsuits we perceive as frivolous or silly. The thing nearly all lawsuits have in common, whether they have merit or not, is that there is a plaintiff and a defendant and they are two separate entities. That said, every…
Most of us are aware of the work of Oskar Schindler thanks to the film Schindler’s List. Less well known are the “Righteous Among the Nations.” These are non-Jewish people recognized by Israel as having put their own lives on the line during the Holocaust to rescue Jewish people from the Nazis. Like Schindler, they…
When George Romero made Night of the Living Dead back in 1968, he set into motion a slow-moving, ravenous machine that would devour pop culture many years later. To hear most people tell it, the zombie genre has peaked and is now in the twilight of its relevance but with a solid stable of zombie…
Can any animated show claim to be more influential than The Simpsons? At this point, it may be the most influential TV show period, animated or otherwise. And whether you love or hate the “new” Simpsons, you can’t deny that the show has been a powerhouse of comedy for over 30 years now. But beyond wacky…
There’s an old saying that goes “use it or lose it” which essentially means if you have a thing, you better make use of it before it’s gone. We don’t have a lot of sayings about overuse, however, and it turns out we should. There are plenty of things in life you can overuse that…
Deception serves a curious purpose in the history of mankind. You can lie to ruin another person, you can lie to get yourself out of trouble, and you can even lie to be kind. Lies are told because sometimes they’re easy and lies are told because sometimes they’re incredibly complex and therefore seem more plausible.…
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” The idea is that you can take an old idea, even a good one, and improve upon it by making something better. That’s a great idea, and the world is full of examples of this happening…
For most of us in the Western world life follows a predictable path, at least in a very basic sense. You live with your family; you go to school; you get a job; you get your own home. There can be a million and one roadblocks and variations but that’s often how it works. Whether…
Evolution is a remarkable process. Any life form from lowly sponges to massive whales can show evidence of how the process of adaptation has worked to its benefit over many long generations. Sometimes an adaptation works so well it becomes a defining characteristic of every branch of that life form’s family tree. Other times they…
For the last 20 years or more the internet has rolled out “this is how Skynet/The Matrix starts” jokes every single time there’s a new advancement in robotics that makes the news. You can pretty much set your watch by it. And while it’s a bit of a tired old trope, people seem to enjoy it.…
One’s place of residence is generally fairly predictable. You might live in a house or an apartment in most parts of the Western world. Some people live in trailers, some in tents, and there are people who live in caves and trees out there as well. Still, you can count most of the places you’d…
It’s usually not a bad thing to be unique and to know where you want to be in life. About 72% of Americans live in the same town where they grew up. Most people live an average of 18 miles from their mother. So once we find a place we like, we stay there. And…
Language is a constantly evolving thing and it can be tricky to navigate for any number of reasons. If you’re a non-native speaker, the grammatical rules of a new language can be confusing. If you’re trying to master English it can be doubly so thanks to gender specific terms that don’t always exist in every…
In the age of social media we’ve learned more than ever that celebrities are just like the rest of us, because of course they are. They’re people. Some are good, some are bad. Some are smart, some are maybe not so smart. But that’s to be expected. And just like the rest of us, celebrities…
It’s not unusual for a person to look back at their life and imagine how things could have been different. If only you’d done this instead of that. But, of course, that’s always just a thought exercise. We can never go back again. Some things just never happened and we have to be okay with…
The saying “you are what you eat” is generally just a reminder to eat good and healthy things. If it were a literal assessment of people and their diets, then the world would be a weird and messy place because the average person eats a lot of questionable things. In fact, the average appetite is…
Everything comes from somewhere. It’s a statement so preposterously obvious it’s rarely worth even making. And yet the implications of it are rarely explored. Where do you come from? Finding the precise time and place that humans began is no easy feat, and it’s the same for most life forms. But there are some things…
Mankind has been looking for ways to improve their sex lives for about as long as they’ve had sex lives. The history of aphrodisiacs goes back thousands of years and every ancient culture had its preferences. Oysters, chocolate, strawberries, the horn of some random animal; you name it, people have tried it. But there is…
Statistics show that 83% of American families eat fast food at least once a week. About 10% of your annual income goes towards it on average. So it’s not hard to see why other businesses might want to adopt a fast food model for their own business. Even if their own business doesn;t lend itself…
They say that when you lose something it’s in the last place you look, which makes sense because you wouldn’t keep looking anywhere else. That’s just something you’ve lost, though. When it comes to discovering something new, the sky is truly the limit for where you can find it. Sometimes it makes sense, but sometimes…
One of the hardest things to wrap your head around in life is that nothing is black and white. People are multifaceted and even the most awful humans in history had to have moments when they did normal, everyday stuff. It’s our nature to want to imagine people in one-dimensional terms – good people are…