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.…
Author: Ian Fortey
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…
Carl Sagan once said “somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” It’s that desire to know what is not already known that drives humanity beyond the stars. We push beyond our own world to the reaches of space to see what’s out there. And what we’ve found is literally beyond comprehension. The James Webb…
Have you ever heard the saying “everything old is new again?” There are plenty of examples of this being true in the worlds of music and fashion and even artistic movements. New generations rediscover the past and people get to enjoy it all over again. It happens so often that sometimes we don’t even realize…
If you ever watch life hack videos on YouTube, you know that people are constantly finding cool new ways to do things. Sometimes that means taking an already existing tool or item and adapting it to a new purpose that makes it even better. This adaptability has a long history. Sometimes people invent a thing…
Have you ever wished you could be someone else? It’s not an uncommon thought, we’re often envious of some part of another’s life. Money, fame, freedom, all sorts of things. Or maybe it’s less what someone else has and just wanting to get away from something you have to endure. No matter the reason it’s…
Sports are likely as old as mankind in one form or another. We play games when we have the time and ability to do so. And that means we’ve had a long, long time to develop different sports. Some obviously become popular and take the world by storm, like baseball or soccer. Others are a…
The US self-help industry is worth over $10 billion a year. That’s a ton of money people are spending to get other people to tell them how to be better people in one way or another. You’d think, if it worked, it would decrease in value every year as people got better and better until…
The world is full of inverse correlations that we pay little attention to. Things like how the less water you consume, the hotter you feel on a summer’s day. That makes sense, and you’re not likely to wonder about it. Anything where two variables have a contrary relationship qualifies, so long as the value of…
April Fool’s Day has been observed in one form or another for hundreds of years. Some of the tricks and jokes played on the day are simple and harmless, while others can be oddly elaborate and mean spirited. In modern times, you can count on newspapers, businesses and websites to run fake stories every April…