Mankind has been fascinated by the idea of building something in our own image for centuries. Technology is only just catching up with our dreams these days and humanoid robots are slowly but surely becoming a reality. The kind of reality that pop culture assures us will kill us all. And it’s easy to laugh…
Author: Ian Fortey
Price fixing is probably as old as industry itself. It occurs in almost any competitive business when two or more parties realize that, instead of competing with each other to make money, they can agree on setting fixed prices for their products to artificially drive them up, forcing consumers to spend more no matter what.…
Winning the lottery seems to be the definition of lucky. In the US, you have a one in 176 million shot of winning the Mega Millions lottery. State lotteries have odds of one in 42 million. So pulling this off is pretty dramatic. Despite that, some lottery winners have made the unfortunate discovery that money…
Doctors have been prescribing medicine for far longer than most people realize. Early prescriptions were etched on clay tablets over 4,000 years ago. The first drugstore was in Baghdad in the eighth century. Medicine has evolved greatly in that time, and the number of prescriptions doctors prescribe has skyrocketed. Upwards of 4.69 billion were filled…
The side hustle has become all too commonplace these days, with many people needing to secure a second income stream just to get by. Even people you’d think are pretty secure with their earnings, like these well known celebrities, have taken up side gigs. 10. John Malkovich Has His Own Clothing Line John Malkovich…
The Paycheck Protection Program was set up in 2020 by the US government as a business loan plan to assist businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic. A massive $953 billion was made available for employers so that they could continue to pay employees. That was what the money was supposed to be for. But with that…
There were 39,000 organ transplants performed in 2020. That’s a lot of potentially life-saving operations. But it’s also worth noting that there are 106,572 people on donor lists. So the need far outweighs the ability to fill it. That’s part of the reason why there are some rigorous standards in place to qualify for an…
No one likes to be sick, and in the age of Covid this hits home more than ever. The moment you get a cough or fever, you have to wonder if it’s just a cold or something worse. And even if it’s not a devastating and lethal illness, if you’re sick with anything, you’re going…
They say the truth is stranger than fiction and while that may not always be true, sometimes the real world is more than willing to throw a few curveballs our way. As an example, look no further than nature. Even something as simple as plantlife can become exceedingly bizarre and downright creepy when you start…
It’s not easy to make the sun go away. Aside from limited cloud cover, we only experience solar eclipses on a very infrequent basis. And there’s no sinister Mr. Burns out there making a sun blocking device that keeps us in eternal shade. That said, there have been a handful of times in history when…
When it comes to throwing everything at a wall and seeing what sticks, few organizations commit as hard as the military. They’re willing to try anything to see if it gets them an advantage, from using bats as explosives to giving psychic soldiers a try. Not every idea works, of course, and sometimes an idea…
We live in an age in which France is lining up flying taxis to help people navigate the next Olympic games and several world governments have stated plans to land a human on Mars within the next decade or so. It’s no wonder, then, that with this level of technology at our fingertips, people have…
Organized crime has become a very hard to understand facet of the modern world. Arguably, no one wants to support crime but, by the same token, we have a habit of elevating organized crime figures to a kind of hero status. You need to look no further than Tony Soprano to appreciate that. And while…
Sumerian is the oldest written language, dating back to 3100 BCE. Language itself is believed to have started somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, when humans developed the capacity to speak using what we understand as a voice box. And since that time it’s estimated humans have come up with an estimated 31,000 languages.…
Human history is full of examples of people claiming to have a link to the divine, to the world of the dead, to spirits and more. Alexander the Great visited the Oracle at Amun in 332 BC. Astrology was developed in the 3rd millennium BC in Mesopotamia. Fortune-telling goes back as far as 4000 BCE…
There’s no doubt humans are the most clever animals on the planet Earth. We developed tool making 2.6 million years ago and in the present we have Swiss army knives and cheese graters, so it’s all worked out well. While animals have yet to develop iPhones and vape pens, that doesn’t mean they haven’t developed…
Urban legends, at least as far as that term has been used to describe them, are relatively new. The name dates back to the 60s and, though they come in many different styles and genres, the basic idea is the same. It’s a story told as though it were true. Often the details are changed…
The word doctor actually comes from the Latin word for “teacher.” These were meant to be people of knowledge and expertise. People who knew things the rest of us didn’t. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? In a general sense, that still holds true. But if you pay attention to the news, you know that not…
Arm wrestling of one kind or another has been around since Ancient Egypt. This, despite the fact Wikipedia will tell you it was created in the 1950s. But the idea of a friendly yet physical way to prove one’s mettle or settle disputes is obviously an old one. Wrestling went back thousands of years. Things…
Challenge courses are a relatively new phenomenon in the world but have exploded in recent years. In the 1980s, there were under 1,000 challenge courses operating in the United States. Today there are over 15,000. There are also no formal rules over what makes a challenge course. In the beginning, they were little more than…
Have you ever seen those videos online of a boot or a cactus and then someone comes along with a knife and cuts it and, holy smokes, it was a cake all along? We’re fascinated by that kind of tomfoolery because it’s done in a safe and enjoyable way. What we don’t like is when…
The human mind likes to make sense of things. We look for patterns and order in everything, even if it’s not really there. Few things spark our interest in finding meaning more than when we stumble upon a coincidence. Many people believe they have to mean something. And whether or not these amazing coincidences are…
Sharks are the most maligned creatures on earth. For most of human history, no one cared about these animals until swimming began to grow in popularity. The odd shark attack put them on the radar, and then the movie Jaws sealed their fate. They were slaughtered by the thousands afterward. Nowadays up to 100 million…
Missing persons statistics are harrowing. Upwards of 600,000 people per year go missing in America alone every year. Global statistics are hard to pin down, but some reports indicate over 800,000 children per year go missing. While many of these people are found again, many more are not. So it should come as no surprise…