You can’t swing a cat on the internet without running into something that was made by AI these days. For a lot of people, this can be hard to detect. What we call AI can take many forms, and some of it is definitely used to cut corners, break rules, or defraud people. Generative AI,…
Author: Ian Fortey
Language is incredibly diverse in our world. There are around 7,000 spoken languages in the world right now and a few dozen of them are known by just a single person. As many as 90% are spoken by less than 100,000 people. Dozens of other languages are officially extinct with no one left to speak…
We know people have wanted to journey to the center of the Earth since at least 1864 when Jules Verne published Journey to the Center of the Earth. Likely it was a curiosity for at least a few years before that. But the practicality of digging your way to the planet’s center is not as…
The internet seems to run on conspiracy theories. There are so many of them around that you probably have a favorite one of your own. Half of Americans believe at least one medical conspiracy theory, like the FDA, is secretly hiding a cure for cancer. Maybe yours is about who shot JFK. Or if the…
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is arguably responsible for making “multiverse” part of the everyday vernacular of millions of people worldwide, but they didn’t create the idea. Multiverse theory, or the Many Worlds Theory as it was first known, was proposed in 1957 by a physicist named Hugh Everett. Before Everett, a man named Erwin Schrodinger…
Technically speaking nothing is faster than light. That’s it, the story’s over, time to go home. Except that is the very simple, very basic answer to the question “is anything faster than light?” A more complicated answer is that nothing is faster than light except for when we can come up with circumstances in which…
Every so often the news will cover a story about UFOs. There is generally little to these stories, but sometimes there’s enough to fuel speculation amongst the devout that perhaps our world has been visited by beings from another. Speculation about alien life is certainly not a new phenomenon. It’s also not strictly the realm…
You are not going to make it through life without getting sick. It happens to the best of us. What kind of sickness you end up with depends on a number of factors. Some illnesses are far easier to get over than others. Some are pretty much death sentences the moment you’re diagnosed. The cause…
The internet is full of articles and social media posts assuring you that a movie cannot be successful unless it makes at least twice its budget. You can find them all over the place. This has been written about since at least 2011. The idea that a movie needs to double its budget to be…
On June 5, 2024, astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams left the Earth for the International Space Station. The mission had been delayed for seven long years thanks to various technical setbacks and other problems. The length of the mission was to be 8 days. Then something happened. The astronauts were using something called the…
A molecule is really just some atoms that are stuck together. Water, H2O, is a molecule. Next to a simple atom, it’s the most basic part of any chemical compound. It’s the small part of any substance you can make without breaking it into something that changes its entire composition. Most of us know the…
Do you believe in ghosts? A majority of Americans do. In a survey of 1,000 people, over 61% said they believed in ghosts. Earlier polls suggested fewer did, at around 41%. Years before that it was 42%. Even at its lowest, that’s still 136 million people. That’s a lot of folks believing in ghosts. The…
In 2004, then-President Bush was expected to announce a new space initiative. There would be a manned mission to Mars and our first moon base would be up and running by 2020. It was set to cost between $40 billion and $80 billion. More recent estimates suggest the cost would be around half a trillion…
Have you ever pondered what the most painful way to die might be? It’s a morbid curiosity that’s perfectly natural and most of us have wondered it at one time or another. It’s also probably very hard to answer that question for any number of reasons. There are all kinds of terrible ways to die,…
Having access to impossible information, divined from spirits or gods or the thoughts of another human, is a fairly old concept. The oracle of Zeus at Dodona could supposedly offer his priests insight into the god’s will through all manner of spiritual and esoteric means. For literally thousands of years we’ve had clairvoyance, mediums, spiritualists,…
Most everyone in the world today knows that radiation exposure is bad but we have little framework for what that means. We’ve seen images of people exposed to it, but most of us have never had to experience it firsthand. Can radiation exposure kill you? You bet. But how it damages your body is a…
It’s a good rule of thumb to avoid getting bit by a snake whenever possible. There are roughly 3,000 kinds of snakes worldwide, and up 10 to 15% of them are venomous. That may not seem like much, but these are venomous snakes, so it’s enough. Plus, those snakes account for about 138,000 fatalities every…
Nearly everything a person does has an intention behind it. Your words and your actions are done towards a goal. Sometimes it’s clumsy and awkward and you miss your mark, sometimes you nail it and succeed perfectly. It’s not just people, either. Businesses work the same way, stories, ideas, you name it. They all have…
Most everyone has heard of Bigfoot, even if you know him as Yeti, Skunk Ape, Sasquatch, Abominable Snowman, or a dozen others. Many cultures worldwide have legends of a large, man-like beast that lives in the wild and is remarkably cagey. Bigfoot, in the North American sense where his name is literally Bigfoot, only dates…
Back in the 1950s and ’60s school children had to do duck and cover drills in the classroom so they would know what to do in the event of a nuclear war. Apparently, all you had to do was hide under your desk. Lucky for us in the Modern Age there are so many more…
We live in a consumer world and we are spoiled for choice all the time, even if the prices of things are through the roof and we can’t actually buy everything we want. The fact remains that there is plenty of stuff in the world and there always has been. Where all that stuff comes…
In a horror movie about demon possessions, you’re going to want to know the name of the demon if you ever hope to get it out of somebody. Names have power. And the real world, your name can affect how people treat you. Employers are known to engage in discrimination against potential employees based solely…
When you hear the word “mummy” you likely think of Egypt. Those mummies are what you might call the traditional kind. They were mummified intentionally, the organs removed, the flesh wrapped, and they were stored away as per custom and ritual. There is another kind of mummy, however. Natural mummification occurs when temperature and humidity…
In the present, we often have a skewed view of the past. We look at events from our modern perspective and apply our modern opinions to them. It’s hard to put yourself in the mindset of a time and a place that you were never a part of. If we do try to consider the…