If there’s one thing mankind has mastered during its history it’s punishing those who break the rules. In every culture and every generation we’ve seen some of the most creative, and oftentimes cruel, methods of correcting behavior. Some punishments have graduated to levels of almost unbelievably complicated, vicious, and surreal weirdness. We covered 10 of…
Author: Ian Fortey
Natural disasters are a part of life, and we have to adjust and adapt to them as best we can. But what few people have ever been able to prepare for is a food-based disaster. And not the kind you might think, like a famine or a bad case of food poisoning. Turns out there…
It’s a cliche at this point that politicians are not necessarily trustworthy. You can expect that on a long enough timeline you’re going to hear a story on the news about a politician caught in a lie, caught stealing something, or caught doing some other nefarious and otherwise underhanded deed. The breadth of the crimes…
The myths of the ancient world still inspire us today in literature and in pop culture. We tend to take it at face value that what history calls myth is nothing more than that. While there are those who firmly believe that every myth has a basis in reality, there’s little done to investigate that…
Some people say that when life gives you lemons you can make lemonade. And if life gives you a handful of metal, maybe a barrel or two, some flammable chemicals, and a few small objects that you can use as projectiles then you can make an entire battlefield’s worth of improvised weapons if you’re dedicated…
If there’s one thing mankind has mastered during its history it’s punishing those who break the rules. In every culture and every generation we’ve seen some of the most creative, and oftentimes cruel, methods of correcting behavior. Some punishments have graduated to levels of almost unbelievably complicated, vicious, and surreal weirdness. We covered 10 of…
There’s a popular adage that 50% of marriages end in divorce. That statistic may have originated sometime in the 1980s. As of 2019, it’s actually about 39% of US marriages that end in divorce. Not a stellar number by any means, but not nearly as bad as half, either. From divorce’s beginnings way back in…
Pop culture has done a good job of tempering the real life horror of the Nazi regime by painting them as foolish in a lot of ways, obsessed with the occult and the impossible in a way that made them seem somewhat incompetent or, at the very least, desperate. These stories aren’t all fake, either.…
Since rockets were first invented, several thousand of them have been launched into space with varying degrees of success. Some of these were just sounding rockets, and others have been massive machines like the 363-foot high Saturn V rocket. The learning curve for getting rockets from the ground into space has been a steep one…
Over 99% of the mass in our entire solar system exists just in the sun. It’s over a hundred times wider than Earth but more than 330,000 times as massive. And all that mass is hydrogen or helium. The entire thing has been burning for 4.6 billion years and it still has a good 5 billion years to go before…
The Amazon rainforest is an absolutely massive patch of nature that covers 2.1 million square miles across nine different countries and comprises over 16,000 different tree species. It’s estimated there are 390 billion individual trees there. With all that land, diversity, and coverage it’s no wonder that there have been more than a handful of…
Pop culture has done a lot of work convincing us that serial killers are fiendishly clever and remarkably intelligent. Hannibal Lecter is like every college professor you ever met rolled into one with a charming little cannibal center. In real life, however, things don’t necessarily work like they do in the movies. For instance, a…
There’s a saying that bad gas travels fast in a small town. But basically that just means that when you start gossiping about someone it’s going to get around. If you’re a celebrity, and you’re basically living on the world stage, then that bad gas gets right out of control. Rumors start to fly and…
In modern times we commonly refer to the reign of Queen Victoria as the Victorian Era in England. That era stretched from the year 1837 until 1901. In the grand scheme of human history, it wasn’t so long ago. In the grand scheme of culinary history, it might as well have happened a million years…
Europe is made up of around 50 sovereign countries at the moment. It covers nearly 4 million square miles and European society has mostly shaped the modern world thanks to its historical influence over every other region on the planet in the past 500 years or more. To put it bluntly, Europeans have had their…
Mankind has long been fascinated by achieving new heights. It’s literally a cliche statement that we’ll make. We look to the stars, we seek to rise above, we jump hurdles. But it’s worth noting there are plenty of things to find when we look down deep down. There are some remarkably deep places on Earth…
History is full of unpredictable, unexpected, and unbelievable events. The sheer number of crazy coincidences that have occurred certainly make you believe that the universe has a sense of humor and is routinely playing jokes on us. We’ve covered a number of the craziest coincidences in history already, and here are 10 more that stretch…
Armies have existed for about as long as civilization has. When a group of people get together, they realize they need to protect themselves from other groups. Soldiers are the ones trained to fight and protect and, generally speaking, follow the chain of command. Every once in a while it doesn’t quite work that way,…
Some people say that when life gives you lemons you can make lemonade. And if life gives you a handful of metal, maybe a barrel or two, some flammable chemicals, and a few small objects that you can use as projectiles then you can make an entire battlefield’s worth of improvised weapons if you’re dedicated…
There’s something mythical about inventors throughout history. People who were able to see the need for something that had never existed before and make it come to life. It’s a kind of genius that many aspire to but few ever achieve. And while the world would look like little more than a group of scared…
Alexander III of Macedon, better known as Alexander the Great, didn’t get his nickname for no reason. He conquered the known world by an age when most people are just getting out of entry-level positions at work. Even thousands of years after his death Alexander is still fascinating to us. And it’s no wonder, when…
Myth and legend are full of wondrous places that capture the imagination and have inspired generations of adventurers to explore the world in search of their treasures. Often they come up empty-handed, but every once in a while there seems to be a sliver of truth to the tales of these mythical places. Let’s take…
Marketing campaigns are at their best ways to entertain and educate you about new products. At their worst they are offensive, misguided, and catastrophic to a company’s bottom line. There are times when marketing can go so wrong that it can bury a company. And then there are other times we can go so wrong…
Marketing is definitely not a science. They can teach it in school, people can claim to be experts in it, but sometimes even the most successful businesses and brands drop the ball in absolutely stunning ways. A good campaign is a rare thing, and it inspires consumers to go out and consume your products. Most…