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,…
Author: Ian Fortey
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…
Russia is more than just dancing bears, vodka, and oligarchs. It has those things in spades but at 6.6 million square miles with a population of 144 million you know there has to be a few more things going on. It’s a very misunderstood country with admittedly a lot of awful things going on, but it…
Most of us in the Western World aren’t as familiar with the history of other nations as we are with our own. For instance, the history of Japan is likely totally unknown to most people beyond their involvement in the Second World War to anyone who hasn’t gone out of their way to learn about…
Usually when we think of archaeology, we’re thinking of something very old and ancient. Oddly enough, that doesn’t just apply to the things being discovered such as ancient tombs, or dinosaur bones. But the idea of discovering these things seems to be old, too. The fact is that archaeologists are discovering new things all the…
Mankind has been creating boats for about 8,000 years now. The earliest boats were either rafts or canoes and obviously pretty simple in their construction and function. If you’ve ever seen a modern super-yacht or aircraft carrier you know how significantly the times have changed. But the path from ancient raft of reeds strapped together…
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…
When’s the last time you heard of any good human experimentation? It’s probably been a while. Human experimentation is often grim, grisly and downright terrifying. Sometimes it’s physically harrowing while other times it’s psychologically scarring. Some of the worst examples have proven that mankind has a boundless creativity when it comes to subjecting our own kind…
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…
They say there’s no accounting for taste, and sometimes the divide between the critic and the common person is quite extensive. There is a kind of elitism associated with any kind of criticism whether it’s for art or food or film. People who make a living criticizing other things are often derided when they have…
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…
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…
NASA is always looking to the stars as are many amateur astronomers around the world. While our own solar system only has eight planets (sorry Pluto, we still love you), it’s estimated that there are billions and billions of them throughout the universe. And that includes over 4,000 exoplanets that we have confirmed so far. Some…
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…
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,…
There are 570 recognized native tribes currently living in the United States, with more in Canada and Mexico. The first people to populate North America likely did so around 17,000 years ago. That’s a long time to develop not just a history but a mythology about the world around you and how it works. The…
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…
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…
A lot of career politicians seem to have fairly boring backstories, at least as far as most of us can recall off the tops of our heads. Problem is, if someone’s been in politics for the last 40 years it seems like there’s not much else you can know about them. But not every world…