If you are like many parents watching your children’s booster seats slide around while they hop into the vehicle and otherwise wonder what precisely is the way you’re supposed to incorporate the seatbelt around the bits so it’s properly positioned on the kids (we’ll get into how to always do this one correctly later in this video), or lord help […]
Read more
In the pantheon of origin stories for some of the world’s biggest businesses, there are no shortage of fascinating tales. From that time Colonel Sanders of KFC fame quite literally tried to kill his competition (via a gunfight that saw one dead and his competition jailed for it, even though said competition was just defending himself and he got shot […]
Read more
On the morning of August 27, 1939, a small aircraft was towed onto the runway at Marienehe airfield in Mecklenberg, northern Germany. To the handful of observers gathered at the edge of the field, the craft must have looked like something out of science fiction, with its gleaming barrel-shaped fuselage, gaping nose intake, and stubby wings awkwardly mounted high atop […]
Read more
Ah, McDonald’s French Fries. According to a poll we recently ran here, 48% of about 42,000 of you prefer this restaurant’s slender tan starch sticks to all the other restaurant tuber cutting offerings, with this percentage more than double the next runner up which was a blanket choice of “Other”- i.e. nearly all other restaurant french fries combined. While many […]
Read more
On August 4, 1945, William Averell Harriman, United States ambassador to the Soviet Union, received a delegation of the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneers, the Soviet equivalent of the Boy Scouts. As a symbol of cooperation between the two Allied nations during the still-raging Second World War, the Young Pioneers presented Harriman with a gift: a hand-carved wooden version of the […]
Read more
At around 7 P.M. on May 2, 1878, the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota was rocked by a massive explosion. In the blink of an eye, the Washburn A flour mill – the largest in the world – disappeared, and a giant column of dust, smoke and debris shot into the sky. The blast was felt 16 kilometres away in Saint […]
Read more
The Nazis weren’t exactly shy about the fact that they didn’t really care for individuals of a race other than the one they idealized. Further, the Japanese seemingly had no problem with peoples like the Jews, even going so far as in WWII taking in Jewish refugees from German occupied lands. Further, unlike Germany’s European allies during WWII, when the […]
Read more
Thanks to Hollywood, as well as words written on the mangled inked corpses of the leafy fellow occupants of our little planet we’ve successfully subjugated, there are a number of common ideas about how an alien invasion of Earth would go. From clandestine infiltration where our celestial enemies walk among us undetected, to these brothers from another primordial goop mother […]
Read more
At 6:45 AM on March 1, 1954, a blinding flash brighter than the sun lit up the sky above Bikini Atoll in the south Pacific. From an observation bunker on Enyu Island 30 kilometres away, scientists watched as a monstrous, glowing fireball rose over the lagoon, expanding to more than seven kilometres in diameter. Within a minute, this fireball had […]
Read more
As the Allied armies advanced through France, Italy and Eastern Europe, high ranking officials and officers in the German National Socialist Party, the SS and the Wehrmacht seem to have finally realised that taking on most of the largest industrialised countries in the World all at the same time had not been the wisest idea, and at this point there […]
Read more
In the pantheon of worst humans to ever human you will find no shortage of bastions of awful. Hitler probably has the most collective conscious panache, but at least he had the decency to bravely, and with no regard for his personal safety, infiltrate the Hitler bunker and then put a bullet through the cranium of Hitler. But individuals like […]
Read more
While Ben Franklin was remarkably successful in keeping elements of his private life very private to the point that historians can only speculate about much of it, despite having a common law marriage, he was, shall we say, noted for his overt and unabashed love of women and their company, particularly if they were educated- something he even used in […]
Read more
Ah, immortality, previously only for the gods and individuals with a fetish for chopping each other’s heads off. In more modern times, science is coming closer and closer to both identifying the tapestry of things that cause humans to grow old, and slowly but surely taking the first steps into finding ways to delay and even reverse this process for […]
Read more
Living with the Animals While modern humans have existed for at least a few hundred thousands years, we didn’t really start massively progressing from our earliest ancestors until we began forming large and very complex societies after transitioning away from small hunter-gather groups for various reasons. Critical to all this being able to happen was creating sets of rules which […]
Read more
Countless films produced in the United States feature use of rather expensive military equipment, and often also real world military personnel. Given the extreme expense of all of this using things paid for by the U.S. taxpayer to benefit for profit companies, how is this allowed? Further, how are projects that the military will support selected? Can just any U.S. […]
Read more
On June 28, 1839, a ship departed Havana, Cuba en route to Puerto Principe. Along with a crew of 7, including two slaves serving as a cabin boy and ship’s cook, the vessel was also packed with cargo worth approximately $60,000, or about $1.7 million today. This included items ranging from wine, saddles, iron castings, mill rollers, fabrics, soap, leather […]
Read more
“Helicopter’s don’t fly – they just beat the air into submission.” and “Helicopters aren’t aircraft – they’re just ten thousand parts flying in close formation.” are just two of the many tongue-in-cheek sayings which have been levelled at rotorcraft. Yet despite their often ungainly and precarious appearance, it cannot be denied that helicopters are remarkable pieces of engineering, capable of […]
Read more
The current total population of people incarcerated on our little spaceship we’ve named Earth is estimated to be around 11 million out of about 8 billion humans, or approximately 1 in 730 people walking the earth. However, 1 out of about 195 nations on our celestial rock, the United States, currently has locked up about 1 in 6 of those […]
Read more