Disney has undeniably made a lot of unusual business decisions over the years, like that time they built a town in Florida in an attempt to create a perfect community that ended up being a haven for old people to have sex with each others’ wives while fake snow falls outside. But the one that keeps us up at night […]
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In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we start with the rather curious way in which George Eastman, founder of Kodak, died. Next up, we have a brief message from our sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of amazing classes covering dozens of creative and entrepreneurial skills. You can take classes in everything from photography […]
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Randrew asks: Why do people say the human soul weighs 21 grams? It’s often said that it’s impossible to put a price on a human life, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t define it by other metrics, something physician Duncan MacDougall tried to do in the early 20th century by setting up an experiment to discern the weight of […]
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The Room is a cinematic paradox. Simultaneously considered one of the worst films ever made and an unintended work of comedic geniuis, it has enjoyed remarkable success since its original 2003 release. Despite being the subject of numerous documentaries and most recently a film starring James Franco, The Disaster Artist, that ironically eclipsed the film it was inspired by’s box […]
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On August 9, 1991 at about 6:30 in the evening, thousands of motorists heading home after a long day of work across the UK were forced to pull over and stop due to a brief comment they’d just heard during a sports broadcast. The comment wasn’t reporting a shock loss or injury, but a joke made by cricket commentator, Jonathan […]
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Briday asks: Is it true that Bill Gates didn’t take any days off work in his 20s? Bill Gates has frequently stated, “I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one.” He goes on, “When I was in my 20s and early 30s, my whole life was focused on work. I didn’t take vacations or weekends off. I […]
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The universe has been finding ways to mess with people long before Edward A. Murphy uttered his famed statement in the aftermath of Dr. John Paul Stapp strapping himself onto a rocket powered sled. One of the earliest instances of this “law” being stated explicitly happened in 1877 where Alfred Holt, in an address to the Institution of Civil Engineers, […]
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Stacey asks: Before Spinal Tap, did anything else “go up to 11”? In the hilarious rockumentary This is Spinal Tap released in 1984, Spinal Tap guitarist Nigel Tufnel proudly boasts of his Marshal amp, “This is a top to what we use on stage, but it’s very, very special because, if you can see, the numbers all go to 11. […]
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In the 1970s, BP oil pipeline workers came across a curious item about 12 miles southwest of Cruden Bay, Aberdeenshire sitting about 86 meters under the surface- an old German U-Boat. In fact, one of the last U-Boats ever sunk in WWII. Unlike so many of its fellow subs, however, this one’s demise came about owing to a sequence of […]
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In modern times if you want to show off extreme wealth, you may purchase expensive sports cars, buy a private jet, wear flashy jewelry, or, as boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. has been known to do, travel around carrying suitcases filled with sometimes millions of dollars in cash. Such extravagant displays of wealth are a trademark of the boxer with Mayweather […]
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Neikoptic asks: If I was transported back in time to Medieval times like in a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court could I still talk to people or would we not understand each other? Contrary to what many a Grammar Nazi the world over would have you believe, language is constantly evolving, occasionally extremely rapidly, and there is nothing wrong […]
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Back in the halcyon days of the 1980s, when all people of the world had to worry about was total annihilation via widespread nuclear war, an American called Dennis Hope made international news when he revealed that after exploiting a loophole in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, he had become the sole owner of our nearest celestial neighbour, the Moon. […]
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Considered to be little more than a historical curio today, the early 18th century Puckle Gun was nonetheless one of the most advanced firearms of its age, capable of firing one shot every 6 seconds in an era when even the most highly skilled soldier equipped with a musket typically topped out at a rate of only about one shot […]
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The favoured instrument of the likes of Lisa Simpsons, former President Bill Clinton, and the co-author of this article and founder of TodayIFoundOut, the saxophone has variously been described as everything from “the most moving and heart-gripping wind instrument” to the “Devil’s horn”. Rather fittingly then the instrument’s inventor, Adolphe Sax, was a similarly polarising figure and led a life […]
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Alex K. asks: Is it true that sommeliers can’t tell the difference between expensive and cheap wines? Having a seasoned tongue that can detect the subtle differences between different kinds of adult grape juice is a sure sign of class. In fact, the go-to Hollywood trope for showing that a character is refined is to give them a penchant for […]
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In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we skip the quick fact because this one took forever to research and put together and I ran out of time. 😉 Instead we jump right into the main topic which is a very real phenomenon that popped up off and on for several hundred years called Dance Mania or St. Vitus’ […]
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Peter E. asks: What could I do during freefall after falling out of a plane to maximize my chances of surviving? According to the Aircraft Crashes Record Office in Geneva, between 1940 and 2008 there were 157 people who fell out of planes without a parachute during a crash and lived to tell about it. A full 42 of those […]
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Humanity has collectively been responsible for a depressingly large amount of animals going extinct in our relatively short time on this Earth. However, perhaps no creature was wiped from the face of the planet for as silly a reason as the great auk. Once endemic to the North Atlantic, the great auk was a flightless seabird not too dissimilar in […]
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