This is a weekly wrap of our popular Daily Knowledge Newsletter. You can get that newsletter for free here. How Dick Came to Be Short for Richard The name Richard is thought by most etymologists to derive from the Proto-Germanic ‘Rikharthu’, meaning more or less “hard ruler” (‘Rik-‘ meaning ‘ruler’ and ‘-harthu’ meaning ‘hard’). This was adopted into Old High […]
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The 1890s were a gilded age of sports in America. Backed by the country’s moral and intellectual elite in the form of ministers and urban reformers, institutions like the YMCA were popularized, enforcing the rather novel idea of healthful recreation via organized sports. While this may seem obvious to us today, this was only decades after a time when watching […]
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Marco Rossi asks: Is it true that the queen of England isn’t required to have a passport when she visits other countries? As the reigning monarch of the United Kingdom, the commonwealth, and certain other countries that have since declared independence but decided they kind of like having the Queen on their money, Queen Elizabeth II enjoys a number of […]
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Initially designed and produced during WW2 for British soldiers, the Sten was developed as a direct response to both dwindling supplies of American made Thompson machine guns and the evacuation of Dunkirk, during which the British abandoned many thousands of guns. In an effort to re-arm its troops as quickly as possible for the defense of the homeland, the British […]
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In this week’s “best of” our YouTube channel, we discuss whether Olympic medalists receive cash prizes, why potatoes are called spuds, if sex before an athletic event will hinder performance, where mosquitoes go during the daytime, the ridiculous nuclear launch code previously used by the US at all minuteman silos and why vitamins make urine bright yellow. Click here to […]
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Melissa T. asks: What is the process involved with climbing Mount Everest? Do you need a permit or something or can anyone just try and climb it if they want to try it? Standing at a foreboding 8,848 metres (or 29,029 feet) high, Mount Everest is recognised as the Earth’s highest mountain. While Everest isn’t generally considered to be the […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Ted Williams’s lifelong dream was to be known as “the greatest hitter who ever lived.” It’s sad, then, that today many people know him as “that baseball player who got cryonically frozen.” HEADING FOR HOME In the summer of 2001, some old friends went to Hernando, Florida, to pay a […]
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Jared M. asks: Why are breasts called boobs? There’s an oft repeated and decidedly untrue claim that Eskimos have hundreds of words for “snow”. (Beyond the fact that there is no single “Eskimo language”, when talking about the wider Eskimo-Aleut language family, these actually have roughly the same number of root-words for snow as English.) The false claim that they […]
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This is a weekly wrap of our popular Daily Knowledge Newsletter. You can get that newsletter for free here. The Strange Story of the First Olympian Disqualified for Doping Olympians have been bending (and occasionally breaking) the rules in an effort to give themselves an edge over the competition since the games began. Despite this, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) […]
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Packed tighter than a sardine in the one-man Freedom 7 capsule, 37-year-old Alan Shepard couldn’t wait any longer. His mission – which originally was going to make Shepard the first human in space – had already been delayed weeks, allowing Yuri Gagarin and the Russians to beat him in blasting off for the stars. Now, in his fourth hour sitting […]
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Howard Hughes, the legendarily reclusive billionaire business magnate, is a man about whom much has been written and most people know at least a little bit about. However, as we did when we covered JP Morgan’ giant, purple, knobbly nose that he largely managed to keep hidden from the world, today we’re going to focus on a lesser known aspect […]
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There’s a long history of rulers bragging about their athletic talents. Ancient Egyptian kings sometimes used sporting prowess to show off masculinity and inspire fear. The Roman Emperor Commodus liked to step into the gladiator ring, often asking for already wounded or weakened opponents so he could look superior. (Yes, he was the partial inspiration for the movie Gladiator. Also […]
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Dan L. asks: Why is 18 the age that people are considered adults? People continue to mature and grow as individuals throughout our lifetimes (at least ideally). So the 45 year old you would probably not only be better equipped to make decisions than the 25 year old version, but also in all likelihood be a very different person, both […]
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In this week’s “best of” our YouTube channel, we discuss how soap actually works given that it does not kill bacteria, why no one would be caught dead using the official Olympic salute anymore, why Michael Jackson’s skin turned white as he got older, why Olympians wear colored tape, that time the Olympics flag went missing for almost a century […]
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Olympians have been bending (and occasionally breaking) the rules in an effort to give themselves an edge over the competition since the games began. Despite this, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) only started testing for performance enhancing substances in 1968, and only seem to have really started taking the issue seriously in the 1990s. As for the 1968 Games, despite that a […]
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For over half a century, Doctor Who has proven itself to be one of the best known, most profitable, and most culturally significant series ever produced. Nevertheless, in the 1960s and 1970s the BBC decided to just up and delete pretty much every episode of the show from its archives. So thorough was this purge that, even today, there are […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader The Godfather is considered one of the best movies ever made—the American Film Institute ranks it #3, after Citizen Kane and Casablanca. The story of how it got made is just as good. BOOKMAKER In 1955 a pulp-fiction writer named Mario Puzo published his first novel, The Dark Arena, about […]
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This is a weekly wrap of our popular Daily Knowledge Newsletter. You can get that newsletter for free here. What Does the Dangly Thing in the Back of Your Throat Do Hanging from the back edge of your soft palate, the palatine uvula seems to serve several functions, none of which are particularly necessary for most people, which is why […]
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