Author Archives: Daven Hiskey

The First Spam Message

##EMBED## Click Here for Sources and to Learn How Spam Came to Mean Junk Message The earliest documented commercial spam message is often incorrectly cited as the 1994 “Green Card Spam” incident.  However, the actual first documented commercial spam message was for a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation computers and was sent on ARPANET to 393 recipients by Gary […]

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Earned Run Average (ERA) Was Not Originally Meant for Evaluating Pitching Skill

##EMBED## Click Here for Sources and to Learn More Interesting Baseball Facts When Henry Chadwick, the creator of the baseball box score, developed the ERA (earned run average) statistic, his goal was not to evaluate a pitchers worth, but rather to provide a statistic that differentiated between runs caused by batting skill and those caused by lack of fielding skill;  […]

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Why “K” Denotes a Strikeout in Baseball

##EMBED## Click Here for Sources and to Learn More Interesting Baseball Facts Text Version: Henry Chadwick, the creator of the baseball box score, chose the “K” to denote a strikeout because it was the last letter in “struck” as in “struck out”.  Chadwick often liked to use the last letter of words instead of the first, particularly when he felt […]

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Why We Laugh

##EMBED## Click Here for Sources and to Learn Why It’s Nearly Impossible to Tickle Yourself Contrary to popular belief, most laughter is not associated with humor, but rather stems from non-humor related social interactions.  This was discovered from a study covering over 2,000 cases of naturally occurring laughter, almost none of which stemmed from jokes or other such humor devices.  […]

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The Sun Won’t Go Supernova

##EMBED## Click Here for Sources and to Learn More Interesting Astronomy Facts Text Version: The Sun does not have enough mass to go supernova and explode.  However, in about 5 billion years it will enter a red giant phase steadily expanding until it consumes the Earth.  But fear not, the Earth will already be dead in about 1 billion years […]

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Where the Name “Twinkies” Came From

##EMBED## Click Here for Sources and More Twinkies Facts Text Version: The name “Twinkies” for the sponge-cake food was thought up by James Dewar, the Vice President of Continental Bakeries who sold under the Hostess brand.  On the way to a marketing meeting, he saw a billboard advertising “Twinkle-Toes Shoes”, and thought up the name “Twinkies”.

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LEGO Stole Their Bricks From Kiddicraft’s Patented Self Locking Building Bricks

##EMBED## Click Here for Sources and to Learn More Interesting Lego Facts In the late 1940s, a company called Kiddicraft began manufacturing “Kiddicraft Self-Locking Building Bricks”, which were patented by Hilary Harry Fisher Page.  Kirk Kristiansen, the founder of LEGO, came across these bricks in a demo he was shown of an injection molding machine.  He then copied these bricks […]

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