Category Archives: Featured Facts

What’s So Special About McDonald’s Fries?

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 […]

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“The Thing” the Revolutionary Soviet Spy Gadget That Baffled the West

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 […]

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Why Did the Japanese Join Nazi Germany During WWII Given Nazi Ideology?

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 […]

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Does Any Government Have a Plan if Aliens Invade the Earth?

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 […]

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That Time Ben Franklin and John Adams Slept Together and the Hilarity That Ensued

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 […]

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Why Do We Grow Old?

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 […]

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The Key to Humans Humaning

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 […]

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How Much Did Top Gun Maverick Cost the U.S. Taxpayer?

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. […]

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An Incredibly Deep Dive Into the Fascinating Invention of the Helicopter

“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 […]

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Why Does the United States Have Such an Insanely Large Prison Population? (And How to Fix It Easily)

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 […]

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What was Hitler Like as a Child? And was His Grandfather Really Jewish?

While just about everyone is abundantly familiar with Adolf Hitler’s exploits in the latter half of his life, an often missed part of the once proclaimed “German Messiah’s” history is that of his childhood. So just how did this “boy like any other” grow into arguably one of the most reviled individuals in the history of humanity? Well, put on […]

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