Ryan asks: What is a Ponzi scheme and why do we call it that? With our short memories, many of us have forgotten that long before Bernie Madoff defrauded his clients and lost $65 billion, another swindler, Charles Ponzi, ran a similar scam in 1920, bilking thousands of people out of millions of dollars by making them an offer that […]
Read more
A time-honored tradition in the U.S. military, contingency plans have been drawn up for the defense against, and invasion of, most major military powers. In fact, in response to recent events on the Korean peninsula, the U.S. and South Korea recently signed on to such a plan. One of the most interesting episodes in this rich history of preparing for […]
Read more
About eleven thousand years ago, in a remote corner of the cradle of civilization, Stone Age people who lacked cities, agriculture and metal tools built an enormous complex of multi-ton stone pillars called Gobekli Tepe (Potbelly Hill) in a region in modern day Turkey. The high degree of artistic skill and organizational wherewithal discovered at the site has caused the […]
Read more
Today I found out the creator of the Nike “swoosh” logo was originally only paid $35 for it. The woman is Carolyn Davidson. At the time she created the now world famous logo, Davidson was a student at Portland State University where one of the co-founders of Nike, Phil Knight, was teaching as an assistant professor in accounting. On the […]
Read more
Dan Lewis runs the wildly popular daily newsletter Now I Know (“Learn Something New Every Day, By Email”). To subscribe to his daily email, click here.. Google the phrase “magic of compound interest” and you’ll come up with about 4 million or so results. Compound interest — which Albert Einstein may have called ”the most powerful force in the universe” — is the […]
Read more
Today I found out that the makers of Barbie used to sell a doll whose breasts grew when her arm rotated. Yes, you read that correctly. It was 1975 and the doll was called “Growing Up Skipper”. When you rotated her arm, she grew an inch taller and her small breasts grew out of her plastic chest. She could return […]
Read more
Corsets dominated the undergarments of wealthier women in the Western world for centuries, until WWI. So how did the war help popularize the bra? In a word, or two words in this case: metal shortage. The making of corsets required quite a bit of metal. Thus, in 1917, the U.S. War Industries Board asked American women to help their “men […]
Read more
The U.S. Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist Baptist minister named Francis Bellamy in 1892. It was published in a popular children’s magazine of the time called The Youth’s Companion as part of the 400th anniversary celebration of Christopher Columbus arriving in the New World. The celebration itself was the brainchild of James B. Upham, a marketer for the […]
Read more
Today I found out why storks are associated with delivering babies. We all know how babies are made. The stork can be seen flying over rooftops with a little cloth bundle before landing at the doorstep of a happy couple who then unwrap their precious, smiling newborn—right? This myth was once a common story to tell children who were deemed […]
Read more
Byron H. asks: How is the Dalai Lama chosen? Actually, the Dalai Lama is not technically chosen; rather, he is found. But to understand how it works, you first have to learn the basics of Tibetan Buddhism and its belief in reincarnation. Tibetan Buddhism A unique variant of Buddhism, the Tibetan form draws on ancient Tibetan Bon and the Mahayana […]
Read more
Most people are familiar with the “Morton”s Salt girl“. With her bright yellow dress, oversized umbrella, and leaking container of table salt, she’s an iconic figure in American grocery stores. But who is the Morton’s girl, and where did she come from? The Morton’s story begins in the 1880s, when a man named Joy Morton invested in a Chicago-based salt […]
Read more
Today I found out how shrunken heads were made. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, a shrunken head is a decapitated human head that is shrunk through a cooking process by members of the Jivaroan tribes of the northwestern region of the Amazon rain forest in Ecuador and Peru. Why do this? Tribal members believed in the […]
Read more
The woman was Huang Yijun from China. When she was 31 in 1948, she became pregnant only to find out that she had an ectopic pregnancy, meaning the egg had not attached in the uterus. In most ectopic pregnancies, the egg will implant in the Fallopian tubes, but in Huang’s case, the egg implanted just outside her Fallopian tubes causing […]
Read more
One of the first challenges that firefighters face when they arrive at a fire is finding a suitable water source that provides enough water for the type of fire they are fighting. Common sense tells us a car on fire will require much less water than a burning apartment building. There are formulas used by firefighters that will tell them […]
Read more
Today I found out the Christmas song Silver Bells was originally called Tinkle Bells. To make matters slightly more humorous, Silver Bells originally appeared in the The Lemon Drop Kid, a 1951 film starring Bob Hope. Needless to say, these two things would have surely resulted in the song getting a few chuckles, had composer Jay Livingston’s wife, Lynne Gordon, […]
Read more
It’s been called a voluntary tax on the poor and under educated, with people spending a whopping $60 billion a year in the United States alone on lottery tickets, most of which are purchased by low income individuals. (All total, about 20% of Americans play the lotto). Despite the high number of lotto tickets purchased annually, when playing the lottery […]
Read more
Humans have invented a variety of amazingly cruel and unusual ways to kill or maim one another (often for shockingly arbitrary reasons). And, of course, wars tend to bring out the worst in people; so it’s not surprising that war-time executions can occasionally be among the most bizarre and cruel. On that note, I was recently reading the first volume […]
Read more
One of the great things about baseball is that it’s amazing with how many games there are per season, even lifelong fans frequently see things during games that they’ve never seen happen before. With that in mind, here are a few of the stranger feats in Major League Baseball history that have only happened once to date: Pitching a no-hitter […]
Read more