In the late 1700s, America needed standardized weights and measures because each state was running its own wild show. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson wrote to his contacts in France requesting a standardized kilogram weight. The ship it was on […]
There are 10 countries, mostly in central Africa, that still have a literacy rate below 50%. Chad ranks the lowest at 27%. The female literacy rate in Chad is even worse at 18.2%. But on the bright side, remember that […]
You might remember VERTU, the first luxury phone brand. “Vertu is the brainchild of the Italian Frank Nuovo, former chief designer at Nokia. He proposed and presented the luxury concept to Nokia’s board, who eventually accepted it in late 1998.” […]
“Advances in AI and satellite imagery allowed researchers to create the clearest picture yet of human activity at sea, revealing clandestine fishing activity and a boom in offshore energy development.” ~ learn more
If you remember this car, you probably remember how unattractive it was… “a car so ham-fisted in its execution it became a metaphor for the clownshow that was pre-bankruptcy GM.” Professional car designer and writer Adrian Clarke tells the story […]
Type in any phrase and get a compilation video of that exact phrase across a library of movies. Do you feel lucky? ~ learn more
Most cells in the body only live for about a year. Skin cells are on this schedule. “Therefore, skin cells should divide and dead cells be cleared out in under a year, not the decades that tattoos would suggest.” So […]
“For the second half of the 19th century, the Western world pretty much ran on a game-changing, nation-making, super-powerful substance—bird poop. At first glance (or, fine, maybe second), guano is an ideal fertilizer. Made almost entirely of nitrogen, phosphate and […]
From Mitchell Hashimoto, the founder of HashiCorp ($HCP). “I also figured a local branch of a global bank is just a fungible tentacle of the giant banking machine, so also… who cares.” ~ learn more
“When someone is born, chemical parts once scattered across the world converge to form a human. Days, years, and decades before, those atoms were always somewhere in the world. I recently got curious about this: where do people come from? […]