Tag Archives: Misc.

Where Did the Keep Calm and Carry On Thing Come From?

You can find it almost everywhere: in every gift shop, on every online merchandise store, on every souvenir stand – and on every object imaginable, from posters and postcards to coffee mugs, water bottles, t-shirts, and phone cases: the brick-red background, the stylized white crown, and in big, bold letters, those five iconic words: Keep… Read More »

Why are Circuit Boards Traditionally Green?

If I ask you to picture the words “digital,” “electronics,” or “cyberspace,” odds are the images that just popped into your head are tinted a bright fluorescent green, like Neo seeing the Matrix for the first time. Indeed, our collective image of digital technology is drenched in shades of green, from the strings of code… Read More »

What is It Actually Like to Be an Amish Person?

As humans continue to rapidly accelerate to replacing ourselves with robot overlords or otherwise see if we can’t make Wall-E into a prophetic mocumentary, one group of homosapiens refuses to go quietly into the night. And, while it may come as a surprise to you, this group is seemingly set to inherit the Earth, given… Read More »

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… Read More »

Dissolving Gold and the Nazis

Gold. Since the dawn of civilization, we humans have been obsessed with this most divine of metals. Empires have risen and fallen over it, oceans crossed and continents conquered in search of it, the entire field of chemistry invented to try and make more of it, and – until relatively recently – the entire global… Read More »

Does Absinthe Actually Make You Hallucinate?

English novelist Marie Corelli, author of the popular 1886 novel A Romance of Two Worlds, once wrote: “Let me be mad, mad with the madness of absinthe, the wildest, most luxurious madness in the world.” In the late 19th and Early 20th centuries, few vices exemplified the spirit of La Belle Epoque and the ideals… Read More »