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The Curious Case of the Campden Wonder
On the 16th of August, 1660, an approximately 70 year old William Harrison walked toward the village of Charingworth, about two miles from Chipping Campden, with the intention of collecting rent for...
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Mark Twain’s Hilarious “Thoughts on the Science of Onanism”
Mark Twain at age 15 Through the latter half of the 19th century, Mark Twain was on a mission to attack pretense with satire. One of his most hilarious, if completely scandalous and by many standards...
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The Curious Case of the Law of the Tongue
Sporting the third deepest natural harbor in the southern hemisphere and a rich habitat, the waters around Eden, Australia attract a variety of wildlife, including baleen whales and, at least in the...
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Why We Say “Sic ’em” to Get Dogs to Attack
Kiaan D. asks: Why do you say “sic him” to dogs when you want them to attack someone? People have been telling dogs to “sic ’em,” with the intent to have the dog attack individual(s), since at least...
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Why Are Certain Alternate Names Called Nicknames?
Carla T. asks: When someone has an alternate name than their legal one that they go by, why is it called a “nick”name? A form of nickname has been around since the early 14th century- eke name,...
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The Bizarre Story of the Sex.com Heist
In 1983, Paul Mockapetris proposed a distributed database of internet name and address pairs, now known as the Domain Name System (DNS). This is essentially a distributed “phone book” linking a...
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Math or Maths?
Travis T. asks: Why do Americans say “math” and other English speaking countries say “maths”? Aluminium or aluminum, zee or zed, and removing u’s from certain words or not- among the many discrepancies...
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Do People Really Have Repressed Memories or Is It Just Things They’ve Forgotten?
Astryx_x asks: Do suppressed memories actually exist? We’ve all seen it in movies- a character will be going along in their lives blissfully unaware of some extremely traumatic event in their long...
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That Time the U.S. Military Launched a Half a Billion Needles to Space for...
In the early 1960s, international communications were limited to transmissions through undersea cables or occasionally unreliable radio signals bounced off of the ionosphere. As you might imagine from...
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That Time Someone Actually Tested the Infinite Monkey Theorem (And Who Came...
The idea that given enough time, even completely random activity could produce something complex goes back at least a couple thousand years, though not without its detractors even then. For example,...
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