If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately one million trillion, whi...
If you have ever wondered why radio and television stations always have call signs beginning with W or K, the answer is that those letters were assigned to American airwaves by an international conven...
If you wash lousy clothing at low temperatures, all you get is cleaner lice.
Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are...
In 1606, a Spanish mariner named Luis Vaez de Torres sailed across the Pacific from South America and straight into the narrow channel (now called the Torres Strait) that separates Australia from New...
In 1755, some seventy years after the last dodo’s death, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that the institution’s stuffed dodo was becoming unpleasantly musty and ordered it tosse...
In 1856, shortly before his death, Lord Ellesmere gave the painting to the new National Portrait Gallery in London as its founding work. As the gallery’s first acquisition, it has a certain sentimenta...
In 1897, still in his early twenties, Hoover was hired by a large and venerable British mining company, Bewick, Moreing and Co., and for the next decade travelled the world ceaselessly as its chief en...
In 1907, or so it has sometimes been written, Albert Einstein saw a workman fall off a roof and began to think about gravity. Alas, like many good stories this one appears to be apocryphal. According...
In 1956, while passing through customs at Sydney Airport, he was found to be carrying a large and diversified collection of pornographic material, and he was invited to take his sordid continental hab...
In 1964, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America rocked Alaska with 200,000 megatons of concentrated might, the equivalent of 2,000 nuclear bombs. Almost 3,000 miles away in Texas, water...
In 1986, The Economist assembled a list of English terms that had become more or less universal. They were: airport, passport, hotel, telephone, bar, soda, cigarette, sport, golf, tennis, stop, O.K.,...
In Flemish bond, headers alternate with stretchers from brick to brick. Flemish bond is much more popular than English, not because it is stronger, but because it is more economical since every facade...
In Iowa, we were not used to seeing the houses of well-known people on account of there were no well-known people in Iowa.
In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care
In a sense William Shakespeare’s greatest achievement in life wasn’t writing Hamlet or the sonnets but just surviving his first year.
In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.
In just 200 million years, possibly less, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about. At
In short, there is just a great deal we don’t know.
In six years, Hoover circled the globe five times. He lived through the Boxer Rebellion in China, hacked through the jungles of Borneo, rode camels across the red emptiness of Western Australia, rubbe...
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