A Christmas Day Economics Story During college at the University of Missouri I was fortunate to take economics classes from the legendary professor Walter L. Johnson. One year he told the following story (paraphrased): When my children were young we used to travel to...

The Google logo before and after a "refresh" in 2015 Fonts are an important part of written communication. According to typographer Rick Pynor, they "express a mood and atmosphere - they give words a certain coloring." The creator of Comic Sans (more on that font...

We're all aware that the U.S. bombarded Japan with both conventional as well as atomic bombs in World War II. What isn't as well known is that Japan also bombed the United States. The Japanese created balloons that would carry bombs across the Pacific at high...

We think largely in words. This leads to an interesting question: do people who speak different languages think differently? A great example of how differences in structure of language may impact thought is the comparison of Turkish vs. English past tense. In Turkish...

He's One of the Best-Selling Living Authors Stephen King, age 72, is prolific writer, master story-teller and an all-around interesting guy. Those who have met him say that he is very kind, humble and comes across as just a normal guy. His books have sold more than...

Life of George Washington, Junius Brutus Stearns, 1851 On December 13, 1799 George Washington developed a sore throat and fever after riding in snowy weather. Bloodletting was prescribed by his doctors and over the next 16 hours he was drained of half the blood in his...

In philosophical terms a razor is a guiding principle or a mental model that allows us to "shave off" unlikely explanations for things. A great philosophical razor is Hanlon's Razor: Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by...

A woodpecker's tongue is so long that it wraps around its skull when not extended! Image from www.birdwatchingdaily.com Describe the Tongue of the Woodpecker Leonardo da Vinci was famously curious. His notebooks ran thousands of pages and were filled with all sorts of...

There is no better sleep than when its super cool in your bedroom and you are covered with heavy blankets. What about when its hot? This summer I stayed in a house for a week with no A/C and it was usually in the mid-80s at bedtime. I still slept under a blanket. It...

The qubit circuits of Google's quantum computer Sycamore October 25th! Happy St. Crispin's Day! (Not to be confused with CRISPR) Earlier this week a paper was published in the journal Nature wherein computer scientists from Google report achieving "quantum supremacy"...

Dennis Quaid, age 65, recently was recently engaged to Laura Savoie, age 26 It is common for younger women to marry older men. The reverse is comparatively rare. When we hear of a younger man marrying an older woman it seems a bit weird. What are the reasons that...

In my area of the country squirrels are everywhere. My dog loves/hates them. Chasing them has really kept him in shape. While some people like squirrels, many consider them pests and they are listed as one of the most invasive species. Squirrels are fascinating,...

Hey - meet me at Still.flash.dame The app/website What3words is pretty amazing. What3words has mapped the earth in 3 meter by 3 meter squares. Each square is identified by three words that have been permanently assigned to that square. The three word locations are...

Last week I attended an excellent seminar on the ethics of gene editing. (See related IFOD on CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing and related ethical considerations.) One of the speakers, a bioethics professor, expressed the following during a panel discussion: A much more...

Published in 1678, the book Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan is one of the best selling books in history. Until the mid-twentieth century it was second only to the Bible in terms of copies sold and is still listed as one of the top selling books of all time. It has...

It's October! The leaves are changing, the weather is turning crisp, both NFL and college football are hitting the heart of their seasons, baseball playoffs are underway (go Cards!) and rock radio stations are celebrating Rocktober!!! In addition, October is also...

Water is arguably the most important substance on our planet. Without water life as we know it on earth would not exist. Today's IFOD is about five of the most amazing things about water. FROZEN WATER FLOATS: A very strange thing about water is that it’s solid state,...

Christian Goldbach The Goldbach Conjecture is a mathematical concept that seems to be true but remains unproven. It is quite simple - you only need the most rudimentary math skills to understand it. In 1742 mathematician Christian Goldbach noted in a letter to his...

Sorites Paradox is a type of paradox dealing with how we categorize things. The classic example of Sorites Paradox concerns when something is a heap (in fact, the word sorites derives from the Greek word for heap). Imagine a heap of sand. You carefully remove one...

The crew standing in front of the B-29 "Bockscar" In the book, Lake Success, a character explains he owns a table made of Japanese Eucalyptus from Kokura, Japan, because the table reminds him how lucky he is. The people of Kokura were very lucky in 1945. What is the...

I had a different IFOD ready to go for today but it will have to wait because based on an informal survey I have found out that some (maybe most) people don't use "Do Not Disturb" on their iPhones (or Androids). Do Not Disturb At Night Here's how Do Not Disturb works...

The Great One Hockey is back! Last night was opening night for the NHL (unfortunately, the Blues lost the Capitals in overtime). Seems like just yesterday that last season ended! Let's look at goal-scoring over the years. I remember when Brett Hull scored 86 goals in...

Horses are fast. My father owns horses and the rare occasion when I've ridden at a full gallop has scared the crap out of me. The horse I ride isn't even a racehorse - just a slightly stocky Tennessee Walking Horse named Max! Thoroughbreds are the horse breed used in...

An IFOD a few years ago concerned ten common myths that are untrue: We only use 10% of our brain. Most heat escapes from our head.  Swallowed Gum Stays in your Stomach for Seven Years. Lightning Doesn’t Strike the Same Place Twice. A Penny Dropped from the Empire...

Footage of the Trinity Test 15 seconds after detonation. On July 16, 1945 the nuclear age was ushered in with the test of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico, called the "Trinity Test." Two nuclear bombs have been used in warfare, but over 2,000 have been tested,...

Do you ever wonder how some people can believe what they believe when it is so different from what you believe? How is it possible? A primary reason this occurs rests on two principles of social psychology: The First Principle: We consider our beliefs to be true to...

"Everybody wants to be a beast, until it's time to do what real beasts do." -Eric Thomas "There's always some beast in everybody." -Michael Jennings (my father), last night at dinner Many (most?) people, suffer from a sense of frustration of not having achieved what...

"You know nothing Jon Snow" We speak about 16,000 words a day on average (and, on a related note, men and women speak about the same number words per day - it is a myth that women speak more words than men, see here). That's 5.84 million words a year, 58 million words...

Leonard da Vinci sketches of his work on friction What is Friction? Friction is the resistance to motion of one object relative to another. It is not a fundamental force like gravity or the electromagnetic force, but rather occurs because all surfaces have roughness....

A basic human characteristic is our motivation to simplify the complex. It makes total sense that we like to reduce complexity as it takes less mental energy to consider a simple matter than a complex one. As discussed in a prior IFOD - we can only consider up to...

The pains and pleasure of social life are intense. Being included as part of a group feels great, but on the flip-side feeling excluded or shunned hurts horribly. Breakups can hurt so bad they are practically disabling. Research into the physiology of the brain has...

Alberto Brandolini, an Italian software engineer, in 2013 formulated what is now known as "Brandolini's Law" or the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle. Here's the original statement of Brandolini's Law: Obviously, asymmetry is misspelled, but let's give Mr. Brandolini a...

The Just-World Theory is the worldview that everything happens for a reason and that, in general, the universe works out fairly. In this worldview, good people generally are rewarded and bad people typically are punished by bad things happening to them. Common figures...

Beginner's Luck refers to the situation where a novice experiences unexpected success, sometimes besting an expert. Does beginner's luck really exist? What causes this phenomenon? Randomness vs. Luck Let's first start with a definition of "luck" and how it relates to...

MRI stands for "magnetic resonance imaging" and MRI machines use magnets to produce images of tissue. How MRI machines do this is rather amazing. Humans, like all things, are made up of atoms and atoms have magnetic properties. Protons in the nucleus of atoms are like...

What's the best tasting vodka in America? Here's clue: this IFOD is going to save you lots of money if you are a vodka drinker. Vodka is the top selling spirit in the U.S., with sales of over $6.2 billion per year. Super-premium brands such as Grey Goose and Ciroc...

Let's say you are going over to a friend's house for dinner and need to bring a bottle of wine. You aren't much of a wine drinker and usually spend $8 - $10 on a bottle of wine, but you'd like to bring something decent to dinner. You think you'd like to bring a Pinot...

There is an obesity crisis in America, 18.5% of children and 39.6% of adults are obese as of 2016. The rates of obesity are rising. Source: State of Obesity 2018 Report, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Obesity is associated with heart disease, some cancers, stroke, and...

People are generally overconfident. A prior IFOD discussed this: Are You Overconfident? (Yes). One aspect of our overconfidence is that we think we understand the world around us and how things work much better than we actually do. This is a distinct aspect of our...

This is a huge topic with many nuances, but below I've kept it pretty simple and focused on just the basics. Composition of Earth's Air The air we breathe consists of various gasses and a bit of water vapor. The gasses in air are: 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen, 0.9% Argon...

If you have a significant other, think about your last few quarrels. What were they about? Research on over 3,500 couples out of Baylor University concludes that no matter the specific topic of fights between couples, all couple quarrels fall within two categories:...

"All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone." ~Blaise Pascal A recent survey of American adults by the Bureau of Labor Statistics asked about how they spent their prior 24 hours. Shockingly, 83% of respondents said they spent zero time...

In 2016 comedian Ben Ward, whose Twitter handle is @pixelatedboat, tweeted out the following: Thus, "Milkshake Duck" is a meme defined by Dictionary.com as "a person (or thing) who becomes extremely popular on the internet for some positive reason, but as their...

Key fobs for remotely locking/unlocking car doors are standard equipment at this point and keyless ignitions using key fob recognition is now standard in over 60% of new car models according to Edmonds. Future generations won't know that we used to use actual keys to...

Quick - who looks more competent?* In a study from 2007 Princeton researchers showed volunteers pictures of people for just a split second. The pictures were of candidates in governor and senate races in other parts of the country. So, for instance, the volunteers...

Ben Franklin was a polymath and all-around pretty amazing guy. He helped draft the Declaration of Independence, was the first Postmaster General, was a scientist, inventor, politician and diplomat. According to History.com, "Benjamin Franklin is the only founding...

Beans (legumes) are amazing. Technically they are a starchy vegetable but packed with protein - about 15g of protein per cup. Here are some of the health benefits: Beans are packed with vitamins and nutrients, including copper, folate, iron, magnesium, potassium, and...

Where is Our Excess Leisure Time? In 1930, celebrated economist John Maynard Keynes published the essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren wherein he predicted that in 100 years the economy would become so productive due to increases in technology that the...

"Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders." -William Faulkner, Light in August Memory is a complex thing. Hours, days and years fly by in our present, but the vast majority of our experience is lost to...

Patient undergoing TMS treatment My 17-year old daughter Audrey has struggled with depression and OCD for years. Many different combinations of antidepressants (with all their associated side-effects) have been tried over the years with limited effect. We've tried...

Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant Three Mile Island The Three Mile Island accident was a near meltdown of a nuclear reactor in which over 30,000 gallons of radioactive water escaped. The 1979 incident almost had Chernobyl like consequences as a complete meltdown...

The Mandela Effect is the popular name for the phenomenon where large groups of people erroneously remember something that didn't actually happen. It is called the Mandela Effect because even though Nelson Mandela died in 2013, large swaths of the population claim to...

As we are all aware, life expectancy has increased globally over the last few hundred years in dramatic fashion. Improvements in water, sanitation, medical technology, food distribution and wealth, among others, have increased the average life expectancy at birth in...

James Earl Jones has a super low voice (about 85 Hz vs. the average male's 125 Hz) Does the pitch of your voice have an affect on career success? It might. For males, having a deep sounding voice confers an advantage. Studies have found that males with deeper voices...

Pappy Van Winkle is considered by many to be the finest bourbon in the world. Some even regard it as the best whiskey in the world. Their whiskey often sells for thousands of dollars a bottle. Case in point: I attended a charity auction a few years ago where a bottle...

1959 Ford Thunderbird The "winner's curse" is an economic concept that refers to the fact that the winning bidder in a competitive auction often overpays. This phenomenon occurs even when the bidders have expertise with respect to the value of the item being...

I often get to ride with co-workers, family and friends in their cars and I've noticed that you can divide people into two categories: Those that use the "auto" setting on their car's A/C and those who prefer to adjust it manually. Personally, I am an "auto" type of...

The Hawthorne Works Plant - Home to 40,000 Workers. Source: Harvard Business School. In the 1920s and 1930s a series of workplace experiments were undertaken at the Hawthorne Works, a factory owned by Western Electric outside of Chicago. The purpose of the experiments...

"Expectations are resentments under construction." -Anne Lamott (author) The Problem with Expectations Anytime we have expectations, we are setting ourselves up for disappointment and resentment. Dr. John Johnson writing in Psychology Today notes two primary problems...

It is very hard to write a book. Like super-duper hard. What's even harder is to write a book with bizarre rules or constraints. Here are five of the strangest works of fiction ever written: (1) Gadsby, by Ernest Vincent Wright. Written in 1939, this is a 50,000 word...

As you are probably aware, on Sunday the US Women's National Soccer Team won their 4th World Cup (out of the last 8 World Cups). In celebration of that awesome achievement here are some interesting facts related to Title IX, the 1972 law that has played a material...

Its a Tacocat! This past week I was hanging with my young cousin Jones and he wore a shirt proclaiming that TACOCAT spelled backwards is also TACOCAT and thus is a palindrome. Awesome! A palindrome is a word, number or phrase that is the same whether spelled forwards...

Idioms are words or phrases that are not intended to be taken literally. What are the sources of some of these interesting idioms? Riding Shotgun: This phrase refers to riding in the front passenger seat of a car. To claim that spot, the first passenger to exclaim...

California has many issues: wildfires, mudslides, earthquakes, expensive cost of living, high taxes and lots of traffic. But, one thing it doesn't have is hurricanes! Why? Aren't there hurricanes in the Pacific? There are hurricanes in the Pacific and they are nasty -...

Hawaii became a state in 1959 and is made up of over 100 islands, with 8 main ones. Here are some very interesting facts about Hawai'i: Hawaii is the 40th most populous state, with 1.42 million inhabitants, with nearly 1 million living on Oahu. Hawai'i (called "the...

I've been thinking about 1989 lately. It was a pretty momentous year. A few things about 1989: ONE: The world changed. The Berlin Wall came down. The Soviet Union was in the midst of collapse. Pro-Democracy Rallies occurred in Tiananmen Square. It was the year that...

A detail from the painting “Witch Hill/ The Salem Martyr” by Thomas Satterwhite Nobel, 1869. A woman, found guilty of witchcraft, walks to the gallows with the hangman and judges. (AP) When we think of witch hunts we here in the U.S. likely think of the Salem Witch...

Caesar's last words in 44 B.C.E. were "Et tu, Brute?"* His last breath, shortly thereafter, consisted of 25 sextillion air molecules. Each of us breathes, with every breath, at least one molecule of those 25 sextillion air particles that were a part of Caesar's last...

Flipping through HBO this weekend I watched a bit of a movie from the late 1980s. I noticed something strange - all sorts of people in the movie were smoking. We don't see that in movies anymore. Similarly, of all the people I know, I think only a handful of them...

Unattainable Triangles are simplified diagrams of three attributes where at most only two of the three are possible. It's a good way to frame choices. Here's "unattainable triangle" of quality, service and price. It looks like this: The concept is that as a consumer...

The "Wisdom Hierarchy", shown above in a pyramid format, was first formulated by organizational theorist Russell Ackoff in 1989. It describes the evolutionary path from mere data to having wisdom. The distinction between data, information, knowledge and wisdom is...

Rendition of rogue planet SIMP discovered beyond our solar system Sometimes former Governors of Alaska go rogue. Other times waves go rogue. This IFOD concerns planets going rogue. Fascinating stuff. When thinking of planets (which I do on occasion), I think of those...

Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist who invented dynamite and died in 1896. In his will, he bequeathed a $9 million fortune to to award “prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." His will directed that the prizes...

I've previously written on dialectical thinking: the notion that opposing thoughts or ideas can both be true at the same time. Dialectical thinking is considered a higher level thinking skill but is difficult because it can create cognitive dissonance. Cognitive...

In the book Death's End by Cixin Liu (which is the final book of the fantastic Three Body Problem Trilogy) a spaceship called Halo has a special propulsion system that curves space and allows the ship to attain light speed. Halo and its occupants journey to a star 286...

Reading time: 5 Minutes. A key to our species' success has been our ability to live and work in tribes and groups. Our social cooperation and teamwork is what has given our relatively weak, slow, and hairless homo sapiens the ability to dominate our planet. We've...

New York City recently experienced a tornado warning which is pretty rare for city inhabitants generally and NYC residents in particular. As a Midwesterner, I am very used to tornado warnings, but interestingly, tornadoes rarely hit the St. Louis area. Why do big...

Venus, photographed in ultraviolet light and rendered in false color. Source: Astronomy.com Venus, the second planet from the Sun is named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. It is the second brightest object in the night sky after the moon. Earth and Venus...

The Fundamental Attribution Error explains a lot about how we view ourselves and others. There are two parts to it: We view other's actions as a reflection on their personality or who they are as people. Thus, if someone wrongs us, we view them as bad, mean, selfish,...

Earth is surrounded by a magnetic field that is generated deep down in the Earth’s core. This magnetic field is very important to life on Earth as it protects us from dangerous solar and cosmic rays. Many species show awareness of the Earth's magnetic field, for...

The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world. So, when my wife and I visited the Louvre years ago we of course decided to see the Mona Lisa. The room in which it was contained was packed and we had to wait in line for a long time until we were able to view...

Source: xkcd.com In his book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter discusses the particularities of estimating how long it would take to complete a computer program. In his observations about the difficulties in estimating the completion...

Over the course of my career, I've conducted hundreds of interviews. I'd like to think I'm a good judge of character and that what I learn in interviews helps me make good hiring decisions. But, if I'm honest with myself, I have to admit I'm biased. I like confident...

In 1956 George Miller published one of the most famous papers in the history of psychology titled The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information. In the paper, Dr. Miller described the phenomenon of us being able to...

Who is more famous than Jesus? Clue: It's not the Beatles. The MIT Media Lab, via a project named Pantheon, has analyzed Wikipedia pages and number of page views to determine the most famous people in history. As a threshold, to be considered famous enough to be...

What is the projected life expectancy of the Great Wall of China? Which of the following great books do you expect will still be in print and widely known in 100 years: A. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (nearly 2,000 years old) B. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen...

In 2002 as part of the California Coastal Records Project to document and study erosion, photographer Kenneth Adelman took thousands of aerial photos of the California coastline. One of the photos, shown above, captured Barbra Streisand's Malibu mansion. Babs found...

Our Solar System (Not Anywhere Close to Scale) Our solar system consists of One yellow dwarf star (the sun)Eight PlanetsFive Dwarf Planets181 moons (Mars has 2, Jupiter 79, Saturn 53, Uranus 27, Neptune 14)Over 550,000 asteroidsOver 3,000 comets Here is a really cool...

Errors of commission are errors of action. You do something and it ends up being a mistake. For example, you go on a date with someone you didn't really like and had a bad time, or worse, married someone and it didn't end up working out. Errors of omission are the...

I live in St. Louis. We get all four seasons in full force: hot humid summers and snow in the winters (the spring and fall are usually very nice). It's a nice place to live, but not spectacularly beautiful - we have no mountains, no ocean. We don't have nearly the...

Another working day has ended. Only the rush hour hell to face. Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes. Contestants in a suicidal race.-The Police, Synchronicity II An IFOD a few weeks ago concerned how much commuting we can generally tolerate each day. The...

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner, is a big fan of recognizing and using "mental models" to help shape thinking. According to Shane Parrish of Farnham Street, Mental models are how we understand the world. Not only do they shape what we think and how...

The concept of the "Overton Window" was created by a policy director at a think tank, Joseph Overton. The concept is that (most) politicians will not pursue policies and ideas outside of a relatively small window of acceptability. Things that are too far outside of...

Graphine may be the most amazing material known to humans. Andre Geim won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for isolating graphene from graphite. What is it? What is Graphene? Graphine is a one atom thick layer of graphite (carbon) with remarkable properties: Being a...

Beware fancy grain-free dog food! We've been feeding our dog fancy, super-healthy sounding and expensive dog food for years. The food we've been buying him have main ingredients such as Cod, Pumpkin and Orange; Whitefish and Potato; Salmon with fruits and vegetables....

The picture from EHT of the supermassive black hole at the center of the M87 Galaxy. An amazing announcement occurred this week: scientists working with what is called the Event Horizon Telescope ("EHT") had captured and image of a black hole. Why is it a big deal? A...

From Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh: When I have a toothache, I discover that not having a toothache is a wonderful thing.  I had to have a toothache in order to be enlightened, to know that not having one is wonderful.  My non-toothache is peace, is joy. ...

Have you ever wondered how in a crowded restaurant, a loud party, a sporting event or any other noisy crowd you can focus in on one voice and all the other voices and noises become muddled in the background? This human ability has been dubbed the Cocktail Party...

In 2005 Ozzy Osbourne conducted the below interview with Conan O'Brien. As you can tell from this short clip from the interview, Ozzy has a quite strong Cockney British accent. In the interview he's describing a break-in at his house: Also in 2005 Ozzy played at...

Eeny, meeny, miny, moCatch a tiger by the toeIf he hollers, let him goEeny meeny miny mo Eeny meeny miny mo - what does it mean? Where did it come from? Why would you want to catch a tiger by its toe? Is it racist? Origins Eeny Meeny is known as a "counting rhyme" or...

Females Do Tend to Have Neater Handwriting Studies confirm that females tend to have better handwriting than males. University of Warwick researchers note that "Girls are generally better handwriters than boys, both on measures of overall quality and of letter...

Researchers from Penn, USC and CUNY did a deep dive into SAT score data. Their research paper can be found here. They analyzed SAT scores and their correlations to: Family IncomeRaceHigh school gradesParental level of education The researchers found that a student's...

How likely is it that you'll be murdered? There are a lot of facts and circumstances that vary that may determine that, so broad averages may not be applicable. However, we can look at statistics for murder in the U.S. which can provide some facts and averages that...

How long is your daily commute? Is it tolerable? Studies on happiness have found that commuting is one of our least favorite activities and research has found that having a longer commute negatively affects our overall happiness. Marchetti's Constant In 1994, Italian...

Cars are amazing. The typical modern car is made of 30,000 parts coming from hundreds of suppliers. Here are a few selected facts about cars through their life cycle. Planning and Design It takes on average six years to go from concept to a car actually being sold to...

Astronomers and physicists know an amazing array of information about celestial bodies all throughout the universe. How stars are made and what they are made of. Whether distant planets are rocky or gas and whether they have atmospheres. Ever stop to think “how do...

A "filler word" is a sound, word, or phrase, usually meaningless, used as a pause or hesitation in speaking. Common filler words include: you knowkind ofumuherahlikerightwell We all use filler words and research has found that, on average, every 17th spoken word is a...

A few years ago I learned an acronym for a social skill from DBT Therapy that I've found has improved my interpersonal skills. It's call the "GIVE Skill." What is DBT? Dialectical Behavior Therapy ("DBT") was developed in the early 1990s to treat individuals with...

What Causes our Joints to "Crack?" According to Harvard Medical School, "the 'pop' of a cracked knuckle is caused by bubbles bursting in the synovial fluid — the fluid that helps lubricate joints. The bubbles pop when you pull the bones apart, either by stretching the...

This past Sunday (the morning daylight-saving started) I was at breakfast at our lodge in Patagonia and I asked our server whether Argentina had daylight-saving time so I could be sure of the correct time. She had no idea what I was talking about so I explained...

Happy Thursday. Back from Argentina - spent time in Buenos Aires, Mendoza, and Patagonia (El Calafate and El Chalten). Me standing in middle of highway 23 on way to el Chalten On to today's IFOD - how long various things are. Intestines: If you removed your...

Pic of Malbec grapes I took yesterday I am currently in Mendoza, Argentina and over the past three days of winery tours and wine-laden lunches and dinners I've consumed more Malbec than I have in my entire life. I've learned a lot of interesting facts about Malbec,...

Black Iberian Pig Hola Here are a few facts I found surprising that people he mentioned to me recently: Fewer than 18% of the world’s population have flown on a plane What’s the difference between a lake and a pond? Ponds are bodies of water shallow enough so that the...

(Captain’s Log: stardate 3/4/19 15:52 Aerolineas Argentina’s Flight 1466 Buenos Aires to Mendoza.) Cardiovascular Disease (“CVD”) is the most common killer of people worldwide. Two primary ways doctors stay on top of their patients’ risk for CVD is to (a) perform...

Marie Curie is much more famous than her husband Pierre. But, Pierre Curie, who tragically died at age 46 by being hit by a horse-cart, was a brilliant scientist in his own right. One of his most notable discoveries concerns heat and magnetism and an effect that...

“The S&P 500 Drops 2% as Global Recession Fears Are Stoked by Disappointing Retailer Earnings." These sorts of headlines always amuse me. The stock market has millions of participants on any given day and billions of dollars and hundreds of millions of shares...

Sighted animals, including humans, see in 2D and use various depth cues to convert what they see into 3D perception. There are three main ways this is accomplished: Light transport. This conveys depth perception via shading - light creates shadows provides cues about...

Picture credit: online for love Online dating is coming up on 25 years old. The first site, Match.com was founded in 1995 (three years before Google). The internet and social media have a big effect on how we meet our love interests. A Surprising Proportion of Young...

Why do we often think of aliens as being "Martians"?  Why don't we attribute aliens to Venus or Uranus (for example)?  Much of the reason for popular culture attributing extraterrestial life to Mars may be due to the astronomer Percival Lowell.  Mr....

This morning I was grateful for: A warm house on a cold morning (especially since such things did not exist for most of the history of our species) The heat and taste of my coffee The relationships and friendships I've developed with members of my YPO forum. I know...

The Soviet Union launched a total of five satellites named Sputnik between 1957 and 1960. Four of the five Sputniks are very interesting. One is just meh. Sputnik 1 Sputnik 1 Sputnik was launched into space on October 4, 1957 by an R-7 Rocket. Here's a few facts about...

Alfred Russell Wallace (left) and Charles Darwin (right) rocking competing beards In 1922 William F. Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas published a paper entitled "Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on Social Evolution." The paper starts "It is an interesting phenomenon that...

So-called "rare earth elements" ("REE") are extremely important to our daily lives and our economy. REE are a set of seventeen chemical elements. They are used in cell phones, batteries, computer disk drives, flat panel TVs, fiber optics, lasers, radar, solar cells,...

RSS Sir David Attenborough (not the best name ever) Our firm is at the very tail end of doing a little refresh to our office space. As such, we have some conference rooms to name and are surveying our people to help name the rooms. We have high hopes our group will...

How much of Britney's success is due to her talent? "For onto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." Matthew 25:29 King James Version There is a common effect variously...

According to the World Health Organization, in 2017 nearly 1 million people worldwide died of HIV related illness and about 37 million people have HIV/AIDS. There were about 1.8 million new infections in 2017. Since the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early...

The size and shape of our bodies affect how warm we stay when we're exposed to the cold. There are two interesting ecogeographical rules that concern body shape/size and heat dissipation. The first is Bergmann's Rule, proposed in 1847 by Carl Bergmann, which observes...

The Pareto Principle is also known as the 80/20 rule. It is named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto who noted that 20% of the pea pods in his garden provided 80% of the peas. At the time he was studying income and wealth and the discovery in his garden...

Dr. Walter Freeman performing a lobotomy with an Ice Pick In 1936, the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz introduced a surgical operation, now known as a lobotomy, which consisted of drilling holes in the patient's skull and then making incisions that destroyed...

"I am so excited about my new appliance I'd love to pay more $$$ to buy a service plan!" Extended warranties are also called "service contracts" and are warranties that protect a purchase for in addition to the manufacturer's standard warranty. Extended warranties are...

Punxsutawney Phil Happy Groundhog's Day 2019! I began writing the IFOD on this site on Groundhog's Day two years ago. The first IFOD was The Interesting Number Paradox. Since that first IFOD, the site has received over 123,000 clicks. Over the two years I've sent out...

Evolution is a tough concept to wrap our minds around. How is it possible that humans and other species of plants and animals have evolved to be such wonderous and complex organisms? Can this really have occurred through chance? The answer is yes, and this IFOD digs a...

Yes Yesterday at about 6:30am I took my dog on a walk. The temperature was -6 degrees and the wind chill was -23 degrees. Wow -23 degrees! I bundled up, including wearing a balaclava on my face. Surprisingly, while it felt cold, it didn’t feel anywhere close to -23...

For most of my life I've heard and read that personality is greatly affected by birth order. As a first-born, I could expect to be ambitious, self-confident, outgoing and a natural leader. My middle brother is supposed to be social, a peace-keeper and...

The concept of "six degrees of separation" is that any two humans are linked to each other by a mere five intermediaries, where each intermediary is an acquaintance of the other. The theory of a limited number of degrees of separation was proposed in 1929 by the...

"Radiation" is energy that travels through space. The sun, x-ray machines, microwave ovens, nuclear reactors and power lines, just to name a few sources, all produce radiation. Radiation comes in two main flavors: ionizing and non-ionizing. What ionizing means is that...

Top view a dead cockroach on white background Cockroaches are one of the oldest species on earth, dating back over 300 million years, which pre-dates the dinosaurs. How is it that they have survived so long? What can we learn from their longevity? Cockroaches have one...

The groundbreaking 1950 Japanese film "Rashomon" depicted a single event - the death of a Samurai - that resulted in four conflicting accounts of what happened by eyewitnesses. The differences among the witness accounts were never resolved and the audience was left...

Overconfidence is the tendency to over-estimate our own knowledge or abilities.  Nobel Prize winning Psychologist Daniel Kahneman called overconfidence "the most significant of cognitive biases." Some examples of overconfidence: 60% of U.S. drivers surveyed put...

Dwarf Galaxy Leo I Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a spiral galaxy containing approximately 200 billion stars. It is about 1,000 light-years thick and about 100,000 light-years across. It will collide with the galaxy Andromeda in about 4 billion years. It is thought...

Each year a huge number of new book titles are written and published. According to Stephen Hawking in his recent book Brief Answers to the Big Questions, he states that "if you stacked the new books being published next to each other, at the present rate of production...

Isambard Kingdom Brunel List of 100 Greatest Britons In 2002 the BBC polled citizens of United Kingdom to determine who are the greatest Britons of all time. Here are the top ten: Winston ChurchillIsambard Kingdom BrunelPrincess Diana (the survey was five years after...

The St. Louis, Missouri Red Cross Motor Corps on duty during the 1918 influenza epidemic. The National Archives. Source: history.com. 195,000 Americans died in October 1918 from the Spanish Flu, making the month the deadliest in U.S. history (in terms of American...

Source: www.top.me/fitness How to Do A Burpee A "burpee" is an exercise performed as follows: Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart. Squat as deeply as you can and place your hands on the floor. Kick back into a push-up position. Do one push-up.Bring your legs...