Which city has the worst traffic in the world? It’s not Paris, France, although I’m using a photo from the French capital to showcase some bad yet beautiful traffic along the Champs-Élysées. Paris came in 3rd place, though. They won the bronze of world traffic ahead of the 2024 Olympics in Paris. Whichever city’s traffic … Read more
There were massive cities throughout the Amazon. This is madness! I never knew this until I opened up the book America Before by Graham Hancock. He devotes 90 pages of that 2019 book to the recent, stunning discoveries of ancient ruins. Thanks to LIDAR, light detection and ranging, technology, archaeologists can look past the thick … Read more
Humanity has sought the dream of creating a perpetual motion machine. A way to get limitless and nearly free energy. There have been three major types of perpetual motion machines “invented”. None work forever thanks to the Laws of Thermodynamics. But here are the three: The only way I see a perpetual motion machine existing … Read more
Where do magnets come from? How did we start using magnets? These are some of the countless questions that pop into my mind. Thank goodness for the Internet! No one is certain when the first magnets were used, but ancient peoples from around the world have used them. They stumbled upon some lodestones that were … Read more
The oldest known empire is the Akkadian Empire. But what are the most recent? Here’s a list of what I consider empires that lasted into at least the 20th Century. P.S. Perhaps China is another, emerging, unofficial Empire?
Lovers of theatre (or is it theater as Shakespeare and America prefers) rejoice. It’s World Theatre Day! But now there’s a day for almost everything. March 27th is also the following: Go to this website to keep track of all the “Days” on the calendar. https://www.daysoftheyear.com/ Who said there’s only 365 days in a year. … Read more
Today’s history of the bizarre takes us back to March 26th, 1804. Picture attending a large party is a large room in a building being used to house the United States Senate. The agricultural abundance of the United States is being celebrated. You spot the remnants of a 1,200 pound hunk of cheese on a … Read more
Masters of the Air just wrapped on Apple+. I highly recommend this show. There’s great acting and action and visuals. Masters of the Air is a 9-episode TV series about the 100th Bomb Group flying B-17 heavy bombers during World War II. What’s the first thing the B-17 pilot and co-pilot did after taking their … Read more
Planet Earth watches over 1 billion hours of video streamed daily. Until 1993, there were no videos streamed (maybe we’ll dig up an advanced ancient civilization that did it earlier but until then we go with 1993). What was the first video to stream on the internet? Unlike the first eBook (the Declaration of Independence), … Read more
Another cool piece of digital history is the story of the first eBook. They are everywhere now, but before 1971, none existed. We only had physical and audiobooks at that time. The eBook began when a student at the University of Illinois, Michael Hart, received an account with a virtually unlimited amount of time on … Read more