Red-headed pharaoh
Ramesses II was the most famous and powerful pharaoh of Egypt’s New Kingdom. And we’re pretty sure that he was a redhead.
Month: August 2019
Placebo surgery
When trialling a new medicine, it’s standard practice to test it against a placebo medicine. But what do you do if you’re trialling a new surgery instead?
All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters
Peter the Great founded a drinking club when he was a young man. Because he was tsar, he took it too far.
The queen’s duck
Have you ever had a boss who just had to contribute to your project in order to prove their worth? There’s an easy way to counteract that: just add a duck.
Prisons of the imagination
M. C. Escher drew impossible objects – things that could not actually exist in three-dimensional space. But an Italian engraver named Giovanni Battista Piranesi was drawing them more than a hundred years earlier.
Ghost murder
If you kill someone because you think they’re a ghost, is it murder or manslaughter? Or self-defence?
The king, the twins, and coffee vs. tea
King Gustav III of Sweden was so convinced that coffee was bad for you that he enlisted two criminal twins to prove his case scientifically.
Gender colour coding
Pink for girls, blue for boys. Or is it pink for boys, blue for girls? A persistent myth holds that colour stereotypes flipped some time in the 20th century.
Oldest river
What’s the oldest river in the world? Well, Larapinta in western Australia only has water for a few days each year, but it has probably been around for four hundred million years.
The other dwarfs
Meet Disney’s seven other dwarfs: Baldy, Burpy, Puffy, Snoopy, Nifty, Thrifty, and Awful.
Whale snot drone pilots
Everyone dreams of being a scientist, but few understand just what that profession entails. Well, among other things, you could be a whale snot drone pilot.
Strip-mined country
Eighty percent of the surface area of the Pacific country Nauru has been strip-mined; most of its land has been shipped to Australia, New Zealand, and Britain.
Ghost marriage
In France, China, and Sudan you can marry a ghost.
Lonely words
Flother is another word for a snowflake. It appears only once, in a 1275 CE book. The poison that killed Hamlet’s father in Shakespeare’s play, hebenon, is mentioned nowhere else. These are the hapax legomena, the lonely words.
Jazz on bones
In the 1950s and 60s, foreign music was censored in the Soviet Union. So bootleggers made illegal records out of old X-ray film: the jazz on bones.
Kidney stone paradox
Statistics are tricky. Consider this: of two treatments for kidney stones, Treatment A is better on average for large stones and small stones. But consider all stones together and Treatment B is better. This is Simpson’s paradox.
The Generalist Academy 