Hello There!

I am Alexandre Coates, please call me Alex.

 

I am a postgraduate masters student doing Physics in the UK. Yes, I graduated and still wanted more. This website start long ago as an effort to keep me unfocused though. To encourage reading broadly, and writing, that most dreaded of tasks.

How Did This Start?

Over the course of my school days I was known for providing occasional facts when I felt like it. Eventually in late 2010 people started coming up to me… and demanding facts. I was startled at first, but decided that people were being polite, and so I indulged them. I would trawl the internet, and pay attention to radio and television broadcasts for new snippets of information before regurgitating them the next day.

It became a rather big thing, with people shouting ‘FACT OF THE DAY!’ at me as I went around my business. If I stopped moving, people would pool around me and I would have to explain various facts to them.

One peculiar day in early 2011, I was cajoled by a group of older students onto a stool so that I could deliver my fact to the whole room. I remember them quieting the whole room, and around 100 pairs of eyes turning to me. I cleared my throat and announced: “Every fruit you eat, oranges, lemons and so on… they are all ovaries. The ovaries of a tree are the fruit they produce.” A dry silence fell across the room as they digested the information. Eventually they approved and I was subject to some pleasant applause. I lowered myself back down to earth, bowed, then rushed across to the nearest person who could hide me. Then I decided:

There has to be a better way than this.

I started a simple fact blog in January 2011, and began to post facts. The facts grew longer and more elaborate, as did the bags beneath my sleepless eyes. Traffic picked up, and by the end of January 2012 I had received a total of 100,000 views, of which I was rather proud. Then I looked over the site, and thought that it was crude, cluttered and a total calamity. So I, not knowing entirely what I was doing, made this site and that is how we got here. This better website is the result of many hours I spent in tedious research. I still like it though.

Hopefully you will find some things here which are entertaining, new, or puzzling to you. My aim is to educate, and learn in the process, so if you spot a mistake please let me know in the comments or by email. I cannot devote all of my time to this, but I will when I can. If you enjoy the website, and feel you have gained something from it, consider donating. Any donations bring this site closer to breaking even, and of course, it would be awfully nice of you.

If you like anything here, share it, and let me know if you have any interesting facts I should write about. To contact me, you can use the aptly named Contact page to do so.

Have a marvelous day, evening, night.