Category
Mostly Odd
Ivy Mike: How the H-bomb Vaporised an Island
5km across, the fireball erupted from the island of Elugelab and engulfed the sky. The shock wave vaporised everything within 5km, and scraped the neighbouring islands clean, no buildings or plants remained. 2 hours later some helicopters flew over what used to be Elugelab. The island was gone. In its place was a dark blue […]
Drapetomania – Freedom the Sickness
In 1851 the prominent American physician Samuel Adolphus Cartwright observed black slaves that fled captivity, and saw an illness. “Drapetomania, or the disease causing Negroes to flee” was the title to his paper explaining that black slaves didn’t want freedom, if they escaped they were ill. The cause was masters who treated slaves as something […]
Line to Nowhere: The Life and Death of a Mojave Phone Booth
Deserted in the desert Two dusty tracks cross in the sun-blasted Mojave Desert; there, perched on the edge of nowhere are concrete blocks where a famous phone booth used to stand. It was there for miners in the 1960s with its hand-cranked convenience, in the 1970s it was upgraded to the newfangled touch-tone technology and […]
Voskhod 2: The Cursed Peak of Soviet Space
Alexei Leonov on his spacewalk. Voskhod 2 was a deadly mission. It was the final space race victory for Soviet Russia before NASA finally claimed its lead and ultimately won with the lunar endgame of 1969. This peak of the Soviet Federal Space Program nearly killed its two cosmonauts but was ultimately successful – it […]
How You Are A Hive Mind
You make decisions. How good you are at doing so is irrelevant, what matters is that you make them. Now, you are smarter than a bee, at least you should be, yet bees make complex decisions in exactly the same way as you do, they use each other to form a literal hive mind. Meanwhile […]
How Much Monopoly Money?
You may have heard that, “more Monopoly Money is printed each year than is printed by the United States.” This is utterly false, which is a shame, but at least you know now. When we make 1 monopoly note equal to $1(USD) and a 500 monopoly note equal to a $500 we see that there […]