When you look at the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza, the life of Cleopatra, and Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, which of those is the most out of […]
Mankind has been seeking a way to slow down aging since the very beginning. As it turns out, the best way to slow time is to move faster.
The history of how the unit of length known as the foot ended up being 12 inches is long and varied. When it came time to develop a metric unit of length, […]
Time zones are relatively new phenomena in world history. Prior to the late 19th century, the authoritative source for the official time of day was the town clock. At noon each day, […]
While the vast majority of your body is fully grown by the age of twenty years, there are parts of your body that have only just begun.
If you are concerned that humanity is outgrowing the available space on this planet, you can relax. As it turns out, there is a lot more room available than you might otherwise […]
Tic Tacs are among the simpler joys of human existence. Since their inception in 1968, the small, hard mints have been released in many flavors in over 100 countries. Anyone who is […]
When it comes to a Last Will and Testament, there are rules mandating how short or long it may be. Take a lesson from the following extremes of the shortest and longest […]
Readers of Douglas Adams‘ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy know the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42. What they may not know is the mathematical formula that will […]
Thanks to Santosh Kulkarni for this great post. Be sure to check out his site for more great articles on many fascinating subjects. Mathematics can get pretty complicated. Fortunately, not all math […]
Those who use the metric system are accustomed to measuring temperature with the Celsius scale. Departing from the Fahrenheit system, with its arbitrary assignment of 32 degrees as the freezing point and […]
Is outer space a distant, mysterious place? Mysterious, perhaps, but it is a lot closer than you might suspect. Depending on just how you define “outer space,” it could be as close […]
NASA’s New Horizons zoomed past Pluto in July 2015. It not only captured some stunning pictures of the planet, (Yes, we at Commonplace still hold to the notion that it is, indeed, […]
The largest recorded snowflake was in Keogh, Montana in 1887. It was 15 inches wide. The phenomenon was witnessed by the personnel at Fort Keogh, and the reports are reliable enough that […]
Although the number of galaxies is so vast that they cannot be accurately counted, they have one thing in common. All disk galaxies, no matter their size or mass, rotate once every […]
