Category: Weird

ChatGPT is here. It’s not going away. And it seems to be evolving in a 5-step linear progression, as follows . . .

A celestial phenomenon not seen for 800 years will happen just after sunset on the winter solstice.

In 2019 I read over 120 books. While I did learn a lot, I did not get anywhere near the amount of wisdom I should of from the 500+ hours of reading I did. I have grown and learned MUCH more in 2020 by ignoring books and doing these things instead.

Intellectual Property is Property. That's it. That's the description.

I looked at the list and got scared anyway. I felt like a con man.

Read on from step one to found out how to open a safe you have permission to crack or a fictional one!

But those cartoons did more than mind-numbingly entertain a generation of children.

The “Letter of Transmittal” for Week Sixteen of Charles F. Haanel’s The Master Key System is somewhat strange.

We’ve learned lots of ‘useful’ information from watching movies. For example, how to effectively shoot back at an enemy, and how to fly away in a spaceship through an asteroid belt. But the big screen misleads us a lot, so over the years many myths were created that we still believe.

In the 1970s, some major advances in computer technology started to influence children's toys during the decade as evident in the simply computerized game of Simon and the development of the Atari computer and gaming system.

In this episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast, we sit down with a scientist who is challenging these assumptions.

The Piri Reis map is a world map compiled in 1513 from military intelligence by the Ottoman admiral and cartographer Piri Reis.

They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, but, when it comes to the best old-time radio horror, each word is worth a thousand pictures.

ver wonder how popular things got, well, popular?

Cicero, Martial and Horace all knew how to give an insult.

But none of that will matter by the end of this article, because everyone will be on the same level. What level is that? The one where you're questioning your sanity and, really, your very existence. You're welcome!

85650789657397829 + 1402 more digits is an illegal number.

In this article we discuss a very brief and simplified history of Quantum Mechanics and will quote what the founding fathers of this branch of science had to say about Vedic influence on the development of their theories.

What is it about Morgan Freeman’s voice that makes us love it so, tasking it to play the voice of God in movies or to guide us safely to our destination through the navigation app Waze? It turns out, there are some science-backed reasons why Freeman’s voice has so many fans.

A scientific study conducted a few years ago found that the sorts of architecture once typical of “museums, churches, and libraries” has measurable effects on brain function that are similar in some ways to traditional forms of meditation.

One of Isaac Newton's 17th-century alchemy manuscripts, buried in a private collection for decades, reveals his recipe for a material thought to be a step toward concocting the magical philosopher's stone.

And it's way more than a metaphor about insects and bad weather. No, it turns out the butterfly effect is a very real and slightly freaky thing. Don't believe us? Well, then how do you explain ...

Famed turn-of-the-century Tenor Enrico Caruso could purportedly shatter Champagne glasses by belting out high notes. And Ella Fitzgerald did it herself in a 1972 Memorex commercial (although she had a little help from two speakers).

Susan Brind Morrow has developed a new translation of the world’s oldest sacred texts.

Well, we don't guarantee that any of the below will work for you -- all we can say is that smarter people than us have gotten them to work under scientifically controlled conditions. They also happen to cost absolutely nothing, so if you need to force you brain to start thinking outside the box, try to ...

When approaching a modern-day intersection, we as drivers don’t need much direction in order to know what to do. We simply see a color—red, yellow or green—and act accordingly. But the meanings of those colors weren’t always so universally known, and the story of how they became so is a bit of an odd one.

In AD 79, the people of Pompeii felt rumblings from the nearby mountain of Vesuvius, but they couldn’t have imagined what would happen next…

Here are ten essentials of quantum mechanics that may cause you to re-examine how you picture our Universe, on the smallest scales and beyond.

Baader-Meinhof is the colloquial name attached to a quirky, though simple, psychological concept that we've probably all experienced at one time or another.

Check out this list of former secret agents turned writers. You might be surprised to see who shows up!

All it takes is bad letter spacing to cause some serious confusion (and laughter). The businesses and individuals pictured below were caught with poorly spaced letters resulting in some unintentionally risqué signs and messages.

History has no shortage of disastrous rulers; this list could easily have been filled with the Roman Emperors alone. Rulers have been homicidal, like Nero or Genghis Khan; incompetent, like Edward II; completely untrustworthy, like Charles I; or amiable but inadequate, like Louis XVI of France or Tsar Nicholas II.

Here are vintage campaign buttons from animated presidential bids. Did you ever spot someone wearing one?

I applied to Stanford University because I wanted to refine my clinical understanding of lucid dreaming: the ability to become conscious during dreams and affect their content.

“I THINK, therefore I am.” René Descartes’ aphorism has become a cliché. But it cuts to the core of perhaps the greatest question posed to science: what is consciousness?

Whether you expect to be reunited with lost loved ones in a heavenly place, or don't believe anything awaits once you have passed away, what really happens after death remains one of life's great mysteries. But now a group of people who have experienced death and believe they can offer an insight to what it's really like have taken to the question and answer site Quora to explain how it feels.

Thou art...

In 1920, the popular newspaper comic strip Jerry on the Job was adapted by Bray Studios into a few animated films. In “The Bomb Idea,” Jerry and another character read that “Bolsheviki” are on the loose throughout the country, and that all citizens should be on alert. Shortly after, a man arrives carrying a heavy, black sphere. Jerry and his friend panic, assuming the item is a bomb, when eventually it is revealed to just be a bowling ball. But it’s clear that by 1920, everyone knew what a bomb looked like.

You hate how your mother-in-law meddles in your marriage, so it's no shocker when you tell her off in your dream—dreams are, after all, your brain's way of working through unresolved conflicts. But what can explain that recent string of random nightmares or incredibly vivid visions? "We know a bit about things that affect dream recall and make for more nightmares," says Deirdre Barrett, PhD, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, and author of The Committee of Sleep. So here, 11 surprising things that can influence what pops up in your dreams or how likely you are to remember them.

HAVE you ever wondered why on Earth that teeny tiny pocket is standard in most denim jeans? It’s a weird one, isn’t it? The list of things that are right for this particular pocket size is fairly limited …

In 1956, a B-25 Mitchell bomber flying from Nevada to Harrisburg crashed into the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh. Two of the six crew members died in the river. Despite many searches, no one has ever found the plane, fueling conspiracy theories about the purpose of the flight and whether the federal government secretly removed the plane from the water in the dead of night.

A lot of what we imagine about famous landmarks comes directly from pop culture or pretty pictures we've seen in magazines and on postcards. Which is dumb, because those are all perfectly framed and digitally altered to look picturesque for our eager consumption. But it turns out that for every perfectly angled shot of a famous location, there's most definitely at least one angle that reveals the whole, unflattering truth. We're talking about places like ...

$2 bills are seen in circulation so rarely that some people still think they’re counterfeit.

On Friday night, the host of a concert where I was playing stepped in front of the audience after one of the pieces and asked people what sorts of mental images the music had stirred up in them. About a dozen people came up with a variety of answers.

Apple, Microsoft, Sony. Seeing their logos can evoke an emotional response, linking their userbase with their ideals. On the flip side, if poorly designed, these symbols can also make a company look out of touch or a little strange.

Novelists, poets and artists can help us to piece together the mystery of human consciousness, says Mark Haddon.

*takes long drag of a cigarette*

But some people – lucid dreamers – have the ability to experience awareness during their dreams by “re-awakening” some aspects of their waking consciousness. They can even take control and act with intention in the dream world (think Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Inception).

If you're in the market for an update to , old Strunk and White, it's probably a good buy. But if you just want to spot-check that you've not been making embarrassing language mistakes for years, a monster list of 58 commonly misused phrases covered in the book that recently appeared in the UK's Independent newspaper is probably a good place to start.