Month: December 2020

Hundreds of years ago gold and silver were rare and valuable, and today they are rare and valuable. Iron and tin were cheap and plentiful and today they are cheap and plentiful. However, there is one metal that was once the rarest and expensive metal in the world, and today it is one of the cheapest and most plentiful. Learn more about aluminum, how it was once rare and then became abundant, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX.

A note on notes: We’d much rather you just went into each episode of The Memory Palace cold. And just let the story take you where it well. So, we don’t suggest looking into the show notes first.

Music

• Memory Waltz from Bernard Herrmann's score to The Snows of Kilimanjaro

• Pink Champagne from Harry Warren's score to An Affair to Remember

• Jonalah from the Chico Hamilton Quintet

• Brouillard, version 2 from Delerue's Jules et Jim score

• Living by Sebastian Plano

Have you ever heard a science story on the news where they mention how old something is then ask yourself “how do they know that?” How is it possible to tell the age of something with any degree of certainty when there was no one around millions or billions of years ago? Well, there are answers to those questions. Learn more about radiometric dating, and how we can measure the age of objects and the Earth, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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On February 10, 2013, in what began as a rather innocuous assembly, Pope Benedict the XVI stunned the world by announcing that he would be retiring. Not only were people stunned, but to paraphrase King George in the Musical Hamilton, most people weren’t even aware that was something a pope could do. Yet, it is something popes can do, and the precedent was set over 700 years earlier. Learn more about Pope Celestine V, the man who really didn’t want to become pope.

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There are lots of stories about lost technologies and techniques of the ancients which have been lost to us through history. In reality, most things were figured out independently by modern people, and we have better modern versions of almost everything the ancients had, including things like Damascus Steel. That is, except for one thing. Learn more about Roman Concrete, the stuff which has lasted over 2,000 years, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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