Author: Gary Arndt

At its peak, the British Empire covered 23% of the world’s population and 24% of the Earth’s landmass. By either measure, it was the largest empire in the history of the world. Since then…..well, let’s just say the Empire has seen better days. While the vast majority of the Empire is gone, there are still assorted crumbs of the empire that exist around the world.

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For years a story had circulated that the rock and roll group Van Halen had a contract that required that a bowl of M&Ms be left backstage wherever they performed, with all the brown M&Ms removed. If there were any brown M&Ms in the bowl, they would use it as an excuse to trash the room. Is this just an urban legend, or was there something behind the story?

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In 1927, Professor Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia created an experiment to demonstrate to his students the concept of viscosity and how some substances which appear to be solids are actually liquids. That experiment is still running 90 years later.

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In a single 6 second period in 1968, Bob Beamon completely rewrote the record books in track and field. His gold medal-winning long jump at the Mexico City Olympics not only set a world’s record, but it added a new word to the English dictionary.

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Nigel Richards is unquestionably the greatest Scrabble player in history. The 52-year-old Kiwi is a five-time world champion, and the only player ever to win more than once. He is a five-time United States Champion and has won more major tournament titles than anyone else. However, all these accolades are probably not his greatest Scrabble accomplishment.

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After the end of WWII in Europe, General Dwight Eisenhower was appointed the military governor of the American Zone in Germany. During his travels around Germany, he noticed that the German autobahn was really good. His respect for the German highways later became the impetus for passing legislation for the United States Interstate Highway System.

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Poor Pluto. It was totally unknown, then it was a planet, and now it’s not a planet anymore. This change in the status of planets isn’t the first time such a thing has happened. Since the dawn of history, the number of things we call a planet has gone up and down. Find out why Pluto got demoted from a planet, and learn about our human history with planets on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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What would happen if a world leader were to totally disappear? As in, the leader of a major country was to just vanish into thin air, without a trace? Such a thing actually happened 50 years ago when a nation’s prime minister disappeared and his body was never found.

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If you answer that question, most likely you are giving an answer based on a calendar that goes all the way back to one put in place by Julius Caesar. Caesar’s calendar, aka the Julian Calendar, was pretty good, but it developed problems over time, so it was modified in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII. This calendar, the Gregorian Calendar, what we’ve been using for the last several hundred years, and it works pretty well.

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In the aftermath of the horrors of WWI, many people in Europe wanted to find a better future going forward. A future of peace and prosperity, where energy, food, and jobs would be available for everyone. One man from Germany named Herman Sörgel had a VERY ambitious idea. An idea which would literally change the map of the planet Earth, and was the biggest proposed engineering project ever put forward.

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