The Prime Meridian

In the mid-18th century, excavations in the ancient town of Herculaneum, just outside the city of Pompeii and destroyed by the same volcano, discovered something….interesting.  They found a villa that...

13 Heinä 202414min

In the early 19th century, the most abundant bird in North America, and perhaps the entire world, was the passenger pigeon. An estimated three billion of them would fly in flocks so large that they co...

12 Heinä 202413min

Depending on how you define it, there were somewhere between 70 to 100 Roman emperors between the ascension of Augustus to the fall of the western empire in 476. A period of about 500 years. Some of t...

11 Heinä 202413min

Let me cut right to the chase. This episode is going to be a deep dive into the origin of some common idioms. I don’t want to dance around the subject or have to walk on eggshells, so I’m using this i...

10 Heinä 202413min

One of the most famous lines in poetry comes from the poet Robert Burns, who spoke of ‘The best-laid schemes of mice and men.’ The line has been used in reference to the fact that no matter how good t...

9 Heinä 202416min

The most popular sports league in the world in terms of the number of people who follow and watch is the English Premier League.  Unlike other sports leagues, the English Premier League is relatively ...

8 Heinä 202415min

In February 1904, the Russian Empire found itself at war with the Empire of Japan over what was territory in the current nation of China.  The problem for Russia was that a big chunk of its navy was l...

7 Heinä 202411min

Mark Twain once said, 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.' The reason why he placed statistics into its own category is because it is possible to use numbers to misrepre...

6 Heinä 202413min