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The year 2015 saw an absolutely bumper crop of fake hate crimes, fictional racist events, bogus claims of anti-gay animus and comically sad misunderstandings about innocent symbols. It’s hard to know where to start. America’s precious-snowflake college students and various hangers-on came up with so many incidents ranging from definitively fake to almost certainly fake. The best thing to do is just kick back, relax and enjoy 2015’s greatest hits of hoaxes in all their dumb glory. 1. Delusional students at the University of Missouri were so dizzy with racism they saw imaginary Ku Klux Klan hoods. In November, following … Continue reading →

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A talented young man has compiled a series of quirky maps showing data from across the world – from military conflicts and beer prices to the causes of death.  Martin Vargic’s fascinating maps show the world’s vital statistics all compiled in his new book, ‘Vargic’s Miscellany of Curious Maps: Mapping Out the Modern World’. The 17-year-old graphic designer from Slovakia, who plans to start a career in business next year, said he puts the maps together in his spare time. Martin said all the maps are created in Photoshop and he uses data from a number of sources including the World … Continue reading →

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In his seminal ‘Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization,’ Bryan Ward-Perkins writes, “Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue forever… They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.” The Empire of Chaos, today, is not about complacency. It’s about hubris – and fear. Ever since the start of the Cold War the crucial question has been who would control the great trading networks of Eurasia – or the “heartland”, according to Sir Halford John Mackinder (1861–1947), the father of geopolitics. We could say that for … Continue reading →

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Many of the things we call “modern” have been around for decades, centuries, and in some cases, millennia. This includes technologies that we believe to be revolutionary. Although their predecessors are largely forgotten, they were considered to be revolutionary in their time, too. 10 Music Streaming We stream music over the Internet today, but our grandparents streamed it over the telephone in 1906. The music they streamed was provided by a piece of extinct music equipment called the telharmonium (aka dymanophone), a massive machine that was 18 meters (60 ft) long, weighed 200 tons, and occupied an entire floor. Interestingly, … Continue reading →

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When scientists use these words, they typically mean something completely different than what they do when non-scientists use them. Sometimes our definitions are too narrow or too broad, and sometimes, we use terms interchangeably when they actually shouldn’t be. We dug deep into the American Museum of Natural History’s website to help set the record straight. 1. AND 2. POISONOUS AND VENOMOUS Though the words poison and venom are often used interchangeably—and although they both describe a toxin that interferes with a physiological process—there is a difference. It’s all about how the substance is delivered: Venom is delivered via an … Continue reading →

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A cache of bones and artifacts buried at a site near to where the Waal and Meuse rivers meet testify to a genocidal slaughter of tragic proportions. As recorded by Julius Caesar himself, a bloody battle took place in 55 BC resulting in the genocide of between 150,000 and 200,000 Germanic tribespeople, including women and children, in what is now Netherlands. Archaeologists from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam , working with three decades’ worth of archaeological finds as well as historical and geochemical data, have formed conclusions about the dark events that took place thousands of years ago between Julius Caesar and two … Continue reading →

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This is a rumination on lies — layer upon layer of lies — told by US intelligence agencies and other officials about what Lee Harvey Oswald, or someone pretending to be him, was allegedly doing in Mexico City just weeks before the Kennedy assassination. The original goal, it seems, was to associate Oswald, in advance of the events of Dealey Plaza, with the USSR and Cuba. The essay focuses on tales told by Richard Helms, a top official of the CIA in 1963 who later became its director — and  is based on a talk given by Peter Dale Scott. … Continue reading →

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In the following instances, officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack) admit to it, either orally, in writing, or through photographs or videos: (1) Japanese troops set off a small explosion on a train track in 1931, and falsely blamed it on China in order to justify an invasion of Manchuria. This is known as the “Mukden Incident” or the “Manchurian Incident”. The Tokyo International Military Tribunal found: “Several of the participators in the plan, including Hashimoto [a high-ranking Japanese army officer], have on various occasions admitted their part in the plot and … Continue reading →

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This is a rumination on lies — layer upon layer of lies — told by US intelligence agencies and other officials about what Lee Harvey Oswald, or someone pretending to be him, was allegedly doing in Mexico City just weeks before the Kennedy assassination. The original goal, it seems, was to associate Oswald, in advance of the events of Dealey Plaza, with the USSR and Cuba. The essay focuses on tales told by Richard Helms, a top official of the CIA in 1963 who later became its director — and  is based on a talk given by Peter Dale Scott. … Continue reading →

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A saliva test could predict how long we have got left to live. Researchers found that levels of a particular antibody falls the nearer a person gets to death. To reach their conclusion took samples from 639 adults in 1995 and tracked them over 19 years. They found that the levels of secretory immunoglobin A (IgA) fell the nearer the person got to death. Antibodies are used by the body to fight infection and are secreted by white blood cells. The researchers said the chemical appears to be a marker of mortality risk and is much less invasive than blood sampling. Testing … Continue reading →

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Installing a mirror in your kitchen or dining room could help you lose weight, according to a study published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. Food psychologists claim that literally watching what you eat is but one of many small changes that can prevent you from piling on the pounds. And, as we fight to lose the extra weight we gained over the Christmas period, surely every little helps. So what other home hacks could help us get trim for 2016? 1. Turn down your heating It may seem an unattractive prospect – even if we are experiencing an uncharacteristically balmy … Continue reading →

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In our first of three parts of this blog entry we discussed  revolvers for self-defense; now it’s semi-automatics. Today’s most popular handgun is the semi-auto (sometimes referred as but technically incorrectly as an automatic). The popularity of the semi-auto began to eclipse the revolver for self-defense in the late 1970s when more models became available and police departments began to adopt them for more fire volume and capacity over revolvers (shots). Semi-autos hold more ammunition than most revolvers and can generally be reloaded faster which is the major reason for the popularity of the gun. As with revolvers there are … Continue reading →

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Nothing speaks more profoundly to the crisis of character than the phrase, ‘I identify as…’. In the past, individuals were. ‘I am a builder.’ ‘I am a mother.’ ‘I am a Jew.’ There was a confidence, a certainty, to their sense of identity, and to their declaration of it. ‘I am.’ Today, individuals identify as something. ‘I identify as working class.’ ‘I identify as non-binary.’ Or, in the notorious case of Rachel Dolezal, the American white woman who effectively blacked-up as she rose up the ranks of the NAACP, ‘I identify as black’. The rise of the i-word in our … Continue reading →

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Etymology is fun! It’s especially fun to learn about the quaint old-fashioned practices that gave rise to some of the words we use. Stereotype comes from printing, hard-up comes from sailing, pipe dream comes from opium dens. Cultural practices change, technology changes, but words stick around—and not just in some long ago, far away place. It’s happening all around us as we speak, a hard truth thatmental_floss editor-in-chief Jason recently had to face up to. That’s right. Kids these days don’t know where hang up comes from, and those of us who remember the pre-cell phone era are already receding into the … Continue reading →

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Paradigm: noun par·a·digm : A theory or a group of ideas about how something should be done, made, or thought about. There are some things about buying a car that people expect every time they go to purchase.  They always expect a big discount from MSRP, a host of rebates, and they expect to be taken advantage of.  As we head into 2016, many consumers have now had one or more extremely pleasant experiences purchasing a car.  This is a paradigm that is changing more and more as car dealers figure out that it is cheaper to have repeat business than to … Continue reading →

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