Podcast Transcript Centuries ago, the most expensive jewelry in the world wasn’t made of diamonds, rubies, or emeralds. Rather, they were made with an extremely rare substance that was occasionally found inside of clams and oysters: pearls. Pearls were so valuable that they could only be possessed by kings, queens, and emperors. Today, the manner …
Podcast Transcript The United States Constitution lays out a set procedure for the election of a president and how a winner is determined from various candidates. However, it says absolutely nothing about how those candidates are determined in the first place. Since the first presidential election, the process by which parties have chosen their candidates …
Podcast Transcript If you ever stay up at night scanning through frequencies on shortwave radio, there is a good chance you might come across something very odd and kind of creepy. You will find a station that is nothing but a disembodied voice reading off a seemingly random string of numbers. There is often an …
Podcast Transcript In the Pacific Theater in World War II, the leader of the combined Japanese fleet was Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. Yamamoto was villanized as the arch-enemy of the American forces in the Pacific, and to be fair, he was their enemy. But there is actually much more to the story. Yamamoto was the loudest …
Podcast Transcript In the year 732, one of the most important battles in world history took place between the cities of Tours and Portier in France. On one side was an unstoppable juggernaut that had amassed one of the largest empires in world history in less than a century. On the other side was a …
Podcast Transcript In the 19th century, a new discipline swept over the medical and legal professions. This belief held that a person’s personality could be determined by analyzing the contours or bumps on their head. The belief had a surprising amount of sway among certain people, and it developed a large following before eventually being …
Podcast Transcript If you take a look at the periodic table of elements, you will notice something interesting. Go to the bottom and take a look at any element over, say, number 94. You will find a bunch of elements you have probably never heard of. Don’t worry because most chemists probably aren’t familiar with …
Podcast Transcript One of the central figures in the drama of the collapse of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire was Marc Antony. He was a rather odd figure in Roman History. He came from a notable but pleblean family. Neither was he wasn’t a great general. Yet he was at …
Transcript One day every year, the United States celebrates its biggest non-official holiday: Super Bowl Sunday. The championship game of the National Football League is almost always the biggest television audience of the year in the United States and one of the most expensive tickets for any sporting event. However, it wasn’t always that way. …