Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More

Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, known to history as just Nero, was not the best of Roman Emperors. In fact, on most lists of Roman Emperors, he would rank somewhere near the bottom. In no small part, this is due to how he reacted after the greatest fire ever to engulf Rome and what he built in its aftermath. Learn more about the Domus Aurea, or Nero’s Golden House, on this episode of Eve...

In the middle of World War II, a small island in Scotland’s Hebrides Islands was suffering through war shortages like most of the country. However, on February 5, 1941, a very fortunate disaster struck the island, and the island’s residents couldn’t have been happier. The reverberations from this lucky calamity are still being felt today. Learn more about the wreck of the SS Politician and its inc...

In 1901, Swiss archeologists Gustave Jequier discovered a large stone stele in what is today western Iran. That large stone was 2.25m or 7.5 feet tall and was covered with cuneiform writing. After it was translated, it was found to have been a list of 282 laws written down by the Babylonian King Hammurabi. The laws covered many of the same issues that people deal with in the modern world. Learn mo...

For over 30 years, Monty Hall was the host of the game show Let’s Make A Deal. In the show, they played a very simple game where you would choose one of three doors. This simple game has led to one of the most controversial and public kerfuffles amongst mathematicians, which caused many distinguished mathematicians to have egg on their face. Learn more about the Monty Hall Problem on this episode...

On May 19, 1946, André René Roussimoff was born into the world in Coulommiers, France. At birth, he weighed 13 pounds or 6 kilograms...and from there, he only got bigger. He eventually topped out at 7 feet, four inches tall, weighed 520 pounds, and became a worldwide phenomenon as a professional wrestler and actor. He is one of the few humans to whom the adjective “legendary” can truly be ascribed...

In 1888, the city of London was terrorized by its most infamous serial killer. Anywhere between 5 and 11 murders were committed over a three-year period in the Whitechapel area of London, and the crimes have never been solved. In the decades since then, a cottage industry has developed of amateur sleuths who have tried to determine the identity of this killer, that the newspapers dubbed Jack the R...

One Sunday 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, and one of the most expensive tickets for any sporting event. However, it wasn’t always that way. In fact, it wasn’t even called the Super Bowl. Learn more about the Super Bowl an...

For over 100 years, radio has been one of the biggest mediums for communication, information, and entertainment. It was the first true broadcast medium. However, recent technical and demographic changes have made the future of radio, or at least some of the bands, doubtful. Learn more about AM and FM radio, its past, present, and future, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more a...

In the 17th century, the Netherlands was struck by the world’s first investment bubble. They weren’t investing in stocks or bonds or real estate. They were investing in…..tulip bulbs. Tulip bulbs became a mania and even common people were spending money on tulips. The price of some tulip bulbs rose so high that at one point a single bulb was worth 10 times the annual salary of a laborer. Learn mor...

How small can a country be and still be a country? In theory, there is no lower limit on the number of people to be a sovereign state. However, in reality, there are costs associated with being an independent country. The fewer the number of people, the higher the cost for everyone in the country. There is one country that has managed to remain an independent republic for over 50 years with a popu...

In 1936, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin determined it was time for the Soviet Union to have another census. They hadn’t conducted one since 1926 and he wanted some actual numbers to show the world the success of the Soviet system. Needless to say, the numbers were not what Stalin had expected….and promised. Learn more about the 1937 Soviet Census, the census that exposed Stalin, on this episode of Ev...

A common misconception that many people have is that embassies are part of the territory of the country that owns the embassy. For example, the American embassy in Canada is part of the United States. This is not quite true. The theory covering how an embassy or a diplomat works deals with the concept of extraterritoriality. Learn more about extraterritoriality, the thing which makes international...

Multiple births happen very infrequently. The odds decrease dramatically the more children are born at once. The odds of twins is 1 in 250 pregnancies. The odds of triplets are about 1 in 62,000. The odds of quadruplets are one in 15 million. And the odds of quintuplets, five children, is an astonishing 1 in 55 million. In fact, the first case of natural quintuplets surviving infancy occurred 86 y...

In 1957 the United States embarked on its most controversial series of nuclear tests. These tests took place on US soil in the state of Nevada. They detonated 29 devices and tested a wide number of things, including how blasts would damage builds, pigs, and soldiers. They detonated bombs on towers, from balloons, and even underground. And, according to legend, they might have even accidentally lau...

150 years ago, an American inventor by the name of Christopher Latham Sholes developed a machine to allow people to easily put text onto paper by pressing mechanical keys. He called his invention the “type writer”. After years of tinkering and adjusting, he finally came up with an arrangement of the keys that worked. The letters on the left side of the top row were Q-W-E-R-T-Y. We have basically b...

The National Football League is big business. It earns more money than any other professional sports league in the world. All of the NFL teams are own by billionaires or consortiums of multi-millionaires….except for one. One team, has no billionaire owner, is located in the smallest town in America to have a professional sports team, and yet has won more championships than any other team in the NF...

According to the old adage, what goes up must come down. Unless you are talking about a satellite, which can go up and never come down. However, sometimes satellites do come down. When they are not expected to. Where they are not wanted. Such was the case in 1978 with a Soviet spy satellite that spread its debris, its nuclear debris, all over northern Canada. Learn more about Cosmos 954, the Sovie...

The Earth takes a year to go around the sun, and a day to turn on its axis. It is tilted 23.5 degrees which is what causes the seasons. All of these facts which you learned in school are true, but they are not permanent. They change, very slowly, over time. One astrophysicist in the 1920s figured out that all of these cycles could interact with each other, affecting the long term climate of the Ea...

After the end of World War II, the newly created Central Intelligence Agency investigated anything and everything which could give the US an advantage in the Cold War. They looked into anything and everything which might possibly give their side an edge, even if it might have seemed ridiculous on face. One such idea was mind control. Learn more about Project MK Ulta on this episode of Everything E...

Every so often, the series Dr. Who would have a special episode where multiple versions of the time-traveling Doctor would appear on the same episode. I think they probably ripped the idea off from the Roman empire, where they had several years with multiple emperors. So, fresh off talking about the year of four emperors, we might as well go straight into the year it was even worse. Learn more abo...

As long as the Roman empire lasted, they never created a set method of choosing successors to emperors. This inability to have an idea of who would be next in line caused numbers problems during the history of the empire. The first major succession crisis occurred in the year 69. One emperor died, and there was no clear replacement. The result was chaos. Learn more about the Year of the Four Emper...

In 1844, the Philological Society of London began investigating the creation of a new English dictionary. This initial foray would lead to a dictionary that would be unlike any other dictionary ever created. It would not just give the definition and spelling of a word, but a complete history of each word and where it came from. It would be one of the most ambitious literary projects in history. Le...

Normally, if a foreign country has you totally surrounded, that isn’t a good thing. However, in some parts of the world, it is a normal, everyday occurrence. Due to historical quirks in drawing maps, there are parts of some countries which are separate from the mainland and are totally surrounded by another country. Learn more about exclaves and enclaves on this episode of Everything Everywhere Da...

Every four years on January 20th, the United States holds a ceremony for the inauguration of the President of the United States. There are traditions for the inauguration, some of which have been passed down since the very first. Why do we use January 20th as the date, and how did many of these traditions get started? Learn more about the history and traditions of the Presidential Inauguration on...

In 1896, the United States was experiencing what we now call a recession. The Panic of 1896 had made life tough on everyone, and many of the companies in the highly competitive railroad business were looking for new ways to make money. One man, William George Crush, came up with a smashing idea. His idea was so popular that it drew enough people to create the second-largest city in Texas for a sin...