検索キーワード： 著者 "Dan Lewis" すべてのカテゴリー

Despite its name, Iceland is actually a very welcoming country if you're a tourist looking to get away. The small island nation is one of the few places where visitors can see the Northern Lights, go whale watching, climb volcanic mountains, and also avail themselves of the heated spas and pools that the nation's geothermal energy allows.

In early 1998, an emaciated Texas inmate named Steven Jay Russell was granted a special parole – one that put him in the custody of a hospice. Russell's medical records spelled out the reason: he had HIV/AIDS, and he wasn't likely to survive much longer.

A reusable shopping bag is typically made of canvas or other durable material and is designed to carry one's purchases home from the grocery store, pharmacy or other retailer. While some stores offer incentives to shoppers who bring their own bags, the majority of people who use such tote bags probably do so on their own volition, aiming to be more eco-friendly when they're buying organic frozen pizza (or the like).

The German town of Bochum is the 16th largest in the country by population; as of 2015, Bochum was home to roughly 365,000 people. In the fall of 2014, though, at least one of those people was in a little bit of trouble.

"You can't win if you don't pay"—that's a slogan used by a number of different state-run lotteries in the United States. It's a truism of sorts—the statement is obviously correct (both in the context of lotteries and more generally) and says nothing really interesting, but it makes for good ad copy.

A candy bar – let's go with the criminally underrated Sky Bar as an example – will cost you about $1 nowadays, give or take. Accounting for inflation (and even though I'm about to talk about Canada, we're going to use all US dollars here, because accounting for inflation and for currency exchange rates at the same time is basically impossible for someone without an advanced math degree), that same candy bar should have cost about 10 cents back in 1947.

As haircuts go, few in the mid-1980s were more famous than Brian Bosworth's. A mix of mullets and mohawks and lines, it really didn't matter.

A large oak tree sits near the corner of South Finley Street and Dearing Street in Athens, Georgia. The tree juts out into Finley, causing a bottleneck.

Off the southwestern corner of the Korean Peninsula is Sorokdo, or Sorok Island. At first glance, it looks like a good vacation getaway – it is a tiny but accessible 1.75-square-mile (or 4.46-square-kilometer) spot of land with nice beaches and pine trees, and is home to about 1,000 people, give or take a few hundred.

The "Furby," a toy that resembles a monstrous chinchilla-esque, owl-like creature, was originally released in 1998 by Tiger Electronics – and, if you were a kid back then (or a parent, for that matter), you can attest to how wildly popular it was. Retailing for about $35, but with a secondary market price easily tripling that, the Furby was a combination of next-generation technology and nightmare-inducing fur.

Beginning in December 1968, whenever the United States sent a manned spacecraft into space, it did so from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with the flight directed by the Kennedy Space Center located on nearby Merritt Island. Both the launch site and the Space Center are located an hour east of Orlando, on the Atlantic Ocean.

Imagine what Earth was like a thousand years ago—the year 1015. Almost everything would be foreign to modern eyes and ears—even the language would be incomprehensible.

The internet has made newspapers' "Help Wanted" ads a thing of the past. But in 2001, before this form of advertising was sent into obsolescence, an entrepreneurial (and seemingly desperate) job seeker named Brian O'Dea used the medium to reverse things.

On March 9, 2014, Neil Moore was in Wandsworth Prison, a maximum security prison in London, England, awaiting trial. Moore, whose modus operandi was fraud, had been charged with orchestrating a series of bank heists – pretending to be a bank official and, via a bit of social engineering, he had managed to convince (real) staffers at other financial institutions to wire him some cash.

EMI was a British music company that once had many different labels under it. But the company's history is more robust than simply putting music onto records, cassettes, CDs and iTunes.

"There's no such thing as a free lunch." That quote, the origins of which are unknown, has been a staple rule of economics for nearly a century.

Yves Rossy is a pilot. Like most other pilots, he flies things. But unlike any other pilot, the thing he flies is himself.

For various reasons, dating someone you work with can be a bad idea. Many companies have rules called "no fraternization" policies, which outline the dos and don'ts of office romance.

Air travel can be fun – but it can be maddening, too. One of the more frustrating aspects is the boarding process, during which everyone tries to stow away their carry-on bags and get their bodies into their seats, seemingly all at the same time.

Did you know that Silly Putty is a by-product of World War II-era rubber rationing, or that the Anglo-Swedish War resulted in exactly zero direct deaths? And about the Richmond Golf Club, who posted an addendum to the official rules in case a round of golf was interrupted by a round of bombs dropped by the Nazi Luftwaffe? Now I Know: Military is the ultimate challenge for any know-it-all who thinks they have nothing left to learn about the military.