fun facts for the next time someone asks

Hedonic Treadmill : Expectations rise with results, so nothing feels as good as you’d imagine for as long as you’d expect.

Pareto Principle : The majority of outcomes are driven by a minority of events.

Dunning-Kruger Effect : Knowing the limits of your intelligence requires a certain level of intelligence, so some people are too stupid to know how stupid they are.

One could also be “crushed” — broken down or destroyed — by sadness or stress, for example. Kory Stamper, a senior editor of lexicography at Dictionary.com, said this figurative sense of “crush” developed alongside the literal meaning. “The historical record is full of the crush of melancholy, the crush of despondency, the crush of death,” Ms. Stam... See more

The first time the word “podcast” appeared in print (alongside “podcasting”) was on Oct 14 2004 in The Los Angeles Times, and taken up by The New York Times, on Oct 28 2004.

About 20 years ago, Google reached an important milestone. The Merriam-Webster dictionary added "Google" as a verb to mean searching for something on the web.

Perhaps because names are so crucial and personal, naming things can feel uniquely human. And until a little over a decade ago, scientists predominantly thought that was true. Then, in 2013, a study suggested that bottlenose dolphins use namelike calls. Scientists have since found evidence that parrots, and perhaps whales and bats, use calls that i... See more

Buridan’s Ass : A thirsty donkey is placed exactly midway between two pails of water. It dies because it can’t make a rational decision about which one to choose. A form of decision paralysis.

Comic Sans wants you to know it wasn’t ever meant to be taken seriously. Vincent Connare, who was then a typographic engineer working at Microsoft, created the typeface in 1994. Most of us were blissfully offline back then, so Microsoft had devised a program called Microsoft Bob to teach people how to use computers. An animated dog named Rover woul... See more

India had fewer than 10 billionaires two decades ago, when Mukesh Ambani and his younger brother first appeared on the Forbes billionaire list after their father, company founder Dhirubhai Ambani, died. Now, the country is the world’s third-biggest source of billionaires after China and the U.S.

India’s 200 billionaires have a combined net worth of... See more