Do the gulags still exist? Technically no, but actually yes. The gulag is not actually a place. We use the expression gulag to refer to a Russian prison, but it is really the name of the government agency that was in charge of the forced labor camps during the Soviet era. The word gulag is […]
#634 Do the gulags still exist? Read More »
What is the difference between a castle, a fort, and a palace? A castle is a fortified building constructed for the nobility. A fort is just a fortified building. A palace is a large house built for royalty, or very wealthy people. Forts appeared long before castles. A fort is a fortified building and the
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What is the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray? Their age, size, quality, audio, and the disc reading technology. DVD is an older technology than Blu-Ray. The technology used to read DVDs was invented in 1958 by David Paul Gregg, an American engineer, and James Russell, an American inventor. Gregg invented a way to record video
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Why don’t shipping containers fall off ships? Well, they do sometimes, but generally they are fastened down with lashing rods. There are almost 5,500 container ships in the world and they ship over 11 billion tons of cargo around the world every year. The size of the ships has also increased year by year. The
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How does a heat-seeking missile work? By detecting and homing in on the infrared radiation released by a plane. Heat-seeking missiles are either launched from a plane or from the ground. They lock onto a target plane, correct their course as they track the plane, and then detonate either when they hit the target or
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Why do we say eleven and twelve, and first, second and third? Why do we say eleven and twelve? All languages have words for the numbers one to ten. However, a large number of languages then go on to count the numbers after ten by saying number plus ten. So, for example, in Chinese twelve
#610 Why do we say eleven and twelve, and first, second and third? Read More »
Why do cameras have mirrors? To flip the image so that we can see it the right way up through the viewfinder. There are two types of cameras: ones with mirrors and ones without. The cameras without mirrors are digital and they don’t need to physically rotate the image because they don’t have a viewfinder.
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How do people predict the weather? These days, by using AI and supercomputers. People have tried to predict the weather for millennia. When most of the population were involved in the agricultural sector, knowing the weather was important. However, the day to day weather may have been less important than the seasonal weather. If there
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What is the difference between a forest, a wood, and a copse? These days, the difference is in the size, but it wasn’t always that way. Let’s look at all three of them. What is a copse? These days a copse is defined as a small group of trees. There is no defined size or
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What are runes? Runes were a series of alphabets used by the Germanic peoples between approximately AD 150 and the 17th century. The word “rune” comes from the Proto-Germanic word “runo” and means “secret, mystery, secret conversation”. This name possibly comes from the legend that the ability to read runes was given to the Norse
#588 What are runes? Read More »
