Curio Library

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• Satellite navigation only works because the clocks are corrected for relativity.
• Switching doors wins twice as often, because the host deliberately showed a goat.
• There is no largest prime. Euclid's argument is a one-page proof of an endless list.
• People help less when they think someone else in the group will do it.
• The secret ballot exists so nobody powerful can watch how you vote.
• Once a public limit is broken, other people cross it as if it had been ordinary.
• The marathon distance is the 1908 London course, kept because it became the rule.
• Chocolate was a bitter drink long before it was a sweet bar.
• Chili heat is a pain signal, and the Scoville scale measures how far you must dilute it.
• The golden record is a greeting sent with no promise of a reader.
• On Venus, the day is longer than the year, and the sun rises in the west.
• Compounding is the growth earning growth. Time is the ingredient people skip.
• Hangul was designed so ordinary people could read and write their own language.
• Salary remembers salt. The part about soldiers being paid in it is the shaky bit.
• Prefer the explanation that assumes less. That is a habit, not a guarantee.
• The cave is a warning about trusting the only picture you have been shown.
• The Ninth was written by a man who could no longer hear the room.
• Careful pictures of animals are older than written history.
• Firefly light is chemistry that wastes almost nothing as heat.
• A small tern flies farther each year than any other bird we know.
• The web began as a page about how to link pages, and that page is still there.
• Lovelace's leap was that a machine of symbols could compose more than sums.
• Seven hours is the floor for most adults, not a luxury for people with spare time.
• Handwashing cut deaths before the profession was ready to believe why.
• The press mattered because a book could finally be made more than once, on purpose.
• The same text in a known language is what opened Egyptian hieroglyphs.
• Honey keeps because it is a poor place for bacteria, not because it is enchanted.
• Water's odd density is why a lake freezes from the top and stays alive underneath.
• Memory falls fast, then levels off. A second look is what makes it stay.
• People will deny a plain sight to stay with the group, at least once.
• Money can be a shared record of a thing, not the thing you can pick up.
• If both must spend the same, people hand over the worse money and hoard the better.
• Sound money is real. People stay with the kind that melts because the herd does.