There are 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute. A lot of measurements — at least in areas that haven’t switched to the Metric system — suffer from that design flaw. It’s not entirely clear why our days have two 12-hour halves or why our hours have 60 minutes of 60 seconds each.
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The first episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood aired in 1968; the last new episode aired in 2001. If you or your children grew up in America and you’re reading this, there’s an almost 100 percent chance that you’ve seen at least bits and pieces of the show.
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Antarctica is unlike any other place on Earth. You can’t grow much of anything there, it’s really cold, it’s not so easy to get to, the vast majority of it is covered in a mile-thick layer of ice, and no one lives there permanently. All told, it doesn’t have a government, per se, but it does have about 5,000 temporary residents and a lot of different research bases. In total, this makes Antarctica a complicated place, at least politically speaking. Here’s a map of all of the odd territorial claims, and while it’s a bit hard to read, that’s kind of the point. Antarctic governance is a mess.
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It’s the same park — same trees, same benches, same footpaths — but now, instead of on the shore of a five-foot deep lake, it’s on the bottom of a 40-foot (12m) deep one.
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The nation of Malawi is located in southern Africa, toward the west of the continent but landlocked, surrounded by other nations on all sides. It’s one of the smallest nations on the continent (by area) and one of the world’s poorest. The population — about 16 million — is mostly rural and the economy agricultural. Infrastructure is lacking and electricity can be hard to come by. Despite the fact that demand for power is dwarfed by Western norms, Malawi’s state-run power company — which provides 95% of the nation’s electricity — is marred by rolling blackouts.
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In 1971, a pair of brothers named Tom and Louis Borders started a bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. That store, Borders, would become one of the world’s largest booksellers within two decades, but now, it’s gone.
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