Fifty years ago today, three men were sitting on top of a missile, hurtling up into the inky void, travelling the 240,000 miles (384,400 kilometres) to the moon. The Saturn V rocket propelling them had contained almost 2,000 tonnes of fuel when it left the launchpad in Florida just three days earlier – a volatile […]
Calvin Coolidge had a reputation for being a pretty straight-laced kind of guy. The president who led the United States throughout the prosperous Roaring Twenties was a man of few words – so much so that he earned the nickname ‘Silent Cal’. But even he had his moments of eccentricity. In the summer of 1927, he […]
While conducting some research recently, I discovered a question in a web forum that got me thinking. In a nutshell, the question was: should you include ‘Sent from my iPhone [or Android phone etc.]’ at the foot of an email if you’re composing it on a mobile device? I confess that, until a few weeks […]
Most people think their driving is above average. That’s a statistical impossibility, of course, otherwise it wouldn’t be an average. Still, it’s what we believe. In one study, no fewer than 93 per cent of Americans questioned placed themselves in the top 50 per cent of drivers. This is an example of what psychologists call […]