Recycling

The QWERTY Keyboard

When I was younger, my Grandmother asked me to teach her to use a computer. We sat down in front of it, and before I even had a chance to press the power button, she asked “Why are the letters on the keyboard laid out in such a weird way”. The keyboard that we use to interact with them is called QWERTY.

Recycling

A few years back China banned importing waste from other countries. This became quite the story because it turned out that the US had a bit of a dirty secret. They were dumping a lot of their plastic recycling waste on China. Thankfully, China has since put a stop to that, but is it true that most of our recycling is going to landfill, or being exported to become another countries problem, and does recycling actually even work?

Voting

There’s a saying “Just because you do not take an interest in politics, doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you”. For those of us who live in some form of a modern democracy, voting is often one of the most direct ways that we can determine the leaders and futures of the places we live.

The Wayback Machine

The library of Alexandria was one of the most famous libraries of the ancient world. The library was supposedly burned down, and with it, all the years of intellectual progress contained within it. This was the inspiration of a very Silicon Valley project, the Wayback machine.

The Five-Day Work Week

The 40 hour, 5 day work week became the norm for industrialised countries almost 90 years ago, and it hasn’t changed much since. So why are we still working on average 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and does it still work all these years later?