Norming

Airport duty free shops are very odd. You're there walking along the airport corridors, after going through security and all of a sudden it's like you've just walked in the front door of Macy's. So what is a duty free exactly? Why do so many airports have them? Why do they sell somewhat odd items to peddle at travellers, and are they actually any cheaper?

Email was built to send messages, and not in a particularly sophisticated way, but it quietly became a very important piece of Internet infrastructure. It’s the lowest-common-denominator of online communication, but it’s also even more significantly the defacto standard for digital identity on the web. So how did a system designed to simply deliver messages evolve into the Internet’s universal form of digital verification?

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.

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?

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.