Notre Dame de Paris took 182 years to build, spanning at least seven master builders, none of whom saw it finished. When the first stone was laid in 1163, Saladin had not yet been born, the Magna Carta was 52 years away, and the Aztec Empire would not exist for another 265 years. The flying buttress was invented during construction to solve a problem nobody anticipated.
A study found that 12 seconds of silent interview footage predicted hiring decisions to a statistically significant degree. Nearly 60 percent of interview decisions are made within the first 15 minutes of a 30-minute interview. The brain does not evaluate after the first impression forms. It justifies. Here is what that means for everyone in the room.
Columbus never set foot on the North American continent across four voyages. He landed in the Caribbean, believed he was in Asia until he died, and the continent is named after someone else because he refused to accept he had found anything new. The first European to reach North American soil was Leif Eriksson, 500 years earlier.
In 1999 David Dunning and Justin Kruger showed that people who perform worst consistently rate themselves highest. The popular version of this finding is about other people. The actual finding is that it applies to everyone, that experts are not exempt, and that knowing about the bias does not help you avoid it.
The claim that the Great Wall of China is visible from space was written in 1754, 215 years before anyone went to space. Every astronaut who has specifically looked for it from orbit has reported they could not see it. The Wall is 6 metres wide. At 400 kilometres altitude, that is below the resolution threshold of the human eye.
Teaching at Oxford began in 1096. The Aztec Empire was not founded until 1428, making Oxford 332 years older. Students were sitting examinations in Oxford while the Aztec empire was at its height. The two worlds simply had not met yet. Here is what else was happening in 1096 when Oxford opened its doors.
Saudi Arabia banned the sale of cats and dogs as pets and prohibited walking them in public. The reason given by the religious police: young men were using them to flirt with women. The cat ban had no basis in Islamic law. The Prophet Muhammad was famously devoted to cats. And the ban was never really enforced.
Venting about your problems feels like release. Research by Amanda Rose and Brad Bushman shows it often makes things worse. Co-rumination predicts closer friendships and more anxiety at the same time. Venting anger maintains and amplifies it. Here is the difference between a conversation that helps and one that rehearses the problem.
Hitler was Austrian. He remained an Austrian citizen until 1932, one year before becoming Chancellor of Germany. For 43 years of his life he held no German citizenship. His antisemitism was formed in Vienna, where he lived homeless for five years after being twice rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts. Austria later spent decades presenting itself as Hitler’s first victim.
