Sunday is Pi Day (3/14, of course!), and to celebrate we baked you these 14 Perfect Pi Pies. (We had originally intended to bake 314 such pies for the sake of greater numerical accuracy, but this proved to be a terrible idea.) Pi Pies, in case you eat all of these before Sunday and need [...]

Today is World Thinking Day, a rather broad and abstract holiday that we think is very strange, and which apparently has something to do with the founders of the Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. For our part, though, we like to take a little extra time on Thinking Day to reflect on all the brilliant [...]

We have been receiving conflicting reports as to the actual date of Opposite Day, which actually seems appropriate for Opposite Day. Some sources claim that it was yesterday, January 24, others claim that today, January 25, is the big backwards day. We’re not taking any chances, though, quite the opposite in fact. We’ve decided that [...]

For all the awkwardness and angst they once caused us, as mature and “fully developed” adults, we can now look back on the educational artifacts that taught us where babies came from in those barely pre-Internet days with a funny fondness. They say times were simpler, but sitting down and talking about these things seems [...]

In the battle of the sexes (by which we mean the actual comparison of genitals between the genders), there has never been much doubt in our minds that vaginas are about 1,000 times more interesting, mysterious and sophisticated than penises. Every time we think we’ve figured them out we learn something new, as we did [...]

Louis Braille, the Frenchman who invented the system for sightless reading that bares his name, was born 200 years ago today. Though his life was marked by many epic wins–for instance, using the same stitching awl with which he’d accidentally blinded himself to create his revolutionary system, and succeeding at a school for the blind [...]

As children, our favorite book was John Stuart Mill’s fun little treatise on what we should and shouldn’t do, Utilitarianism, which taught us when to think of others first, and when it’s best to look after ourselves, among many other things (potty-training, for instance). At any rate, Mill’s kids book seems a little dry compared [...]

Today is World Aids Day, so if you’re not walking down some major street amid a sea of red shirts as you read this, or at least sporting a red ribbon, you should probably get on that. With that in mind, we’re taking this year’s WAD as an opportunity to appreciate just how global and, [...]

As much as we enjoy learning all the various details that contribute to the expansions and contractions of successive global empires, we’d much rather watch them unfold as an animated infographic than have to, you know, learn them in a textbook or something. Happily, graduate student Pedro M. Cruz’s thesis on information visualization involved creating [...]

As our graduation from the Masters program we’re drawing out as best we can approaches (very, very slowly), we’re already trying to figure out where to apply for our next degree. Of course, the money thing is a bit of a problem… so we’re perusing the academic credentials of the universities featured in mental_floss’s listicle [...]