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.

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 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?

Some European countries like France or Italy are known for incredible food cultures. Ireland on the other hand, is better known for their drinking than eating. Our Whiskey's and Coffee's are fairly well known worldwide, but we’re probably best known for Guinness. It is, after all, our national drink. So what makes a national drink, and why is Guinness ours?

There's a fantastic list of the most expensive domain names on Wikipedia. The most expensive so far is voice.com that was bought for $30 million. So why are domain names going for such crazy sums of money these days?

Happy leap year! It's pretty easy to figure out when we have a leap year, right? Nothing about time is what it seems. Let's find out why.

Most people feel a sense of security when they lock something that they own. But this sense of security is misplaced. Most locks that we use in our homes can be picked in a few minutes flat. So why do we still use them?

CAPTCHA is a test to distinguish humans from computers on the internet. But with computers becoming better at things that were previously only possible by humans, does it still work today?

If you live in one of 70 odd countries with Daylight Saving Time, changing your clocks twice a year is a normal part of life. But in the rest of the world in this day and age, this practice seems bizarre. Should we just do away with it altogether?

Happy World Standards Day 2023! To celebrate, I rate every norm featured on Norming to date, on a five-star scale.

Ireland didn't get a postcode system until 2015, which makes it one of the newest in the world. So what does a postcode for the 21st Century look like? And how does it compare to its contemporaries?

The topic of the best plug has been hotly debated by patriotic plug enthusiasts around the world, claiming that their plug is better than all others. So the question is, who is right and who is wrong?

If you've ever had the displeasure of dividing up an A4 sheet of paper with a ruler, you'll know that it measures 210x297mm. Conveniently short enough to measure with a standard ruler. But the question remains, why 297mm and not the more convenient 300mm?

If I wanted to buy a new car in 1910, I'd have three drivetrain options to choose from, steam, internal combustion or electricity. Over 100 years later, electricity is making a comeback again. Does history have any hints as to how successful we might be this time?

Chances are if you've ever sneaked a look at someone else's YouTube, Netflix or Spotify home page, you'll see a very different place to your own. Recommendation systems are so personalised these days that a recommended feed almost feels like an invasion of privacy.

The web has become cluttered with pop-ups asking for our consent to cookies and tracking policies. So how did we get here, what is a cookie and why do we have to accept them just to be able to browse the web?

An unfortunate paradox of successful typefaces is that, the more wide their use is, the less noticeable they become. And there is possibly no typeface that this is more true for than Times New Roman. So how did it reach such ubiquity that it became a icon of the word processing age? And how did it ultimately eventually fall out of fashion?

Recently while visiting the United States I noticed that nearly every time I used my debit card to make a payment I was asked if I would like to pay with "credit or debit". Curiosity took the better of me and I occassionally said "Credit" to see what would happen. The payment still successfully went through each time. If it would work either way, why ask the question?