History Nerd

Alcatraz was built to be escape-proof.

• Sharks in the water
• Guards on every tower
• Freezing currents no man could survive

For years, no one made it out until June 11, 1962.

The true story of the greatest prison break in history:

The Human Genome Project ran from 1990 to 2003. It cost the NIH about $2.7 billion in 1991 dollars, and finished more than two years ahead of schedule.

In the three months ended June 30, 2026, Anthropic’s compute and infrastructure expense was $5.6 billion. That is one quarter of computing for one company.

For most of the last century, the largest scientific instruments were built by governments over decades. Some of the largest now sit on a single company’s balance sheet.

Never underestimate the power of pettiness… it’s due to pettiness that the need for a human to connect every phone call was eliminated.

In the 1880’s, an undertaker became convinced of a conspiracy: the telephone operator was stealing his customers.

The telephone operator’s husband was his biggest competitor.

Almon Strowger suspected that she was rerouting calls to her husband instead.

Every phone call had to go through an operator, who manually connected the caller to whoever they wanted to reach.

So he decided to cut her out completely: Strowger built a device that allowed people to connect their own calls without speaking to an operator.

His first prototype was reportedly made from a round collar box and straight pins.

By 1891, he had patented the automatic telephone exchange and within a year had opened the first commercial system in Indiana.

In 1981, three years before the Macintosh shipped, Steve Jobs argued with his team about the curve of a rectangle.

The Mac's window corners were rounded, not sharp. An engineer told him it was nearly impossible to render and pointless since nobody would care.

Jobs walked him outside and pointed at the street signs, the car windows, and the shapes all around them.

Rounded rectangles were everywhere in the real world because humans find them easier to look at. The code got written.

The detail nobody would consciously notice was exactly the one he refused to skip.

Matic is a rounded square for the same reason, except the shape is functional too.

Homes are built on 90-degree corners, and round robots physically cannot reach into them. The team shaped the robot to the house instead of asking the house to forgive the robot.

"Great products are built by people who sweat the parts you'll never consciously see."

When car commercials were made to entertain, not just to sell, Kia’s 2012 ad proves that fun advertising has become a lost art

Source: Kia Motors America, 2012 Super Bowl commercial