Ytterbium is a soft, silvery rare-earth metal with atomic number 70, best known today for its role in high-power fiber lasers, though its path to discovery was a tangled, decades-long story involving mistaken identities and scientific rivalry. Its name comes from Ytterby, a tiny village in Sweden where a mineral containing the element was first…
Our 2026 Halloween
Halloween is, in some ways, my favorite holiday of the year, and I look forward to it every single time. I even get a little sad when Halloween night ends and there are another 365 days of waiting. Like every year, I put a lot of thought into our Halloween for 2026, and like any…
10 Fun Facts and Trivia For November 2026
Walt Whitman Park holds the distinction of being the site of the very first playground built on public parkland specifically for the children of United States government workers. King Eadwig of England carries a peculiar historical reputation, widely remembered for allegedly abandoning his own coronation feast to “spend the night” with his wife and mother-in-law….
Things I Like: Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin (Nintendo DS)
Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin was a game I picked up fairly soon after release, if not on day one, for the Nintendo DS. By that point, I’d already worked through Harmony of Dissonance, followed by Symphony of the Night, Circle of the Moon, Aria of Sorrow, and Dawn of Sorrow, thoroughly enjoying every single one…
Fun Facts and Trivia About Halloween
Halloween draws its origins from a Celtic festival called Samhain, celebrated more than two thousand years ago across what is now Ireland, the United Kingdom, and parts of northern France. The Celts held that on the night of October 31, the barrier separating the living from the dead grew thin enough for spirits to pass…