Frank Jacobs

3 weeks ago | bigthink.com | Frank Jacobs

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people The size of your standard PDF matches the paper in your printer: A4 in most of the world, “letter-sized” in the U.S. and Canada. But standards are not limits. The biggest possible size for a PDF, it has long been said, is a square with sides 237.7 miles (381 km) long, for a total area of 56,047 square miles (145,161 km2).

1 month ago | bigthink.com | Frank Jacobs

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people “The quality of mercy is not strained,” argues Portia in The Merchant of Venice, meaning there should be no limits to being kind and forgiving. But 21st-century culture wars are no Shakespeare play. These days, mercy is a finite resource, and the question is how strained the quality (and quantity) of yours is, for it might reveal your tribal affiliation: liberal or conservative.

1 month ago | bigthink.com | Frank Jacobs

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people This may look like a weather map, but what it shows isn’t your usual kind of atmospheric interference. The red hexagons denote areas affected by GPS jamming in the preceding 24 hours. GPS jamming, which disables the positioning system of electronic devices, including those used to locate aircraft, can be anything from inconvenient to deadly.

2 months ago | bigthink.com | Frank Jacobs

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people The Danes are in “crisis mode” after a “horrendous” call in mid-January between President Donald Trump and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in which Trump in no uncertain terms reiterated his desire to acquire Greenland. What are the Danes to do — ponder and vacillate like Hamlet? Or remember that offense is the best defense?

Jan 22, 2025 | bigthink.com | Frank Jacobs

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people Why didn’t the Romans invent the steam engine, electricity, or the airplane? Perhaps because they were 3 IQ points less clever than they could have been. The culprit: lead pollution — but not of the kind we already knew about. The Romans drank tap water from lead pipes, prepared and ate their food on lead-containing kitchenware, used lead in their cosmetics, and even sweetened and preserved their wine with lead acetate.