Second Thoughts

The Python Programming Language

12/05/2017

Updated on 10/13/2018

There are many dozens of programming languages that exist in the tech universe today. In no particular order, Assembly, BASIC, C, C++, C#, Fortran, Java, Perl, Python, Javascript, PHP, SQL, Delphi, Visual Basic, Lua, Lisp, Go, Objective-C, Swift, ColdFusion, R, Actionscript, COBOL, Erlang, ABC, Haskell, ASP, A, B, D, E, F, F#, F*, G, Pascal, Tcl, YAML, SALSA are some of…read more

The $179.3 Million Picasso

11/19/2017

Updated on 10/08/2018

History was made on November 13, 2017, when a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi, sold for $450.3 million at auction to an unknown buyer, making it the most expensive painting ever sold at auction1. Dating from around 1500, the oil on walnut panel painting depicts Jesus Christ against a dark background holding a very unrealistic glass orb. Despite…read more

NFL Second Rounders

11/01/2017

Updated on 10/08/2018

The quarterback-heavy New England Patriots the other day traded their backup (or second-string) quarterback to the quarterback-needy San Francisco 49ers for a pick in the second round of the 2018 NFL draft. Reasons for the trade are beyond the scope of this particular post, however, the trade of a valuable player who came into professional football as a second-round pick…read more

John F. Kennedy and the Second Gunman

10/26/2017

Updated on 09/24/2022

The National Archives today are due to release somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 never-before-seen documents along with the full versions of at least 30,000 other redacted documents that had previously been released all pertaining to the November 22, 1963, assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. As new findings emerge from these documents, I thought it would be a good…read more

German Passports 2017

10/25/2017

Updated on 12/27/2018

A recent report issued by Arton Capital, a global financial advisory firm, shows that Germany owns the second most powerful passport in the world. You can see for yourself by having a look at the Passport Index. This updated index was covered by several major news publications including Business Insider, CNN, and the Telegraph, except they weren’t focusing on the second most…read more

Laika the Space Dog

10/24/2017

Updated on 09/10/2022

Sputnik 1 was successfully launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, becoming the first artificial object to reach Earth orbit. Having been launched during the Cold War era, this tiny, beeping, ball-shaped satellite caused great concern among many paranoid red-scared Americans for whom the event was not so much a great moment of scientific achievement, but rather a disconcerting development…read more

Second-degree Burns

10/19/2017

Updated on 10/08/2018

Editor’s note: Please don’t be a moron. Under no circumstances should anything written in this post be considered medical advice or be used for diagnostic purposes. Doctors do that stuff. I’m not a doctor and I don’t pretend to be. SilverMedals.net is not a refereed journal by any stretch. At some point in all our lives we experience a first-degree burn….read more

Elcano, Drake, or Urdaneta?

10/11/2017

Updated on 09/24/2022

You’d think that if finding out the first person to do something was relatively easy, then finding the second person to do something would be just as easy, right? SilverMedals finds that this is not the case in many cases, and annoyingly so. For instance who was the second person to circumnavigate the globe? Most of us American kids learned…read more

Lasedi La Rona Diamond

10/05/2017

Updated on 10/08/2018

A little over a week ago, the Lesedi La Rona diamond, the second-biggest gem-quality* diamond ever found, sold for a whopping $53 million. Well, whopping is a relative term here, just a few years prior the diamond had failed to sell at auction when nobody was willing to meet the opening bid price, which Sotheby’s had set at $70 million. At 1,109-carats (about…read more