For sure this is interesting, but it's curious that articles of this sort are appearing on HN with increasing frequency. There used to be purely tech news, now it seems that anything interesting qualifies for an up vote.
The first page alone includes articles on the migration of monarch butterflies, boardinghouses, income taxes by US counties, doodles by medieval kids, health benefits of eating nuts, and more.
HN is for anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. The only time it was purely tech news was when it was called Startup News.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080616133301/http://ycombinato...
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
It's a refreshing change from say, Reddit's technology subreddits, which are a continuous regurgitation of the same old Comcast, Google, Apple and Microsoft opinions every single day; a thinly-veiled political and astroturfing soapbox at best, where anything remotely interesting in regards to what we're learning about this universe and how our technology applies to it, barely gets above 50 points.
"Tech" is not just computers.