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Jason is Editor in Chief of LifeSavvy, How-To Geek's sister site focused on helping people live their best life through tips, tricks, and advice on everything from parenting to career building. Prior to that, he was the Founding Editor of Review Geek, another How-To Geek sister site focused on consumer products and services. Jason has over a decade of experience in publishing and has penned thousands of articles during his time at LifeSavvy, Review Geek, How-To Geek, and Lifehacker. In addition to his current duties as Editor in Chief of LifeSavvy, he's an Editorial Advisor on How To-Geek's editorial board where he helps direct the growth and vision of the How-To Geek family. He's also the site's resident trivia expert---relentlessly poring over research and publications in search of the bizarre to amaze and delight 365 days a year.
He's been in love with technology since his earliest memories of writing simple computer programs with his grandfather, but his tech writing career took shape back in 2007 when he joined the Lifehacker team as their very first intern. After cutting his teeth on tech writing at Lifehacker and working his way up, he left as Weekend Editor and transferred over to How-To Geek in 2010. With years of awesome fun, writing, and hardware-modding antics at How-To Geek under his belt, Jason helped launch How-To Geek's sister site Review Geek in 2017. In 2019, he stepped back from his role at Review Geek to focus all his energy on LifeSavvy.
In addition to the long run as a tech writer and editor, Jason spent over a decade as a college instructor doing his best to teach a generation of English students that there's more to success than putting your pants on one leg at a time and writing five paragraph essays. While his days of steering students towards greatness are behind him, his lifelong desire to delight, entertain, and inform lives on with his work for How-To Geek and Review Geek.
If you're looking for him after hours, he's probably four search queries and twenty obscenities deep in a DIY project or entranced by the limitless exploration possibilities of some open-world game or another. He loves long walks on virtual beaches, playing worker placement board games with inconsequential themes, and spending time with his wife, daughter, and highly opinionated dog Cricket.
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The technical name for the blood pressure cuff they use to measure your blood pressure at the doctor’s office is sphygmomanometer. The term is a combination of the Greek word for pulse, “sphygmos”, and the French word for pressure meter, “manomètre”.
M&M candies got more colorful in 1995 when, via popular vote, the tan M&M was replaced with the blue one.
Glue doesn’t stick to its bottle because it’s a solid dissolved in a solvent—when the glue dries after you have applied it (or if you have left the cap off the bottle too long), the solvent evaporates and the glue is fixed in place.
In August of 1902, Theodore Roosevelt became the first sitting U.S. President to ride in an automobile as part of his Presidential duties—which he did while traveling through the state of Connecticut during a speaking tour of New England.
Unlike the majority of paper you encounter on a daily basis (which is made from wood pulp), the paper U.S. currency is made from is 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen fibers.
Earthworms don’t have hearts like mammals, but they do have “aortic arches” to help circulate blood. What aortic arches lack in complexity, however, is made up for in numbers—earthworms have five of them spread throughout their long bodies.
The Statue of Liberty’s full name, as bestowed by its creator French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, is “Liberty Enlightening the World”.
The first well documented example of a diamond engagement ring was in 1477 when Archduke Maximilian of Austria gave one to Mary of Burgundy upon his betrothal to her.
Today we call Puerto Rico’s capital San Juan, but we should be referring to it in reverse. Ambiguous use by most inhabitants combined with map makers’ errors hundreds of years ago reversed the name of the island (San Juan) with the name of its capital (Puerto Rico, or “Rich Port”) and it was never corrected.
The iconic arcade game “Pac-Man” was released as “Puck Man” in Japan due to the titular character’s hockey puck-like shape—but when released in English speaking countries, it was changed to Pac-Man so that the arcade cabinets couldn’t be easily vandalized into displaying something obscene.
Female sharks have much thicker skin than male sharks, which helps protect them from the males’ biting during mating.
The Motorola 68000 CPU is a versatile little computer chip that has served in a wide variety of roles over the years and appeared in everything from the first Apple Macintosh computer to the TI-89 graphing calculator.
In the candy industry, the process of coating candies with very sour surface flavor (like the tart sugar coating on Sour Patch Kids candy) is called “sour sanding” and is done by dusting the surface with either citric or tartaric acid (two food safe and very sour compounds) and sugar.
Maple syrup is classified in three main categories: Grade A (Golden Color/Delicate Taste, Amber Color/Rich Taste, Dark Color/Robust Taste, Very Dark Color/Strong Taste), Processing Grade, and Substandard.
Most muppets are left-handed because most muppeteers are right-handed (and prefer to operate the muppet’s head with their dominant hand and its hands with their non-dominant hand).
The Eiffel Tower leans away from the sun thanks to the heat of the sun expanding the sun-facing side—on a very warm and sunny day, it can lean up to approximately 6 inches (15 centimeters).
Just like spoken languages, sign language has accents which are expressed by variations in the positioning of the hands, body language, facial expressions, speed while signing, and occasionally even different signs representing the same word.
The Airbus A380 jumbo passenger jet has approximately 330 miles (530 kilometers) worth of wiring in it.
Jack Kerouac, the beat poet and author best known for penning the book On the Road, never had a driver’s license (but did know how to drive).
The 1987 comedy film Three Men and a Baby was directed by Leonard Nimoy.
Argyle socks and other clothing with the familiar diamond and line patterning on them, like sweaters and leggings, are derived from the tartan (pattern) of Clan Campbell, of Argyll in western Scotland.
Some species of hummingbirds migrate over the Gulf of Mexico; the journey takes 18-22 hours of flying, covers around five hundred miles, and results in the hummingbird losing approximately half of its pre-migration flight body weight.
In the early 1980s, some high-end VHS recorders had a “simulcast” feature wherein you could record video off the television but audio off the radio; this allowed users to record stereo audio before stereo television broadcasts were common.
The full name of Shaggy, one of the protagonists of the Scooby Doo franchise and Scooby Doo’s owner, is Norville “Shaggy” Rogers.
Green, white, yellow, oolong, black, and pu-erh (dark) tea all come from the same plant, Camellia sinensis, but are processed differently in order to create varying levels of oxidation and flavor.
