I’ve mentioned before my fondness for learning random new things. This has morphed from grabbing random volumes of the Encyclopedia when I was a kid to the modern-day equivalent, which is either looking at Quora or punching up topics on Wikipedia that crossed my mind.

I was flying over the Great Salt Lake a few days ago, and I decided to learn about it (my initial curiosity was regarding whether there was life in the lake or not, and there is, although mostly in the form of brine shrimp). One illustration was particularly striking to me: it showed how the present-day Salt Lake (which is huge) used to be just a small portion of a vastly larger body of water called Lake Bonneville. (You have probably heard of the fabled Bonneville salt flats where land-speed records are challenged).