Learn
Curious Facts
Records, comparisons, scale demonstrations and weird knowledge. The category most likely to produce a sentence beginning "did you know".
19 sites
A gazetteer of the world's odd corners — bone chapels, abandoned observatories, restaurants built inside caves.
- 1 hr+
Long, carefully researched articles on forgotten disasters, obsessives and near misses from history.
- 1 hr+
A browsable index of every named dinosaur, with size comparisons and the period each one actually belonged to.
- 10 min
FactNet
AltFShort, sourced facts arranged so one leads into the next. Built for the specific pleasure of learning something you can repeat.
- 10 min
A daily gleaning of curiosities, lateral puzzles and pleasing coincidences, kept up since 2005 without fuss.
- 2 min
The official register of the longest, fastest and most improbable things people have done entirely on purpose.
- 10 min
Popular science headlines with the volume turned up, handy for the fact you half-remember reading somewhere.
- 2 min
Jason Kottke has been posting the interesting bits of the web since 1998, with no algorithm involved at any point.
- 10 min
Enter your birthday and watch a live tally of the heartbeats, blinks and steps you have got through so far.
- <1 min
Wikipedia's running audit of the things almost everyone believes and almost nobody has ever checked.
- 10 min
Daily science news with a weakness for the strange finds — mummies, deep sea oddities, cosmic near misses.
- 10 min
A solar-powered website that can go offline in bad weather, publishing long, careful articles on old and low-energy technologies.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Trivia and origin stories written for the sort of person who reads the plaque next to the exhibit.
- 10 min
One well-sourced strange story per weekday, told at exactly the length of a cup of coffee.
- 2 min
Converts your scrolling into real distance and tells you what you have just passed — a giraffe, the Eiffel Tower, low Earth orbit.
- 10 min
The original rumour desk, still patiently establishing whether the thing your uncle forwarded actually happened.
- <1 min
Cecil Adams' archive of exhaustively answered daft questions, invented decades before you could just ask the internet.
- 10 min
Reddit's fact firehose, where each post is one verified surprise with the source link attached underneath.
- <1 min
Live counters for population, emissions, water use and books published, ticking faster than is entirely comfortable.
- <1 min
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Curious Facts: questions
How many sites are in Curious Facts?
19 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off. 2 of them are AltF originals that run right here.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
19 of the 19 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
18 of 19 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 19 are safe for work and 19 work with the sound off.