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Collection of interesting things I've gathered from around the internet. To view a single category, check the files/ folder.

Table of Contents

cs_misc

blogs

misc_longform

shops

  • Mugobunni Stationery Shop - Mugobunni stationery shop, we specialize in kawaii illustrated original designs such as washi tapes, stickers, sticker sheets, BUJO accessories and other cute journaling and decorating goodies.

  • Cute Scandinavian Charm - A collection of cute animal ceramics, stationery and apparel inspired by Eastern aesthetics and Scandinavian design.

  • Kelly Pringle Art - Traditional illustrations, prints, home decor and more from illustrator Kelly Pringle.

  • Bandage Brigade - Artist-owned original brand based in Southern California. Shop our silly apparel, enamel pins, stickers, prints, and more!

  • KamiAri Studio - KamiAri Studio is 100% dedicated to bringing a little happiness into our everyday lives~♡ All merchandise in the shop is created, hand-packed, and shipped out by the artist, Ari.

  • ONIONLABS Store - ONIONLABS is a collective of both pixel art and illustration. Peak inside the mind of Nelson Wu with beautiful prints, functional accessories and high quality apparel.

  • JoannaShenArt - Welcome to JoannaShenArt, where Jo turns her unique nature, food, and Asian culture inspired designs into lifestyle merchandise that adds an extra...

  • Microbiome Arts - Browse all products from Microbiome Arts.

  • Thanksxu - art, charm, and buns~

  • Meyoco - Apparel and accessories designed by the artist Meyoco

  • Chocolett - Chocolett is a small artist shop who loves to design and create products such as stationery, accessories, stickers, artwork and more. Chocolett was created by Arlette Bauder who is an artist in Portland OR, A lot of the artwork in greatly influenced by kids books and is often bright and happy,

  • Crowlines Shop - Shirts, pins, keychains, and other Fun Stuff!

  • Knock Thrice - Knock Thrice - making whimsical wears for all fae folk.

  • tern : Official Store - tern is a streetwear clothing brand. Discover our latest clothes only available online. Shipping Worldwide

  • Cute Things from Japan -- For your needs for Japanese craft supplies and planner items. - Cute Things from Japan offers craft and planner supplies from Japan such as washi tapes, stickers, rubber stamps, origami, Traveler's Notebook accessories.

  • Carmico - Home page for Carmico, an apparel brand, dedicated to inclusivity and mindful business practices. You can find fashion, accessories, home goods and more here!

  • roundbirbart - The ROUNDEST birb merchandise!

  • Traintrackr - Live LED Maps

  • Grassfur

  • errornogo - errornogo: the brand with no logo. At the apex between contemporary streetwear and early-21st century nostalgia, errornogo seeks to subvert the relentless power of iconic branding with familiar iconography from a shortly-removed time.

  • Fiveboos

  • Sticker Shop - THEJUICEBOXCLUB - Creative Artist - Sticker Shop - Glassware - Tote Bags

  • kluia

  • 13magpies - Stationery and accessories shop, primarily featuring bird- and landscape-themed merchandise.

  • chirofish

  • Leikya store - cute and unique nature themed apparel & accessories - Leikya store - I sell cute nature themed items including enamel pins, apparel, accessories, and art prints.

  • Sugahri Store - A comfy store with a lot of variety: apparel section, stationery, illustration and more

  • coco glez shop - Shop art prints, accessories, and apparel with illustrations by Coco Glez.

  • Shop Noisywyvern - we are what dreams are made of

  • Bliboop - Cute Zelda themed pins, illustrations, stationary, stickers and more! Discover uniquely designed and adorable LoZ items for you or as a gift.

  • heyheymomo - A comic about a little dog and a small frog having fun

  • Stickers - Comics and art prints from False Knees

  • Shop By Design - Looking for a specific design? You've come to the right place. Ni De Mama in the Wild Swipe through for some IG pics

  • acorviart - Illustration & Design

  • laaaicha

  • INPRNT - Discover your favorite art and shop online galleries by thousands of artists from around the world. Sign up to sell art prints and more.

  • itskleine - itskleine

  • Umvvelt - All originally designed sea life merchandise to show your love for the ocean & its wonders!

  • rainylune - Frog themed pins, keychains, stickers, plushies and more!

  • 0K47 - The official website and shop of 0K47. Find the latest content, buy merch, and support our nerdy apparel.

crochet

papers

videos

tweets

general_resources

design_resources

computing_resources

stories

  • Foreach 001 - By the Lake

  • The Sniper, a harry potter fanfic | FanFiction

  • When He Calls Your Name - There’s nights in the deep end of summer so hot and thick and wet you can feel the dark wrinkling up your fingers like bathwater—and my last night breathing was one of those. 2 a.m. came to ring my bell and found me perfectly awake, swinging back and forth on a hanging sweetheart bench with […]

  • The Best Way to Survive a Tiger Attack - Content note: child abuse   The tiger curls in my living room, on the sofa in front of the TV. Finish your lunch, she says, and her words bend my back until I’m on my hands and knees, hunching over the plate she’s set down on the floor, like a dog. Finish your lunch, she […]

  • Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole - Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast. This page: Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim

  • The Worms that Ate the Universe - The planet of the worms is a cold, barren, sunless place. The worms do not think. They feel nothing but hunger, and so they eat. They eat through the planet’s surface. They eat through the planet’s molten core. Over time, the planet grows speckled and spongelike, riddled with tunnels and holes. But the worms don’t […]

  • Three Views of a Parking Lot - We are excited to kick off the month of October with a new, free, story from Ken Liu today!

  • Wikihistory - Wikihistory by Desmond Warzel

  • HE IS A GOOD BOY.

  • Love at the Event Horizon - I never thought I’d want to make a film about the Lost Countrymen and the ghosts that haunt their ship. It’s been years since my brief time with them, but how could I forget them, the ghosts muttering to themselves about worlds long gone? Eyes starry wide, dreaming of a future Earth that would receive […]

  • Fandom for Robots - Computron feels no emotion towards the animated television show titled Hyperdimension Warp Record (超次元 ワープ レコード). After all, Computron does not have any emotion circuits installed, and is thus constitutionally incapable of experiencing “excitement,” “hatred,” or “frustration.” It is completely impossible for Computron to experience emotions such as ...

  • The Year Without Sunshine - During one of the much smaller disasters that preceded the really big disaster, I met a lot of my neighbors online. I can’t remember if we set up the WhatsApp group because of the pandemic or the civil disorder or both. My Minneapolis block had always been reasonably friendly—people would take their kids around on […]

  • Loneliness Universe - From: Nefnef_baby@lyons-edu.org To: Cara Hasani CaraMia1990@mailbuddy.gr September 18, 2015, 5:36 am Subject: I am drifting, but thank you for the photos My dear Cara, Thank you for sending me the photos, I never thought I’d feel this way again. But the pictures help. They really do. I can’t stop looking at them. Thank you for […]

  • They're Made out of Meat

  • Lena @ Things Of Interest

  • The Venus Effect - This is 2015. A party on a westside roof, just before midnight. Some Mia or Mina or throwing it, the white girl with the jean jacket and the headband and the two-bumps-of-molly grin, flitting from friend circle to friend circle, laughing loudly and refilling any empty cup in her eyeline from a bottomless jug of sangria, Maenad Sicagi. There are thre...

  • The Magnus Archives – Rusty Quill

  • On the Fox Roads - While learning the ropes from a crafty Jazz Age bank robber, a young stowaway discovers their authentic self, a hidden gift, and that there are no straight lines when you run the fox roads...

  • Radium Girls

  • Bad Doors - The country was at just over ten thousand deaths the morning that the door appeared. On Kosmo’s phone NPR was interviewing a doctor with a nasal voice about the need for social distancing, while Kosmo himself collected empty cans from around his home office. They were everywhere. Walls of recyclable cans dominated his room. Just […]

  • Peaks and Valleys - Chapter 1 - clefairytea - Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series) [Archive of Our Own]

  • The God of Arepo - Adaptation of the popular internet short story. Temples are made for gods. Knowing this a farmer builds one to see which god turns up.

  • The Great Silence - “The Great Silence” by Ted Chiang The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe. But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices? We’re a nonhuman […]

  • What football will look like in the future - Something is terribly wrong. Something is terribly wrong. Something is terribly wrong. Something is terribly wrong.

  • War in the Shade - Posts about comic written by toastyhat

  • Archipelago - The archive for the fantasy/sci-fi webcomic Archipelago which originally ran from 2005-2015. The story of how a waitress saves the world.

  • Good Hunting by Ken Liu - Good Hunting by Ken Liu is a steampunk fantasy tale of individual adaptability and resistance in a time of historical transformations. It was first published in Strange Horizons in October 2012.

  • The Curing - Content note: Hate crimes and animal death   We stole the bottle of Elmer’s glue in the pass time between lunch and free period, the orange cap a beacon on the art room’s back shelves. Mrs. Chowdhury was out having her third baby in as many years, and the sub they’d hired to take her […]

  • The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere - Winner of the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. In the near future water falls from the sky whenever someone lies (either a mist or a torrential flood depending on the intensity of the lie). Th…

  • The Passing of the Dragon - A woman who fears she’s failing as a painter and as an artist seeks inspiration from one of her favorite poets and finds something even more wondrous, but also more impossible to capture on canvas……

  • Can You Hear Me Now? - Wait, stop. Pause. Don’t move. Please. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Just…don’t touch anything. The remote, your phone, your always-listening voice-activated digital assistant designed to make modern life a breeze. Accept my cookies. Agree to my terms. Don’t change the channel, if you still have channels. Whatever you do, don’t hit skip a...

  • We Do Not Eat Much Fish - Content note: sexual assault and child death.   For woman wild with witch’s curse, Take husband’s hand and heed this verse. As man and child make mother whole, A wedded witch may save her soul.   Ylva clutches the prayer to her chest. It is her most precious thing, a gift from her father on […]

  • How to Draw a Horse - To learn to draw horses, you can’t just want to draw them; you must NEED to draw them.

  • Diary of a Wimpy Kid: 25 Years Later (Part 1)

  • Miz Boudreaux's Last Ride - You ever love the pretty right off someone? When I was a kid, had me a BMX, bright red like a candy apple. I rode it all summer long, cresting hills trying to catch the perfect gleam in the sunlight. Only that same sunlight that gave the bike its shine burnt all the sparkle out […]

  • Theses on the Scientific Management of Goetic Labour - The most remarkable thing about Fuentes was not his genius at innovative goetic summoning, the likes of which the world had never seen and with luck will never see again. While formidable, his genius was not immediately apparent, because the work was dense and difficult and could only be truly appreciated by another expert in […]

  • Mary Oliver Wild Geese

  • Collaboration? - Content Note: This story uses unusual formatting and fonts that may not be accessible to screen readers. A screen reader- and accessibility device-friendly version is located in this link here.   Worlds pop into existence, composed by clicking keyboards or in spraying foam on waves of thought; tucked away in spells, algorithms, entangled particles, ...

  • One Man's Treasure - Aden had never once forgotten his gear for bulk trash day, but he found it touching that Nura still taped a monthly reminder note on the door from the kitchen to the garage. Sweet of her to remember, given how exhausted med school had her these days. He ducked out to the garage to toss […]

  • Yinying­—Shadow - Since Mother’s death, a changeling was all I could be. Father said so before he himself passed, “A real child, a real daughter, our daughter, would never cause death, would never bring death upon this family.” Mother named me Yangguang—sunlight. But Father changed it to Yinying—shadow—for robbing his love of her light. But she told […]

  • I Am a Little Hotel - and they tell me my body is not the home they’re looking for, not the presidential suite—lavish décor, wine, freshly pressed linen sheets— but sweat-soaked, blood-stained mattress in the basement behind locked doors, covered in dust, abandoned, by everyone but myself. But sometimes, even I forget that beneath withered, wrinkled, time- stamped hands,...

  • Girl Oil - The second place winner of the LeVar Burton Reads writing contest, as co-presented by FIYAH Literary Magazine and Tor.com! Chelle’s friend, Wenqian, has everything Chelle doesn’t. A slim figure, pa…

  • The Goldfish Man - I live in my car. It’s both worse and better than you’d expect. It’s an old Subaru hatchback so I can put the back seat down and sleep. I have all my stuff in the back but I have a space where I can lay. The place where I park is, like, the unofficial place […]

  • Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time - I’m trying to piss against a wall when the vampire bites me. Trying because drunk-me can barely hold a glass, much less maneuver a limp prosthetic cock. My attacker holds me like he did on the dance floor, one arm wrapped around my chest, this time digging into my ribs. I struggle against his supernatural […]

  • Rabbit Test - Content Note: Sexual Assault, abuse, traumatic miscarriage, psych ward treatment, and suicide.   It is 2091, and Grace is staring at the rabbit in the corner of her visual overlay. It is an Angora rabbit, fluffy and white, and when Grace picked the icon out, she did not realize how much she would come to […]

  • Ribbons - Monday’s lover tugs at Jan’s ribbon with his teeth. Jan doesn’t yell at the lover to stop. The guy just received bad news from the front—a friend lost to a bomb, perhaps, a sibling blown to bits; Jan doesn’t ask. He tells the lover, instead, to be careful: We don’t want my head rolling off […]

  • Requiem for a Dollface - The doll was dead. There was nothing for it. Bear had seen bad cases before: legs ripped off, heads torn from necks, hair rudely shorn. Dolls mutilated by ink, fire, even—once—the lawn mower. Not every child loved their toys gently. That was life. This was murder. He wondered if the little girl knew yet. It […]

news

wikipedia

  • Up to eleven - "Up to eleven", also phrased as "these go to eleven", is an idiom from popular culture, coined in the 1984 film This Is Spinal Tap, where guitarist Nigel Tufnel demonstrates a guitar amplifier whose volume knobs are marked from zero to eleven, instead of the usual zero to ten. In 2002, the phrase entered the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary with t...

  • Paektu Mountain - Paektu Mountain or Baekdu Mountain (Korean: 백두산) is an active stratovolcano on the Chinese–North Korean border. In China, it is known as Changbai Mountain (Chinese: 长白山). At 2,744 m (9,003 ft), it is the tallest mountain in North Korea and Northeast China and the tallest mountain of the Baekdu-daegan and Changbai mountain ranges. The highest peak, c...

  • Billy Mitchell (gamer) - William James Mitchell Jr. (born July 16, 1965) is an American video game player. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he was recognized for numerous records on classic video games before disputes arose over their legitimacy beginning in 2018. Mitchell has also appeared in several documentaries on competitive gaming and retrogaming. In 1982, Mitchell was...

  • Low-background steel - Low-background steel, also known as pre-war steel and pre-atomic steel, is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. Typically obtained from ships (either as part of regular scrapping or shipwrecks) and other steel artifacts of this era, it is often used for modern particle detectors because more ...

  • Seoul Halloween crowd crush - On 29 October 2022, around 22:20, a crowd surge occurred during Halloween festivities in the Itaewon neighborhood of Seoul, South Korea, killing 159 people and wounding 196 others. The death toll includes two people who died after the crush. The victims were mostly young adults; 27 of the victims were foreign nationals. The crowd crush was the deadl...

  • Ana Montes - Ana Belén Montes (born February 28, 1957) is an American former senior analyst at the United States Defense Intelligence Agency who spied on behalf of the Cuban government for 17 years. Montes was arrested on September 21, 2001, and she subsequently was charged with conspiracy to commit espionage for the government of Cuba. Montes pleaded guilty to ...

  • Scaly-foot gastropod - Chrysomallon squamiferum, commonly known as the scaly-foot gastropod, scaly-foot snail, sea pangolin, or volcano snail, is a species of deep-sea hydrothermal-vent snail, a marine gastropod mollusc in the family Peltospiridae. This vent-endemic gastropod is known only from deep-sea hydrothermal vents in the Indian Ocean, where it has been found at de...

  • Capitol Hill Occupied Protest - The Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP), also known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, originally known as Free Capitol Hill, and later known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), was an occupation protest and self-declared autonomous zone in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. The zone, originally covering two intersect...

  • Natalia Grace - Natalyah Grace Renee Mans (born Natalia "Natasha" Vadymivna Gava (Ukrainian: Наталія «Наташа» Вадимівна Гава), September 4, 2003; formerly Natalia Lourdes Ciccone and Natalia Grace Barnett) is a Ukrainian-born American with dwarfism, who was adopted by an American family at the age of seven in 2010, but was allegedly abandoned three years later. Kr...

  • Igbo Landing - Igbo Landing (also called Ibo Landing, Ebo Landing, or Ebos Landing) is a historic site at Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island, Glynn County, Georgia. It was the setting of a mass suicide in 1803 by captive Igbo people who had taken control of the slave ship they were on, and refused to submit to slavery in the United States. The event's moral value a...

  • My Weekend as a 28-Year-Old in Chicago - My Weekend as a 28-Year-Old in Chicago is a satirical video created by American comedian Mike Schwanke, under the pseudonym Judd Crud. It was published on August 29, 2022, on TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram. A parody of "day in the life" vlogs, the video walks through the events of an imagined weekend of Schwanke's life in Chicago, Illinois, growing ...

  • Hungry grass - In Irish mythology, hungry grass (Irish: féar gortach; also known as fairy grass) is a patch of cursed grass. Anyone walking on it was doomed to perpetual and insatiable hunger. Harvey suggests that the hungry grass is cursed by the proximity of an unshriven corpse (the fear gorta). William Carleton's stories suggest that faeries plant the hungry gr...

  • Jeremy Renner Official - Jeremy Renner Official (or Jeremy Renner on the Google Play Store) was a mobile app created by American actor Jeremy Renner. He created the app in March 2017 to hear the input and comments of his fans. The app was shut down in September 2019 in part due to the frequent bullying and trolling that the platform had experienced. The app featured optiona...

  • Seattle Freeze - The Seattle Freeze is, according to widely held belief, a difficulty with making new friends in the American city of Seattle, Washington, particularly for transplants from other areas. A 2005 article in The Seattle Times written by Julia Sommerfeld appears to be the first known use of the term, although the phenomenon was documented during rapid po...

  • Honeypot ant - Honeypot ants, also called honey ants, are ants which have specialized workers—repletes, plerergates or rotunds—that consume large amounts of food to the point that their abdomens swell enormously. This phenomenon of extreme inflation of the trunk is called physogastry. Other ants then extract nourishment from them, through the process of trophallax...

  • Ketchup as a vegetable - The ketchup as a vegetable controversy stemmed from proposed regulations of school lunches by the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) in 1981, early in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The regulations were intended to provide meal planning flexibility to local school lunch administrators coping with cuts to the National School Lunch Program enac...

  • Sluggard waker - A sluggard waker was an 18th-century job undertaken by a parishioner (usually the parish clerk), in British churches. The sole task of the sluggard waker was to watch the congregation during the services and tap anyone who appeared to be falling asleep sharply on the head. The actual tapping was not done by hand, nor was it done particularly gently ...

  • Onfim - Anthemius (Old Novgorodian: Онѳимє, romanized: Onthime; fl. c. 1220–60), better known by the modern Russian spelling of his name, Onfim (Russian: Онфим), was a boy who lived in Novgorod (now Veliky Novgorod, Russia) in the 13th century, sometime around 1220 or 1260. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark, which was pre...

  • List of unusual units of measurement - An unusual unit of measurement is a unit of measurement that does not form part of a coherent system of measurement, especially because its exact quantity may not be well known or because it may be an inconvenient multiple or fraction of a base unit. Many of the unusual units of measurements listed here are colloquial measurements, units devised to ...

  • Olo (color) - Olo is an imaginary color that can be seen by shooting lasers into the retina to isolate the response M cone cells. It is impossible to view under normal viewing conditions, due to the overlap between the wavelengths of light which stimulate M cone cells, and those that stimulate S and L cone cells. In other words, there is no monochromatic stimulus...

  • FYIFV - FYIFV (standing for "Fuck You, I'm Fully Vested") or FYIV[1] is a piece of early Microsoft jargon that has become an urban legend: the claim that employees whose stock options were fully vested (that is, could be exercised) would occasionally wear T-shirts or buttons with the initials "FYIFV" to indicate they were sufficiently financially independen...

  • Go Away Green - Go Away Green refers to a range of paint colors used in Disney Parks to divert attention away from infrastructure. It has been compared to military camouflage like Olive Drab. Imagineer John Hench wrote about developing such colors, "We chose a neutral gray-brown for the railing, a 'go away' color that did not call attention to itself, even though i...

  • Juan Pujol García - Juan Pujol García (Spanish: [ˈxwan puˈʝol ɣaɾˈθi.a]; 14 February 1912 – 10 October 1988), also known as Joan Pujol i García (Catalan: [ʒuˈan puˈʒɔl i ɣəɾˈsi.ə]), was a Spanish spy who acted as a double agent loyal to Great Britain against Nazi Germany during World War II, when he relocated to Britain to carry out fictitious spying activities for th...

  • Mike Winkelmann - Michael Joseph Winkelmann (born June 20, 1981), known professionally as Beeple, is an American digital artist, graphic designer, and animator known for selling NFTs. In his art, he uses various media to create comical, phantasmagoric works which make political and social commentary while using pop culture figures as references. British auction house...

  • Blue Mustang - Blue Mustang (colloquially known as Blucifer) is a cast-fiberglass sculpture of a mustang located at Denver International Airport (DEN). Colored bright blue, with illuminated glowing red eyes, it is notable both for its striking appearance and for having killed its sculptor, Luis Jiménez, when a section of it fell on him at his studio.

  • Secchi disk - The Secchi disk (or Secchi disc), as created in 1865 by Angelo Secchi, is a plain white, circular disk 30 cm (12 in) in diameter used to measure water transparency or turbidity in bodies of water. The disc is mounted on a pole or line and lowered slowly down in the water. The depth at which the disk is no longer visible is taken as a measure of the ...

  • Project Babylon - Project Babylon was a space gun project commissioned by then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. It involved building a series of "superguns". The design was based on research from the 1960s Project HARP led by the Canadian artillery expert Gerald Bull. There were most likely four different devices in the program. The project began in 1988; it was halte...

  • I, Libertine - I, Libertine is a historical novel that began as a practical joke by late-night radio raconteur Jean Shepherd who aimed to lampoon the process of determining best-selling books. After generating substantial attention for a novel that did not actually exist, Shepherd approved a 1956 edition of the book written mainly by Theodore Sturgeon—which was la...

  • Voynich manuscript - The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex, hand-written in an unknown script referred to as Voynichese. The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438). Stylistic analysis has indicated the manuscript may have been composed in Italy during the Italian Renaissance. The origins, authorship, and purpos...

  • Ceremonial first puck - The ceremonial first puck is a longstanding ritual of ice hockey in which a guest of honor drops a puck to mark the end of pregame festivities and the start of the game. Like baseball's ceremonial first pitch, this first puck does not actually begin play but is retrieved and presented to the guest of honor as a keepsake. In the National Hockey Leagu...

  • The War of the Worlds (1938 radio drama) - "The War of the Worlds" was a Halloween episode of the radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air directed and narrated by Orson Welles as an adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds (1898) that was performed and broadcast live at 8 pm ET on October 30, 1938, over the CBS Radio Network. The episode is infamous for inciting a panic by...

  • Cat organ - A cat organ (German: Katzenorgel, French: Orgue à chats), also called cat piano (German: Katzenklavier, French: piano à chats), is a hypothetical musical instrument which consists of a line of cats fixed in place with their tails stretched out underneath a keyboard so that they cry out when a key is pressed. The cats would be arranged according to t...

  • Eggcorn - An eggcorn is the alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements, creating a new phrase which is plausible when used in the same context. Thus, an eggcorn is an unexpectedly fitting or creative malapropism. Eggcorns often arise as people attempt to make sense of a stock phrase that uses a ter...

  • Lavarand - Lavarand, also known as the Wall of Entropy, is a hardware random number generator designed by Silicon Graphics that worked by taking pictures of the patterns made by the floating material in lava lamps, extracting random data from the pictures allegedly using the result to seed a pseudorandom number generator.

  • Air America (airline) - Air America was an American passenger and cargo airline established in 1946 and covertly owned and operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1950 to 1976. It supplied and supported covert operations in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, including allegedly providing support for drug smuggling in Laos.

  • Post-Internet - Post-Internet is a 21st-century art movement involving works that are derived from the Internet or its effects on aesthetics, culture and society.

  • Moiré pattern - In mathematics, physics, and art, moiré patterns (UK: MWAH-ray, US: mwah-RAY, French: [mwaʁe] ) or moiré fringes are large-scale interference patterns that can be produced when a partially opaque ruled pattern with transparent gaps is overlaid on another similar pattern. For the moiré interference pattern to appear, the two patterns must not be co...

  • Generative art - Generative art is post-conceptual art that has been created (in whole or in part) with the use of an autonomous system. An autonomous system in this context is generally one that is non-human and can independently determine features of an artwork that would otherwise require decisions made directly by the artist. In some cases the human creator may ...

  • List of wrong anthem incidents - This is a list of incidents when an incorrect national anthem was accidentally played, sung or performed, including playing the anthem of the wrong country, playing an outdated anthem, and playing a non-anthem piece in place of a national anthem.

  • Vela incident - The Vela incident was an unidentified double flash of light detected by an American Vela Hotel satellite on 22 September 1979 near the South African territory of Prince Edward Islands in the Indian Ocean, roughly midway between Africa and Antarctica. Today, most independent researchers believe that the flash was caused by a nuclear explosion—an unde...

  • Numeronym - A numeronym is a word, usually an abbreviation, composed partially or wholly of numerals. The term can be used to describe several different number-based constructs, but it most commonly refers to a contraction in which all letters between the first and last of a word are replaced with the number of omitted letters (for example, "i18n" for "internat...

  • Americans for Common Cents - Americans for Common Cents is an organization based in Washington, D.C. that lobbies in favor of keeping the United States penny in circulation. It was established in 1990. The organization has conducted surveys and organized advertising campaigns in support of the continuing production of the penny. Its executive director, Mark Weller, has argued t...

  • Oxitec - Oxitec is a British biotechnology company that develops genetically modified insects in order to improve public health and food security through insect control. The insects act as biological insecticides. Insects are controlled without the use of chemical insecticides. Instead, the insects are genetically engineered to be unable to produce offspring...

  • Town and gown - Town and gown are two distinct communities of a university town; 'town' being the non-academic population and 'gown' metonymically being the university community, especially in ancient seats of learning such as Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, and St Andrews, although the term is also used to describe modern university towns as well as towns with a signif...

  • Crash cover - A crash cover is a philatelic term for a type of cover (including the terms air accident cover, interrupted flight cover, wreck cover), meaning an envelope or package that has been recovered from an air crash, train wreck, shipwreck or other accident. Crash covers are a type of interrupted mail. Crashes of flights carrying airmail were a regular oc...

  • Sea-based X-band radar - The Sea-Based X-band radar (SBX-1) is a floating, self-propelled, mobile active electronically scanned array early-warning radar station designed to operate in high winds and heavy seas. It was developed as part of the United States Department of Defense Missile Defense Agency's (MDA) Ballistic Missile Defense System. The radar is mounted on a fifth...

  • Trump–Ukraine scandal - The Trump–Ukraine scandal was a political scandal that arose primarily from the discovery of U.S. President Donald Trump's attempts to coerce Ukraine into investigating his political rival Joe Biden and thus potentially damage Biden's campaign for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. Trump enlisted surrogates in and outside his adminis...

  • Hogan's Alley (FBI) - Hogan's Alley is a Federal Bureau of Investigation training facility operated by the FBI Academy in Marine Corps Base Quantico near Quantico, Prince William County, Virginia. Opened in 1987, Hogan's Alley is a full-scale replica of a nondescript town in the United States, spread over approximately 10 acres (4 ha). The facility is used to train feder...

  • Shabbat elevator - A Shabbat elevator is an elevator which works in a special mode, operating automatically, to satisfy the Jewish law requiring Jews to abstain from operating electrical switches on Shabbat (the Sabbath). These are also known as Sabbath or Shabbos elevators.

  • Buttered toast phenomenon - The buttered toast phenomenon is an observation that buttered toast tends to land butter-side down after it falls. It is used as an idiom representing pessimistic outlooks. Various people have attempted to determine whether there is an actual tendency for bread to fall in this fashion, with varying results.

  • Least publishable unit - In academic publishing, the least publishable unit (LPU), also smallest publishable unit (SPU), minimum publishable unit (MPU), loot, or publon, is the minimum amount of information that can be used to generate a publication in a peer-reviewed venue, such as a journal or a conference. (Maximum publishable unit and optimum publishable unit are also u...

  • Flash of unstyled content - A flash of unstyled content (FOUC, or flash of unstyled text) is an instance where a web page appears briefly with the browser's default styles prior to loading an external CSS stylesheet, due to the web browser engine rendering the page before all information is retrieved. The page corrects itself as soon as the style rules are loaded and applied; ...

  • Fool's Gold Loaf - Fool's Gold Loaf is a sandwich made by the Colorado Mine Company, a restaurant in Denver, Colorado. It consists of a single warmed, hollowed-out loaf of bread filled with the contents of one jar of creamy peanut butter, one jar of grape jelly, and one pound (454 g) of bacon. The sandwich's connection to the singer Elvis Presley is the source of its ...

  • Entebbe raid - The Entebbe raid or Operation Entebbe, officially codenamed Operation Thunderbolt (retroactively codenamed Operation Yonatan), was a 1976 Israeli counter-terrorist mission in Uganda. It was launched in response to the hijacking of an international civilian passenger flight (an Airbus A300) operated by Air France between the cities of Tel Aviv and Pa...

  • Peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich - The peanut butter and banana sandwich (PB&B), or peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich (PB,B&B), sometimes referred to as an Elvis sandwich, the Velvet Elvis, or simply the Elvis, is a sandwich with toasted bread, peanut butter, sliced or mashed banana, and occasionally bacon. Honey or jelly is seen in some variations of the sandwich. The sandwic...

  • Garden-path sentence - A garden-path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning. Garden path refers to the saying "to be led down [or up] the garden path", meaning to be deceived, ...

  • Mr. Dude - Mr. Dude is Portland, Oregon's mascot in Japan.

  • Punji stick - The punji stick or punji stake is a type of booby trapped stake. It is a simple spike, made out of wood or bamboo, which is sharpened, heated, and usually set in a hole. Punji sticks are usually deployed in substantial numbers. The Oxford English Dictionary (third edition, 2007) lists less frequent, earlier spellings for "punji stake (or stick)": pa...

  • Củ Chi tunnels - The tunnels of Củ Chi (Vietnamese: Địa đạo Củ Chi) are an immense network of connecting tunnels located in the Củ Chi District of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam, and are part of a much larger network of tunnels that underlie much of the country. The Củ Chi tunnels were the location of several military campaigns during the Vietnam War, and were t...

  • Evo Moment 37 - "Evo Moment #37", or the "Daigo Parry", is a portion of a Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike semifinal match held at Evolution Championship Series 2004 (Evo 2004) between Daigo Umehara and Justin Wong. During this match, Umehara made an unexpected comeback by countering 15 consecutive hits of Wong's "Super Art" move with only one remaining unit of healt...

  • Carrier's constraint - Carrier's constraint is the observation that air-breathing vertebrates with two lungs that flex their bodies sideways during locomotion find it difficult to move and breathe at the same time, because the sideways flexing expands one lung and compresses the other, shunting stale air from lung to lung instead of expelling it completely to make room fo...

  • Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins - Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins, 447 U.S. 74 (1980), was a U.S. Supreme Court decision issued on June 9, 1980 which affirmed the decision of the California Supreme Court in a case that arose out of a free speech dispute between the Pruneyard Shopping Center in Campbell, California, and several local high school students (who wished to canvass si...

  • Osborne effect - The Osborne effect is a social phenomenon of customers canceling or deferring orders for the current, soon-to-be-obsolete product as an unexpected drawback of a company's announcing a future product prematurely. It is an example of cannibalization. The term alludes to the Osborne Computer Corporation, whose second product did not become available un...

  • EURion constellation - The EURion constellation (also known as Omron rings or doughnuts) is a pattern of symbols incorporated into a number of secure documents such as banknotes, cheques, and ownership title certificates designs worldwide since about 1996. It is added to help imaging software detect the presence of such a document in a digital image. Such software can t...

  • Fire-safe cigarette - Fire-safe cigarettes (FSC) are cigarettes that are designed to extinguish more quickly than standard cigarettes if ignored, with the intention of preventing accidental fires. They are also known as lower ignition propensity (LIP), reduced fire risk (RFR), self-extinguishing, fire-safe or reduced ignition propensity (RIP) cigarettes. In the United St...

  • Oakland Buddha - The Oakland Buddha (Vietnamese: Pháp Duyên Tự) is a statue of a Buddha placed in a traffic median in Oakland, California, in 2009. The statue was placed by neighborhood resident Dan Stevenson who was upset about the frequent use of the median for illegal dumping. Stevenson attached the statue to the median using epoxy and rebar to deter theft of the...

  • Smart cow problem - The smart cow problem is the concept that, when a group of individuals is faced with a technically difficult task, only one of their members has to solve it. When the problem has been solved once, an easily repeatable method may be developed, allowing the less technically proficient members of the group to accomplish the task. The term smart cow pro...

  • Korean axe murder incident - The Korean axe murder incident (Korean: 판문점 도끼살인사건; lit. Panmunjom axe murder incident), also known domestically as the Panmunjom axe atrocity incident (판문점 도끼 만행 사건), was the killing of two United Nations Command officers, Captain Arthur Bonifas and First Lieutenant Mark Barrett, by North Korean soldiers on August 18, 1976, in the Joint Security Ar...

  • Battle of the Porpoises - The Battle of the Porpoises (Portuguese: Batalha das Toninhas) is the name given to a military blunder involving the Brazilian Navy in the Gibraltar Strait, near the end of the First World War. While on patrol for potential German submarines, the crew of the Bahia slaughtered a passing shoal of porpoises, mistaking them for the periscope of a U-boat...

  • Wikipedia:List of citogenesis incidents - In 2011, Randall Munroe in his comic xkcd coined the term "citogenesis" to describe the creation of "reliable" sources through circular reporting. This is a list of some well-documented cases in which Wikipedia has been the source.

  • Hainan Island incident - The Hainan Island incident was a ten-day international incident between the United States and the People's Republic of China (PRC) that resulted from a mid-air collision between a United States Navy EP-3E ARIES II signals intelligence aircraft and a Chinese Air Force J-8 interceptor on April 1, 2001. The EP-3 was flying over the South China sea at a...

  • BeiDou - The BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS; Chinese: 北斗卫星导航系统; pinyin: běidǒu wèixīng dǎoháng xìtǒng) is a satellite-based radio navigation system owned and operated by the China National Space Administration. It provides geolocation and time information to a BDS receiver anywhere on or near the Earth where there is an unobstructed line of sight to...

  • Big Dipper - The Big Dipper (US, Canada) or the Plough (UK, Ireland) is a large asterism consisting of seven bright stars of the constellation Ursa Major; six of them are of second magnitude and one, Megrez (δ), of third magnitude. Four define a "bowl" or "body" and three define a "handle" or "head". It is recognized as a distinct grouping in many cultures. The...

  • Hollywood Freeway chickens - The Hollywood Freeway chickens are a colony of feral chickens that live under the Vineland Avenue off-ramp of the Hollywood Freeway (U.S. Route 101) in Los Angeles, California. It is not definitively known how they came to be there, although news stories generally ascribe them to an overturned poultry truck. Chickens underneath the Vineland off-ramp...

  • Decoy effect - In marketing, the decoy effect (or attraction effect or asymmetric dominance effect) is the phenomenon whereby consumers will tend to have a specific change in preference between two options when also presented with a third option that is asymmetrically dominated. An option is asymmetrically dominated when it is inferior in all respects to one optio...

  • Let them eat cake - "Let them eat cake" is the traditional translation of the French phrase "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche", said to have been spoken in the 18th century by "a great princess" upon being told that the peasants had no bread. The phrase "let them eat cake" is conventionally attributed to Marie Antoinette, although there is no evidence that she ever uttered...

  • E ticket - An E ticket (officially an E coupon) was a type of admission ticket used at the Disneyland and Magic Kingdom theme parks before 1994, where it admitted the bearer to the newest, most advanced, or popular rides and attractions. It is now commonly used to describe a category of top tier and cutting edge theme park attractions. The term is especially c...

  • End Poem - The end credits of the video game Minecraft include a written work by Julian Gough, conventionally called the End Poem, which is the only narrative text in the mostly unstructured sandbox game. Minecraft's creator Markus "Notch" Persson did not have an ending to the game up until a month before launch, and following recommendation by Twitter followe...

  • Lizzie Borden - Lizzie Andrew Borden (July 19, 1860 – June 1, 1927) was an American woman who was tried and acquitted of the August 4, 1892 axe murders of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts. No one else was charged in the murders, and, despite ostracism from other residents, Borden spent the remainder of her life in Fall River. She died of pneum...

  • Shamima Begum - Shamima Begum (born 25 August 1999) is a British-born woman who entered Syria to join the Islamic State at the age of 15 in 2015. As of 2024, she is living in al-Roj detention camp in Syria. While enrolled at Bethnal Green Academy, Begum and two schoolmates travelled to Syria in February 2015. The journey was facilitated by an IS smuggler who was pr...

  • Tsutomu Yamaguchi - Tsutomu Yamaguchi (山口 彊, Yamaguchi Tsutomu) (16 March 1916 – 4 January 2010) was a Japanese marine engineer who survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings during World War II. Although at least 160 people are known to have been affected by both bombings, he is the only person to have been officially recognized by the government of Japa...

  • Printer tracking dots - Printer tracking dots, also known as printer steganography, DocuColor tracking dots, yellow dots, secret dots, or a machine identification code (MIC), is a digital watermark which many color laser printers and photocopiers produce on every printed page that identifies the specific device that was used to print the document. Developed by Xerox and Ca...

  • Reality Winner - Reality Leigh Winner (born December 4, 1991) is an American U.S. Air Force veteran and former NSA translator. In 2018, she was given the longest prison sentence ever imposed for an unauthorized release of government information to the media after she leaked an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. She w...

  • Michel Lotito - Michel Lotito (French pronunciation: [miʃɛl lɔtito]; 16 June 1950 – 17 April 2006) was a French entertainer, born in Grenoble, famous for deliberate consumption of indigestible objects. He came to be known as Monsieur "Mouth" Mangetout ("Mr. Eat-All"). His digestive system was incredibly resilient, allowing him to consume up to 900 grams of metal p...

  • Numbers station - A numbers station is a shortwave radio station characterized by broadcasts of formatted numbers, which are believed to be addressed to intelligence officers operating in foreign countries. Most identified stations use speech synthesis to vocalize numbers, although digital modes such as phase-shift keying and frequency-shift keying, as well as Morse ...

  • 27 Club - The 27 Club is an informal list consisting mostly of popular musicians, often expanded by artists, actors, and other celebrities who died at age 27. Although the claim of a "statistical spike" for the death of musicians at that age has been refuted by scientific research, it remains a common cultural conception that the phenomenon exists, with many ...

  • Chocolate bar strike - The candy bar protest, also known as the 5 cent chocolate war, the 5 cent war and the chocolate candy bar strike, was a short-lived 1947 protest by Canadian children over the increase in price of chocolate bars from five to eight cents. The strike began in Ladysmith, British Columbia, and spread across the country to include protests in Calgary, Edm...

  • Gallaudet Eleven - The Gallaudet Eleven were a group of eleven deaf men recruited in the late 1950s and 1960s to participate in a joint research program led by NASA and the U.S. Naval School of Aviation Medicine to study the effects of prolonged weightlessness on the human body. They were selected for participation in the study because damage they had sustained to the...

  • List of terms referring to an average person - The following is a list of terms referring to an average person. Many are used as placeholder names.

  • Assassination market - An assassination market is a prediction market where any party can place a bet (using anonymous electronic money and pseudonymous remailers) on the date of death of a given individual. This incentivises assassination of the individual, as parties with advanced knowledge of an assassination plot can profit by betting accurately on the date of the dea...

  • Long Boi - Long Boi (fl. 2018 – April 2023) was an unusually tall male duck that lived by Derwent College, University of York, England. He was thought to be an Indian Runner duck-Mallard cross, standing out among the other ducks on the campus due to his height. He went viral and became an internet meme in 2021. His popularity saw him become an unofficial masco...

  • San Francisco tech bus protests - The San Francisco tech bus protests, also known as the Google bus protests, were a series of protests in the San Francisco Bay Area beginning in late 2013, when the use of shuttle buses employed by local area tech companies became widely publicized. The tech buses have been called "Google buses" although other companies—such as tech companies Apple,...

  • Pacific Northwest tree octopus - The Pacific Northwest tree octopus is an Internet hoax created in 1998 by a humor writer under the pseudonym Lyle Zapato. Since its creation, the Pacific Northwest tree octopus website has been commonly referenced in Internet literacy classes in schools and has been used in multiple studies demonstrating children's gullibility regarding online sourc...

  • npm left-pad incident - On March 22, 2016, software engineer Azer Koçulu took down the left-pad package that he had published to npm (a JavaScript package manager). Koçulu deleted the package after a dispute with Kik Messenger, in which the company forcibly took control of the package name kik. As a result, thousands of software projects that used left-pad as a dependency,...

  • Brain (computer virus) - Brain is the industry standard name for a computer virus that was released in its first form on 19 January 1986, and is considered to be the first computer virus for the IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC) and compatibles.

  • Orson Welles Paul Masson advertisements - Orson Welles acted in a series of advertisements for Paul Masson California wine from 1978 to 1981, best known for their slogan "We will sell no wine before its time," becoming a much-parodied cultural trope of the late 20th century. Years later, the commercials regained notoriety when a bootleg recording of out-takes was distributed, showing an app...

  • Women in refrigerators - Women in refrigerators is a literary trope coined by Gail Simone in 1999 describing a trend in fiction which involves female characters facing disproportionate harm, such as death, maiming, or assault, to serve as plot devices to motivate male characters, an event colloquially known as "fridging". Simone's original list of over 100 affected female c...

  • 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack - In 1984, 751 people suffered food poisoning in The Dalles, Oregon, United States, due to the deliberate contamination of salad bars at ten local restaurants with Salmonella. A group of prominent followers of Rajneesh (later known as Osho) led by Ma Anand Sheela had hoped to incapacitate the voting population of the city so that their own candidates ...

  • title of show - [title of show] is a one-act musical, with music and lyrics by Jeff Bowen and a book by Hunter Bell. The show chronicles its own creation as an entry in the New York Musical Theatre Festival, and follows the struggles of the author and composer/lyricist and their two actress friends during the initial brief (three-week) creative period, along with ...

  • Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands - The Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands (also known as the Gay Kingdom of the Coral Sea) was a putative micronation established as a symbolic political protest by a group of gay rights activists based in Australia. Declared in June 2004 in response to the introduction of a government bill to the Australian Parliament in May 2004 (and pa...

  • Tensioned stone - Tensioned stone is a high-performance composite construction material: stone held in compression with tension elements. The tension elements can be connected to the outside of the stone, but more typically tendons are threaded internally through a drilled duct. Tensioned stone can consist of a single block of stone, though drill limitations and othe...

  • Cephalophore - A cephalophore (from the Greek for "head-carrier") is a saint who is generally depicted carrying their severed head. In Christian art, this was usually meant to signify that the subject in question had been martyred by beheading. Depicting the requisite halo in this circumstance offers a unique challenge for the artist: some put the halo where the h...

  • Miller columns - Miller columns (also known as cascading lists) are a browsing/visualization technique that can be applied to tree structures. The columns allow multiple levels of the hierarchy to be open at once, and provide a visual representation of the current location. It is closely related to techniques used earlier in the Smalltalk browser, but was independen...

  • Midnight basketball - Midnight basketball is an initiative which developed in the 1990s to curb inner-city crime in the United States by keeping urban youth off the streets and engaging them with alternatives to drugs and crime. It was founded by G. Van Standifer in the late 1980s. Young people aged from 14 to 29, mostly men of various minority groups, could go and play ...

  • Unusual eBay listings - Many unusual items have been listed for sale on the auction website eBay. Some were successfully sold, while other auctions were stopped by eBay because the listing breached their policies.

  • Dymaxion Chronofile - The Dymaxion Chronofile is Buckminster Fuller's attempt to document his life as completely as possible. He created a very large scrapbook in which he documented his life from 1917 to 1983. Fuller describes his Chronofile as "[contribution] to the scientific documentation of the emergent realization of the era of accelerating-acceleration of progress...

  • Disappearing polymorph - In materials science, a disappearing polymorph is a form of a crystal structure that is suddenly unable to be produced, instead transforming into a different crystal structure with the same chemical composition (a polymorph) during nucleation. Sometimes the resulting transformation is extremely hard or impractical to reverse, because the new polymor...

  • In-Q-Tel - In-Q-Tel (IQT), formerly Peleus and In-Q-It, is an American not-for-profit venture capital firm based in Arlington, Virginia. It invests in companies to keep the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United States intelligence capability. The name "In-Q-Tel" is ...

  • Black Dahlia - Elizabeth Short (July 29, 1924 – c. January 14–15, 1947), known as the Black Dahlia, was an American woman found murdered in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, on January 15, 1947. Her case became highly publicized owing to the gruesome nature of the crime, which included the mutilation of her corpse, which was bisected at the...

  • Camp David - Camp David is a 125-acre (51 ha) country retreat for the president of the United States. It is located in the wooded hills of Catoctin Mountain Park, in Frederick County, Maryland, near the towns of Thurmont and Emmitsburg, about 62 miles (100 km) north-northwest of the national capital city of Washington, D.C. It is code named Naval Support Facilit...

  • Clare Francis (science critic) - Clare Francis is a pseudonym used since 2010 by the author (or authors) of hundreds of whistle-blowing emails sent to the editors of scientific journals that call attention to suspected cases of plagiarism and fabricated or duplicated figures. Described as a scientific gadfly, the pseudonymous Francis is "a source both legendary and loathed in biome...

  • Crown Prince Sado - Crown Prince Sado (Korean: 사도세자; Hanja: 思悼 世子; 13 February 1735 – 12 July 1762), personal name Yi Seon (이선; 李愃), was the second son of King Yeongjo of Joseon. His biological mother was Royal Noble Consort Yeong of the Jeonui Yi clan. Due to the prior death of Sado's older half-brother, Crown Prince Hyojang, the new prince was the probable future mon...

  • Eremina desertorum - Eremina desertorum (formerly Helix desertorum) is a species of land snails in the genus Eremina. It is native to desert regions in Egypt and Israel. A specimen from Egypt thought to be dead was glued to an index card at the British Museum in March 1846. However, in March 1850, it was found to be alive. The Canadian writer Grant Allen observed: The ...

  • Alan MacMasters hoax - On 10 February 2012, photography and ICT student Alan MacMasters attended a university lecture where the class was cautioned against using Wikipedia as a source. The lecturer mentioned that his friend had falsely claimed to be the inventor of the toaster on the Wikipedia page. Following the lecture, Alan and his friends edited the Wikipedia toaster ...

  • Heaven's Gate (religious group) - Heaven's Gate was an American new religious movement known primarily for the mass suicides committed by its members in 1997. Commonly designated a cult, it was founded in 1974 and led by Bonnie Nettles (1927–1985) and Marshall Applewhite (1931–1997), known within the movement as Ti and Do, respectively. Nettles and Applewhite first met in 1972 and ...

  • Jonestown - The Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, better known by its informal name "Jonestown", was a remote settlement in Guyana established by the Peoples Temple, an American cult under the leadership of Jim Jones. Jonestown became internationally infamous when, on November 18, 1978, a total of 918 people died at the settlement, at the nearby airstrip in ...

  • List of common misconceptions - Each entry on this list of common misconceptions is worded as a correction; the misconceptions themselves are implied rather than stated. These entries are concise summaries of the main subject articles, which can be consulted for more detail.

  • Corporate Memphis - Corporate Memphis (alternative names: Alegria art, big tech art, flat art, or corporate artstyle) is an art style named after the Memphis Group that features flat areas of color and geometric elements. Widely associated with Big Tech illustrations in the late 2010s and early 2020s, it has been met with a polarized response, with criticism focusing o...

  • Graffiti (Palm OS) - Graffiti is an essentially single-stroke shorthand handwriting recognition system used in PDAs based on the Palm OS. Graffiti was originally written by Palm, Inc. as the recognition system for GEOS-based devices such as HP's OmniGo 100 and 120 or the Magic Cap-line and was available as an alternate recognition system for the Apple Newton MessagePad,...

  • Snake wine - Snake wine (Chinese: 蛇酒; pinyin: shé-jiǔ; Vietnamese: rượu rắn; Khmer: ស្រាពស់, sra poas) is an alcoholic beverage produced by infusing whole snakes in rice wine or grain alcohol. The drink was first recorded to have been consumed in China during the Western Zhou dynasty (c. 1040–770 BC) and believed in folklore to reinvigorate a person according to...

  • National conventions for writing telephone numbers - National conventions for writing telephone numbers vary by country. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) publishes a recommendation entitled Notation for national and international telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and Web addresses. Recommendation E.123 specifies the format of telephone numbers assigned to telephones and similar commun...

  • No one likes us, we don't care - "No one likes us, we don't care" is a sports chant that originated as a football chant sung by supporters of the English football club Millwall in the late 1970s. It is sung to the tune of "(We Are) Sailing" by Rod Stewart. The late 1960s saw the rise of fan violence and football hooliganism throughout England; Millwall was one of several English t...

  • CONOP 8888 - CONPLAN 8888, also known as Counter-Zombie Dominance, is a U.S. Department of Defense Strategic Command CONOP document that describes a plan for the United States and its military defending against zombies. It was initially classified by the United States Intelligence Community, but was eventually declassified following a Freedom of Information Act...

  • Zheng Pingru - Zheng Pingru (1918 – February 1940) was a Chinese socialite and spy who gathered intelligence on the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. She was executed after an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Ding Mocun, the security chief of the Wang Jingwei regime, a puppet government for the Japanese. Her life is believed to be the ...

  • DVD region code - DVD region codes are a digital rights management technique introduced in 1997. It is designed to allow rights holders to control the international distribution of a DVD release, including its content, release date, and price, all according to the appropriate region. This is achieved by way of region-locked DVD players, which will play back only DVDs...

  • Speakers' Corner - A Speakers' Corner is an area where free speech open-air public speaking, debate, and discussion are allowed. The original and best known is in the north-east corner of Hyde Park in London, England. Historically there were a number of other areas designated as Speakers' Corners in other parks in London, such as Lincoln's Inn Fields, Finsbury Park, ...

  • Montreal–Philippines cutlery controversy - The Montreal–Philippines cutlery controversy was an incident in 2006 in which a Filipino-born Canadian boy was punished by his school in Roxboro, Montreal, for following traditional Filipino etiquette and eating his lunch with a fork and a spoon, rather than the Canadian tradition of a knife and fork. In response to the media coverage of the affair,...

  • Santiago Calatrava - Santiago Calatrava Valls (born 28 July 1951) is a Spanish architect, structural engineer, sculptor and painter, particularly known for his bridges supported by single leaning pylons, and his railway stations, stadiums, and museums, whose sculptural forms often resemble living organisms. His best-known works include the Olympic Sports Complex of Athe...

  • John Rabe - John Heinrich Detlef Rabe (23 November 1882 – 5 January 1950) was a German businessman and Nazi Party member best known for his efforts to stop war crimes during the Japanese Nanjing Massacre (also romanized as Nanking) and his work to protect and help Chinese civilians during the massacre that ensued. The Nanking Safety Zone, which he helped to est...

  • Pirahã people - The Pirahã (pronounced [piɾaˈhɐ̃]) are an indigenous people of the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil. They are the sole surviving subgroup of the Mura people, and are hunter-gatherers. They live mainly on the banks of the Maici River in Humaitá and Manicoré in the state of Amazonas. As of 2018, they number 800 individuals. The Pirahã people do not call th...

  • Chicken gun - A chicken gun or flight impact simulator is a large-diameter, compressed-air gun used to fire bird carcasses at aircraft components in order to simulate high-speed bird strikes during the aircraft's flight. Jet engines and aircraft windshields are particularly vulnerable to damage from such strikes, and are the most common target in such tests. Alth...

  • Trojan Room coffee pot - The Trojan Room coffee pot was a coffee machine located in the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, England. Created in 1991 by Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky, it was migrated from their laboratory network to the web in 1993, becoming the world's first webcam. To save people working in the building the disappointment of fi...

  • Veterstrikdiploma - A veterstrikdiploma, also known as veterdiploma or strikdiploma (English: shoelacing diploma) is a diploma which children between 5 and 6 years can get in the Netherlands and Belgium after they manage to tie their shoelaces by themselves. It is often the first diploma a child achieves and thus has an important pedagogic meaning, giving the child the...

  • Polar bear jail - The polar bear jail (officially known as the Polar Bear Holding Facility) is a special building in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada where polar bears that are considered troublesome or dangerous are isolated until they can be relocated.Before the facility was established, polar bears which were considered dangerous were shot. The jail was established i...

  • Jeffrey Manchester - Jeffrey Allen Manchester (born 1972) is an American convicted spree-robber and former United States Army Reserve officer known as the 'Rooftop Robber' or simply 'Roofman' due to his modus operandi of entering his targets (most commonly McDonald's locations) by drilling through the roof and dropping in. Before being apprehended for the second time in...

  • Bogdanov affair - The Bogdanov affair was an academic dispute regarding the legitimacy of a series of theoretical physics papers written by French twins Igor and Grichka Bogdanov (alternatively spelled Bogdanoff). The papers were published in reputable scientific journals, and were alleged by their authors to culminate in a theory for describing what occurred before ...

  • Snowplow Game - The Snowplow Game was a regular-season game played between the Miami Dolphins and New England Patriots on December 12, 1982, at Schaefer Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Due in part to icy conditions, the game remained scoreless until late in the fourth quarter, when the snowplow operator was called in to clear a spot on the snowy field specifi...

  • Carbuncle Cup - The Carbuncle Cup was an architecture prize, given annually by the magazine Building Design to "the ugliest building in the United Kingdom completed in the last 12 months". It was intended to be a humorous response to the prestigious Stirling Prize, given by the Royal Institute of British Architects.The cup was launched in 2006, with the first winne...

  • Miura fold - The Miura fold (ミウラ折り, Miura-ori) is a method of folding a flat surface such as a sheet of paper into a smaller area. The fold is named for its inventor, Japanese astrophysicist Kōryō Miura.The crease patterns of the Miura fold form a tessellation of the surface by parallelograms. In one direction, the creases lie along straight lines, with each par...

  • Pirate Party of Catalonia - Pirates of Catalonia (Catalan: Pirates de Catalunya, PIRATA.CAT) is a political party in Catalonia. The party is based on the model of the Swedish Pirate Party and is a member of the Pirate Parties International, it supports intellectual property reform, open access to culture and knowledge, transparency and direct democracy.The party was founded in...

  • Mystery Seeker - Mystery Seeker was a website based on the Google search engine. that until November 30, 2009 had been known as Mystery Google. The WHOIS domain name record for mysterygoogle.com was created on 10 February 2009 with registrant Google Inc, but since February 26, 2017 it has had no website. The website has been featured in a number of technology blog...

  • Reverse Polish notation - Reverse Polish notation (RPN), also known as reverse Łukasiewicz notation, Polish postfix notation or simply postfix notation, is a mathematical notation in which operators follow their operands, in contrast to prefix or Polish notation (PN), in which operators precede their operands. The notation does not need any parentheses for as long as each op...

  • Lake Nyos disaster - On 21 August 1986, a limnic eruption at Lake Nyos in northwestern Cameroon killed 1,746 people and 3,500 livestock.The eruption triggered the sudden release of about 100,000–300,000 tons (1.6 million tons, according to some sources) of carbon dioxide (CO2). The gas cloud initially rose at nearly 100 kilometres per hour (62 mph; 28 m/s) and then, bei...

  • Mass suicides in 1945 Nazi Germany - During the final weeks of Nazi Germany and World War II in Europe, many civilians, government officials, and military personnel throughout Germany and German-occupied Europe committed suicide. In addition to high-ranking Nazi officials like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Philipp Bouhler, and Martin Bormann, many others chose suicid...

  • Road of Life - The Road of Life (Доро́га жи́зни, doroga žizni) was the set of ice road transport routes across Lake Ladoga to Leningrad during the Second World War. They were the only Soviet winter surface routes into the city while it was besieged by the German Army Group North under Feldmarschall Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb.The routes operated in the winters of 1941...

  • Sanrizuka Struggle - The Sanrizuka Struggle (三里塚闘争, Sanrizuka tōsō) refers to a civil conflict and riots involving the Japanese government and the agricultural community of Sanrizuka, comprising organised opposition by farmers, local residents, and leftist groups to the construction of Narita International Airport (then New Tokyo International Airport). The struggle ste...

  • Page 3 - Page 3, or Page Three, was a British newspaper convention of publishing a large image of a topless female glamour model (known as a Page 3 girl) on the third page of mainstream red-top tabloids. The Sun introduced the feature in November 1970, which boosted its readership and prompted competing tabloids—including The Daily Mirror, The Sunday People,...

  • Anti-computer tactics - Anti-computer tactics are methods used by humans to try to beat computer opponents at various games, most typically board games such as chess and Arimaa. They are most associated with competitions against computer AIs that are playing to their utmost to win, rather than AIs merely programmed to be an interesting challenge that can be given intentio...

  • Manifold Destiny (cookbook) - Manifold Destiny is a 1989 cookbook (ISBN 0679723374), its updated 1998 edition (ISBN 0375751408) and a 2008 update (ISBN 1416596232) on the subject of cooking on the surface of a car engine. It was written by Chris Maynard and Bill Scheller, a photographer and a travel writer who were also rally drivers.The authors claimed inspiration from a trip f...

  • Hand of Glory - A Hand of Glory is the dried and pickled hand of a hanged man, often specified as being the left (Latin: sinister) hand, or, if the person was hanged for murder, the hand that "did the deed." Old European beliefs attribute great powers to a Hand of Glory combined with a candle made from fat from the corpse of the same malefactor who died on the gall...

  • Beagle Brigade - Beagle Brigade is a team of beagles and their human handlers who, as part of the United States Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), inspect luggage at U.S. airports searching for agricultural products. According to the USDA, the Beagle Brigade program averages around 75,000 seizures of prohibited agricultu...

  • China–Hong Kong football rivalry - The China–Hong Kong football rivalry is a sports rivalry between the national association football teams of the People's Republic of China and Hong Kong. The rivalry has been exacerbated by Hong Kong's status as a Special Administrative Region of China, with major political and ideological differences than on the mainland, a legacy of having been un...

  • Chinese number gestures - Chinese number gestures are a method to signify the natural numbers one through ten using one hand. This method may have been developed to bridge the many varieties of Chinese—for example, the numbers 4 (Chinese: 四; pinyin: sì) and 10 (Chinese: 十; pinyin: shí) are hard to distinguish in some dialects. Some suggest that it was also used by business ...

  • The purpose of a system is what it does - The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a systems thinking heuristic coined by Stafford Beer, who observed that there is "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do." The term is widely used by systems theorists, and is generally invoked to counter the notion that the purpose of a system ca...

  • Response to sneezing - In English-speaking countries, the common verbal response to another person's sneeze is "[God] bless you", or, less commonly in the United States and Canada, "Gesundheit", the German word for health (and the response to sneezing in German-speaking countries). There are several proposed bless-you origins for use in the context of sneezing. In non-En...

  • Child Abusers Are Getting Better at Using Crypto to Cover Their Tracks - Crypto tracing firm Chainalysis found that sellers of child sexual abuse materials are successfully using “mixers” and “privacy coins” like Monero to launder their profits and evade law enforcement.

  • Glorified rice - Glorified rice is a dessert salad popular in the Midwestern cuisine served in Minnesota and other states in the Upper Midwest, United States and other places with Norwegian populations. It is popular in more rural areas with sizable Lutheran populations of Scandinavian heritage. It is made from rice, crushed pineapple, and whipped cream. It is often...

  • Nutri-Score - The Nutri-Score, also known as the 5-Colour Nutrition label or 5-CNL, is a five-colour nutrition label and nutritional rating system, and an attempt to simplify the nutritional rating system demonstrating the overall nutritional value of food products. It assigns products a rating letter from A (best) to E (worst), with associated colors from green ...

  • Alex (parrot) - Alex (May 18, 1976 – September 6, 2007) was a grey parrot and the subject of a thirty-year experiment by animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, initially at the University of Arizona and later at Harvard University and Brandeis University. When Alex was about one year old, Pepperberg bought him at a pet shop. In her book "Alex & Me", Pepperberg descr...

  • AquAdvantage salmon - AquAdvantage salmon is a genetically engineered (GE) fish, a GE Atlantic salmon developed by AquaBounty Technologies in 1989. The typical growth hormone-regulating gene in the Atlantic salmon was replaced with the growth hormone-regulating gene from Pacific Chinook salmon, with a promoter sequence from ocean pout. This gene enables GM salmon to gr...

  • Freetown Christiania - Freetown Christiania (Danish: Fristaden Christiania), also known as Christiania or simply the Staden, is an intentional community and commune in the Christianshavn neighbourhood of the Danish capital city of Copenhagen. It began in 1971 as a squatted military base. Its Pusher Street is famous for its open trade of cannabis, which is illegal in Denma...

  • Methbot - Methbot was an advertising fraud scheme.

  • Jonathan (tortoise) - Jonathan (hatched c. 1832) is a Seychelles giant tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea hololissa), a subspecies of the Aldabra giant tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea); he is the oldest known living land animal. Jonathan resides on the island of Saint Helena, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic Ocean.

  • Sixty-fourth note - In music notation, a sixty-fourth note (North American), or hemidemisemiquaver or semidemisemiquaver (British), sometimes called a half-thirty-second note, is a note played for half the duration of a thirty-second note (or demisemiquaver), hence the name. It first occurs in the late 17th century and, apart from rare occurrences of hundred twenty-eig...

  • Caning of Michael Fay - In 1994, Singaporean authorities sentenced American teenager Michael Fay to be lashed six times with a cane for violating the Vandalism Act. This caused a temporary strain in relations between Singapore and the United States.Fay was arrested for stealing road signs and vandalizing 18 cars over a ten-day period in September 1993. Fay pled guilty, but...

  • Scunthorpe problem - The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional blocking of online content by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue. The problem arises sin...

  • Simmons–Tierney bet - The Simmons–Tierney bet was a wager made in August 2005 between Houston banking executive Matthew R. Simmons and New York Times columnist John Tierney. The stakes of the bet were US$10,000.00. The subject of the bet was the year-end average of the daily price-per-barrel of crude oil for the entire calendar year of 2010 adjusted for inflation, which ...

  • Walburga Oesterreich - Walburga Oesterreich (née Korschel; 1880 – April 8, 1961), nicknamed "Dolly" and "Queen of Los Angeles", was a German-born American housewife, married to a wealthy textile manufacturer Fred William Oesterreich (December 8, 1877 – August 22, 1922), who gained notoriety for the shooting death of her husband and the subsequent bizarre revelation that s...

  • Long-term nuclear waste warning messages - Long-term nuclear waste warning messages are communication attempts intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000 years. Nuclear semiotics is an interdisciplinary field of research, first done by the American Human Interference Task Force in 1981. A 1993 report fro...

  • Vulnerability of nuclear plants to attack - The vulnerability of nuclear plants to deliberate attack is of concern in the area of nuclear safety and security. Nuclear power plants, civilian research reactors, certain naval fuel facilities, uranium enrichment plants, fuel fabrication plants, and even potentially uranium mines are vulnerable to attacks which could lead to widespread radioactive...

  • The Thing (listening device) - The Thing, also known as the Great Seal bug, was one of the first covert listening devices (or "bugs") to use passive techniques to transmit an audio signal. It was concealed inside a gift given by the Soviet Union to W. Averell Harriman, the United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, on August 4, 1945. Because it was passive, needing electromagn...

  • Metcalf sniper attack - On April 16, 2013, an attack was carried out on Pacific Gas and Electric Company's Metcalf transmission substation in Coyote, California, near the border of San Jose. The attack, in which gunmen fired on 17 electrical transformers, resulted in more than $15 million worth of equipment damage, but it had little impact on the station's electrical power...

  • 1989 California medfly attack - In 1989, a sudden invasion of Mediterranean fruit flies (Ceratitis capitata, "medflies") appeared in California and began devastating crops. Scientists were puzzled and said that the sudden appearance of the insects "defies logic", and some speculated "biological terrorists" were responsible. Analysis suggested that an outside hand played a role in ...

  • Joe Ades - Joseph Ades (; 18 December 1934 – 1 February 2009), also known as the "Gentleman Peeler", was a well-known street peeler seller in New York City, United States.

  • Pigeon photography - Pigeon photography is an aerial photography technique invented in 1907 by the German apothecary Julius Neubronner, who also used pigeons to deliver medications. A homing pigeon was fitted with an aluminium breast harness to which a lightweight time-delayed miniature camera could be attached. Neubronner's German patent application was initially rejec...

  • John Willis (gangster) - John Willis (born May 11, 1971), nicknamed Bac Guai John in Cantonese, or White Devil John, is an American mobster linked with the Chinese mafia in Boston and New York. Willis claims to have been the only white person within Chinese organized crime, an assertion backed by FBI agent Scott O'Donnell, who stated he has "never seen" a case like that of ...

  • Daffynition - A daffynition (a portmanteau blend of daffy and definition) is a form of pun involving the reinterpretation of an existing word, on the basis that it sounds like another word (or group of words). Presented in the form of dictionary definitions, they are similar to transpositional puns, but often much less complex and easier to create. Under the name...

  • Herringbone seating - A herringbone seating arrangement describes the positioning of seats partially and equally askew in one direction. As the name suggests, the arrangement of the seats looks very similar to the skeleton of a fish, and has been called "fish-bone seats" in a few languages. The term is derived from the arrangement of interlocking brickwork, and has been ...

  • Two hundred fifty-sixth note - In music, a two hundred fifty-sixth note, or occasionally demisemihemidemisemiquaver (British), is a note played for 1⁄256 of the duration of a whole note. It lasts half as long as a hundred twenty-eighth note and takes up one quarter of the length of a sixty-fourth note. In musical notation it has a total of six flags or beams. Since human pitch pe...

  • Grain entrapment - Grain entrapment, or grain engulfment, occurs when a person becomes submerged in grain and cannot get out without assistance. It most frequently occurs in grain bins and other storage facilities such as silos or grain elevators, or in grain transportation vehicles, but has also been known to occur around any large quantity of grain, even freestandin...

  • Toynbee tiles - The Toynbee tiles, also called Toynbee plaques, are messages of unknown origin found embedded in asphalt of streets in about two dozen major cities in the United States and four South American cities. Since the 1980s, several hundred tiles have been discovered. They are generally about the size of an American license plate (roughly 30 by 15 cm or 12...

  • Don't be evil - "Don't be evil" is Google's former motto, and a phrase used in Google's corporate code of conduct. Following Google's corporate restructuring under the conglomerate Alphabet Inc. in October 2015, Alphabet took "Do the right thing" as its motto, also forming the opening of its corporate code of conduct. The original motto was retained in Google's cod...

  • California nut crimes - California nut crimes refers to the organised theft of nuts (almonds, pistachios, cashews, and pecans) in California. Reported cases of nut theft go as far back as 2006 with the worth of stolen nuts being millions of dollars. The thefts demonstrate a high level of sophistication, encompassing identity theft and a deep understanding of computer secur...

  • Morris worm - The Morris worm or Internet worm of November 2, 1988, is one of the oldest computer worms distributed via the Internet, and the first to gain significant mainstream media attention. It resulted in the first felony conviction in the US under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It was written by a graduate student at Cornell University, Robert Tapp...

  • Area denial weapon - An area denial weapon is a defensive device used to prevent an adversary from occupying or traversing an area of land, sea or air. The specific method may not be totally effective in preventing passage, but is sufficient to severely restrict, slow down, or endanger the opponent. Some area denial weapons pose risks to civilians entering the area even...

  • Island of California - The Island of California (Spanish: Isla de California) refers to a long-held global misconception, dating from the 16th century, that California was not part of mainland North America but rather a large island separated from the continent by a strait now known as the Gulf of California. One of the most famous cartographic errors in history, it was ...

  • The Million Dollar Homepage - The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provid...

  • Operation Paperclip - Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from the former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959. Conducted by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), it was l...

  • American cover-up of Japanese war crimes - The occupying US government undertook the cover-up of Japanese war crimes after the end of World War II, granting political immunity to military personnel who had engaged in human experimentation and other crimes against humanity, predominantly in mainland China. The pardon of Japanese war criminals, among whom were Unit 731's commanding officers Ge...

  • Asahi Linux - Asahi Linux is a project that ports the Linux kernel and related software to Apple silicon-powered Macs. The software design project was started and is led by Hector Martin. Work began in early 2021, a few months after Apple formally announced the transition to Apple silicon. An initial alpha release followed in 2022. The project has been made chall...

  • Disposition Matrix - The Disposition Matrix, informally known as a kill list, is a database of information for tracking, capturing, rendering, or killing suspected enemies of the United States. Developed by the Obama administration beginning in 2010, it goes beyond existing kill lists and is intended to become a permanent fixture of U.S. policy. The process determining ...

  • Max Jacobson - Max Jacobson (3 July 1900 – 1 December 1979) was an American physician and medical researcher who treated numerous high-profile clients in the United States, including President John F. Kennedy. Jacobson came to be known as "Miracle Max" and "Dr. Feelgood" because he administered highly addictive "vitamin shots" laced with various substances that in...

  • Sinking of MV Sewol - The ferry MV Sewol sank on the morning of April 16, 2014, en route from Incheon towards Jeju in South Korea. The 6,825-ton vessel sent a distress signal from about 2.7 kilometres (1.7 mi; 1.5 nmi) north of Byeongpungdo at 08:58 KST (23:58 UTC, April 15, 2014). Out of 476 passengers and crew, 306 died in the disaster, including around 250 students fr...

  • Zoot Suit Riots - The Zoot Suit Riots were a series of riots that took place from June 3–8, 1943, in Los Angeles, California, United States, involving American servicemen stationed in Southern California and young Latino and Mexican American city residents. It was one of the dozen wartime industrial cities that suffered race-related riots in the summer of 1943, along...

  • Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 - Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 was the chartered flight of a Fairchild FH-227D from Montevideo, Uruguay, to Santiago, Chile, that crashed in the Andes mountains on October 13, 1972. The accident and subsequent survival became known as the Andes flight disaster (Tragedia de los Andes) and the Miracle of the Andes (Milagro de los Andes). The inexperie...

  • Baker-Miller pink - Baker-Miller Pink, also known as P-618, Schauss pink, or Drunk-Tank Pink is a tone of pink which has been observed to temporarily reduce hostile, violent or aggressive behavior. It was originally created by mixing white indoor latex paint with red trim semi-gloss outdoor paint in a 1:8 ratio by volume.Alexander Schauss did extensive research into th...

  • Saddle Ridge Hoard - The Saddle Ridge Hoard is the name given to a hoard of 1,427 gold coins unearthed in the Gold Country of the Sierra Nevada, California in 2013. The face value of the coins totaled $27,980, but was assessed to be worth $10 million. The hoard contains $27,460 in twenty-dollar coins, $500 in ten-dollar coins, and $20 in five-dollar coins, all dating fr...

  • 2008 submarine cable disruption - The 2008 submarine cable disruption refers to three separate incidents of major damage to submarine optical communication cables around the world. The first incident caused damage involving up to five high-speed Internet submarine communications cables in the Mediterranean Sea and Middle East from 23 January to 4 February 2008, causing internet disr...

  • Lenin was a mushroom - Lenin was a mushroom (Russian: Ленин — гриб) was a highly influential televised hoax by Soviet musician Sergey Kuryokhin and reporter Sergey Sholokhov. It was first broadcast on 17 May 1991 on Leningrad Television.

  • Hebenon - Hebenon (or hebona) is a botanical substance described in William Shakespeare's tragic play Hamlet. The identity and nature of the poison has been a source of speculation for centuries.

  • Rotating locomotion in living systems - Several organisms are capable of rolling locomotion. However, true wheels and propellers—despite their utility in human vehicles—do not seem to play a significant role in the movement of living things (with the exception of certain flagella, which work like corkscrews). Biologists have offered several explanations for the apparent absence of biologi...

  • Ronald Opus - Ronald Opus is the subject of a fictional murder case, often misreported as a true story. The case was originally told by Don Harper Mills, then president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, in a speech at a banquet in 1987. After it began to circulate on the internet as a factual story and attained the status of urban legend, Mills stated...

  • Big Four (debutantes) - Chicago's Big Four were a quartet of debutantes in the Chicago social scene during World War I, described as "the four most attractive and socially desirable young women in Chicago."

  • Siege of Suiyang - The siege of Suiyang (Chinese: 睢陽之戰; pinyin: Suīyáng zhī zhàn) was a military campaign during the An Lushan Rebellion, launched by the rebel Yan army to capture the city of Suiyang from the loyalist forces of the Tang army. Although the battle was ultimately won by the Yan army, it suffered a major loss of manpower and time. The battle was noted for...

  • Hapax legomenon - In corpus linguistics, a hapax legomenon ( also or ; pl. hapax legomena; sometimes abbreviated to hapax, plural hapaxes) is a word or an expression that occurs only once within a context: either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or in a single text. The term is sometimes incorrectly used to describe a word that...

  • Ghost word - A ghost word is a word published in a dictionary or similarly authoritative reference work even though it had not previously had any meaning or been used intentionally. A ghost word generally originates from readers interpreting a typographical or linguistic error as a word they are not familiar with, and then publishing that word elsewhere under th...

  • Taito (kanji) - Taito, daito, or otodo (𱁬/) is a kokuji ("kanji character invented in Japan") written with 84 strokes, and thus the most graphically complex CJK character—collectively referring to Chinese characters and derivatives used in the written Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages. This rare and complex character graphically places the 36-stroke tai 䨺 (wi...

  • E-meter - The E-meter, originally the electropsychometer, is an electronic device for displaying the electrodermal activity (EDA) of a human being. It is used for auditing in Scientology and divergent groups. The efficacy and legitimacy of Scientology's use of the E-meter has been subject to extensive litigation and in accordance with a federal court order, t...

  • Shabbos App - The Shabbos App claimed to be a proposed Android app to enable Orthodox Jews, and Jewish Sabbath-observers, to use a smartphone on the Sabbath. The app was supposed to appear in late 2014. Some argued from the outset that this project was nothing more than an elaborate hoax or prank.

  • Dr. Dynasaur - Dr. Dynasaur is a publicly funded healthcare program in the U.S. state of Vermont, created in 1989. Vermont had an estimated 140,000 people under age 18 (90,000 under 300% above the Federal Poverty Level (FPL). Dr. Dynasaur covered 56,000 of these uninsured. After adding the coverage of this program to those already covered by private health insuran...

  • Alfonso de Borbón y Borbón - Alfonso de Borbón y Borbón (Madrid, 15 November 1866 - Madrid, 28 April 1934) was a Spanish nobleman, the great-great-grandson of Charles III of Spain, and is known for having had 88 forenames. This is recognised as a record by Guinness World Records.Alfonso was a son of Infante Sebastian of Portugal and Spain, and his second wife, Infanta Maria Chr...

  • La Sombrita - La Sombrita (Spanish for "The Little Shade") is a prototype sunshade created for the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT). Its purpose was to assist female bus riders by offering shade during the hottest hours of the day and providing sidewalk lighting at night. This was especially targeted at locations where the swift construction of tr...

  • Ginevra King - Ginevra King Pirie (November 30, 1898 – December 13, 1980) was an American socialite and heiress. As one of Chicago's "Big Four" debutantes during World War I, she inspired many characters in the novels and stories of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald; in particular, the character of Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. A 16-year-old King met an 18-year-old...

  • Scaly boy - The scaly boy (Aboma etheostoma) is a species of goby native to the Pacific coast of Central America from Mexico to Panama. This species is the only known member of its genus.

  • Telegarden - The TeleGarden was a telerobotic community garden for the Internet. Starting in the mid-1990s, it allowed users to view, plant and take care of a small garden, using an Adept-1 industrial robotic arm controlled online.

  • Marcus McDilda - Lieutenant Marcus Elmo McDilda (December 15, 1921 – August 16, 1998) was an American P-51 fighter pilot who was shot down over Osaka and captured by the Japanese on 8 August 1945, two days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

  • Turnspit dog - The turnspit dog is an extinct short-legged, long-bodied dog bred to run on a wheel, called a turnspit or dog wheel, to turn meat. It is mentioned in Of English Dogs in 1576 under the name "Turnespete". William Bingley's Memoirs of British Quadrupeds (1809) also talks of a dog employed to help chefs and cooks. It is also known as the Kitchen Dog, th...

  • Netflix Prize - The Netflix Prize was an open competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to predict user ratings for films, based on previous ratings without any other information about the users or films, i.e. without the users being identified except by numbers assigned for the contest. The competition was held by Netflix, a video streaming servic...

  • Timothy Dexter - Timothy Dexter (January 22, 1747 – October 23, 1806) was an American businessman noted for his eccentric behavior and writings. He became wealthy through marriage and a series of improbably successful investments, and spent his fortune lavishly. Though barely educated or literate, Dexter considered himself "the greatest philosopher in the Western Wo...

  • Joan of Leeds - Joan of Leeds or Johannas de Ledes (fl. early 14th century) was an English nun, who, bored with her monastic and enclosed life, at some point in 1318 escaped from St Clement's by York priory to journey to Beverley, where she was accused of living with a man. To escape, she feigned mortal illness and constructed a dummy of herself, which her colleagu...

  • Children (composition) - "Children" is an instrumental composition by Italian composer Robert Miles. It was first released in Italy in January 1995 as part of the EP Soundtracks on Joe Vannelli's DBX label, but it did not chart. Vannelli brought the track to a nightclub in Miami where it was heard by Simon Berry of Platipus Records. Berry worked with Vannelli and James Bart...

  • Irish road bowling - Road bowling (Irish: Ból an bhóthair; also called [long] bullets) is an Irish sport in which competitors attempt to take the fewest throws to propel a metal ball along a predetermined course of country roads. The sport originated in Ireland and is mainly played in counties Armagh and Cork. Road bowling in Ireland is governed by the voluntary Irish ...

  • Animals taking public transportation - Some domestic pets, feral animals and wild animals have learned to use human public transportation to travel independently. This is tolerated or even celebrated by passengers, although most public transportation systems only allow service animals and forbid pets. According to urban wildlife specialist Suzanne MacDonald, animal "commuters" are usuall...

  • Vanity sizing - Vanity sizing, or size inflation, is the phenomenon of ready-to-wear clothing of the same nominal size becoming bigger in physical size over time. This has been documented primarily in the United States and the United Kingdom. The use of US standard clothing sizes by manufacturers as the official guidelines for clothing sizes was abandoned in 1983. ...

  • First Lady Bake-Off - The First Lady Bake-Off, renamed the Presidential Cookie Poll in 2016, was a baking competition held by Family Circle from 1992 until 2016 between the spouses of leading presidential candidates. It originated after Hillary Clinton made a political gaffe which was interpreted by some as disparaging baking or housewives. The competition later became k...

  • Diesel therapy - Diesel therapy is a form of punishment in the United States in which prisoners are shackled and then transported for days or weeks; the term refers to the diesel fuel used in prisoner transport vehicles.It has been alleged that some inmates are deliberately sent to incorrect destinations as an exercise of diesel therapy. Voluntary surrender at the p...

  • Norfolk Southern–Gregson Street Overpass - The Norfolk Southern–Gregson Street Overpass, also known as the 11-foot-8 Bridge, is a railroad bridge in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Built in 1940, the bridge allows passenger and freight trains to cross over South Gregson Street in downtown Durham. The bridge was designed in the 1920s, with a clearance for vehicles of 11 feet 8 inches (...

  • List of notable people banned from entering the United States - The following is a list of notable people who are or were barred from entering the United States. The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) handles deportation in the United States, often in conjunction with advice from the U.S. Department of State. Such bans are often temporar...

  • Zeitpyramide - The Zeitpyramide (lit. 'time pyramid') is a work of public art by Manfred Laber under construction in Wemding, Germany. The pyramid was begun in 1993 – the 1,200 year anniversary of the town. It will take another 1,160 years to complete and is scheduled to be finished in the year 3183. The project at the end of 2023 will be 3.3% complete with the fi...

  • Wow! signal - The Wow! signal was a strong narrowband radio signal detected on August 15, 1977, by Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope in the United States, then used to support the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The signal appeared to come from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius and bore the expected hallmarks of extraterrestri...

  • Pirate Joe's - Pirate Joe's was a specialty grocery store in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, owned by Michael Hallatt. Its inventory consisted entirely of store brand products resold from locations of the U.S.-based grocery chain Trader Joe's, which does not operate any locations in Canada. Despite the high costs of operating the store because of its business...

  • Thigmonasty - In biology, thigmonasty or seismonasty is the nastic (non-directional) response of a plant or fungus to touch or vibration. Conspicuous examples of thigmonasty include many species in the leguminous subfamily Mimosoideae, active carnivorous plants such as Dionaea and a wide range of pollination mechanisms.

  • 996 working hour system - The 996 working hour system (Chinese: 996工作制) is a work schedule practiced by some companies in China. It derives its name from its requirement that employees work from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, 6 days per week; i.e. 72 hours per week. A number of Mainland Chinese internet companies have adopted this system as their official work schedule. Critics argue t...

  • Operation Coffee Cup - Operation Coffee Cup was a campaign conducted by the American Medical Association (AMA) during the late 1950s and early 1960s in opposition to the Democrats' plans to extend Social Security to include health insurance for the elderly, later known as Medicare. As part of the plan, doctors' wives would organize coffee meetings in an attempt to convinc...

  • Nut rage incident - The nut rage incident, also referred to as nutgate (Korean: 땅콩 회항, Ttangkong hoehang), was an air rage incident that occurred on December 5, 2014, at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City onboard Korean Air Flight 086. Korean Air vice president Heather Cho (Korean name: Cho Hyun-ah), dissatisfied with the way a flight attendant serv...

  • David Brandt (farmer) - David Brandt (1946 or 1947 – May 21, 2023) was an American farmer known for working on sustainable agriculture techniques, specifically no-till farming and cover crops. Outside of the agriculture field, he was known on the internet for being the face of a meme.

  • Operation Monopoly - Operation Monopoly was a covert plan by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to build a tunnel underneath the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., to gather secret intelligence in effect from 1977 until its public discovery in 2001.The embassy of the Soviet Union was relocated to a new building complex in 1977. The US government fe...

  • Baby Tooth Survey - The Baby Tooth Survey was initiated by the Greater St. Louis Citizens' Committee for Nuclear Information in conjunction with Saint Louis University and the Washington University School of Dental Medicine as a means of determining the effects of nuclear fallout in the human anatomy by examining the levels of radioactive material absorbed into the dec...

  • List of animals awarded human credentials - This list of animals awarded human credentials includes nonhuman animals who have been submitted as applicants to suspected diploma mills, and have been awarded a diploma. On occasion, they have been admitted and granted a degree, as reported in reliable sources. Animals are often used as a device to clearly demonstrate the lax standards or fraudule...

  • MaxMind - MaxMind is a Massachusetts-based data company that provides location data for IP addresses and other data for IP addresses, and fraud detection data used to screen hundreds of millions of online transactions monthly for more than 7,000 businesses.

  • Interservice rivalry - Interservice rivalry is rivalry between different branches of a country's armed forces. This may include competition between land, marine, naval, coastal, air, or space forces.Interservice rivalry can occur over such topics as the appropriation of the military budget, prestige, or the possession of certain types of equipment or units. The latter cas...

  • Kodinhi - Kodinhi is a village in Malappuram district in Kerala, India. The village is situated close to the town of Tirurangadi and, as of 2008, is home to around 2,000 families. Administered by the Nannambra panchayat, the village came to international attention for the unusually large number of multiple births in the region, especially twins, although Indi...

  • Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol - The Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP) is a facetious communication protocol for controlling, monitoring, and diagnosing coffee pots. It is specified in RFC 2324, published on 1 April 1998 as an April Fools' Day RFC, as part of an April Fools prank. An extension, HTCPCP-TEA, was published as RFC 7168 on 1 April 2014 to support brewing t...

  • Kremen v. Cohen - Kremen v. Cohen, 337 F.3d 1024 (9th Cir., 2003), was a court ruling at the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The ruling was an important early cyberlaw precedent, determining that an Internet domain name is an item of property that can be bought, sold, and stolen.

  • Abdul Qadeer Khan - Abdul Qadeer Khan, NI, HI, FPAS ( (listen); Urdu: عبد القدیر خان; 1 April 1936 – 10 October 2021), known as A. Q. Khan, was a Pakistani nuclear physicist and metallurgical engineer who is colloquially known as the "father of Pakistan's atomic weapons program".An émigré (Muhajir) from India who migrated to Pakistan in 1952, Khan was educated in the m...

  • Henry Molaison - Henry Gustav Molaison (February 26, 1926 – December 2, 2008), known widely as H.M., was an American who had a bilateral medial temporal lobectomy to surgically resect the anterior two thirds of his hippocampi, parahippocampal cortices, entorhinal cortices, piriform cortices, and amygdalae in an attempt to cure his epilepsy. Although the surgery was ...

  • Cenn Fáelad mac Ailella - Cenn Fáelad mac Ailella (alias Cennfaeladh) (died 679) was an early medieval Irish scholar renowned for having his memory markedly improve and possibly becoming eidetic after suffering a head wound in battle.

  • Who Moved My Cheese? - Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life, published on September 8, 1998, is a bestselling seminal work and motivational business fable by Spencer Johnson. The text describes the way one reacts to major change in one's work and life, and four typical reactions to those changes by two mice and two "Littlep...

  • Operation Legacy - Operation Legacy was a British Colonial Office (later Foreign Office) programme to destroy or hide files, to prevent them being inherited by its ex-colonies. It ran from the 1950s until the 1970s, when the decolonisation of the British Empire was at its height.

  • Mill Ends Park - Mill Ends Park (sometimes mistakenly called Mill's End Park) is a tiny urban park, consisting of one tree, located in the median strip of SW Naito Parkway next to Tom McCall Waterfront Park along the Willamette River near SW Taylor Street in downtown Portland, Oregon, United States. The park is a small circle 2 ft (0.61 m) across, with a total area ...

  • AlphaBay - AlphaBay is a darknet market operating both as an onion service on the Tor network and as an I2P node on I2P. After it was shut down in July 2017 following law enforcement action in the United States, Canada, and Thailand as part of Operation Bayonet, it was relaunched in August 2021 by the self-described co-founder and security administrator DeSnak...

  • Whale fall - A whale fall occurs when the carcass of a whale has fallen onto the ocean floor at a depth greater than 1,000 m (3,300 ft), in the bathyal or abyssal zones. On the sea floor, these carcasses can create complex localized ecosystems that supply sustenance to deep-sea organisms for decades. This is unlike in shallower waters, where a whale carcass will...

  • The Third Wave (experiment) - The Third Wave was an experimental social movement created by California high school history teacher Ron Jones in 1967 to explain how the German population could have accepted the actions of the Nazi regime during the rise of the Third Reich and the Second World War.While Jones taught his students about Nazi Germany during his senior level Contempor...

  • Winchester Mystery House - The Winchester Mystery House is a mansion in San Jose, California, that was once the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of firearms magnate William Wirt Winchester. The house became a tourist attraction nine months after Winchester's death in 1922. The Victorian and Gothic style mansion is renowned for its size and its architectural c...

  • Portuguese man o' war - The Portuguese man o' war (Physalia physalis), also known as the man-of-war, is a marine hydrozoan found in the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean. It is considered to be the same species as the Pacific man o' war or blue bottle, which is found mainly in the Pacific Ocean. The Portuguese man o' war is the only species in the genus Physalia, which i...

  • Robert Bork - Robert Heron Bork (March 1, 1927 – December 19, 2012) was an American jurist who served as the solicitor general of the United States from 1973 until 1977. A professor at Yale Law School by occupation, he was later acting U.S. attorney general and a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1982 to 1988. In 1987, President Ronald ...

  • Lion of Gripsholm Castle - The Lion of Gripsholm Castle is a notable example of bad taxidermy located in Gripsholm Castle, Sweden. The lion is badly stuffed and is considered to have a comically deformed face.In 1731, the Bey of Algiers presented King Frederick I of Sweden with a lion, one of the first lions in Scandinavia. When alive, the lion was kept in a cage near Juniba...

  • Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir - The complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir (UET V 81) is a clay tablet that was sent to ancient Ur, written c. 1750 BCE. It is a complaint to a merchant named Ea-nasir from a customer named Nanni. Written in Akkadian cuneiform, it is considered to be the oldest known written complaint. It is currently kept in the British Museum. The tablet has also become an ...

  • My Immortal (fan fiction) - My Immortal is a Harry Potter-based fan fiction serially published on FanFiction.net between 2006 and 2007. Though notable for its convoluted narrative and constant digressions, the story largely centers on a non-canonical female vampire character named "Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way" and her relationships with the characters of the Harry Potte...

  • Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (HPMOR) is a Harry Potter fan fiction by Eliezer Yudkowsky, published on FanFiction.Net. It adapts the story of Harry Potter to explain complex concepts in cognitive science, philosophy, and the scientific method. Yudkowsky published HPMOR as a serial from February 28, 2010 to March 14, 2015, totaling 122 ...

  • Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles - Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles is a Harry Potter-based fan fiction, serially published on FanFiction.Net by Grace Anne Parsons under the username proudhousewife. The fan fiction rewrites the Harry Potter series as an Evangelical version and replaces magic with prayer and religious phenomena. The fanfiction went viral because of its extreme r...

  • Quicksand - Quicksand, also known as sinking sand, is a colloid consisting of fine granular material (such as sand, silt or clay) and water. It forms in saturated loose sand when the sand is suddenly agitated. When water in the sand cannot escape, it creates a liquefied soil that loses strength and cannot support weight. Quicksand can form in standing water or ...

  • 2001 anthrax attacks - The 2001 anthrax attacks, also known as Amerithrax (a portmanteau of "America" and "anthrax", from its FBI case name), occurred in the United States over the course of several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001, one week after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and to Se...

  • Character amnesia - Character amnesia is a phenomenon whereby experienced speakers of some East Asian languages forget how to write Chinese characters previously well known to them. The phenomenon is specifically tied to prolonged and extensive use of input methods, such as those that use romanizations of characters, and is documented to be a significant issue in China...

  • "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers) - "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers) is a work of conceptual art produced by Félix González-Torres in an edition of three, plus one artist's proof, between 1987 and 1990. It consists of two identical synchronized clocks, that will eventually fall out of sync. An ambiguous work of art, many have interpreted it to be a commentary on González-Torres' partner's ...

  • 20 Fenchurch Street - 20 Fenchurch Street is a commercial skyscraper in London that takes its name from its address on Fenchurch Street, in the historic City of London financial district. It has been nicknamed "The Walkie-Talkie" because of its distinctive shape, said to resemble a two-way radio handset. Construction was completed in spring 2014, and the three-floor "sky...

  • Ahmed Naser Al-Raisi - Ahmed Naser Al-Raisi (also romanised as Ahmed Nasser Al-Raisi) is an Emirati military general officer. He currently serves as the 30th president of Interpol and the inspector general of the United Arab Emirates' interior ministry.

  • Memex - Memex is a hypothetical electromechanical device for interacting with microform documents and described in Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think". Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, "mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed an...

  • Endurance art - Endurance art is a kind of performance art involving some form of hardship, such as pain, solitude or exhaustion. Performances that focus on the passage of long periods of time are also known as durational art or durational performances.Writer Michael Fallon traces the genre to the work of Chris Burden in California in the 1970s. Burden spent five d...

  • Tokyo subway sarin attack - The Tokyo subway sarin attack (地下鉄サリン事件, Chikatetsu Sarin Jiken, "Subway Sarin Incident") was an act of domestic terrorism perpetrated on 20 March 1995, in Tokyo, Japan, by members of the cult movement Aum Shinrikyo. In five coordinated attacks, the perpetrators released sarin on three lines of the Tokyo Metro (then Teito Rapid Transit Authority) du...

  • Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act 1907 - The Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act 1907 (7 Edw.7 c.47) was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, allowing a man to marry his dead wife's sister, which had previously been forbidden. This prohibition had derived from a doctrine of canon law whereby those who were connected by marriage were regarded as being related to each other in a...

  • ANT catalog - The ANT catalog (or TAO catalog) is a classified product catalog by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) of which the version written in 2008–2009 was published by German news magazine Der Spiegel in December 2013. Forty-nine catalog pages with pictures, diagrams and descriptions of espionage devices and spying software were published. The items ...

  • Frog cake - The frog cake is an Australian dessert in the shape of a frog's head, composed of sponge cake and cream covered with fondant. It was created by the Balfours bakery circa 1923, and soon became a popular treat in South Australia. Originally frog cakes were available exclusively in green, but later brown and pink were added to the range. Since then oth...

  • Aoshima, Ehime - Aoshima (青島, Aoshima), also known as Cat Island (猫の島, Neko no shima), is an island in Ehime Prefecture, Japan, known for its large number of feline residents. Felines have been reported by news outlets to outnumber humans by ratios between 6:1 and 10:1, but as elderly inhabitants of the island have died, the ratio has greatly increased to almost 36:...

  • WeWork - WeWork Inc. is a provider of coworking spaces, including physical and virtual shared spaces, headquartered in New York City. As of December 31, 2021, the company operated 44.8 million square feet (4,160,000 m2) of space, including 19.8 million square feet (1,840,000 m2) in the United States and Canada, in 756 locations in 38 countries, and had 590,0...

  • maia arson crimew - maia arson crimew (formerly known as Tillie Kottmann, and also known as deletescape and antiproprietary; born August 7, 1999) is a Swiss developer and computer hacker. crimew worked in information technology as a teenager, becoming the founding developer of Lawnchair Launcher, a popular application launcher for Android. She is known for leaking sour...

  • F. D. C. Willard - F. D. C. Willard (1968–1982) was the pen name of a Siamese cat named Chester, who internationally published under this name on physics in scientific journals. He is most famous for his work on low temperature physics as a co-author in 1975. At one later occasion, he published as the sole author.

  • Variable yield - Variable yield, or dial-a-yield, is an option available on most modern nuclear weapons. It allows the operator to specify a weapon's yield, or explosive power, allowing a single design to be used in different situations. For example, the Mod-10 B61 bomb had selectable explosive yields of 0.3, 5, 10 or 80 kilotons, depending on how the ground crew se...

  • Salmon chaos - In March 2021, a wave of Taiwanese people changed their legal names to include the word "salmon" (Chinese: 鮭魚; pinyin: guīyú) to take advantage of a promotion by the Japanese conveyor belt sushi chain Sushiro. The chain offered free sushi to guests whose names included the word. This phenomenon was dubbed the "salmon chaos" by English-language media...

  • Simplified Spelling Board - The Simplified Spelling Board was an American organization created in 1906 to reform the spelling of the English language, making it simpler and easier to learn, and eliminating many of what were considered to be its inconsistencies. The board operated until 1920, the year after the death of its founding benefactor, who had come to criticize the pro...

  • Sexually dimorphic nucleus - The sexually dimorphic nucleus (SDN) is an ovoid, densely packed cluster of large cells located in the medial preoptic area (POA) of the hypothalamus which is believed to be related to sexual behavior in animals. Thus far, for all species of mammals investigated, the SDN has been repeatedly found to be considerably larger in males than in females. I...

  • Wikipedia Articles - 🌐 A collection of interesting Wikipedia articles

  • Great Hanoi Rat Massacre - The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre (Vietnamese: Cuộc thảm sát chuột ở Hà Nội; Chữ Nôm: 局摻刹𤝞於河內; French: Massacre des rats de Hanoï) occurred in 1902, in Hanoi, Tonkin, French Indochina (present day Hanoi, Vietnam), when the French government authorities attempted to control the rat population of the city by hunting them down. As they felt that they weren'...

  • Super Ball - A Super Ball or Superball is a toy bouncy ball based on a type of synthetic rubber invented in 1964 by chemist Norman Stingley. It is an extremely elastic ball made of Zectron, which contains the synthetic polymer polybutadiene as well as hydrated silica, zinc oxide, stearic acid, and other ingredients. This compound is vulcanized with sulfur at ...

  • 1946 California gubernatorial election - The 1946 California gubernatorial election was held on November 5, 1946. It is notable for the incumbent Governor, Earl Warren, being nominated by both the Republican and Democratic parties, as well as the Progressive Party. Subsequently, Warren won re-election effectively unopposed, receiving more than 90% of the vote. He was the first Governor of ...

  • Metasyntactic variable - A metasyntactic variable is a specific word or set of words identified as a placeholder in computer science and specifically computer programming. These words are commonly found in source code and are intended to be modified or substituted before real-world usage. The words foo and bar are good examples as they are used in over 330 Internet Engineer...

  • Port and Starboard (orcas) - Port and Starboard are a pair of adult male orcas notable for preying on great white sharks off the coast of South Africa. The duo are identified as having rare and distinct collapsed dorsal fins and they are named for the nautical terms, as Port's fin collapses left and Starboard's collapses right. Port and Starboard are part of a distinctive "flat...

  • Sony Pictures hack - On November 24, 2014, a hacker group identifying itself as "Guardians of Peace" leaked a release of confidential data from the film studio Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE). The data included personal information about Sony Pictures employees and their families, emails between employees, information about executive salaries at the company, copies of...

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