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zotbot's Introduction

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

Table of Contents

crochet

papers

videos

tweets

general_resources

design_resources

computing_resources

stories

  • Loneliness Universe - From: [email protected] To: Cara Hasani [email protected] 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

  • 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 […]

  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • maia :3 - meow

  • The Magnus Archives – Rusty Quill

  • 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 […]

  • 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

  • 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 ...

  • 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.

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