gnostek1 / 19Enemies being killed and roasted in South America – engraving by Theodor de Bry (1592)
01Kuru, spread by endocannibalism among the Fore people, killed an estimated 1,100 people between 1957 and 2004.
02Women and children ate the brain and organs; men ate muscle — explaining why women died at far higher rates.
03Nobel laureate D. Carleton Gajdusek identified kuru's prion cause in 1976 after living with the Fore for years.
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01Kendrick released five diss tracks in roughly two weeks during April–May 2024, an unprecedented pace.
02Drake's legal team sent cease-and-desist letters to Universal Music Group over specific lyrical allegations.
03'Not Like Us' became the fastest rap diss track to reach number one in Billboard Hot 100 history.
gnostek1 / 13Takifugu in a tank
01Tetrodotoxin is 1,200 times more lethal than cyanide by weight; the fugu liver holds the highest concentration.
02Between 1996 and 2015, 23 people died in Japan from fugu poisoning — almost all amateur fishermen cooking their own catch.
03Chefs must present a valid fugu license; unlicensed preparation carries up to two years in Japanese prison.
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01Wittig delivered 'The Straight Mind' at the 1980 MLA conference, declaring heterosexuality a political regime, not a preference.
02Her 1969 novel 'Les Guérillères' featured an army of women burning every text that named them.
03She argued 'lesbian' is the only subject position outside the male/female binary — not a third gender, an escape.
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01Casartelli died on July 18, 1995, during stage 15 of the Tour — a descent in the Pyrenees.
02The race organisation did not neutralise the stage; riders finished while Casartelli was airlifted, dying, to hospital.
03It was the first Tour fatality since British rider Tom Simpson died on Mont Ventoux in 1967.
gnostek
01Ferrer's Escuela Moderna gave boys and girls identical curricula — heretical in 1901 Catholic Spain.
02He was convicted of 'intellectual authorship' of the 1909 Tragic Week riots despite no direct evidence.
03His execution triggered protest riots across Europe, toppling the Spanish prime minister within weeks.
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01Students witnessed Iamblichus levitate ten cubits, bathed in golden light, on two separate occasions.
02He systematized theurgy — divine ritual magic — as philosophically superior to mere intellectual contemplation.
03His commentary on Pythagoras described numerical mysticism as the architecture underlying all reality.
gnostek1 / 5An illustration of Cantor's diagonal argument (in base 2) for the existence of uncountable sets . The sequence at the bottom cannot occur anywhere in the enumeration of sequences above.
01Cantor's diagonal argument fits on one page: construct a number differing from every listed entry at position n.
02It proved the reals are 'uncountably' infinite — a strictly larger infinity than the counting numbers.
03Cantor suffered repeated breakdowns; fellow mathematician Kronecker called him a 'corrupter of youth.'
gnostek1 / 2A Jake and Dinos Chapman fused mannequin piece from the exhibition Come and See at the Serpentine Gallery
01The original Goya plates date from 1810–1820; the Chapmans overpainted them in 2003.
02They titled the defaced series 'Insult to Injury,' inverting Goya's humanitarian intent entirely.
03Jake Chapman said ruining the Goyas was more creative than making new work from scratch.