gnostekShigechiyo Izumi600%Craziest Guinness Book of World Record RecordholdersShigechiyo Izumi was certified as the oldest person ever at 120 years — until investigators found his birth registry was his grandfather's entry. His actual age was likely 105.+ See More01He was officially listed in Guinness from 1980 until his death in 1986 as age 120.02Japanese researchers found the 1865 birth record belonged to a grandfather of the same name.03His likely true birth year of 1880 would still place him among the oldest verified humans.
gnostek+10‹›1 / 17Septimius Severus800%Best Roman emperorsRome's first African-born emperor marched his army to Scotland's edge, declared the campaign unfinished, and died in York in 211 AD — 3,000 miles from Leptis Magna, where he was born.+ See More01Septimius Severus was born in Leptis Magna, modern Libya, becoming Rome's first African-born emperor.02He died in Eboracum — modern York — while planning a deeper invasion of Caledonia.03His deathbed advice to his sons: 'Enrich the soldiers; ignore everyone else.'
gnostek+6‹›1 / 13Large Hadron Collider600%Most expensive scientific research projectsThe LHC accelerates protons to 99.9999991% of light speed inside a 27 km ring cooled to −271°C — colder than deep space — to smash them into the Higgs boson's first confirmed appearance.+ See More01The LHC's superconducting magnets operate at 1.9 Kelvin, colder than the cosmic microwave background.02On July 4, 2012, CERN announced the Higgs boson's discovery to a room where Peter Higgs wept.03Each proton beam carries the kinetic energy equivalent of a 400-tonne train at 150 km/h.
gnostek+23‹›1 / 30Poster symbolizing the Ele Não Movement.Controversies surrounding Jair Bolsonaro1000%Controversial statements by politicians in the 21st centuryOn the Senate floor, Bolsonaro told Senator Maria do Rosário she was 'not worth raping' — then, as president, publicly praised the colonel who tortured her during Brazil's military dictatorship.+ See More01In 2016, Bolsonaro told Senator Maria do Rosário she was 'not worth raping' during a floor dispute.02As president in 2019, he praised Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra — the man who tortured do Rosário — by name.03Ustra's torture methods included electric shocks; Bolsonaro called him 'a terror for the left' on national television.
gnostek+3‹›1 / 10Gustav Landauer15013%Anarchy: Real World ExamplesGustav Landauer, Germany's foremost anarchist philosopher, was stomped and shot by soldiers in a Munich prison courtyard on May 2, 1919. His last book on Shakespeare was still unfinished. Philosophy ended with a boot.+ See More01Soldiers stripped Landauer, beat him with rifle butts, then shot him in the Stadelheim prison yard.02Landauer had served as Commissioner of Enlightenment in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic for just weeks.03His friend Martin Buber collected and published his unfinished writings as an act of mourning.
gnostek‹›1 / 7Joey Chestnut300%Craziest Guinness Book of World Record RecordholdersJoey Chestnut ate 76 hot dogs in 10 minutes at Nathan's Famous while a protestor physically tackled him mid-contest. He kept eating. He won. The hot dogs were still in his hand.+ See More01Chestnut consumed 76 Nathan's Famous hot dogs and buns in exactly 10 minutes in 2023.02A protestor rushed the stage and tackled him mid-competition; Chestnut subdued them without stopping eating.03He has won Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest 16 times — more than any other competitor in history.
gnostek‹›1 / 6Michel Foucault1110%Revolutionaries in Queer TheoryFoucault spent his last years cruising San Francisco bathhouses while dying of AIDS — a fact he reportedly knew. The man who said power invented sexuality lived the argument to its end.+ See More01Foucault was reportedly aware he had AIDS by 1983 and continued frequenting San Francisco bathhouses through that year.02He coined 'biopower' — the state's management of bodies and populations — in a 1976 lecture at the Collège de France.03His 'Discipline and Punish' (1975) opens with a four-page description of a man being drawn and quartered in 1757 Paris.
gnostek‹›1 / 4Atari video game burial1000%Stories about legendary video game developmentDesigned in five and a half weeks by one man, 3.5 million unsold cartridges were buried under concrete in an Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill — a corporate burial that became an urban legend confirmed by excavation in 2014.+ See More01Howard Scott Warshaw had 5.5 weeks to code it; a normal Atari game took 6–9 months.02Atari pressed roughly 12 million cartridges for a console with only 10 million owners.03A 2014 dig in Alamogordo pulled 1,300 cartridges from concrete-sealed desert landfill.
gnostek‹›1 / 5Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging700%South African farm killingsThe AWB's tri-legged swastika flag flew at rallies where Eugene Terre'Blanche rode a white horse before crowds of 50,000 — a movement that threatened civil war, then imploded when apartheid ended anyway.+ See More01AWB members stormed the Kempton Park CODESA negotiations in 1993, driving an armored vehicle through the glass entrance.02Three AWB members were shot dead by a lone Black police officer during the Bophuthatswana invasion in 1994.03Terre'Blanche was photographed passed out drunk in a Johannesburg gutter in 2001, ending the movement's mystique.