Chris Burden

Skydiver Bill Booth 's second rule states that "The safer skydiving gear becomes, the more chances skydivers will take, in order to keep the fatality rate constant."

Red Bird – watercolour on paper

A depiction of a hypothetical Dyson swarm surrounding a star

Messenia , homeland of Sparta's helot population, from Mount Ithome .

In 1971 Burden asked an assistant to shoot him in the left arm with a .22 rifle inside a Santa Ana garage. The bullet grazed the bone. The event lasted five seconds and was witnessed by a handful of people.

Risk compensation

After seatbelt laws passed, Sam Peltzman measured the data: drivers sped up and followed closer, killing roughly the same number of car occupants — but significantly more pedestrians and cyclists.

Chris Ofili

Ofili painted the Virgin Mary with a clump of elephant dung as one breast and pornographic collage for her halo. Mayor Giuliani called it 'disgusting' and tried to evict the Brooklyn Museum in 1999.

Dyson sphere

Freeman Dyson proposed in 1960 that a civilization running out of energy would dismantle its own planets to build a shell around its star, capturing every photon. We should look for the heat.

Frostbite

Researchers immersed prisoners' arms in freezing water until the limbs were solid, then struck them with a stick to test whether the tissue cracked. Doctors called the sound 'the sound of a ripe watermelon.'

Balfour Declaration

Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote 67 words to Lord Rothschild in 1917, promising a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Those 67 words are still quoted in international courts more than a century later.

Eisriesenwelt

Eisriesenwelt stretches 42 kilometres into the Austrian Alps — the world's largest accessible ice cave — where wind racing through the entrance freezes meltwater into towers and archways that survive year-round despite mild summers above.

Crypteia

Spartan boys earned citizenship by stalking and murdering helot slaves at night, alone, with a knife. The state called it education. The helots called it nothing — they left no record.

John J. Muccio

A 1950 letter signed by U.S. Ambassador John Muccio authorized American soldiers to fire on Korean civilian refugees approaching front lines. The paper trail survived. An ally's civilians, cleared for killing by a diplomat's signature.