Orlan

Plot of shear rate as a function of the shear stress. Dilatants in green.

Medieval English split tally stick ( front and reverse view). The stick is notched and inscribed to record a debt owed to the rural dean of Preston Candover , Hampshire, of a tithe of 20 d each on 32 sheep, amounting to a total sum of £2…

Orlan had horns surgically implanted into her forehead while reading Kristeva aloud on the operating table. Nine operations. Each broadcast live. The body as an artist's material — edited without anesthesia for the soul.

Winchester Mystery House

Sarah Winchester built stairs that dead-end into ceilings, doors that open to 10-foot drops, and a séance room with one entrance and three exits — reportedly to confuse the ghosts of Winchester rifle victims.

Column of Marcus Aurelius

Erected after 193 AD, the Column of Marcus Aurelius depicts Romans burning German villages and beheading captives in a 190-metre spiral. It was so ignored that a hermit lived inside it for years.

Dilatant

Cornstarch stirred into water becomes a dilatant: press slowly and your finger sinks; punch it and the fluid hardens to concrete. BAE Systems built flexible armour panels from it that stop a knife in 8 milliseconds.

Iamblichus

He rose ten cubits off the ground — glowing gold — while his students watched twice. A Syrian Neoplatonist who made ritual magic philosophically respectable. What do you do with a man who keeps floating?

Bracewell probe

Ronald Bracewell proposed in 1960 that the cheapest way to make contact is to park a probe in a target star's solar system and wait. Something may already be parked in ours.

Tally stick

For 700 years, the English Exchequer split hazel sticks to record royal debts — the king kept one half, the creditor the other. In 1834, Parliament burned the old sticks and accidentally set Westminster on fire.

Cerberus Capital Management

Cerberus Capital — named for the three-headed dog guarding the underworld — bought Chrysler from Daimler for $7.4 billion in 2007, then watched it go bankrupt in exactly 735 days. Hell kept the dog; taxpayers kept the bill.

Kargil War

Pakistani soldiers secretly occupied Indian peaks above 15,000 feet in early 1999. Pakistan's army chief denied knowledge; the operation's planning notebooks were later found to bear General Pervez Musharraf's own handwriting.