Silvia Federici — gnostek

01Federici calculates that roughly 50,000 women were executed as witches across Europe between the 15th and 18th centuries.
02She argues witch trials peaked precisely in regions where women held common land rights — the burnings followed the enclosures.
03Federici began the Wages for Housework campaign in 1972, demanding states pay women for domestic labor as a precondition for any feminist politics.

A carpet beater

01Caesar's soldiers killed roughly 10,000 Pompeians and captured 15,000 at Thapsus; the lopsided toll suggests a rout, not a battle.
02Ancient sources including Plutarch record Caesar falling into a seizure at the onset, carried to a nearby tower to recover while his army fought without him.
03After the battle, Caesar's own veterans executed several surrendered enemy officers on the spot — Caesar was reportedly unable to stop them.

Temperature map of the cosmic microwave background measured by the Planck spacecraft

01The pigeons roosting inside the horn antenna were trapped and relocated twice before the engineers accepted the hiss was cosmic.
02Penzias and Wilson won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics — accidentally, while testing satellite communication equipment.
03Princeton cosmologist Robert Dicke had been building a detector specifically to find this radiation; Penzias called him first, and Dicke told his team: 'We've been scooped.'