Susan Griffin

01Griffin's 'Pornography and Silence' (1981) used close readings of Hugh Hefner's published manifestos to argue pornography was hatred wearing the costume of desire.
02Her 1978 'Woman and Nature' was composed in two alternating voices — one the authoritative voice of Western science, one the body it was describing.
03Griffin was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1980 partly on the strength of work her own academic department had refused to recognize as scholarship.

An 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.

The DU penetrator of a 30 mm round from the GAU-8 Avenger

Susan Griffin's 1978 book 'Woman and Nature' interleaved passages about scientific objectivity, factory farming, and the Nazi medical experiments on Jewish women to argue they were the same cognitive operation. She wrote it as prose poetry, not argument.

Sammy Gravano

Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano admitted to 19 murders, testified against John Gotti, served five years, then ran a 30,000-pill-per-week ecstasy ring in Scottsdale, Arizona, using his family as distributors.

Dik-dik

The dik-dik marks territory by pressing a preorbital gland — located millimetres from its eyeball — directly onto twigs, essentially staking claim with its own face, one poke at a time.

Mellified man

Elderly Arab men, per medieval accounts, volunteered to subsist entirely on honey until their flesh was saturated — then, after death and 100 years of submersion in honey, their preserved corpses were sold as medicine.

Killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki

Sixteen-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen eating dinner in Yemen, was killed by a drone two weeks after his father. The Obama administration later said it was a mistake. His grandfather asked why.

LIGO

LIGO's mirrors must hold still to one-ten-thousandth the width of a proton. That precision, costing $1.1 billion, caught the first gravitational wave in September 2015 — a collision 1.3 billion years old.

Cantor's diagonal argument

Cantor showed in 1891 that the infinity of real numbers cannot be listed — proving it by constructing one number guaranteed to be missing from any list. Infinity has a size hierarchy; most people never heard it.

Plague (disease)

Unit 731 maintained plague-flea breeding facilities producing 3 kilograms of fleas per week — roughly 45 million fleas — enough to seed an epidemic across a mid-sized city in a single sortie.

Depleted uranium

The US Army fired roughly 300 tons of depleted uranium rounds into Iraq and Kuwait, then left the radioactive debris in the sand. Birth defect rates in Basra spiked in the years that followed.