Nikephoros II Phokas

A typical crossbow

01Caesar's inner wall (contravallation) was 11 miles; his outer wall (circumvallation) was 14 miles — both built in under six weeks.
02The relief army of roughly 250,000 Gauls attacked both walls at once; Caesar personally rode to plug a breach, his red cloak used as a field signal.
03When the relief army failed, Vercingetorix surrendered 80,000 starving survivors — and the 20,000 Mandubii civilians Caesar had refused to feed died in the gap between the walls.

Pyrocumulonimbus cloud formed by the firestorm following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima , 1945. Nuclear winter effects are triggered by at least a hundred such city firestorms.

01The paper coined the term 'nuclear winter'; Sagan published it simultaneously in Science and in Parade magazine, reaching 17 million readers at once.
02Soviet climatologist Vladimir Alexandrov independently produced near-identical temperature-drop models in Moscow the same year.
03The 35°C cooling estimate meant most temperate-zone crops would fail within weeks of a detonation, before fallout reached them.

Anti-immigrant protesters in Calais hold a sign in French reading "Diversity is a code word for white genocide", above a banner calling for remigration (8 November 2015).

The Wilton Diptych, c. 1395 –1399. Each panel is 53 cm × 37 cm (21 in × 15 in) .

Nikephoros II Phokas

The Byzantine emperor who reconquered Cilicia, Cyprus, and parts of Syria slept on a hair shirt on the floor and petitioned to have soldiers killed in battle canonized as martyrs by the Church.

Crossbow

The Second Lateran Council banned the crossbow against Christians in 1139 — the first arms-control treaty in Western history. Knights ignored it, and within a century the bolt had made armor obsolete and chivalry theatrical.

Jay Gould

Jay Gould and partner James Fisk cornered the entire U.S. gold market in September 1869. On 'Black Friday' the price collapsed, ruining thousands — while Gould had already quietly sold at the peak.

Utahraptor

Utahraptor weighed as much as a grizzly bear and carried a 9-inch hooked claw on each foot — the weapon that made Jurassic Park's Velociraptors look like the timid cousins they actually were.

Battle of Alesia

Caesar built two concentric walls totaling 25 miles — one facing inward to trap 80,000 men, one facing outward against 250,000 relieving warriors. He was the besieged and the besieger simultaneously.

Nuclear winter

Carl Sagan and four co-authors published calculations in 1983 showing that even a 'limited' nuclear exchange of 100 warheads could throw enough soot into the stratosphere to drop global temperatures by 35°C — killing more people than the bombs.

Murder of Yeardley Love

UVA lacrosse captain George Huguely V beat teammate Yeardley Love to death in her apartment hours before their 2010 graduation. He was convicted of second-degree murder; her family later won a $7.5 million civil judgment.

White genocide conspiracy theory

A claim of white genocide in South Africa — built on disputed murder statistics from Afrikaner advocacy sites — migrated from Boer forums to Brenton Tarrant's manifesto, cited by name before the Christchurch massacre.

Wilton Diptych

Painted around 1395 for Richard II, the Wilton Diptych contains a tiny orb held by a painted angel — inside it, under magnification, a green island with a white castle appears: England, rendered smaller than a fingernail, seen as if from above the clouds.