01Nicephorus II Phocas asked Patriarch Polyeuctus to declare soldiers slain in battle as Christian martyrs.
02He slept on a hair-cloth mat on the floor, refusing a bed, throughout his reign.
03His own wife and her lover Tzimisces had him murdered in his bedroom in December 969.
gnostek1 / 5An 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.
01Cantor's diagonal argument fits on one page: construct a number differing from every listed entry at position n.
02It proved the reals are 'uncountably' infinite — a strictly larger infinity than the counting numbers.
03Cantor suffered repeated breakdowns; fellow mathematician Kronecker called him a 'corrupter of youth.'
gnostek1 / 7
01The bird-demon is seated on a commode; the souls it excretes fall visibly into a glass pit below.
02The Garden of Earthly Delights hung in the palace of Henry III of Nassau — a secular, not a church, commission.
03Bosch's iconography has no confirmed theological source; no contemporary written key to his symbols has ever been found.
gnostek
01Ali Hassan al-Majid ordered the Anfal campaign, killing an estimated 50,000–100,000 Kurds with chemical weapons.
02He personally signed the document declaring Kuwait Iraq's 19th province in August 1990.
03Convicted and sentenced to death four separate times before his 2010 execution by hanging.
gnostek1 / 2
01Cerberus paid $7.4 billion for Chrysler in May 2007; Chrysler filed for bankruptcy by April 2009.
02Daimler paid Cerberus $650 million to take Chrysler off its hands — a negative sale price.
03The U.S. government ultimately injected $12.5 billion to rescue the company Cerberus had just bought.
gnostek1 / 9
01Construction on the Ryugyong Hotel halted in 1992 with the shell complete; it sat visibly unfinished for 16 years.
02The building was so embarrassing that North Korean state maps omitted it entirely for nearly two decades.
03At 330 meters tall, it would be the 4th-tallest hotel on Earth if it ever opened; its 3,000 rooms remain empty.
gnostek1 / 17
01Titus reportedly wept at dinner if he had performed no act of generosity that day.
02He commanded the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD, during which the Second Temple was destroyed.
03He reigned only 26 months before dying of fever at 41; his brother Domitian may have hastened his death.
gnostek
01Livermore's 1929 short position netted roughly $100 million — equal to ~$1.8 billion today.
02He went bankrupt not once but three times, each time clawing back a fortune from zero.
03His suicide note, left for his wife Dorothy, consisted of a single handwritten page calling himself a failure.
gnostek1 / 4Memorial stone to the Ems dispatch in Bad Ems
01Bismarck edited the Ems Dispatch over dinner, then released it to newspapers the same evening.
02France declared war on Prussia within five days of the doctored text appearing in print.
03The resulting Franco-Prussian War ended with Germany's proclamation as a unified empire at Versailles.