Samuel Taylor Coleridge

01'Kubla Khan' was written in a single opium-induced session in 1797; Coleridge claimed an interruption by 'a person from Porlock' broke the trance.
02By 1816 Coleridge was consuming up to two quarts of laudanum per week, documented in letters to his physician James Gillman.
03Wordsworth formally ended their friendship partly over Coleridge's unreliability — lectures cancelled, manuscripts undelivered, debts accumulated.

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.

Trump's tweet activity from his first tweet in May 2009 until June 2020

Exterior view of the building known as Ransom Room, in Cajamarca where the Inca Atahualpa was confined.

A scene from the Bayeux Tapestry depicting Bishop Odo rallying Duke William 's army during the Battle of Hastings in 1066

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge wrote 'Kubla Khan' in an opium dream in 1797, then spent forty more years unable to quit — dictating, borrowing money, and theorizing consciousness while his doses climbed. Wordsworth eventually cut him off. The poem stayed unfinished.

Timothy Wilson Spencer

Timothy Spencer was executed in Virginia in 1994 as the first person in U.S. history put to death on DNA evidence alone — evidence that also exonerated David Vasquez, who had already confessed and pled guilty to one of Spencer's murders.

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.

Presidency of Rodrigo Duterte

A sitting president joked, live on stage, that he should have 'gone first' before soldiers raped and killed Australian missionary Jacqueline Hamill in 1989. The crowd laughed. He won the election anyway.

Use of X by Donald Trump

Trump tweeted 'South Africa' and 'large scale killing of farmers' after a Tucker Carlson segment in August 2018 — Pretoria summoned the U.S. ambassador within hours and land prices dropped before markets closed.

Ransom Room

Atahualpa filled a 22-foot room once with gold and twice with silver to purchase his freedom. Pizarro accepted the metal, pocketed the treasure, then had the Inca emperor strangled anyway in 1533.

Hoxne Hoard

Eric Lawes borrowed a metal detector to find a lost hammer in a Suffolk field and instead turned up 15,234 Roman coins, still in their wooden chest. The hammer was found too.

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.

Bayeux Tapestry

Embroidered in wool on linen 70 metres long, the Bayeux Tapestry was likely stitched within twenty years of the 1066 invasion it records — by English hands, for a Norman patron, depicting the death of a king the embroiderers may have watched fall.