Dynamite

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.

A Jake and Dinos Chapman fused mannequin piece from the exhibition Come and See at the Serpentine Gallery

Alfred Nobel read his own obituary—'merchant of death'—while still alive, then spent his fortune engineering the Peace Prize to rewrite his legacy. The man who perfected mass killing also endowed its antidote.

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.

John Paul Getty III

J. Paul Getty — then the world's richest man — refused his grandson's ransom until a severed ear arrived by post. He negotiated the $17 million demand down to $2.2 million, the maximum he could deduct on taxes.

Jake and Dinos Chapman

The Chapmans bought a complete set of Goya's 'Disasters of War' etchings — 80 prints of dismembered soldiers — and painted Ronald McDonald and clown faces over the victims' heads. They called it 'rectification.'

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.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

In 'Death from Above,' the player inhabits a soldier already struck by a nuclear blast, dragging themselves across rubble, unable to stand. No HUD. No objective marker. The level ends when the character dies — and it always ends that way.

Bosco Ramos

Bosco, a black Labrador–rottweiler mix, was elected mayor of Sunol, California in 1981 over two human candidates — and held the role until his death in 1994, becoming the town's most beloved public figure.

Book of Kells

Created around 800 CE on the island of Iona, the Book of Kells contains 680 vellum pages in which no two decorated initials repeat — hidden faces, serpents, and cats nursing kittens emerge under magnification, invisible to the naked eye.

Vito Cascio Ferro

Vito Cascio Ferro reputedly committed the first Mafia murder on American soil — detective Joe Petrosino, shot in Palermo in 1909 — and allegedly boasted he was the only man to have done it personally in years.