Perverse incentive — gnostek

gnostek

01When the British scrapped the cobra bounty, breeders released their entire stock — all worthless now.
02A parallel scheme in Hanoi, 1902, paid for rat tails; Vietnamese cut tails off and released rats to breed more.
03The term 'cobra effect' was coined by German economist Horst Siebert in his 2001 book of the same name.

Wikipedia Canon

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01Wind speeds on Ventoux's summit regularly exceed 90 km/h; the exposed limestone reflects heat like a furnace.
02Tom Simpson collapsed and died 1.3 km from the Ventoux summit on July 13, 1967.
03In 2016, Chris Froome ran 1 km uphill in cycling shoes, bike under his arm, after a crash with a motorcycle.

Wikipedia Canon

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01Doom's shareware Episode 1 was downloaded approximately 10 million times in its first two years.
02id Software's nine-person team built the engine and shipped the entire game in under 18 months.
03Doom has been ported to refrigerators, pregnancy tests, and ATMs — an unofficial benchmark for computing itself.

Wikipedia Canon

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A Coleman white gas lantern mantle glowing at full brightness

01Gas mantles contained thorium-232, a radioactive isotope with a half-life of 14 billion years.
02A single crushed mantle released radioactive dust directly into the breathing air of the room.
03Thorium mantles were still legally sold in camping supply shops in the United States into the 1990s.

Wikipedia Canon

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01Philby personally warned Soviet spy Donald Maclean in 1951, triggering a defection that consumed British intelligence for a decade.
02He was cleared by Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan in Parliament in 1955 — an official denial that bought him eight more years.
03When he finally defected to Moscow in 1963, he had been operating for 30 years — recruited at Cambridge in the early 1930s.

Wikipedia Canon

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01Donaghy bet on 57 NBA games between 2005 and 2007, going 70–80% accurate due to inside information.
02He passed tips to Thomas Martino, a childhood friend with mob connections, using pre-paid burner phones.
03Donaghy served 15 months in federal prison; his allegations that the NBA itself manipulated playoff games were never formally investigated.

Wikipedia Canon

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01The scroll lists roughly 65 tons of gold and silver buried across 64 locations — an implausibly large figure for the era.
02It was written in a Hebrew dialect so unusual that scholars initially couldn't agree on its translation for decades.
03Unlike every other Dead Sea Scroll, the Copper Scroll is purely a ledger — no theology, no narrative, just coordinates.

Wikipedia Canon

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Fengdu Ghost City

01The Darvaza crater is approximately 70 metres wide and 30 metres deep, still burning since 1971.
02Turkmenistan's president ordered it extinguished in 2022, citing lost national revenue — the fire ignored the decree.
03Temperatures at the crater rim reach high enough that the surrounding sand vitrifies into glass.

Wikipedia Canon

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01Hobby Lobby paid $3 million in civil fines and forfeited 5,500 artifacts to the U.S. government in 2017.
02The smuggled cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals entered the U.S. labeled as 'tile samples' from Israel.
03The Museum of the Bible, funded largely by the Green family, opened in 2017 just blocks from the U.S. Capitol.

Wikipedia Canon

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