gnostek1 / 2Skydiver Bill Booth 's second rule states that "The safer skydiving gear becomes, the more chances skydivers will take, in order to keep the fatality rate constant."
01Peltzman's 1975 paper found US seatbelt laws produced no net reduction in traffic fatalities.
02He argued drivers treated safety gear as a 'risk budget' — spend it on faster driving.
03The effect has since been observed in helmets, airbags, and even surgical safety checklists.
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01Wasendorf intercepted paper bank statements by rerouting his firm's mail to a personal P.O. box he controlled for two decades.
02The fraud totaled $215 million stolen from roughly 13,000 customers — discovered only when an automated ACH check failed.
03His 2012 suicide attempt failed; he was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison at age 64.
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01The Kanun was transmitted orally for centuries; it wasn't written down until Franciscan friar Shtjefën Gjeçovi compiled it in 1933.
02One article of the Kanun fixes the price of a man's blood at 'twelve oxen' — the base unit of honor debt.
03Dukagjini lived contemporaneously with Skanderbeg and reportedly feuded with him personally.
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01The blood on the boys' faces had to be wiped with wool soaked in milk — the boys were required to laugh.
02Women deliberately lined the streets to be struck by the goat-hide thongs, believing it guaranteed fertility.
03Pope Gelasius I tried to suppress Lupercalia in 494 AD, writing a furious letter that confirms it was still happening.
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01A neutron star packs 1.4 solar masses into a sphere roughly 20 km across.
02Its surface gravity is 200 billion times Earth's — a marshmallow dropped from 1 meter hits with nuclear-bomb force.
03The crust is so rigid that a 'starquake' of 1 mm releases more energy than the Sun emits in 100,000 years.
gnostek1 / 7A barrel-type butter churn
01Producing one pound of butter required approximately 40 minutes of continuous up-and-down plunging by hand.
02Children were routinely assigned churning duty in American farm households through the early 20th century.
03The dash churn, a vertical tube with a plunging rod, was the dominant design from 1700 to 1900.
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01Brancheau had 16 years at SeaWorld and was considered its most accomplished trainer at the time of her death.
02OSHA fined SeaWorld $75,000 and banned trainers from entering the water with orcas — a rule SeaWorld fought in court for years.
03Internal documents showed SeaWorld knew Tilikum had been involved in two prior deaths before Brancheau entered his pool.
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01Port Authority police boarded the departing Air France flight and removed Strauss-Kahn from seat number 1A, first class.
02Nafissatou Diallo, a 32-year-old Guinea-born housekeeper, described the assault in a civil suit that settled for an undisclosed sum.
03French polls showed Strauss-Kahn leading Nicolas Sarkozy by 10 points in presidential projections the week of his arrest.
gnostek1 / 11A tulip, known as "the Viceroy" ( viseroij ), displayed in the 1637 Dutch catalogue Verzameling van een Meenigte Tulipaanen ("Collection of a Crowd of Tulips"). Its bulb was offered for sale for between 3,000 and 4,200 guilders (florins)…
01The Semper Augustus bulb peaked at 10,000 guilders — equal to ten times a skilled craftsman's annual wage.
02At the crash's peak, tulip futures contracts were sold in taverns for bulbs that hadn't yet grown.
03Some historians argue the 'mania' was exaggerated — only a narrow merchant class was ever truly exposed.