01Newton initially made £7,000 profit from South Sea shares, then bought back in near the top.
02His total loss of £20,000 equals roughly $3–4 million in today's purchasing power.
03The South Sea Company's supposed trade monopoly covered a route where Spain controlled all the ports.
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 / 3The Apicius manuscript (ca. 900 AD) of the monastery of Fulda in Germany, which was acquired in 1929 by the New York Academy of Medicine
01Apicius reportedly spent 100 million sestertii on food; when 10 million remained, he poisoned himself rather than eat cheaply.
02His cookbook, 'De Re Coquinaria,' lists recipes requiring flamingo tongue, dormouse stuffed with pine nuts, and roasted parrot.
03He reputedly drowned a live mullet in a fish sauce vat to watch it change color as it died, for aesthetic pleasure.
gnostek1 / 2
01Donaghy placed bets through a childhood friend who relayed picks to a professional gambler named James Battista.
02He earned roughly $30,000 from his gambling operation before FBI wiretaps caught him.
03Donaghy later alleged that other referees also fixed games — the NBA denied it.
gnostek1 / 5
01RENAMO was founded in 1977 by Rhodesian CIO officer Ken Flower specifically to destabilize the newly independent FRELIMO government in Maputo.
02After Rhodesia fell, South African military intelligence absorbed RENAMO entirely, funding and supplying it through the 1980s as a proxy Cold War force.
03RENAMO commanders ordered limb amputations to leave living evidence — they explicitly wanted victims to walk to the nearest village as a warning.
gnostek1 / 8
01The id team rented office space in a Mesquite, Texas strip mall directly above a little Caesar's pizza.
02Carmack's BSP rendering engine was so fast the team's benchmark software could not time it accurately.
03Doom was installed on more PCs than Windows 95 within its first year, according to Bill Gates's own team.
gnostek1 / 4
01South Korean authorities killed an estimated 60,000–100,000 of their own civilians in weeks during summer 1950.
02Victims included Bodo League members — a government-run 're-education' program whose enrollees were then deemed threats.
03The South Korean government denied the massacres for over 50 years; a truth commission confirmed them in 2008.
gnostek1 / 2
01Hayashi killed 19 enemy soldiers in one engagement near Tendola, Italy, in April 1945.
02His Medal of Honor was withheld for 55 years; a 1996 law ordered a review of all Japanese American WWII awards.
03He was one of 21 Japanese Americans upgraded to Medal of Honor in a single White House ceremony in June 2000.
gnostek1 / 3
01Enemies with no arms and no legs still crawl forward to bite you — programmed behavior, not a glitch.
02The game renders dismembered limb physics per body part, creating literal piles of human debris mid-fight.
03Director Tomonobu Itagaki left Tecmo in a lawsuit the same year the game shipped, June 2008.