gnostek1 / 5Sir Geoffrey Luttrell , mounted, being assisted by his wife and daughter-in-law. Folio 202v.
01The Luttrell Psalter was created around 1320–1340 for Sir Geoffrey Luttrell of Irnham, Lincolnshire, at a cost of £32.
02Marginalia include a man with a wheel for a body, a dog playing bagpipes, and a knight genuinely losing to a giant snail.
03The agricultural scenes are so detailed that historians reconstruct 14th-century plowing technique, crop rotation, and harness design from its pages.
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01Buhen's outer wall featured loopholes angled to allow bowmen to cover the moat floor without exposure — 3,800 years ago.
02The fortress enclosed an area of roughly 150 by 170 metres on the west bank of the Nile at the Second Cataract.
03When the Aswan High Dam was built in the 1960s, Buhen was submerged beneath Lake Nasser, permanently.
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01The FBI recorded Blagojevich using the phrase 'fucking golden' to describe Obama's Senate seat on December 9, 2008.
02He solicited a $1.5 million campaign contribution in exchange for the appointment of a specific named candidate.
03Donald Trump pardoned Blagojevich in 2020 after he served 8 of a 14-year federal prison sentence.
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01Drew's cattle-watering trick added hundreds of pounds per animal before the weighmaster's scale.
02He printed $10 million in unauthorized Erie Railroad shares to defeat Cornelius Vanderbilt's takeover bid in 1868.
03Drew died broke in 1879, his entire fortune lost in the panic he had helped engineer.
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01Trajan's Column stands 38 metres tall; its spiral frieze depicts 2,662 individual human figures.
02The column served as Trajan's tomb; his ashes were sealed in a golden urn in its base.
03It was cast from 29 hollow marble drums, each weighing roughly 32 tonnes, stacked with millimetre precision.
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01Donaghy placed or received bets on 57 games between 2005 and 2007, including playoffs he was assigned to work.
02He was identified not by the NBA but by an FBI investigation into organized crime connections.
03After release, Donaghy alleged in a lawsuit that NBA officials instructed referees to extend a 2002 Western Conference Finals series.
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01Burden gave a single instruction: 'Shoot me.' The assistant complied from 15 feet away.
02No hospital record was filed immediately; Burden treated the wound himself that night.
03The piece, 'Shoot,' appeared in no gallery at the time — it was performed in a rented garage.
gnostek1 / 9A bile bear in a "crush cage" on Huizhou Farm, Huizhou , China
01An estimated 20,000 bears are currently held on bile farms in China and Vietnam, many in 'crush cages.'
02Bear bile contains ursodeoxycholic acid — a compound now synthesized cheaply in labs, making farming medically redundant.
03Moon bears on farms are often declawed and defanged at capture; some have been caged since cubhood.
gnostek1 / 3Figure 1. The arrangement of hydrogen atoms (black circles) about oxygen atoms (open circles) in ice. Two hydrogen atoms (bottom ones) are close to the central oxygen atom while two of them (top ones) are far and closer to the two other…
01Spin ice is made from dysprosium titanate, a crystal cooled to within a fraction of absolute zero.
02Magnetic monopoles — lone north or south poles — were predicted by Dirac in 1931 but never found in free nature.
03In spin ice, these quasi-monopoles move through the lattice like real particles, obeying Coulomb's magnetic law.