2008 Mumbai attacks

Recreation of Martin Luther King Jr. 's cell in Birmingham Jail at the National Civil Rights Museum

Plot of Weierstrass function over the interval [ − 2, 2]. Like some other fractals , the function exhibits self-similarity : every zoom (red circle) is similar to the global plot.

2008 Mumbai attacks

Ten men from Lashkar-e-Taiba landed by inflatable dinghy in Mumbai on November 26, 2008, killing 166 people across twelve sites over sixty hours. One attacker was captured alive and hanged four years later.

Jay Gould

Jay Gould and partner James Fisk cornered the entire U.S. gold market in September 1869. On 'Black Friday' the price collapsed, ruining thousands — while Gould had already quietly sold at the peak.

Iamblichus

He rose ten cubits off the ground — glowing gold — while his students watched twice. A Syrian Neoplatonist who made ritual magic philosophically respectable. What do you do with a man who keeps floating?

Vidkun Quisling

Vidkun Quisling seized the Norwegian government by radio announcement on the night of Germany's 1940 invasion. He was executed by firing squad in 1945 — and his surname had already entered the dictionary as the universal word for traitor.

Bloodgate

Harlequins winger Tom Williams bit a fake blood capsule to fake an injury; team physio Steph Brennan then sliced his lip with a scalpel to cover it up. A doctor lost her medical license over a substitution rule.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

Written in margins of smuggled newspaper and on scraps of paper, King's letter from Birmingham Jail on April 16, 1963 answered eight clergymen by name. It circulated in millions of copies within the year.

Anwar al-Awlaki

Anwar al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico, was placed on a presidential kill list, denied due process in U.S. courts, and killed by CIA drone in Yemen in September 2011. His lawyers were told they needed a license to represent him.

Ninja Gaiden II

Limbless enemies drag themselves across the floor on their chins to bite the player. Ninja Gaiden II's 2008 combat generates severed-limb piles no other game has matched. The genre called it ultraviolence; reviewers called it art.

Weierstrass function

Weierstrass wrote down a function in 1872 that draws a continuous curve — no gaps, no jumps — yet has no defined slope at any single point. Every zoom reveals more jaggedness. It shouldn't exist; it does.