gnostek1 / 2Decimation. Etching by William Hogarth in Beaver's Roman Military Punishments (1725)
01Decimated soldiers were forced to eat barley — a diet associated with animals — as ongoing humiliation.
02The condemned drew lots from a helmet; your closest comrades then beat you to death with clubs.
03Crassus decimated 500 men after Spartacus routed two of his legions in 71 BCE.
gnostek1 / 5The Wow! signal represented as "6EQUJ5". The original printout with Ehman's handwritten exclamation is preserved by Ohio History Connection .
01Jerry Ehman wrote 'Wow!' in red pen on the Ohio State Big Ear printout on August 15, 1977.
02The signal hit exactly the 1420 MHz hydrogen frequency SETI researchers had predicted aliens would use.
03Forty-seven years of follow-up observations have produced zero repetitions or explanations.
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01Hetty Green's fortune of roughly $100 million in 1916 equals over $2.5 billion today — all self-managed.
02Her son Ned's leg was amputated after she allegedly delayed treatment to avoid medical fees.
03She lived in cheap boarding houses and ate cold oatmeal, despite being America's wealthiest woman.
gnostek1 / 33Spanish bullfight in Las Ventas in Madrid
01The Minoan bull-leaping fresco at Knossos, c. 1450 BC, shows both male and female athletes mid-vault.
02The Spanish bullfight's three-act structure — tercio de varas, banderillas, faena — mirrors ancient sacrificial killing sequences.
03Ernest Hemingway's 'Death in the Afternoon' documented 1,200 bulls killed in a single Madrid season in the 1920s.
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01Smith was 17 when he wrote Manic Miner; it sold over 30,000 copies on the ZX Spectrum.
02He disappeared from the UK games industry entirely in the mid-1980s, rumored to be living in a commune.
03He resurfaced at the 2002 Classic Gaming Expo, his first confirmed public appearance in roughly 15 years.
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01The Atocha sank in 1622 carrying 40 tons of silver, 115 gold bars, and 350 chests of unregistered contraband.
02Fisher's son Kane and daughter-in-law Angel died July 19, 1975 when the salvage vessel Northwind rolled over at night.
03Fisher's daily battle cry for sixteen years was 'Today's the day' — he said it the morning of the main find.
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01Wittig delivered the argument 'One is Not Born a Woman' at the MLA convention in 1980, predating Judith Butler by a decade.
02She argued that the category 'woman' was a political and economic class, not a natural fact — making it dissolvable.
03Wittig fled France after her novel 'Les Guérillères' was condemned; she spent most of her career at the University of Arizona.
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01Rapture's founding philosophy quotes Rand directly; Andrew Ryan's name is an anagram of Ayn Rand.
02The Little Sisters harvest a substance called ADAM from corpses — a child labor economy written into the lore.
03The twist in 1960 Rapture: the player-character was a sleeper agent controlled by the phrase 'Would you kindly.'
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01Lyon's team was betrayed after a Malay fisherman spotted them near Merapas Island in September 1944.
02Lyon died in a firefight on October 16, 1944, paddling a rubber dinghy toward a Japanese gunboat.
03All 23 members of Operation Rimau were killed or executed — none reached Singapore harbour.