Vindolanda tablets

Predjama Castle

Artist's conception of a powerful magnetar in a star cluster

An illustration of Cantor's diagonal argument (in base 2) for the existence of uncountable sets . The sequence at the bottom cannot occur anywhere in the enumeration of sequences above.

01Roman officer Volusenus struck Commius in the head with a sword during a supposed parley; Commius escaped and swore never to set eyes on a Roman again.
02Commius later negotiated a formal peace with Mark Antony on the sole condition that he never be required to enter Roman presence.
03He eventually crossed to Britain, founded a dynasty among the Atrebates tribe, and minted coins bearing his own name — the only Gallic rebel to build a kingdom afterward.

Vindolanda tablets

A Roman soldier stationed at Hadrian's Wall received a birthday party invitation and a parcel of socks from his mother — the oldest surviving personal letter written by a woman in Latin.

Predjama Castle

Built directly into the mouth of a vertical cave high on a cliff face in Slovenia, Predjama Castle housed a rebel knight named Erasmus of Lueg who held off a siege for over a year by receiving supplies through a secret tunnel.

Magnetar

One teaspoon of magnetar crust outweighs Mount Everest; its magnetic field, at 10^15 gauss, would strip the iron from your blood from half the distance to the Moon.

Cantor's diagonal argument

Cantor showed in 1891 that the infinity of real numbers cannot be listed — proving it by constructing one number guaranteed to be missing from any list. Infinity has a size hierarchy; most people never heard it.

Eugene de Kock

Eugene de Kock commanded Vlakplaas, a death squad that killed, dismembered, and barbecued victims' remains to destroy evidence — his own men called him 'Prime Evil' before prosecutors did.

Alexei Leonov

Alexei Leonov floated free of his capsule in 1965, then found his suit had ballooned so rigid he couldn't reenter — so he bled pressure from the suit valve himself, alone, 500 km up.

Lapis lazuli

Every Virgin Mary painted in ultramarine blue — Raphael, Van Eyck, Vermeer — owed that color to a single mine in Badakhshan, Afghanistan. The pigment cost more than gold per ounce in medieval Europe.

Commius

Caesar trusted Commius enough to send him as personal ambassador to Britain — then ordered him assassinated mid-mission. Commius survived, defected, fought on for years, and finally escaped Caesar's reach by sailing into darkness.

Operation Biting

British paratroopers landed on a French clifftop, dismantled a Würzburg radar dish under German fire, and carried its components back to England — handing scientists a device that changed the air war in six months.