2023 Tour de France

gnostek

1 / 8

gnostek

gnostek

1 / 7

gnostek

gnostek

gnostek

1 / 12

gnostek

1 / 16

gnostek

1 / 4

gnostek

1 / 12

Flick ↓ for more

Over seven decades, press motorcycles weaving through the peloton have shattered collarbone, kneecap, and career — one cameraman's vehicle knocked Joseba Beloki into a fracture pattern that ended his season in 2003.

Switch a lamp on and off — once per second, then half a second, then a quarter — completing infinite switches in two minutes flat. Mathematics gives no answer to whether it's on or off at minute two.

Thomas Paine dismantled the Bible verse by verse from a Paris prison cell in 1793, fully expecting the guillotine. The chalk mark on his cell door was drawn on the wrong side by accident.

While Unit 731 experimented on humans, Unit 100 infected horses, cattle, and water supplies with anthrax, glanders, and sheep-pox — then measured how fast an army without animals collapses.

HIV-positive Ron Athey carved ritual patterns into collaborator Divinity Fudge's back, blotted the blood onto paper towels, and hoisted them over the audience on a clothesline. The NEA lost funding over it.

Jim Jones rehearsed mass suicide with fake poison for years before making it real. On November 18, 1978, 918 died — 276 of them children. A gun was found in Jones's hand.

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.

Margaret Atwood co-invented the LongPen — a robotic signing device transmitting her pen strokes in real time from anywhere on earth — so she could "be" at book signings without flying. She filed the patent in 2004 and the company still operates.

Hamilcar Barca made his nine-year-old son Hannibal swear eternal war on Rome over a sacrificial animal's bleeding entrails — then spent the rest of his life building Spain into a weapon for that oath.