gnostek1 / 18Langton's ant after 11,000 steps. A red pixel shows the ant's location.
01The 'highway' pattern — a repeating 104-step diagonal corridor — emerges reliably around step 10,000.
02Christopher Langton described the ant in 1986; the highway emergence remains unproven from first principles.
03The ant is Turing-complete: given an infinite grid, it can simulate any computation.
gnostek1 / 2A Jake and Dinos Chapman fused mannequin piece from the exhibition Come and See at the Serpentine Gallery
01The original Goya plates date from 1810–1820; the Chapmans overpainted them in 2003.
02They titled the defaced series 'Insult to Injury,' inverting Goya's humanitarian intent entirely.
03Jake Chapman said ruining the Goyas was more creative than making new work from scratch.
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01EO 9066 never named Japanese Americans — it authorized military commanders to designate 'exclusion zones' by geography.
02Roosevelt signed it just 74 days after Pearl Harbor, while Nisei were already serving in the U.S. Army.
03The order was used once to briefly exclude a handful of Italian and German Americans — then exclusively against Japanese Americans.
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01Booker consumed 49 glazed doughnuts in 8 minutes — roughly one every 9.8 seconds.
02He weighed approximately 400 pounds during his competitive eating peak and stood 6 feet 3 inches.
03Off the circuit, Booker works as a New York City Transit subway conductor and records rap music.
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01Casartelli died on July 18, 1995, during stage 15 of the Tour — a descent in the Pyrenees.
02The race organisation did not neutralise the stage; riders finished while Casartelli was airlifted, dying, to hospital.
03It was the first Tour fatality since British rider Tom Simpson died on Mont Ventoux in 1967.
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01Players hum into the Wii remote's mic to pacify aggressive sharks — no weapons, no struggle.
02The game features over 300 real species, each with naturalist notes written in a diver's field-journal style.
03A character named Oceana joins the player on dives, pointing out creatures by name as they pass.
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01Aum Shinrikyo's 1995 Tokyo subway attack killed 13, injured 50 severely, and affected nearly 1,000 commuters.
02Asahara charged disciples $2,000 to drink his bathwater, marketed as 'Miracle Pond,' for spiritual initiation.
03His group also released sarin in Matsumoto in 1994, killing 8 — a less-known earlier attack.
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01Caesar's soldiers killed roughly 10,000 Pompeians and captured 15,000 at Thapsus; the lopsided toll suggests a rout, not a battle.
02Ancient sources including Plutarch record Caesar falling into a seizure at the onset, carried to a nearby tower to recover while his army fought without him.
03After the battle, Caesar's own veterans executed several surrendered enemy officers on the spot — Caesar was reportedly unable to stop them.
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01Two farmworkers, one aged 15, killed Terre'Blanche with a panga and a club on April 3, 2010.
02He was found face-down in his bedroom; his dogs, which he famously used to intimidate crowds, did not intervene.
03The 15-year-old received a lighter sentence; the older worker, Chris Mahlangu, was jailed for life.