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Close-up of a barbed wire

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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.

Mont Ventoux's summit is bare white limestone — no trees, no shade above 1,800 metres. Simpson died here in 1967; Chris Froome ran up it on foot in 2016 after his bike shattered on a crash.

Hocquenghem's 1972 'Homosexual Desire' declared the anus — not the phallus — the true seat of revolutionary politics. He died of AIDS in 1988, at 41, unrecanted.

Kublai Khan's fleets were wrecked twice — in 1274 and again in 1281 — by typhoons striking the same Japanese coastline. The Japanese named the storms kamikaze: divine wind.

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.

In April 1919, thirty-six mail bombs were posted simultaneously to US senators, a Supreme Court justice, and John D. Rockefeller. Most were intercepted by a postal worker who noticed the postage due. Justice nearly by accident.

Mookie Wilson's routine grounder rolled through Bill Buckner's legs in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, scoring Ray Knight and handing the Mets a win. Boston had been one out from their first title since 1918.

Alexander personally led a cavalry wedge directly at Darius III, splitting a Persian army estimated at 250,000. Darius fled on horseback for the second time — the Achaemenid Empire, 220 years old, effectively ended in that single charge.

Joseph Glidden's 1874 barbed-wire patent — filed after sketching the design on a coffee grinder — closed the American open range within a decade and then reappeared at the Somme, herding men into machine-gun fire.