gnostek1 / 2Plot of Weierstrass function over the interval [ − 2, 2]. Like some other fractals , the function exhibits self-similarity : every zoom (red circle) is similar to the global plot.
01It's defined as an infinite sum of cosines with ever-increasing frequencies and shrinking amplitudes.
02Hermite called it a 'dreadful plague' in an 1893 letter to Stieltjes — mathematicians felt personally wronged.
03Before Weierstrass, the consensus was that continuous functions must be smooth almost everywhere — he ended that.
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01The photograph is called 'Piss Christ' and was printed at 60 × 40 inches.
02U.S. senators read the title aloud on the Senate floor in 1989 as evidence of federal depravity.
03A print was physically attacked with hammers by protesters in Avignon, France, in 2011.
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01Johnson's urine sample tested positive for stanozolol, an anabolic steroid; his world record of 9.79 was formally struck.
02His eyes were jaundiced yellow at the finish line — visible in broadcast footage, a physiological sign of steroid use.
03Of the eight finalists in that 100m race, six have since been linked to doping violations or investigations.
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01Soldiers stripped Landauer, beat him with rifle butts, then shot him in the Stadelheim prison yard.
02Landauer had served as Commissioner of Enlightenment in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic for just weeks.
03His friend Martin Buber collected and published his unfinished writings as an act of mourning.
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01Dworkin told the Meese Commission in 1986 that pornography was not speech but the act of violation itself.
02Her 1974 book 'Woman Hating' argued fairy tales functioned as binding instructions for female self-destruction.
03She co-authored an ordinance with Catharine MacKinnon allowing women to sue pornographers for civil rights damages; it was vetoed by Minneapolis's mayor twice.
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01Crowley led the Ordo Templi Orientis and published its graded initiation rites while in active heroin dependency.
02He attempted a formal cure at a German sanatorium in 1930 and relapsed within weeks of discharge.
03Several of Crowley's closest disciples developed severe opiate addictions after following his 'magical' drug regimens.
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01Golden eagle talons exert 750 psi on impact — exceeding the bite force of most large predators.
02Mongol hunters trained golden eagles to take wolves and foxes across the Central Asian steppe.
03The eagle appears on the flags or seals of over a dozen modern nation-states.
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01Septimius Severus was born in Leptis Magna, modern Libya, becoming Rome's first African-born emperor.
02He died in Eboracum — modern York — while planning a deeper invasion of Caledonia.
03His deathbed advice to his sons: 'Enrich the soldiers; ignore everyone else.'
gnostek1 / 2A depiction of a hypothetical Dyson swarm surrounding a star
01Freeman Dyson proposed it in a 1960 paper; he suggested searching for anomalous infrared radiation, not radio signals.
02Building one would require dismantling Jupiter — 318 Earth-masses of raw material — entirely.
03Tabetha Boyajian's 'alien megastructure' star KIC 8462852 was briefly considered a partial Dyson sphere candidate.