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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01D'Éon negotiated secretly with Empress Elizabeth of Russia on behalf of Louis XV, disguised as a woman at the Russian court.
02In 1777, Louis XVI issued a formal royal order requiring d'Éon to live permanently as a woman.
03London gamblers wagered £120,000 on d'Éon's birth sex — a legal dispute that outlasted her diplomatic career.
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01Supreme's 2012 New Hampshire primary campaign included a glitter-bomb thrown at rival candidate Randall Terry during a public forum.
02He polled 833 votes in the 2016 New Hampshire Democratic primary, beating two candidates who spent real campaign money.
03His pony platform doubles as an economic policy: ponies as personal transportation to reduce fossil fuel dependence.
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01Duterte named the victim — Jacqueline Hamill — while joking about her gang rape and murder at a 1989 prison riot.
02He made the joke during a 2016 presidential campaign rally, then won with 39% of the vote.
03Australian officials formally protested; Duterte responded by calling the ambassador a 'son of a whore.'
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01Adrienne Mayor's 2000 book The First Fossil Hunters documented how Protoceratops nesting sites align with ancient griffin territory.
02Griffin legends specify a beaked, four-legged creature guarding gold — Protoceratops has a beak and lived near gold-bearing ore.
03Protoceratops laid eggs in spiral clutches; entire nesting colonies have been found in the Gobi, visibly eroding from dunes.
gnostek1 / 7A barrel-type butter churn
01Producing one pound of butter required approximately 40 minutes of continuous up-and-down plunging by hand.
02Children were routinely assigned churning duty in American farm households through the early 20th century.
03The dash churn, a vertical tube with a plunging rod, was the dominant design from 1700 to 1900.
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01Radcliffe was given five weeks to partition a subcontinent he had never visited, then paid £3,000.
02The line split the Punjab in half; within months, an estimated 200,000 people were dead.
03Radcliffe burned his working papers before departing India, erasing the record of his deliberations.
gnostek1 / 4A slab of pykrete
01Pykrete is 86% ice and 14% sawdust, yet it deflects rifle bullets without shattering.
02Project Habbakuk's planned carrier weighed 2 million tons — dwarfing every steel warship ever built.
03A small Pykrete block was demonstrated to Allied chiefs in a Quebec hotel bathtub in 1943.
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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.