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The cursed stone city of Saudi Arabia; the largest brick arch in the world; why Lebanon’s prime minister is always Christian, its president always Sunni Muslim, and its speaker Shi’a Muslim; and the strange force of the number 40 in Abrahamic religions.
The tiniest wee car in the world, the car with two faces, the time a Grand Prix driver crashed his car on purpose, and the problem with driving cars after the end of the world.
In 1864 two ships were wrecked on the same desert island. Despite sharing the island for an entire year, the crews never met and had no idea they were not alone.
The Cloaca Maxima in Rome is one of the world’s first sewer systems. It still works today, and with good reason: it has its own goddess.
Some of the first public schools in North America were founded explicitly to counteract “that old deluder, Satan.”
Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky composed Pictures at an Exhibition based on a journey through his late friend’s art exhibit – but what happened to the pictures?
The mechanical paradox is a device that seemingly defies the law of gravity: a pair of cones that roll uphill.
The Chinese chariot that always points south, the first person killed by a robot, the invisible code produced by all modern printers and photocopiers, and the helicopter which flew 12 kilometres up… and then stopped.
The Swedish king’s “scientific” battle between coffee and tea, the East German coffee crisis, edible tea, and coffee / tea blends.
During a child support dispute in 2002, a DNA test seemed to show that a mother was not the parent of her own biological children. The truth was stranger than anyone expected.
A bit of the Apollo 12 rocket from 1969 is still floating around out in space. It orbits the sun – but every thirty or forty years it comes back to orbit the Earth for a while.
Imagine an elevator with no doors that never stops: this is the paternoster lift.
Earlier this year, the current World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen deliberately played the worst opening move possible against the American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura… who then deliberately played the worst possible response.
In 1994 the art duo K Foundation burned a million pounds in cash. They did it on purpose.
The cowboy college, the clown college, the impossibility of proof, and the impossibility of universal categorization.
The Generalist Academy 