Chain across the Baltic
In 1989 two million people formed a human chain stretching 675km from Tallinn to Riga to Vilnius.
Firing the anvils
On the day that Texas joined the Confederacy, a dissenting Texas Ranger was forced to fire anvils into the air with gunpowder. He was not the first to do this.
Contradictory goods
One of the cardinal rules of microeconomics is that as the price of a good goes up, demand goes down. But Veblen goods and Giffen goods do the opposite.
Update 5
Yes, it’s time once more for a quick set of updates.
Memory culture
Through sophisticated mnemonics and error-checking mechanisms the Vedas, the canonical religious texts of Hinduism, have been transmitted orally for three and a half thousand years with shocking precision in both word and sound.
Electoral fairness
The Gallagher Index measures how well the makeup of a legislative body represents the proportion of votes cast to elect it. Some countries do this much better than others.
Gilligan’s Grace
The hymn Amazing Grace was set to its current tune more than fifty years after it was written. Because it was written in common metre, it can also be sung to Mack the Knife, Sympathy for the Devil, the Pokemon theme, and the Gilligan’s Island theme.
American gibberish
What does an American accent sound like to an Italian? The Italian song Prisencolinensinainciusol will show you.
The game is the rules
To win the game Nomic, you need to change the rules so that you can win the game Nomic.
Pride vs. the cyclone
Three American and three German warships spent months in a standoff in Apia Harbour in Samoa. And then a cyclone hit.
Da Vinci and Machiavelli steal a river
Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli once teamed up to steal the Arno river.
Telepathic snail mail
In 1850 Jacques-Toussaint Benoît claimed to be able to send messages via telepathically linked snails. He could not.
Infinite pi
The Indian mathematician Mādhava was the first to use infinite series to calculate pi, some time around 1400 CE.
Medieval clam
In 2006 scientists in Iceland caught a clam that was born eight years after Christopher Columbus sailed to America.
Endless clock
A pendulum clock in Dunedin, New Zealand, has been running for 156 years without being wound.
