Habeas corpulent
Habeas corpus formally entered English law because of a parliamentarian’s fat joke in 1679.
Author: The Generalist
I live in Auckland, New Zealand, and am curious about most things.
First free-falling skydiver
Tiny Broadwick was the first person to intentionally jump out of a flying airplane without being tethered to something.
From the archives: The Quran
The Quran contains several mysterious letters, no-one is quite sure why; the Islamic concept of moderation, expressed as “best, middle, centred, balanced”; the order of chapters in the Quran; and the cats of Islam.
February 30th
The calendar date February 30th has happened just once in history: in Sweden in 1712.
Admirals of Nebraska
The US state of Nebraska is landlocked; all the states around it are also landlocked; and all the states around them are also landlocked. And yet, the Governor of Nebraska can grant residents the honorary title of Nebraska Admiral.
Blanket heater table
The Japanese kotatsu combines a table, a heater, and a layer of comfortable blankets.
The Man of the Hole
The Man of the Hole is an indigenous man living alone in the Amazon rainforest. Authorities believe that he is the last survivor of a tribe otherwise wiped out by illegal loggers.
Double borrowing
The English language is notorious for borrowing words from other languages. And sometimes it borrows them more than once.
From the archives: The deep
The bioluminescent suction shark that’s one third liver; the falling houses feeding the deep; an unexplained underwater fossil that has been around for half a billion years; and the quadrillion bristlemouths of the mesopelagic twilight zone.
Ball of the burning men
Six dancers in costume caught on fire at a ball in 1393 Paris. Only two survived; one of them was King Charles VI.
The doomsday algorithm
Want to work out what day of the week for any date? Just use the doomsday algorithm.
Oldest government in exile
The Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic has operated as a government in exile for more than a hundred years.
Extreme geocaching
Geocaching is a recreational treasure hunt, with containers hidden worldwide just waiting to be found. And I do mean worldwide: they can be found at the very bottom of the world, the very top of the world, and even out of this world entirely.
Horned Moses
Michelangelo’s statue of Moses has horns, thanks to a mistranslation in the Latin Vulgate Bible.
From the archives: On the canal
The rise and fall and rise of the British canal; Dutch canal vaulting; the proposed canal to cut off a country; and the fifteen ships trapped on the Suez Canal for eight years.
Scavenger cistern
The Basilica Cistern in Istanbul is an underground underwater forest of 336 huge marble columns. It was built in the 6th century CE, but parts are much older – because they were scavenged from other buildings, sometimes with original sculptures intact.
The Generalist Academy 