Volcanic city
Auckland, New Zealand, is built on top of more than fifty volcanoes.
Author: The Generalist
I live in Auckland, New Zealand, and am curious about most things.
Featured category: North & Central America
The 1859 military standoff between the United States and Canadian territories over a single pig; the Panamanian rain forest that splits the transcontinental highway; foods that are illegal in the US; and how to swim all the way across North America.
From the archives: The senses
Blind imagination; the best colour vision in the world; the sixth, seventh, eight, and ninth senses; and how to train yourself to see light polarisation.
Mythical Indian Ocean continent
Before we knew about plate tectonics, a zoologist proposed a lost continent connecting Madagascar and India across the Indian Ocean. That hypothesis, now debunked, was nevertheless picked up by Theosophists and Tamil revivalists.
Dancing plant
The leaves of Codariocalyx motorius move fast enough that you can see their motion. This plant likes to dance.
The history of The History of King Lear
From 1681 to 1838, performances of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy King Lear had a happy ending.
Horses of Chernobyl
Przewalksi’s horse is genetically distinct from modern horses (it has an extra chromosome pair). It went extinct in the wild in 1969, but a small population was introduced to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in 1998; they have thrived.
Messy border
The border between Belgium and the Netherlands at Baarle-Hertog is one of the messiest in the world. It includes bits of Belgium in the Netherlands, and bits of the Netherlands in the bits of Belgium that are in the Netherlands.
Featured category: Games & sport
The Mongolian Olympics; H. G. Wells’ miniature war game; the very first Mexican wrestler to be unmasked in the ring; and the 1970 computer-mediated fight between Rocky Marciano and Muhammad Ali.
From the archives: Hackers
The second computer worm in history was created to seek and destroy the first computer worm; cracking encrypted messages with “gardening”; the man who hacked a lottery’s random number generator; and the single line of code that can shut down a computer.
Original cliffhanger
Cliffhangers have been a staple of serialised fiction for centuries, but the first literal cliffhanger appears in an 1873 novel by Thomas Hardy.
Seventh child
By tradition, the president of Argentina is godparent to all seventh sons and seventh daughters born in the country; in Belgium, the seventh children are named after the reigning monarch, and that monarch also becomes their godparent.
War elephants vs. bird army
The 105th surah of the Quran relates a battle outside Mecca between Yemeni war elephants and a flock of birds.
Shakespeare riot
On May 10, 1849, New Yorkers rioted over who was the better Shakespearean actor, the English performer William Macready or the American Edwin Forrest.
Eventful pub
There are few pubs in the world that can claim to be the site of the founding of a religious denomination, the creation of a style of beer, and also a murder by a famous gangster. But there’s at least one pub that can.
Featured category: Astronomy
The planet which is the closest to every other planet in the solar system; stars escaping their galaxy; the Martian moon that’s one third empty space; and the unidentified anomaly pulling a hundred thousand galaxies (including our own) around.
The Generalist Academy 