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Category: Sciences
Dam the Mediterranean
In 1929 Bavarian architect Herman Sörgel proposed building a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar and shrinking the Mediterranean.
Hand-woven memory
The Apollo Guidance Computer used core rope memory; the software was literally woven by hand into it.
Leopold’s manoeuvres
Without ultrasound, how do you know whether a fetus in utero is facing the right way? You use Leopold’s manoeuvres.
Volume harmony
Take a cone, sphere, and cylinder of equal height and radius. The volume of the cone plus the volume of the sphere is equal to the volume of the cylinder.
Fashionable limp
Queen Alexandra had a scar and a limp – and British fashion followed suit.
Cow clicking
In 2010 a satirical video “game” called Cow Clicker accidentally became a viral sensation, despite being one of the most deliberately tedious games ever invented.
Cryptography gardening
If you want to decipher an encrypted message, it’s helpful to plant some plaintext seeds.
Dancing plagues
Sudden bouts of contagious dancing plagued pre-modern Europe – afflicting up to a thousand people at a time.
Bee mummies
Worker bees will eject waste to keep the hive clean. But if the waste is too big to carry out, say a dead mouse, it will instead be mummified.
The town of no appendices
Before you move into Villa Las Estrellas you must have your appendix removed.
Sequences in pi
Within the first thousand digits of pi there are six nines in a row. This should not be a surprise.
This chariot always points south
Around 255 CE, a Chinese inventor named Ma Jun created a chariot that could always point south – without using magnets.
Automatic ant
The cellular automaton Langton’s Ant follows just two simple commands, and in doing so moves in turn from symmetry to chaos to implacable order.
Cities at the bottom of the sea
423,000 people live in Flevoland, a province of the Netherlands. Before 1957, the entire area did not exist.
The sun after sunset
Where can you see sunlight after the sun has set? In the zodiac or sometimes directly opposite the sun in the night sky.
The Generalist Academy 