flickering pictures

It’s called trepanation, and this extreme cousin to acupuncture has been around for at least 8,500 years. Though it’s recently fallen out of favour — mainly because it comes with a pretty fair chance brain damage, death, or searing agony at the very least — the practice is aimed at heightening the consciousness of […]

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In the winter of 1914, German and British soldiers spent Christmas Eve in the trenches, wading through mud, supplies and the corpses of their fallen friends. Their main activity was dodging the bullets from the enemy bunkers that were sometimes just 60 yards away.
To raise their sinking morale, both armies’ governments sent their troops […]

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Really.
From the “micro-nation”’s official website:

Our nearest neighbour, the United Kingdom, noted our country with some disdain and much indifference […]. As time moved on, our Principality became more firmly entrenched; an attempt by the UK to occupy our country fell to the UK Courts to be quashed, and finally our permanent presence was accepted. Following […]

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On one of my frequent Wikipedia sidetracks, I stumbled across a link to the official biography of Kim Jong-Il, North Korea’s Chairman of the National Defense Commission, Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea and Grand Poobah of the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes:

From his childhood, Comrade […]

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The folks at Damn Interesting have done it again — this time with a great piece by Alan Bellows on the origins of eugenics, the practice of selectively breeding humans for the purpose of improving the gene pool.
From the article:

In 1865, Darwin’s half-cousin Sir Francis Galton pried the lid from yet another worm-can with the […]

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I hadn’t heard of her either, but I wish I had.
In 1958, at the tender age of 18, a pregnant Mildred Jeter travelled to Washington, D.C. to marry Richard Loving. Mildred was black, Richard was white, and interracial marriage was illegal in their home state of Virginia. In spite of their novel attempt […]

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Whether you’re a a chivalrous hero or a dastardly black knight, CatapultKits.com sells the right siege weapon for you, from onagers to catapults, trebuchets to ballistae. Many items are available in pint-sized desktop format, so you can lob projectiles over cubicle walls at your co-workers. They’ll never know it was you — unless […]

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