The Martinek NameRabbit Holes
61 of the internet's best deep dives, in 8 flavours. Each summary is drawn from the Wikipedia article it links to. Warning: you will lose an afternoon.
Weird history
Emu War ↗
The Emu War was a nuisance wildlife management operation undertaken by the Australian Army in late 1932.
Wikipedia
Great Molasses Flood ↗
The Great Molasses Flood, also known as the Boston Molasses Disaster, was a disaster that occurred on January 15, 1919, in the North End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.
Wikipedia
Dancing plague of 1518 ↗
The dancing plague of 1518, or dance epidemic of 1518, was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace, in the Holy Roman Empire from July 1518 to September 1518. Somewhere between 50 and 400 people took to dancing for weeks.
Wikipedia
Tanganyika laughter epidemic ↗
The Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962 was an outbreak of mass hysteria in or near the village of Kashasha on the western coast of Lake Victoria in Tanganyika, near the border with Uganda.
Wikipedia
Cadaver Synod ↗
The Cadaver Synod is the name commonly given to the ecclesiastical trial of Pope Formosus, who had been dead for about nine months, in the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome during January 897.
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Great Stink ↗
The Great Stink was an event in Central London during July and August 1858 in which the hot weather exacerbated the smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent that was present on the banks of the River Thames. The problem had been mounting for several years, with an ageing and inadequate sewer system that emptied directly into the Thames.
Wikipedia
Bone Wars ↗
The Bone Wars, also known as the Great Dinosaur Rush, was a period of intense and ruthlessly competitive fossil hunting and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history, marked by a heated rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. Each of the two paleontologists used underhanded methods to try to outdo the other in the field, resorting to bribery, theft, and the destruction of bones.
Wikipedia
Defenestrations of Prague ↗
The Defenestrations of Prague were three incidents in the history of Bohemia in which people were defenestrated. Though already existing in Middle French, the word defenestrate is believed to have first been used in English in reference to the episodes in Prague in 1618 when the disgruntled Protestant estates threw two royal governors and their secretary out of a window of the Hradčany Castle and wrote an extensive apologia explaining their action.
Wikipedia
Winchester Mystery House ↗
The Winchester Mystery House is a mansion in San Jose, California, that was once the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of firearms magnate William Wirt Winchester. The house became a tourist attraction nine months after her death in 1922.
Wikipedia
Mysteries
Toynbee tiles ↗
The Toynbee tiles, also called Toynbee plaques, are messages of unknown origin found embedded in asphalt of streets in about two dozen major cities in the United States and three South American cities. Since the 1980s, several hundred tiles have been discovered.
Wikipedia
Voynich manuscript ↗
The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex, hand-written in an undeciphered script referred to as "Voynichese". The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438).
Wikipedia
Wow! signal ↗
The Wow! signal was a strong narrowband radio signal detected on August 15, 1977, by Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope in the United States, then used to support the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The signal appeared to come from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius and bore expected hallmarks of extraterrestrial origin.
Wikipedia
Bloop ↗
Bloop was an ultra-low-frequency, high-amplitude underwater sound detected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 1997.
Wikipedia
Numbers station ↗
A numbers station is a shortwave radio station characterized by broadcasts of formatted numbers, which are addressed to intelligence officers operating in foreign countries. Most identified stations use speech synthesis to vocalize numbers, although digital modes such as phase-shift keying and frequency-shift keying, as well as Morse code transmissions, are also used.
Wikipedia
Cicada 3301 ↗
Cicada 3301 is the name given to three sets of puzzles posted online under the name "3301" between 2012 and 2014. The first puzzle started on January 4, 2012, on 4chan, and ran for nearly a month.
Wikipedia
Ball lightning ↗
Ball lightning is a rare and unexplained phenomenon described as luminescent spherical objects that vary from pea-sized to several meters (yards) in diameter. Though usually associated with thunderstorms, the observed phenomenon is reported to last considerably longer than the split-second flash of a lightning bolt and is distinct from St.
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Tunguska event ↗
The Tunguska event was a large explosion that occurred on the morning of 30 June [O.S. 17 June] 1908, at around 7:14 KRAT in Central Siberia, then part of the Russian Empire.
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Weird science
Mpemba effect ↗
The Mpemba effect is the observation that very hot liquids or colloids can freeze more quickly than colder ones, for similar volumes and surrounding conditions. The effect is named after Erasto Mpemba, a Tanzanian teenager who studied it scientifically in the 1960s for the first time, along with Denis Osborne.
Wikipedia
Pitch drop experiment ↗
A pitch drop experiment is a long-term experiment which measures the flow of a piece of pitch over many years. "Pitch" is the name for any of a number of highly viscous liquids which appear solid, most commonly bitumen, also known as asphalt.
Wikipedia
Kola Superdeep Borehole ↗
The Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3 is the deepest human-made hole on Earth, which attained maximum true vertical depth of 12,262 metres (40,230 ft) in 1989. It is the result of a scientific drilling effort to penetrate as deeply as possible into the Earth's crust conducted by the Soviet Union in the Pechengsky District of the Kola Peninsula, near the Russian border with Norway.
Wikipedia
Overview effect ↗
The overview effect is a cognitive shift reported by some astronauts while viewing the Earth from space. Researchers have characterized the effect as "a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus".
Wikipedia
Kessler syndrome ↗
The Kessler syndrome, also known as the Kessler effect, collisional cascading, or ablation cascade, is a scenario proposed by NASA scientists Donald J. Kessler and Burton G.
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Antikythera mechanism ↗
The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient Greek hand-powered orrery built in the 2nd century BC and discovered in 1901. It is the oldest known example of an analogue computer.
Wikipedia
Rubber duck debugging ↗
Rubber duck debugging is a debugging technique in software engineering, wherein a programmer explains their code, step by step, in natural language—either aloud or in writing—to reveal mistakes and misunderstandings.
Wikipedia
Lunar Laser Ranging experiments ↗
Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) is the practice of measuring the distance between the surfaces of the Earth and the Moon using laser ranging. The distance can be calculated from the round-trip time of laser light pulses, travelling at the speed of light, which are reflected back to Earth by the Moon's surface or by one of several retroreflectors installed on the Moon.
Wikipedia
Odd places
Bir Tawil ↗
Bir Tawil is a 2,060 km2 (795.4 mi2) area of land along the border between Egypt and Sudan which is claimed by neither country. Together with the neighbouring Halaib Triangle, it is sometimes called the Bir Tawil Triangle, despite its quadrilateral shape; the two regions border at a quadripoint.
Wikipedia
Null Island ↗
Null Island is the location at zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude, where the prime meridian and the equator intersect in the Atlantic Ocean near the Gulf of Guinea. Since there is no landmass located at these coordinates, it is not an actual island.
Wikipedia
Svalbard Global Seed Vault ↗
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a secure backup facility for the Earth's crop diversity on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago. The Seed Vault provides long-term storage for duplicates of seeds from around the world, conserved in gene banks.
Wikipedia
Pole of inaccessibility ↗
In geography, a pole of inaccessibility is the farthest location in a given landmass, sea, or other topographical feature, starting from a given boundary, relative to a given criterion. A geographical criterion of inaccessibility marks a location that is the most challenging to reach according to that criterion.
Wikipedia
Socotra ↗
Socotra, locally known as Saqatri, is a Yemeni island in the Indian Ocean. It is situated between the Gulf of Aden, the Guardafui Channel and the Arabian Sea, and lies near major shipping routes.
Wikipedia
Sedlec Ossuary ↗
The Sedlec Ossuary is a Roman Catholic chapel, located beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints, part of the former Sedlec Abbey in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic. The ossuary is estimated to contain the skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 people, whose bones have, in many cases, been artistically arranged to form decorations and furnishings for the chapel.
Wikipedia
Strange life
Tardigrade ↗
Tardigrades, also known as water bears or moss piglets, are a phylum of eight-legged segmented micro-animals. They were first described by the German zoologist Johann August Ephraim Goeze in 1773, who called them Kleiner Wasserbär 'little water bear'.
Wikipedia
Mantis shrimp ↗
Mantis shrimp are carnivorous marine crustaceans of the order Stomatopoda. Stomatopods branched off from other members of the class Malacostraca around 400 million years ago, with more than 520 extant species of mantis shrimp known.
Wikipedia
Turritopsis dohrnii ↗
Turritopsis dohrnii, commonly known as the immortal jellyfish, is a species of small, biologically immortal Medusozoa (jellyfish) found worldwide in temperate to tropic waters. It is one of the few known cases of an animal capable of completely reverting to a sexually immature, sedentary polyps colonial stage after having reached sexual maturity as a solitary individual.
Wikipedia
Axolotl ↗
The axolotl is a species of mole salamander. It is neotenic, reaching sexual maturity without undergoing metamorphosis, and the adults remain fully aquatic with obvious external gills.
Wikipedia
Pando (tree) ↗
Pando is the name of a quaking aspen clone located in Sevier County, Utah, United States, in the Fishlake National Forest. A male clonal organism, Pando has an estimated 47,000 stems (ramets) that appear to be individual trees but are genetically identical parts of a single tree connected by a root system that spans 42.8 ha.
Wikipedia
Rat king ↗
A rat king is a collection of rats whose tails are intertwined and bound together in some way. This could be a result of an entangling material like hair, a sticky substance such as sap or gum, or the tails being tied together.
Wikipedia
Space
Olympus Mons ↗
Olympus Mons is a large shield volcano on Mars. As measured by the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA), it is 21.287 kilometres (69,840 ft) high, about 2.5 times the elevation of Mount Everest above sea level.
Wikipedia
Valles Marineris ↗
Valles Marineris is a system of canyons that runs along the Martian surface east of the Tharsis region. At more than 4,000 km (2,500 mi) long, 200 km (120 mi) wide and up to 7 km (23,000 ft) deep, Valles Marineris is the largest canyon in the Solar System.
Wikipedia
Phobos (moon) ↗
Phobos is the innermost and larger of the two natural satellites of Mars, the other being Deimos. The two moons were discovered in 1877 by American astronomer Asaph Hall.
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Boötes Void ↗
The Boötes Void is a roughly spherical region of space in the vicinity of the constellation Boötes. It contains just 60 galaxies, which is significantly fewer than the approximately 2,000 galaxies expected for an area of comparable size.
Wikipedia
Voyager 1 ↗
Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977, as part of the Voyager program, to study the outer Solar System and the interstellar space beyond the Sun's heliosphere. It was launched 16 days after its twin, Voyager 2.
Wikipedia
Pioneer plaque ↗
The Pioneer plaques are a pair of gold-anodized aluminium plaques that were placed on board the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft, featuring a pictorial message, in case either Pioneer 10 or 11 is intercepted by intelligent extraterrestrial life. The plaques show the nude figures of a human male and female along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft.
Wikipedia
Vanguard 1 ↗
Vanguard 1 is an American satellite that was the fourth artificial Earth-orbiting satellite to be successfully launched, following Sputnik 1, Sputnik 2, and Explorer 1. It was launched 17 March 1958.
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Sputnik 1 ↗
Sputnik 1, often referred to as simply Sputnik, was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space program.
Wikipedia
Starlink ↗
Starlink Services, LLC is a telecommunications subsidiary of the American spaceflight company SpaceX, providing broadband Internet service in approximately 160 countries and territories. It also aims to provide global mobile broadband.
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Iridium satellite constellation ↗
The Iridium satellite constellation provides L band voice and data information coverage to satellite phones, satellite messenger communication devices and integrated transceivers. Iridium Communications owns and operates the constellation, additionally selling equipment and access to its services.
Wikipedia
Puzzles & paradoxes
The Library of Babel ↗
"The Library of Babel" is a short story by Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set.
Wikipedia
Infinite monkey theorem ↗
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys independently and at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare. More precisely, under the assumption of independence and randomness of each keystroke, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times.
Wikipedia
Monty Hall problem ↗
The Monty Hall problem is a brain teaser, in the form of a probability puzzle, based nominally on the American television game show Let's Make a Deal and named after its original host, Monty Hall. The problem was originally posed in a letter by Steve Selvin to the American Statistician in 1975.
Wikipedia
Birthday problem ↗
In probability theory, the birthday problem asks for the probability that, in a set of n randomly chosen people, at least two will share the same birthday. The birthday paradox is the counterintuitive fact that only 23 people are needed for that probability to exceed 50%.
Wikipedia
Banach–Tarski paradox ↗
The Banach–Tarski paradox is a theorem in set-theoretic geometry that states the following: Given a solid ball in three-dimensional space, there exists a decomposition of the ball into a finite number of disjoint subsets that can be put back together in a different way to yield two identical copies of the original ball. Indeed, the reassembly process involves only moving the pieces around and rotating them, without changing their original shape.
Wikipedia
Ship of Theseus ↗
The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's Paradox, is a paradox and common thought experiment about whether an object is the same object after having all of its original components replaced with others over time.
Wikipedia
Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel ↗
Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel is a thought experiment which illustrates a counterintuitive property of infinite sets. It shows that a fully occupied hotel with infinitely many rooms may still accommodate additional guests, even infinitely many of them, and this process may be repeated infinitely often.
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Czech curiosities
Prague astronomical clock ↗
The Prague astronomical clock, or Prague Orloj, is a medieval astronomical clock attached to the Old Town Hall in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic.
Wikipedia
Kutná Hora ↗
Kutná Hora is a town in the Central Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 22,000 inhabitants.
Wikipedia
Pilsner ↗
Pilsner is a type of pale lager. It takes its name from the Bohemian city of Plzeň, where the world's first pale lager was produced in 1842 by Pilsner Urquell Brewery.
Wikipedia
Golem ↗
A golem is an animated anthropomorphic being in Jewish folklore that is created entirely from inanimate matter, usually clay or mud. The most famous golem narrative involves Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late-16th-century rabbi of Prague.
Wikipedia
The Little Mole ↗
The Little Mole is a series of cartoons as well as the name of their title character, an anthropomorphic mole, created by Czech animator Zdeněk Miler between 1957 and 2002. The first short film premiered at the 1957 Venice Film Festival, where it won the award for the best directing achievement.
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Kofola ↗
Kofola is a carbonated soft drink produced by the eponymous Czech company, which is headquartered in Krnov. It is the principal rival of Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Wikipedia
Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia ↗
Wenceslaus I, Wenceslas I or Václav the Good was the Prince (kníže) of Bohemia from 921 until his death, probably in 935. According to the legend, he was assassinated by his younger brother, Boleslaus the Cruel.
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