One in four thousand people are said to suffer from photosensitive epilepsy, in which flashing computer screens can induce seizures. In 2008 the World Wide Web Consortium determined that online content should not flash more than three times in a one-second period. Federal government websites must design pages that avoid screen flickering within the range of 2 to 55 hertz.
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A doctoral student in economics at Harvard University in 2004 compared the rise and fall of temperatures to the likelihood of witch trials in Europe, discovering that they often formed an inverse relationship. The average temperature between roughly 1520 and 1770 was two degrees lower than previous centuries, leading to crop failure and economic instability. The majority of trials and executions for witchcraft occurred during the period, known as the “little ice age.”
In 1936 Sotheby’s auctioned many of Isaac Newton’s nonscientific papers, containing much writing about his alchemical interests. A large batch was bought by John Maynard Keynes, who wrote in a lecture published posthumously as “Newton, the Man,” that the physicist and mathematician “was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.”
In May 1953, the TV show This is Your Life honored Hanna Bloch Kohner, a Holocaust survivor, and surprised her with appearances from her closest friend in Auschwitz and a soldier who liberated the camp. It was the first national television show to tell the story of a Holocaust survivor. On the program in May 1955, Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a survivor of Hiroshima, came face-to-face with Captain Robert Lewis, copilot of the Enola Gay.
The G8 met in Hokkaido, Japan, in July 2008 to address the global food crisis. Over an eighteen-course meal—including truffles, caviar, conger eel, Kyoto beef, and champagne—prepared by sixty chefs, the world leaders came to a consensus: “We are deeply concerned that the steep rise in global food prices coupled with availability problems in a number of developing countries is threatening global food security.”
At a seance in the White House in 1862, Nettie Colburn Maynard, the medium, recalled that, after losing consciousness, she, channeling Daniel Webster, spoke for over an hour, during which President Abraham Lincoln was assured that the Emancipation Proclamation he had written but not signed would be “the crowning event of his administration and life” and that he needed to “stand firm” against dissenters. Arthur Conan Doyle later speculated that it “may have been one of the most important [moments] in the history of the United States.”
“Just opposite, an island of the sea, / There came enchantment with the shifting wind, / That did both drown and keep alive my ears,” wrote John Keats in Hyperion. It was published in a collection of poems in 1820; Keats died the following year. In 1822 Percy Bysshe Shelley, returning from a visit to Lord Byron, drowned after his schooner, the Don Juan, capsized. His body washed up on the Tuscan shore a few days later. In his pocket was a copy of Keats’ poems.
The story of Juan Ponce de León searching for the Fountain of Youth in Florida in 1513 was fabricated after his death in a chronicle by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, a Spanish courtier who found the explorer to be egocentric, dim-witted, and gullible—and so wished to render him foolish in the annals.
While manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, Joe Maddon put his batting lineup in order for a July 2014 game using the field position numbers 8-6-7-5-3-0-9 in honor of the Tommy Tutone hit. The designated hitter served as the 0; the catcher (2) and second baseman (4) batted eighth and ninth. The Rays lost the game to the Detroit Tigers by a score of 1–8.
As a young man studying in Amsterdam, Vincent van Gogh on August 18, 1877, wrote to his brother Theo, “I breakfasted on a piece of dry bread and a glass of beer—that is what Dickens advises for those who are on the point of committing suicide, as being a good way to keep them, at least for some time, from their purpose.”
Before leaving his post as Qi chancellor in 193 bc, Cao Can gave advice to his successor: “If you stir up the markets and empty out the jails, then evil men will have no place to stay and will make trouble for you elsewhere.” A footnote in the English text from translator Burton Watson explains: “It was an assumption among Han officials and intellectuals that most, if not all, men engaged in trade were swindlers.”
On Friday, January 13, 1882, thirteen men met in New York City as the Thirteen Club; they walked under a ladder, ate lobster salad sculpted into the shape of a coffin, and sat beneath a banner reading morituri te salutamus (“we who are about to die salute you”). The following year, the club’s newsletter gleefully reported that “not a single member is dead.”
In 1745 a German cleric by the name of Ewald Georg von Kleist tried to pass an electrical current into a bottle through a nail and was shocked for his efforts. From this accident came the Leyden jar, an electrical condenser that allows electricity to be stored. The following year the abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet discharged a Leyden jar in front of Louis XV, sending electrical current through 180 Royal Guards, who jumped at the sensation.
In the United States around 1787—the year that Thomas Jefferson took a three-month sabbatical to tour the vineyards of France and Italy—the average drinking American consumed the equivalent of an estimated six gallons of pure alcohol per year. The figure today is 2.2.
After Helen Gahagan Douglas was elected as a Democratic representative in 1944, news outlets spread rumors of a vicious rivalry between her and Republican congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce; one headline read helen vs. clare: torch vs. icicle. “For reporters short of real news,” Douglas complained, “it was a simple day’s work to speculate that we would claw at one another.” The women resolved to avoid giving fodder to such baseless stories by never discussing the same subject on the same day.