Geniuses who were just insane

Lord Byron, English poet, 1788-1824:

It began when Byron arrived at Cambridge, where he was ordered to send his dog back home as keeping one was against school rules. Desperate for a pet, Byron scoured college policies for an animal not expressly forbidden. He found no reference to bears.
The bear stayed with Byron in his dorm room. Being a responsible pet owner, Byron took it on regular leashed walks through the university, terrifying fellow students and lecturers. When asked by administration what purpose the bear served on campus, the poet tried in vain to get his beast a fellowship.

More here (including Newton).

Bacteria were the real killers in the 1918 flu pandemic

For instance, had a super virus been responsible for most deaths, one might expect people to die fairly rapidly, or at least for most cases to follow a similar progression. However, Shanks and Brundage found that few people died within three days of showing symptoms, while most people lasted more than a week, some survived two – all hallmarks of pneumonia.

Socialist origins of pledge of allegiance

Excerpted from Cato:

From its inception, in 1892, the Pledge has been a slavish ritual of devotion to the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people. It was written by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist pushed out of his post as a Baptist minister for delivering pulpit-pounding sermons on such topics as "Jesus the Socialist." Bellamy was devoted to the ideas of his more-famous cousin Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward. Looking Backward describes the future United States as a regimented worker's paradise where everyone has equal incomes, and men are drafted into the country's "industrial army" at the age of 21, serving in the jobs assigned them by the state...Bellamy's book inspired a movement of "Nationalist Clubs," whose members campaigned for a government takeover of the economy.

Knights Templar seeking compensation

The Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ has launched a court case in Spain, demanding Pope Benedict “recognise” the seizure of assets worth €100bn. The Spanish-based group of Templars apparently says in a statement: "We are not trying to cause the economic collapse of the Roman Catholic Church, but to illustrate to the court the magnitude of the plot against our Order."

Most bizzare patron saints

#3. Saint Fiacre: Patron Saint of People with STDs:
As a sacred healer he could cure blindness, leprosy, tumors and more, all by touch. "More" also includes venereal disease. His patronage was assigned to the ailments he healed which means a lot of happy endings for 7th century dongs.

Tiny mistakes that led to huge catastrophes

On losing a B-2:

... it's just a $1.4 billion aircraft, not like they could have ever guessed it would be flown in a place where there was humidity. We always go to war with dry countries...
When another bomber pulled into Guam earlier this year, on presumably an equally humid day, a different maintenance crew left the wet sensors the way they were. As it turns out, those air sensors feed data to the Stealth Bomber's flight control system. Important data. The kind that keeps Stealth Bombers in the air...
The malfunctioning sensors resulted in a premature take off, a 30-degree nose-towards-the-sky ascent, and...

Top ten richest people in history

5. Asaf Jah VII (whose given name was Osman Ali Khan Bahadur) was the last Nizam or ruler of the Princely State of Hyderabad and Berar, before it was invaded and annexed by India in 1948.

By most accounts, "His Exalted Highness" the Nizam of Hyderabad was a benevolent ruler who promoted education, science and development. He spent about one-tenth of his Principality's budget on education, and even made primary education compulsory and free for the poor. In his 37-year rule, Hyderabad witnessed the introduction of electricity, railways, roads, and other development projects.

In 1937, Asaf Jah VII was on the cover of Time Magazine, labeled as the richest man in the world.

Old time gangsters

Machine Gun Kelly:

No one would have suspected that George Kelly Barnes would have turned to a live of crime – he was born into a very wealthy family from Memphis and had a quiet, “normal” childhood. He even went to Mississippi State University in 1917 for agriculture. But this is where things went awry. He flunked out, so his dad stopped giving him money.

1000 years of urbanisation in Europe and the Arab world

Baghdad was a wonder of the world in the year 800 while London was an economic backwater. By 1800, London was the largest city in the world while Arab cities languished. Recent research attributes this ‘trading places’ to institutional differences: Arab cities were tied to the fate of the state while European cities were independent growth poles.

A religious history of American neuroscience

3) The third point is how the broader cultural equation of religion with “spirituality,” with “mystical experience,” and with the “search for meaning,” has shaped the research concerns of neuroscience when it turns its attention to religious questions. At least in the popularized image of the intersections of religion and neuroscience that filter out of the laboratory and into, say, Newsweek, the focus seems inevitably to be on “Tibetan monks lost in meditation” or “Franciscan nuns deep in prayer.” Such images of brain imaging convey an essentialized romantic picture of religion as mystical absorption, as immediate personal experience.

Scams that marked the internet

From Techcult re EVE Online:

In 2006 a player called Cally (real name Dentara Rast) set up the “EVE Investment Bank”, and in yet another example of the amazing unrealistic things that can happen in video games, people entrusted their money to a man named “Cally”.

Over time the bank expanded and eventually had over 700 Billion ISK (over one hundred thousand real, honest to god “You can buy food or sex with these” dollars) in the account. Then, in a corporate crime that real-life CEOs can only dream of (and I’m sure often do), Cally just took all the money and ran. Specifically, he ran and bought an Ultimega-death clas hyper cruiser, put a million ISK bounty on his own head and cruised off into deep space simply daring anyone to try and kill him. See this? THIS is why people play video games so much - in real life white collar crime is fudged numbers and emigration to tax havens, in EVE we’ve got a bank manager who deals with service complaints with a fusion cannon.

Thomas Paine: Hero, patriot... and a Paine in the butt!

From Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again via Neatorama:

On January 10, 1776, Paine published Common Sense, a 50-page pamphlet that laid out the case for American independence in no uncertain terms. It was an immediate sensation, with 500,000 copies sold. Common Sense heavily influenced Thomas Jefferson's writing of the Declaration of Independence, published on July 4, 1776, just six months later.
But after having written the script for the American Revolution, Paine found that his services were no longer required. He was given a number of minor political posts by the Continental Congress during the war, but just to keep him out of the way. Wealthy, politically ambitious Brahmins like John Jay and John Adams were not prepared to give a loose cannon like Paine any responsibility.

The New Coke debacle

Even Gay Mullins– the man who tried to sue to restore the old flavor– showed a preference for New Coke when subjected to blind taste tests. It has been suggested that if Coca-Cola had changed their recipe but retained the familiar branding, New Coke and its taste-test-winning flavor might have been more acceptable to our primitive brains. Sensation transference was also powerfully demonstrated in a 2007 experiment, in which preschoolers were given McDonald's menu items in both branded and plain wrappers. Although the foods were identical aside from their wrappings, the children said they preferred the taste of the McDonald's-branded burgers, carrots, and apple juice in the vast majority of tests.

Nazi Jews

Upward of 150 000.

What is even more startling is that Adolf Hitler was aware of this and for a while allowed them to serve. In most cases these soldiers had no knowledge of the Holocaust killing machine. From their point of view they were simple German patriots fighting for their country. Many did not even consider themselves Jewish. Some were unaware of their “Jewish blood”. According to his book, at least 20 soldiers of “jewish blood” were awarded The Knights Cross. Included in the ranks were two field marshals and fifteen generals.

Vonnegut's letter from his PoW days in 1945 Germany

On Christmas eve the Royal Air Force bombed and strafed our unmarked train. They killed about one-hundred-and-fifty of us. We got a little water Christmas Day and moved slowly across Germany to a large P.O.W. Camp in Muhlburg, South of Berlin. We were released from the box cars on New Year's Day. The Germans herded us through scalding delousing showers. Many men died from shock in the showers after ten days of starvation, thirst and exposure. But I didn't.

Untold stories of D-Day

First published in June '02.

The original American cannibal

Alferd G. Packer holds a unique spot in American jurisprudence. He is the only U.S. citizen ever charged, tried, and convicted for the crime of murder and cannibalism.

The crime was committed in 1873, but the trial began in 1884.

Researchers pushing their own bodies for science

In 1929, Werner Forssmann was a surgical trainee who wanted to learn about the heart. Unlike other wimpy doctors at the time, instead of learning about it from books or dead animals, he went for the more classic investigatory approach of "poke it with something."
Without any supervision, advice, or regard for that concept you call "survival," he cut a hole in his arm and pushed a catheter all the way up the limb and jammed it into his still-living heart.

The heroes of SARS

In early April, however, a 71 year-old doctor named Jiang Yanyong began to speak out against the official policy. Unlike most Chinese dissenters, Dr Jiang openly identified himself, and made no secret of his role as a senior military doctor in the People’s Liberation Army, and a lifelong member of the Communist Party. Perhaps he owed his doggedness to his advancing years; while he understood the authorities’ efforts to maintain prestige and public order, he was convinced that the free flow of information would be needed to halt the spread of the disease. If SARS were to rampage unchecked among the 1.3 billion Chinese population, the best disease-control efforts of other countries would be in vain.

Tracing the history of Pink Floyd's pig

[Berlin:]But he was so big that he knocked a ton of bricks off the top of the Wall when he inflated. Actually, it was a very, very impressive piece of engineering by Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park. So that was the next incarnation. He never escaped because he had no ass. He was just a head and shoulders. So he had no chance to fly, sadly.