Huh.
Collection of links that make you go "Huh."
Great Michigan Pizza Funeral
The ceremonial disposal of 29,188 frozen cheese-and-mushroom pizzas in Ossineke, Michigan. The manufacturer, Mario Fabbrini, had been ordered to recall the pizzas by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) after initial tests suggested botulism was present in a batch of canned mushrooms.
1976 Philadelphia Legionnaires' disease outbreak
On July 21, 1976, the American Legion opened its annual three-day convention at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. More than 2,000 Legionnaires, mostly men, attended the convention. The date and city were chosen to coincide with America's celebration of the 200th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence at Philadelphia in 1776.
One-electron universe
Proposed by John Wheeler in a telephone call to Richard Feynman in the spring of 1940, is the hypothesis that all electrons and positrons are actually manifestations of a single entity moving backwards and forwards in time.
Dancing plague of 1518
A case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace (modern-day France), in the Holy Roman Empire from July 1518 to September 1518. Somewhere between 50 and 400 people took to dancing for weeks.
Kilroy was here
Kilroy was here is a meme that became popular during World War II, typically seen in graffiti. Its origin is debated, but the phrase and the distinctive accompanying doodle became associated with GIs in the 1940s: a bald-headed man (sometimes depicted as having a few hairs) with a prominent nose peeking over a wall with his fingers clutching the wall.
Weather Station Kurt
An automatic weather station, erected by a German U-boat crew in northern Labrador, Dominion of Newfoundland, in October 1943. Installing the equipment for the station was the only known armed German military operation on land in North America during the Second World War.
Johari window
A technique designed to help people better understand their relationship with themselves and others. It was created by psychologists Joseph Luft (1916–2014) and Harrington Ingham (1916–1995) in 1955, and is used primarily in self-help groups and corporate settings as a heuristic exercise.
Illegal number
An illegal number is a number that represents information which is illegal to possess, utter, propagate, or otherwise transmit in some legal jurisdiction. Any piece of digital information is representable as a number; consequently, if communicating a specific set of information is illegal in some way, then the number may be illegal as well.
Prisonnière
Some producers of Poire Williams include an entire pear inside each bottle, called prisonnière. This is achieved by attaching the bottle to a budding pear tree so that the pear will grow inside it.
52-hertz whale
Colloquially referred to as 52 Blue, is an individual whale of unidentified species that calls at the unusual frequency of 52 hertz. This pitch is at a higher frequency than that of the other whale species with migration patterns most closely resembling the 52-hertz whale's – the blue whale (10 to 39 Hz) and the fin whale (20 Hz).
Get Out and Push Railroad
A 19th-century street railway, connecting Wilmington, California, to the Willmore area of Long Beach, California, which requested its patrons to assist trains over the steeper parts of the route.
Bush hid the facts
A common name for a bug present in some versions of Microsoft Windows, which causes text encoded in ASCII to be interpreted as if it were UTF-16LE, resulting in garbled text. When the string "Bush hid the facts", without quotes, was put in a new Notepad document and saved, closed, and reopened, the nonsensical sequence of Chinese characters "畂桳栠摩琠敨映捡獴" would appear instead.
"Reflections on Trusting Trust"
To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software.