Potsdam Giants en.wikipedia.org

The king trained and drilled his own regiment every day. He liked to paint their portraits from memory. He tried to show them to foreign visitors and dignitaries to impress them. At times he would try to cheer himself up by ordering them to march before him, even if he was in his sickbed. This procession, which included the entire regiment, was led by their mascot, a bear. He once confided to the French ambassador that "The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me, but tall soldiers—they are my weakness".

I can eat glass, it does not hurt me en.wikipedia.org

I Can Eat Glass was a linguistic project. [...] The objective was to provide speakers with translations of the phrase "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me" from a wide variety of languages. [...] Visitors to a foreign country have "an irresistible urge" to say something in that language, and whatever they say (a cited example being along the lines of "Where is the bathroom?") usually marks them as tourists immediately. Saying "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me", however, ensures that the speaker "will be viewed as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect".

Whataboutism en.wikipedia.org

Whataboutism denotes in a pejorative sense a procedure in which a critical question or argument is not answered or discussed, but retorted with a critical counter-question which expresses a counter-accusation.

yak shaving en.wiktionary.org

A less useful activity done consciously or subconsciously to procrastinate about a larger but more useful task

Onfim en.wikipedia.org

Onfim was a boy who lived in Novgorod (present-day Russia) in the 13th century, some time around 1220 or 1260. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark.

ISO 3103 en.wikipedia.org

ISO 3103 is a standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (commonly referred to as ISO), specifying a standardized method for brewing tea, possibly sampled by the standardized methods described in ISO 1839. It was originally laid down in 1980 as BS 6008:1980 by the British Standards Institution.[1] It was produced by ISO Technical Committee 34 (Food products), Sub-Committee 8 (Tea).

Micromort en.wikipedia.org

A micromort (from micro- and mortality) is a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death

Takahashi method en.wikipedia.org

Unlike a typical presentation, no pictures and no charts are used. Only a few words are printed on each slide—often only one or two short words, using very large characters. To make up for this, a presenter will use many more slides than in a traditional presentation, each slide being shown for a much shorter duration.

Crows are watching your language, literally corvidresearch.blog

As with the carrion crow study, when these crows were presented with playback of a more familiar acoustic style—in this case a Japanese speaker—they didn’t show a strong reaction. Play them what was likely a completely unfamiliar language—Dutch—and the crows were rapt. Or at least they acted more vigilant and positioned themselves closer to the speaker. In other words, large-billed crows were able to discriminate between human languages without any prior training!

Small Seasons smallseasons.guide

Prior to the Gregorian calendar, farmers in China and Japan broke each year down into 24 sekki or “small seasons.” These seasons didn't use dates to mark seasons, but instead, they divided up the year by natural phenomena.

Functional fixedness en.wikipedia.org

For example, if someone needs a paperweight, but they only have a hammer, they may not see how the hammer can be used as a paperweight. Functional fixedness is this inability to see a hammer's use as anything other than for pounding nails; the person couldn't think to use the hammer in a way other than in its conventional function.

Black Rock River river breaching into the Indian ocean youtube.com

The moment a river cuts a new channel to the ocean

Carcinisation: one of the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab en.wikipedia.org

Carcinisation (or carcinization) is an example of convergent evolution in which a crustacean evolves into a crab-like form from a non-crab-like form

Winston Churchill received a prescription for alcohol to get around American Prohibition twitter.com

The quantity is naturally infinite

Estote parati it.wikipedia.org

Locuzione in latino per "siate pronti" o "siate preparati"

The Idler (1993) en.wikipedia.org

The Idler is a bi-monthly magazine, devoted to its ethos of 'idling'. Founded in 1993 by Tom Hodgkinson and Gavin Pretor-Pinney, the publication's intention is to return dignity to the art of loafing, to make idling into something to aspire towards rather than reject.

I assure you, medieval people bathed going-medieval.com

In fact, medieval people loved a bath and can in many ways be considered a bathing culture, much in the way that say, Japan is now. Medieval people also very much valued being clean generally in an almost religious way.

If spiders worked together, they could eat all humans in a year nypost.com

That means that spiders eat at least as much meat as all seven billion humans on the planet combined, who the authors note consume about 400 million tonnes of meat and fish each year.