by choice?

Yeah honestly, sounds like standard jerking off to me. Do the rest of you all charge for orgasm as fast as possible?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiune_Sugihara

japanese diplomat in lithuania who issued visas to over 6000 jews, allowing them to escape the nazis. ignored commands to do so.

was hand writing visas for 18 to 20 hours a day up until the point he left.

Amazing. Every once in a while, stories about these heroes come to my attention and it's a moving read.

There were late, maybe even posthumous, reports about a man who - much like Schindler - saved many Jews through fake-employment in his facilites and kept a low (or no) profile about this in post-war Germany.
I'm not 100% on this and can't seem to find this story (you can laugh about my user name all you want).

When he got a feature in a major newspaper (SZ in ca. 2007), it included a story of a Jewish woman shot while out shopping in broad daylight. When he realized that everyone went about their business as if nothing happened, the shock was immense and he started weighing his options. I teared up big time over reading that article actually.

This would make a really good movie script

Did you know that you can download all of Wikipedia (sans pictures). The compressed file is only 12 GB. You can keep a offline copy if you want and use it even without internet access using some readers.

There is of course a Wikipedia page that has all this information and explains how to do it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipe...abase_download

Wow, that's amazing. I'd have thought it would be a much bigger file as well.

What's the max amount of hours one of you has spent reading stuff in this thread? I'm super addicted at the moment.

At one time, about 3 hours, because of the wiki effect where you just keep linking around. Overall prolly 16-18

conspiracy theories

this makes it sound more like the theory is that when they switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar they screwed up where to put the year zero.

the numbers station freaks me out every time I listen to it when it's dark

I think the "ancient astronomy" argument against is too solid to bother with this theory. You'd require civilizations across the planet forging their accounts w/o a good motive.
And I personally don't care much, as 2016 is a pretty arbitrary number to begin with, right? It only shows me how ****ing fast time flies probably.

As for the hours spent, maybe an hour at most. There are some fun lists, like the serial killers and unusual death ones but I've been long gone through them, and then it sort of dries up for me quickly and s/t else grabs my attention. I think youtube is the worst offender actually.
I checked the unusual deaths list a couple months back and was disappointed there hasn't been a new entry in a while

Today is allegedly the 15th anniversary of Wikipedia, so some good media coverage of similar issues to this thread.

Washington Post has a killer entry for this thread: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...u-havent-read/

A bunch of fascinating wikipedia articles, including:

Also, FiveThirtyEight.com has a listing of the most edited articles which probably has some degree of correlation with controversy/interest/etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogonophobia

The wonderful world of UPCs. Those silly barcodes on your product is the result of much history and thought:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Product_Code

Sounds like Nicholas Winton, dubbed the British Schindler.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Winton

There was a fairly recent 60 minutes story on him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0aoifNziKQ

put on your tinfoil hats. MK Ultra

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra

I think the opening paragraph summarizes it all very well. The entire article has a lot of interesting happenings.

Project MKUltra—sometimes referred to as the CIA's mind control program—was the code name given to an illegal program of experiments on human subjects, designed and undertaken by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

A bit further down:

A secret memorandum granted the MKUltra director up to six percent of the CIA research budget in fiscal year 1953, without oversight or accounting

****

VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) planes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTOL

I think the title of the article says it all. Lots of interesting and cool airplanes there.

Wait, is the tinfoil part that the CIA found random people in the 70s to inject with drugs and ****? Doesn't seem so tinfoil, that horrible **** is pretty open and well-known as I understand it.

Is the tinfoil part is that the CIA has experimental secret programs they think strengthen American security? That's also well known, but let's not ruin possible GOAT thread with politarding pls.

Anyway, planes are cool, as always.

http://www.futuretimeline.net

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSy5mEcmgwU

I guess this is a relevant wiki article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

Poe's law is an Internet adage which states that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, parodies of extreme views will be mistaken by some readers or viewers for sincere expressions of the parodied views.

SLAM - Supersonic Low Altitude Missile

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supers...titude_Missile

Was an Air Force program conceived in 1955 to build a supersonic guided missile that would deliver nuclear bombs.

But you ask, isn't that just a cruise missile??

Kinda, but this was powered by an Unshielded Nuclear Reactor!!!! It could stay aloft for 100s of thousands of miles and travel at Mach 4.2

And they actually built an engine and tested it and it worked. You can read about that here

Project Pluto - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto

The reactor could produce 600 megawatts. Enough energy to power about 60,000 average homes.

Basically they were building a flying Chernobyl that also dropped thermonuclear bombs..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill

The Indiana Pi Bill was a bill that attempted to restrict the free use of a mathematical proof called "Squaring a Circle" to the state of Indiana, despite the fact that a proof of impossibility was shown 15 years prior. Other fallacies, though not explicitly stated in the "proof," implied that Pi = 3.2.

It passed the house or representatives and was eventually ridiculed out of existence in the senate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion

As the article states, it goes Million - Milliarde - Billion in German. There are translation issues all the time because of this and many don't notice this way into their adult lifes.

That's hilarious, it sounds like a Parks and Rec plot.