Interesting Wikipedia articles for killing time and expanding your mind!! - Page 31 - Other Topics Forum - Discuss Pop Culture, Arts and Entertainment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_Sultan_Khan

Indian chess player who in the 1930's came to Europe and posted impressive tournament results (rated as high as 6th in the world) despite having very little experience in western chess (his background was in an Indian version of the game) and his inability to read western languages prevented him from studying the game.

quote from American Grandmaster Ruben Fine:

Quote:

The story of the Indian Sultan Khan turned out to be a most unusual one. The "Sultan" was not the term of status that we supposed it to be; it was merely a first name. In fact, Sultan Khan was actually a kind of serf on the estate of a maharajah when his chess genius was discovered. He spoke English poorly, and kept score in Hindustani. It was said that he could not even read the European notations.

After the tournament [the 1933 Folkestone Olympiad] the American team was invited to the home of Sultan Khan's master in London... Sultan Khan, who was our real entrée to his presence, was treated as a servant by the maharajah (which in fact he was according to Indian law), and we found ourselves in the peculiar position of being waited on at table by a chess grand master.

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08-17-2010 , 07:27 PM

#753

vetiver

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death

Quote:

Fan death is a putative phenomenon, generally accepted only in South Korea, in which an electric fan left running overnight in a closed room can cause the death of those inside.

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08-19-2010 , 04:12 PM

#754

SnotBoogy

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foxconn suicides of 2010

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Fo...yong.27s_death

enjoy your iphone, *******

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08-19-2010 , 06:45 PM

#755

EZmoney74

grinder

Join Date: Jan 2010 Posts: 544

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Estonia

A ferry sinks, killing over 800 people. Many unanswered questions as to why it sank, and what was really being shipped in the car/cargo hold. Bodies are never recovered, the site is off limits, and they even attempted to cover the wreck in concrete.
I think officer Barbrady says it best: "Move along people, nothing to see here."

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08-21-2010 , 11:55 AM

#756

BitterChris

adept

Join Date: Apr 2005 Posts: 831

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maple..._urine_disease

This is interesting, IHOP

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09-17-2010 , 10:10 AM

#757

SnotBoogy

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just spent about an hour and a half reading about this and links from it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe

the montreal screwjob was interesting

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10-11-2010 , 11:55 AM

#758

amoeba

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Rothstein

According to crime writer Leo Katcher, Rothstein "transformed organized crime from a thuggish activity by hoodlums into a big business, run like a corporation, with himself at the top."[2] According to Rich Cohen, Rothstein was the person who first saw in Prohibition a business opportunity, a means to enormous wealth, who "understood the truths of early century capitalism (hypocrisy, exclusion, greed) and came to dominate them". Rothstein was the Moses of the Jewish gangsters, according to Cohen, the progenitor, a rich man's son who showed the young hoodlums of the Bowery how to have style; indeed, the man who, the Sicilian-American gangster Lucky Luciano would later say, "taught me how to dress."

The author F. Scott Fitzgerald used Arnold Rothstein as the inspiration for Jay Gatsby's crooked associate Meyer Wolfsheim in the novel The Great Gatsby. At one point, Gatsby says to narrator Nick Carraway, "He's the man who fixed the 1919 World Series."

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10-11-2010 , 02:19 PM

#759

UCBananaboy

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Delta Flight 191

"This accident is one of the few commercial air crashes in which the meteorological phenomenon known as microburst-induced wind shear was a direct contributing factor."

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10-14-2010 , 12:38 AM

#760

Wesker1982

adept

Join Date: Aug 2007 Posts: 1,119

Milgram experiment

Quote:

The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

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10-14-2010 , 01:42 AM

#761

mug3n

veteran

Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 2,747

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wesker1982

Milgram experiment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

slow pony

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=717

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10-14-2010 , 02:24 AM

#762

rodekio

centurion

Join Date: Apr 2008 Posts: 166

grunching, so my apologies if this has already been mentioned, but this dude has the most interesting dietary habits of all time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarrare

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10-14-2010 , 04:38 AM

#763

tvent37

old hand

Join Date: Dec 2006 Posts: 1,822

Operation Midnight Climax

In the 50s and 60s the CIA put prostitutes on the payroll and opened brothels with the purpose of luring people in to test the effect of LSD on people that hadn't consented. You've got to hand it to them for the name.

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10-14-2010 , 02:22 PM

#764

RichGangi

Laughable false & highly douchey

Join Date: Aug 2005 Posts: 9,567

Quote:

Originally Posted by rodekio

grunching, so my apologies if this has already been mentioned, but this dude has the most interesting dietary habits of all time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarrare

HOLY ****

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10-14-2010 , 05:56 PM

#765

SarcasticRat

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Tarrare article delivers. Also, "the fork was never found" might be my favorite closing line in a Wiki article ever.

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10-14-2010 , 10:11 PM

#766

ZackAttack

grinder

Join Date: Jan 2006 Posts: 548

This might be too mainstream for most of you, but I love reading the wikipedia entry on the Titanic disaster.

Another favorite subject to read up on are the self-made business titans of the 19th and early 20th century. These guys were the original ballers...

John D Rockefeller

Quote:

As kerosene and gasoline grew in importance, Rockefeller's wealth soared, and he became the world's richest man and first American worth more than a billion dollars.[2] Adjusting for inflation, he is often regarded as the richest person in history.[3][4][5][6]

J.P. Morgan

Quote:

Enemies of banking attacked Morgan for the terms of his loan of gold to the federal government in the 1895 crisis, for his financial resolution of the Panic of 1907, and for bringing on the financial ills of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. In December 1912, Morgan testified before the Pujo Committee, a subcommittee of the House Banking and Currency committee. The committee ultimately found that a cabal of financial leaders were abusing their public trust to consolidate control over many industries: the partners of J.P. Morgan & Co. along with the directors of First National and National City Bank controlled aggregate resources of $22.245 billion. Louis Brandeis, later a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, compared this sum to the value of all the property in the twenty-two states west of the Mississippi River.[14]

Andrew Carnegie

Quote:

In his final days, Andrew Carnegie suffered from bronchial pneumonia. Before his death on 11 August 1919, Mr. Carnegie had donated $350,695,654 for various causes. The 'Andrew Carnegie Dictum' illustrates Carnegie's generous nature:

- To spend the first third of one's life getting all the education one can.
- To spend the next third making all the money one can.
- To spend the last third giving it all away for worthwhile causes.

Andrew Carnegie was involved in philanthropist causes, but he kept himself away from religious circles. He wanted to be identified by the world as a 'positivist'.

Cornelius Vanderbilt

Quote:

When the American Civil War began in 1861, Vanderbilt attempted to donate his largest steamship, the Vanderbilt, to the Union navy. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles refused it, thinking its operation and maintenance too expensive for what he expected to be a short war. Vanderbilt had little choice but to lease it to the War Department, at prices set by ship brokers. When the Confederate ironclad Virginia (popularly known in the North as the Merrimack) wrought havoc with the Union blockading squadron at Hampton Roads, Virginia, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and President Abraham Lincoln called on Vanderbilt for help. This time he succeeded in donating the Vanderbilt to the Union navy, equipping it with a ram and staffing it with handpicked officers.

John Jacob Astor

Quote:

In the 1830s, John Jacob Astor foresaw that the next big boom would be the build-up of New York, which would soon emerge as one of the world’s greatest cities. Astor withdrew from the American Fur Company, as well as all his other ventures, and used the money to buy and develop large tracts of Manhattan real estate. Predicting the rapid growth northward on Manhattan Island, Astor purchased more and more land beyond the current city limits. Astor rarely built on his land, and instead let others pay rent to use it.

Last edited by ZackAttack; 10-14-2010 at 10:21 PM.

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10-14-2010 , 10:29 PM

#767

ZackAttack

grinder

Join Date: Jan 2006 Posts: 548

I haven't looked through all 52 pages of this thread, but in case no one has posted it this, it's pretty awesome...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Db_cooper

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10-15-2010 , 12:23 AM

#768

mikekelley

veteran

Join Date: Feb 2008 Posts: 2,192

OMFG at that Heidnik article

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10-15-2010 , 01:02 AM

#769

Salva135

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Quote:

Originally Posted by ZackAttack

I haven't looked through all 52 pages of this thread, but in case no one has posted it this, it's pretty awesome...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Db_cooper

That whole incident is positively prehistoric in the world we live in, amazing.

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10-15-2010 , 09:42 AM

#770

blind squirrel

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Quote:

Originally Posted by rodekio

grunching, so my apologies if this has already been mentioned, but this dude has the most interesting dietary habits of all time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarrare

From that article:

"The procedures failed, and doctors were unable to keep him on a controlled diet; he would sneak out of the hospital to scavenge for offal in gutters, rubbish heaps and outside butchers' shops, and attempted to drink the blood of other patients in the hospital and to eat the corpses in the hospital morgue. After falling under suspicion of eating a toddler he was ejected from the hospital."

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10-15-2010 , 10:06 AM

#771

Nonfiction

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Quote:

Originally Posted by rodekio

grunching, so my apologies if this has already been mentioned, but this dude has the most interesting dietary habits of all time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarrare

this is insane

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10-15-2010 , 10:22 AM

#772

Nonfiction

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Quote:

Originally Posted by rodekio

grunching, so my apologies if this has already been mentioned, but this dude has the most interesting dietary habits of all time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarrare

From the "see also" at the bottom of Tarrare, they have a link to a Polish soldier during the same time period with the same problem as Tarrare.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Domery

Quote:

While stationed near Paris he was recorded as having eaten 174 cats in a year, and although he disliked vegetables he would eat 4 to 5 pounds (1.8 to 2.3 kg) of grass each day if he was unable to find other food. During service on the French frigate Hoche, he attempted to eat the severed leg of a crew member hit by cannon fire, before other members of the crew wrestled it from him.

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10-15-2010 , 11:28 AM

#773

SnotBoogy

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tarrare and domery would crush chesnut and kobayashi

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10-15-2010 , 12:18 PM

#774

Jintster

grinder

Join Date: Apr 2006 Posts: 676

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Shereshevskii

Shereshevskii participated in many behavioral studies, most of them carried by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria over a thirty year time span. He met Luria after an anecdotal event in which he was told off for not taking any notes while attending a work meeting in the mid-1920s. To the astonishment of everyone there (and to his own also, due to his belief that everybody had such an ability to recall), he could recall the speech word by word. Along the years Shereshevskii was asked to memorize complex mathematical formulas, huge matrices and even poems in foreign languages and did so in a matter of minutes.[1] Despite his astounding memory performance, Shereshevskii scored absolutely average in intelligence tests.

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10-17-2010 , 03:14 AM

#775

so bad

grinder

Join Date: Nov 2009 Posts: 653

List of animals with fraudulent diplomas

Quote:

Animals have been submitted as applicants in suspected diploma mills in several cases. On some occasions the animal has been not only admitted, but granted a degree. In one case, a cat's degree helped lead to a successful fraud prosecution against the institution which issued it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ulent_diplomas

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