The US Government began to construct fortifications just south of the [Canadian] border at Rouses Point on Lake Champlain. After a significant portion of the construction was completed, measurements revealed that at that point, the actual 45th parallel was three-quarters of a mile south of the surveyed line; the fort, which became known as "Fort Blunder," was in Canada. This created a dilemma for the United States that was not resolved until a provision of the treaty left the border on the meandering line as surveyed.

It is known to be one of the largest living organisms, where scientists have estimated a single specimen found in Malheur National Forest in Oregon to have been growing for some 2,400 years, covering 3.4 square miles.

But back in the 1970s, liquid hand soap was sold by one guy: Robert Taylor, and his small company Minnetonka. It was his invention, and he knew he was on to something big. Test audiences loved the product and, despite barely having enough resources to do so, Minnetonka decided to go all in and make a push to take the product nationwide.

There was only one problem: Nothing he was selling could be patented. The concept of liquid soap wasn't new, and simple pumps had been around since the dawn of civilization. As a result, Taylor knew several huge soap manufacturers were ready to happily steal his idea the very moment it looked like it could succeed on a large scale. Armed with superior resources and the ability to quickly R&D an imitation product, the industry giants were ready to crush tiny Minnetonka.

Taylor, however, was ready for this. Before any other company had the chance, Taylor decided to go shopping one day and bought a few plastic pumps. And by a few we mean *****ING ALL OF THEM. There were only two companies nationwide manufacturing those little pumps, and Taylor ponied up $12 million -- more than the total net worth of his company at the time -- and ordered 100 million of them, effectively buying every single pump these two companies would be able to manufacture for the next year or two. We don't know exactly how Taylor broke the news to his competitors, but we imagine him standing atop a hundred-foot pile of plastic pumps in the shape of a middle finger while yelling, "I'M KING OF THE PUMPS, YOU MOTHER*****ERS!"

Anyway, without the part required to dispense the soap, there was nothing the major companies could do but sit and watch Taylor slowly own the entire market. His product would become known as SoftSoap, and a bunch of you reading this have a bottle of it next to at least one of your sinks. Two years after his little stunt, Colgate-Palmolive would be forced to just buy SoftSoap from Taylor ... for $61 million.

North Sentinel Island is home to a tribe of indigenous people, the Sentinelese, whose present numbers are estimated to be anywhere between 50 and 400 individuals. They reject any contact with other people, and are among the last people to remain virtually untouched by modern civilization. Because there has never been any treaty with the people of the island, nor any record of a physical occupation whereby the people of the island have conceded sovereignty, the island exists in a curious state of limbo under established international law and can be seen as a sovereign entity under Indian protection. It is, therefore, one of the de facto autonomous regions of India.

The local government (Andaman and Nicobar Islands) has recently stated that they have no intention to interfere with the lifestyle or habitat of the Sentinelese. Although the island is likely to have suffered seriously from the effects of the December 2004 tsunami, the survival of the Sentinelese was confirmed when, some days after the event, an Indian government helicopter observed several of them, who shot arrows at the hovering aircraft, with the apparent intent of repelling it.

...even gifts and peaceful offerings left onshore by anthropologists and Indian government officials have been answered with a hail of arrows.

Since the late 90s, the official policy of the Indian government has been to leave the Sentinalese alone. Still, that hasn’t stopped accidental run-ins from occurring; back in 2006, a boat carrying two fisherman accidentally drifted into the shallows of North Sentinel, and the fishermen were killed. When a helicopter was dispatched to retrieve the bodies from the beach, the islanders chased it away with arrows.

They don’t know how to make fire; observations made by landing parties in deserted villages have concluded that the Sentinelese wait for lightning strikes, then keep the resulting embers burning as long as they can.

Another isolated Andamanese tribe, the Jarawa, have somewhat recently decided to stop murdering those who attempt to contact them, and in a startling about-face, now seem to love frolicking with the outsiders who come to their beaches to study them.

Mojibake - An unintelligible sequence of characters.

Mojibake is often caused when a character encoding is not correctly tagged in a document, or when a document is moved to a system with a different default encoding. Such incorrect display occurs when writing systems or character encodings are mistagged or "foreign" to the user's computer system: if a computer does not have the software required to process a foreign language's characters, it will attempt to process them in its default language encoding, usually resulting in gibberish.

This letter was sent to a Russian student by her French friend, who manually wrote the address that he received by e-mail. His e-mail client, unfortunately, was not set up correctly to display Cyrillic characters, so they were substituted with diacritic symbols from the Western charset (ISO-8859-1) The original message was in KOI8-R.



The Russian postal service managed to translate the characters back into Cyrillic (see the red letters above the garbage characters) and deliver the letter successfully.

When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of the German physicists Max von Laue (1914) and James Franck (1925) in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from confiscating them.

The German government had prohibited Germans from accepting or keeping any Nobel Prize after the jailed peace activist Carl von Ossietzky had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. De Hevesy placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals.

After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation who recast the medals and again presented them to Laue and Franck.