In 1932 Australia sent soldiers and two machine guns to fight the emus destroying its wheat crops. After six weeks the birds had won. Here is how the strangest war unfolded.
No one has heard a real dinosaur. So the sounds in Jurassic Park were built from tortoises, elephants, horses and a Jack Russell terrier. The raptors’ menacing chatter has an X-rated source.
The mechanical shark in Jaws barely worked. It sank, corroded and jammed. Forced to hide it, a young Spielberg made the film scarier than any working shark could have been.
Replace a ship’s planks one by one until none of the original remains. Is it the same ship? Now rebuild the old planks into a second ship. Which one is the real one?
Give a tortoise a head start and, by one ancient argument, the fastest runner alive can never overtake it. The logic is clean. The conclusion is absurd. Untangling it took 2,000 years.
A judge promises a prisoner a hanging next week, on a day he will not see coming. The prisoner proves it can never happen. Then it happens, exactly as promised.
Measure Britain’s coast with a long ruler and you get one number. Use a shorter ruler and it grows. Keep shrinking the ruler and the coastline heads toward infinity.
In huge collections of real-world numbers, the leading digit is a 1 about 30% of the time, not 11%. The pattern is so reliable that auditors use it to catch fraud.
A simple coin game has an infinite average payout, so in theory you should stake everything you own to play. Almost no one would pay more than a few coins. That gap founded a science.
You have 100 kilograms of potatoes that are 99% water. Leave them out until they are 98% water. They now weigh 50 kilograms. The maths is right, even though it feels impossible.
In 1973 Berkeley seemed to admit men far more often than women. Look department by department and the bias vanishes, even tilts the other way. Same numbers, opposite story.
A hundred prisoners must each find their own number among a hundred boxes, opening only half. Random guessing gives essentially no hope. One clever rule gives them a 31% chance.
Someone hands you two envelopes, one holding twice as much money as the other. You pick one. Should you switch? A tempting argument says yes, forever.
Hitchcock’s Psycho terrified audiences in 1960 with a murder that used chocolate syrup for blood and a melon for the sound of the knife.
You have probably heard that medieval windows are thicker at the bottom because glass slowly drips over centuries. It is a tidy story, and it is false.
For decades textbooks said microbes outnumber your own cells ten to one. The real figure is closer to a tie, and the story of the old number is its own lesson.
There is a spot in the Pacific so far from land that the nearest people are usually astronauts overhead. It doubles as a graveyard for spacecraft.
Put 23 strangers in a room and it is a coin flip that two of them share a birthday. It sounds wrong. The maths is stubborn.
For five years an American dictionary defined a word no one had ever used. It got there because an editor misread a note about the letter D.
One short recording of a man yelling has been dropped into hundreds of films since 1951, from Star Wars to Disney cartoons. Once you know it, you cannot unhear it.
