HN Explorer

Ask HN: Wikipedia articles that made you say "wow "?

16 points by frogulis ↗ HN
As title suggests, I'm looking for Wikipedia articles that made you feel like "one of today's lucky 10000" [1].

I recently read the article about Catatumbo lightning [2], which gave me the desired feelings of cool, surprising, and scientifically interesting. I'd love to be aware of more such topics. I suppose it doesn't even have to be Wikipedia; it's just a good medium for this sort of thing.

1. https://xkcd.com/1053/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catatumbo_lightning

19 comments

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mtmail
Feel free to submit interesting articles, other users do https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org

I recently found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_micronations

high_byte
this one is interesting! I really see the future becoming more like the network states balaji is talking about.

specifically this one is interesting, crowdfunded an island! I dreamt about exactly this around the same time - but this guy actually did it! :D

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

h2odragon
I post this one occasionally, for the pure joy of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compre...

"it doesn't have to work for very long" design doesn't get much shorter time scale than that. (Barring fusion / fission but you shouldn't do that in the garage)

In a way it's the inverse of: https://www.capturedlightning.com/frames/shrinker.html

mikewarot
There was research a while back to fit optics to the back end of fighter aircraft. Effectively turning the airplane into a gas dynamic laser, and extracting the energy from the population inversion of CO2 in the supersonic exhaust could yield up to 10 Megawatts of output!
spr3zi
The article 'List of missing treasures' is a great launching point. While there are many fantastic things in there, I particularly enjoy learning about all of the artifacts from rulers of past that have been lost to time, and are theoretically out there somewhere in the water or some farmer's field.

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

wruza
Not a wiki article, but a whole googology and fast growing hierarchies field. It is quite a rabbithole. You can read/watch about things like G, TREE, SCG, BB. But only after diving deep you can start to comprehend what you could think they actually are. All astrophysics wows instantly pale in comparison.

For example, the tiny big number like 3^^^^3 has ~around 3^^^^3 digits in basically any reasonable base: base-10, base-16, base-64k, base-1m. You can’t express its length in a regular form. For contrast, the “trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillions” has only 21 digits in base-1m.

Another example is Moser:

N in a triangle is N^N. So e.g. N in two triangles would be (N^N)^(N^N).

N in a square is N in N triangles.

N in a pentagon is N in N squares.

Mega is 2 in a pentagon, i.e. 2 in two squares, or 2 in two triangles and a square, or 256 in a square, or 256 in 256 triangles. Pretty big, huh?

Moser is 2 in a Mega-gon.