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๐ White House Reconstruction
The White House Reconstruction, also known as the Truman Reconstruction, was a comprehensive dismantling and rebuilding of the interior of the White House from 1949 to 1952. A century and a half of wartime destruction and rebuilding, hurried renovations, additions of new services, technologies, the added third floor and inadequate foundations brought the Executive Residence portion of the White House Complex to near-imminent collapse.
In 1948, architectural and engineering investigations deemed it unsafe for occupancy. President Harry S. Truman, his family, and the entire residence staff were relocated across the street to Blair House. For over three years, the White House was gutted, expanded, and rebuilt.
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- "White House Reconstruction" | 2024-12-10 | 24 Upvotes 7 Comments
๐ Wikipedia: List of Citogenesis Incidents
In 2011, Randall Munroe in his comic xkcd coined the term "citogenesis" to describe the creation of "reliable" sources through circular reporting. This is a list of some well-documented cases where Wikipedia has been the source.
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- "Wikipedia: List of Citogenesis Incidents" | 2023-04-12 | 169 Upvotes 92 Comments
๐ Potoooooooo
Potoooooooo or variations of Pot-8-Os (1773 โ November 1800) was an 18th-century thoroughbred racehorse who won over 30 races and defeated some of the greatest racehorses of the time. He went on to be a sire. He is now best known for the unusual spelling of his name, pronounced 'Potatoes'.
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- "Potoooooooo" | 2025-01-16 | 104 Upvotes 42 Comments
- "Potoooooooo" | 2021-07-28 | 128 Upvotes 32 Comments
๐ Why Wikipedia cannot claim the earth is not flat
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- "Why Wikipedia cannot claim the Earth is not flat" | 2025-10-12 | 140 Upvotes 129 Comments
- "Why Wikipedia cannot claim the Earth is not flat" | 2022-08-25 | 21 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Why Wikipedia cannot claim the earth is not flat" | 2017-11-20 | 212 Upvotes 121 Comments
๐ United States military and prostitution in South Korea
During and following the Korean War, the United States military used regulated prostitution services in South Korean military camptowns. Despite prostitution being illegal since 1948, women in South Korea were the fundamental source of sex services for the U.S. military as well as a component of American and Korean relations. The women in South Korea who served as prostitutes are known as kijichon (๊ธฐ์ง์ด) women, also called as "Korean Military Comfort Women", and were visited by the U.S. military, Korean soldiers and Korean civilians. Kijich'on women were from Korea, Philippines, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Indonesia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, specifically Russia and Kazakhstan.
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- "United States military and prostitution in South Korea" | 2021-01-19 | 76 Upvotes 28 Comments
๐ World's Littlest Skyscraper
The NewbyโMcMahon Building, commonly referred to as the world's littlest skyscraper, is located at 701 La Salle (on the corner of Seventh and La Salle streets) in downtown Wichita Falls, Texas. It is a late Neoclassical style red brick and cast stone structure. It stands 40ย ft (12ย m) tall, and its exterior dimensions are 18ย ft (5.5ย m) deep and 10ย ft (3.0ย m) wide. Its interior dimensions are approximately 12ย ft (3.7ย m) by 9ย ft (2.7ย m), or approximately 108ย sqย ft (10.0ย m2). Steep, narrow, internal stairways leading to the upper floors occupy roughly 25 percent of the interior area.
Reportedly the result of a fraudulent investment scheme by a confidence man, the NewbyโMcMahon Building was a source of great embarrassment to the city and its residents after its completion in 1919. During the 1920s, the NewbyโMcMahon Building was featured in Robert Ripley's Ripley's Believe It or Not! syndicated column as "the world's littlest skyscraper," a nickname that has stuck with it ever since. The NewbyโMcMahon Building is now part of the Depot Square Historic District of Wichita Falls, a Texas Historic Landmark.
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- "World's Littlest Skyscraper" | 2021-03-13 | 131 Upvotes 49 Comments
๐ Gรถdel's Loophole
Gรถdel's Loophole is a "inner contradiction" in the Constitution of the United States which Austrian-German-American logician, mathematician, and analytic philosopher Kurt Gรถdel claimed to have discovered in 1947. The flaw would have allowed the American democracy to be legally turned into a dictatorship. Gรถdel told his friend Oskar Morgenstern about the existence of the flaw and Morgenstern told Albert Einstein about it at the time, but Morgenstern, in his recollection of the incident in 1971, never mentioned the exact problem as Gรถdel saw it. This has led to speculation about the precise nature of what has come to be called "Gรถdel's Loophole". It has been called "one of the great unsolved problems of constitutional law."
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- "Gรถdel's Loophole" | 2025-08-06 | 21 Upvotes 11 Comments
- "Gรถdel's Loophole" | 2023-07-24 | 21 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "Gรถdel's Loophole" | 2023-04-05 | 12 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "Gรถdel's Loophole" | 2023-01-20 | 10 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Gรถdel's Loophole" | 2021-03-25 | 131 Upvotes 130 Comments
๐ IBM Simon
The IBM Simon Personal Communicator (simply known as IBM Simon) is a handheld, touchscreen PDA designed by International Business Machines (IBM), and manufactured by Mitsubishi Electric. BellSouth Cellular Corp. distributed the Simon Personal Communicator in the United States between August 1994 and February 1995, selling 50,000 units. The Simon Personal Communicator was the first personal digital assistant or PDA to include telephony features. The battery lasted only an hour, and flip phones became increasingly slim which led to its demise.
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- "IBM Simon" | 2022-02-03 | 47 Upvotes 17 Comments
- "IBM Simon" | 2014-08-12 | 43 Upvotes 4 Comments
๐ Laudatio Turiae
Laudatio Turiae ("In praise of Turia") is a tombstone engraved with a carved epitaph that is a husband's eulogy of his wife. It was made in the late 1st century BC. It portrays the love of a husband for his loyal wife.
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- "Laudatio Turiae" | 2024-05-06 | 103 Upvotes 8 Comments
๐ Happy Petrov day
Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov (Russian: ะกัะฐะฝะธัะปะฐฬะฒ ะะฒะณัะฐฬัะพะฒะธั ะะตััะพฬะฒ; 7 September 1939 โ 19 May 2017) was a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces who played a key role in the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident. On 26 September 1983, three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm, and his decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol, is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that could have resulted in large-scale nuclear war. Investigation later confirmed that the Soviet satellite warning system had indeed malfunctioned.
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- "It's Stanislav Petrov day โ40yrs ago he saved world by suppressing a tech glitch" | 2023-09-26 | 129 Upvotes 7 Comments
- "Happy Petrov day" | 2013-09-26 | 138 Upvotes 30 Comments