A cabinet of lovable weirdos
Tiny true stories,
lovingly odd.
Weird science, forgotten history, and human quirks — each one true, each under a minute, each a little stranger than you’d expect.
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Santorio Santorio
The Chair That Would Not Let Him Eat
What does a Renaissance physician discover when he rigs his dining chair to yank the table away the moment he has eaten his ration?
He weighed his food, his sleep, his feces, and, by his own accounting, his sex life. For thirty years he sat in a chair that took his dinner away. Santorio Santorio, founder of quantitative physiology, discovered that we are all quietly evaporating.
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The Wrapping
The man whose equations run every JPEG, MP3, and MRI scan came back from Egypt convinced heat was the secret to staying alive — and wore several overcoats indoors, in summer, until it killed him.
The Servant of Jesus
In 1602 the Jesuits sent a former soldier to walk from India to China in disguise to settle a geography argument — what could possibly go wrong?
The Man Who Was Seventy-Five People
He cast a horoscope for a man who didn't exist and determined he'd been born nine and a half hours before his own conception.
