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
I recently found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_micronations
"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
Keith Sapsford (14yrs old) died from falling out of a landing wheel compartment of a plane shortly after take off. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel-well_stowaway
It was basically that episode of South Park where Butters becomes a pimp and it almost cost FDR his career.
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.
I mean, sure, Helen Keller accomplished a lot. But crazy to me that no one talks about the deafbling woman who validated tactile signing almost 50 years before her.