Full title: This is Ambergris, a rare substance produced as waste by sperm whales around indigestible squid beaks. This strange whale waste can become extremely valuable after aging in the ocean and has historically been used in luxury perfumes as a fragrance fixative.

Full title: John C Woods, hangman of Nuremberg trials, who lied about his experience to get the job (he actually learned about hanging from old cowboy films). His lack of expertise led to excessive suffering of condemned Nazis.

Full title: At their peak, 3–5 billion passenger pigeons filled North America. Flocks were so huge they darkened the sky for hours. Some shooting contests required 30,000 dead birds to win. By 1914, the last one was gone. One of history’s most brutal population collapses.

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encryption/

since the motion of fluids is notoriously hard to compute, this makes for a good source of randomness.

Full title: The Ellora Caves are a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Maharashtra, India, famous for 34 rock-cut cave temples and monasteries carved straight out of solid basalt cliffs between the 6th and 10th centuries CE.