Friday Links (Wikipedia Edition)

A special edition today — some of my favourite entries from the now-defunct Best of Wikipedia Tumblr

• Metro-2, a rumoured secret metro network alleged to have been built by Stalin in Moscow to run in parallel with the standard metro network but only for top-level party officials.
• Sweater curse: “Knitters use the term “sweater curse” or “curse of the love sweater” to describe a situation in which a knitter gives a hand-knit sweater to a significant other, who quickly breaks up with the knitter.”
• Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language, a [probably] unique case where a community had a sign language that was used by both deaf AND hearing people, including by hearing people when talking between themselves without deaf people present.
• Rosenhan experiment: “The first part involved the use of healthy associates or “pseudopatients” (three women and five men) who briefly simulated auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12 different psychiatric hospitals in five different states in various locations in the United States. All were admitted and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. After admission, the pseudopatients acted normally and told staff that they felt fine and had not experienced any more hallucinations. Hospital staff failed to detect a single pseudopatient, and instead believed that all of the pseudopatients exhibited symptoms of ongoing mental illness. Several were confined for months. All were forced to admit to having a mental illness and agree to take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release.”
• Dancing Plague of 1518, where hundreds of people in Strasbourg were afflicted with some sort of mass hysteria where they danced themselves non-stop for about a month — in many cases to death.
• Tanganyika laughter epidemic, a similar case in 1962 in Tanzania where over the course of a few months there were outbursts of unstoppable mass laughter for up to 16 days. Fortunately it appears there were no deaths.
• Schmidt Sting Pain Index, a pain scale for bee stings. It is the descriptions that make it so interesting. 1.0 is “Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.” 2.0 is “Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.” 4.0 is “Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.”
• The Tree of Ténéré, the world’s most solitary tree. It stood in Niger in the Sahara and was famous for being the sole landmark for over 400km until a Lybian drunk driver ran it over in 1973.
• Henry “Box” Brown, “a 19th century Virginia slave who escaped to freedom by arranging to have himself mailed to Philadelphia abolitionists in a wooden crate”.