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The Very Best of Wikipedia

These are some of my favorite readings from the great bookshelf of Wikipedia. Organized for your pleasure by topic.

Oh, the curiosities of life!

• Rotating Locomotion In Living Systems Ever wonder why wheels aren't really a thing in the natural world?
• "Hell Worms" The deepest dwelling multicellular organism known to science.
• "Audax Viator" The deepest dwelling *unicellular* organism known to science.
• Abyssal Gigantism The peculiar habit of deep sea organisms to get much larger than their surface dwelling relatives.

Mysteries from our deep past, long buried in rock.

• Vaalbara Potentially the oldest of the continents!
• The Boring Billion Despite the name, the article's a good read; Earth's "Middle Ages" where nothing really happened.
• Francevillian Biota Possibly the oldest examples of multicellular life, over a billion years before the Cambrian.
• Ediacaran Biota A much better documented crop of Pre-Cambrian life-forms with an ambiguous spot on the Tree of Life.

An esteemed favorite of mine amongst the continents. The cold enigma at the end of the world.

• Lake Vostok A 160-mile long lake completely under the ice.
• The McMurdo Dry Valleys Antartica is well known for the ice and snow, but the places without are even more brutal.
• The Antartic Midge Antartica's largest fully terrestrial animal! Hold your applause.
• Air New Zealand Flight 901 The most horrendously large loss of human life on the Antartic continent to date.

Math can get WEIRD sometimes. Here are some of my favorite "wormholes" to get lost down!

• One Billion Check out the sense of scale section!
• Belphegor's Prime A palindromic, demonic prime number.
• Flatland A social commentary novel now famous for its exploration of the second, first, and zeroth dimensions.
• The Planiverse A much more scientific exploration into two dimensional life.
• Sphere-World Thought Experiment A peculiar world where everything seems normal.

Unexplained phenomena and lost inventions all you "believers" out there.

• Ball Lightning A little studied collection of explosive meteorological phenomena.
• The Bath County Meat Shower Cloudy with a chance of... meat.
• Star Jelly A peculiar meteorological phenomenon. Reminds me of Dr. Seuss' Bartholomew and the Oobleck.

Articles about our Solar System and the wild universe beyond.

• Small Solar System Bodies There's a lot more than Pluto.
• The Great Attractor A strange well of gravity out in the middle of nowhere.

Trust me! This is the very best section to lose yourself in.

• List of Common Misconceptions This is my favorite of the lists. It reminds me of those random trivia books I would read as a child.
• List of Logical Fallacies For when you want to be THAT person next time you get into an argument with your friends.
• Timeline of the Far Future It's all downhill from here.
• List of Unsolved Problems in Physics A great place to learn just how much we don't know.
• List of Works Inspired by Dreams Maybe you'll be on this one some day!
• List of Lists of Lists This one REALLY makes you feel like you've a whole library at your fingertips.

A bit of a loose ends section, for fun articles about Wikipedia itself.

• Getting to Philosophy A fun quirk in the nature of Wikipedia rabbit-holes.
• The Wikipedia Game For competitive rabbit-hole dives.
• The Official "Silly Things" Wikipedia Page A collection of goofs and gags throughout the annals of Wikihistory.
• The Front Page of Wikipedia Surprised? When's the last time YOU visited the front page?