Hans Calmeyer was a left-wing German lawyer -- his law license was temporarily suspended when he was accused of being a Communist -- who was inducted into the German army under the Nazis, who put him in charge of an office that determined which Dutch people would be deported to Auschwitz during the Nazi occupation. Read the rest

Efteling is an amazing Dutch theme park about an hour outside of Amsterdam; while it deploys many of the same technologies as Disney-style parks, it has a completely different affect, centered around small, homely, perfect little jewel-box rides that bring fairy tales to life. Read the rest

The British empire was a globe-spanning criminal enterprise that produced vast riches for England (and, to a lesser extent, Scotland and Wales) by stealing the lands of others while slaughtering and enslaving them; today the empire is in decline and the UK is no longer reliant on direct looting. Read the rest

Gumshoe sneakers are made with rubber derived in part from gum chewed by residents of Amsterdam, made jointly with Gumdrop, whose gum recycling bins are used to collect feedstock for processes that create plastics and rubbers. Read the rest

Address space layout randomization is an important first line of defense against malicious software: by randomizing where in memory instructions are stored, ASLR makes it much harder to overwrite memory with new code that will be jumped to as a program executes, offering significant protection against buffer overflow attacks. Read the rest