A gallery of, well, Alaskan shipwrecks.
(via Information Junk)
Day: July 26, 2006
How Fast Does the Eye Transmit Visual Input?
As fast as an ethernet connection.
(via Robot Wisdom)
The Best: Deadly Poisons, Ingested or Inhaled
From Wired:
It’s hard to rank the lethality of toxins, but experts agree that botulinum – several orders of magnitude deadlier than sarin – is the gold standard. Your nervous system fails and you die in extreme pain. Works miracles on wrinkles, though.
2. Ricin (ingested or inhaled)
Made from the lowly castor bean, ricin causes respiratory and organ failure, followed by death within hours. Even chewing a few beans can kill you.
3. Anthrax (inhaled)
Cutaneous exposure can kill, but the most deadly, panic-inspiring form of anthrax is inhaled. It starts with flu that doesn’t get better – then your respiratory system collapses.
(Thanks Mark)
Grow-a-Brain’s Comment Contest
In celebration of his 5 millionth hit, Hanan from Grow a Brain is giving away $100 to a random commenter if he gets 500 comments to this post.
How Baseball Cards Lost Their Luster
Shit, there goes my retirement money.
First, I got a couple of disconnected numbers for now-defunct card shops. Not a good sign. Then I finally reached a human. “Those cards aren’t worth anything,” he told me, declining to look at them…
Baseball cards peaked in popularity in the early 1990s. They’ve taken a long slide into irrelevance ever since, last year logging less than a quarter of the sales they did in 1991. Baseball card shops, once roughly 10,000 strong in the United States, have dwindled to about 1,700. A lot of dealers who didn’t get out of the game took a beating. “They all put product in their basement and thought it was gonna turn into gold,” Alan Rosen, the dealer with the self-bestowed moniker “Mr. Mint,” told me. Rosen says one dealer he knows recently struggled to unload a cache of 7,000 Mike Mussina rookie cards. He asked for 25 cents apiece.
Star Wars Theme Played on Banjo
This ties in nicely with the Luke and Leia makeout scene.