Japanese Neon Fight
14 Jul
Archive | Interesting RSS feed for this section
Bizarre Creature Part 1: Platypus
3 Jul
The bizarre appearance of this egg-laying, venomous, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed mammal baffled European naturalists when they first encountered it, with some considering it an elaborate fraud. It is one of the few venomous mammals; the male Platypus has a spur on the hind foot that delivers a venom capable of causing severe pain to humans.
What to do in quarantine
27 Feb
“Not long ago I was diagnosed with a rare strain of Tuberculosis and I’ve been stuck in a hospital quarantine room in Sydney for a total of about 60 days, with at least another 30 to go, while I am being treated and stuff… To help kill the time and take my mind off the treatment, I have been making some vids from hospital. Here is a rap song that I made about my time here in quarantine so far.”
Placebo Buttons
10 Feb
The advent of computer-controlled traffic signals make the walk buttons at pedestrian crossings on heavily trafficked streets obsolete. By the late 1980s, most (but not all) walk buttons in New York City have been deactivated yet people push them anyhow, either in ignorance, out of habit, or in the off chance the buttons did work.
Many large office buildings also have dummy thermostats to give office workers the illusion of control. Some even go as far as installing white-noise generators to mimic the hum of fans after the HVAC system is shut off.
The same goes for the close button in elevators. Most elevators built or installed since the early 1990s don’t have close buttons that work, unless you have a fireman’s key. People do push them anyhow, because the fact that the door eventually closes reinforces their belief that the button works.
Survival Tip #1: How to Survive a 35,000 ft fall
2 Feb
120-mph, 35,000-ft, 3-minutes-to-impact survival guide
- 35,000 ft: Oxygen is scarce at these heights. By now, hypoxia is starting to set in. You’ll be unconscious soon, and you’ll cannonball at least a mile before waking up again.
- 22,000 ft: You awaken, now aim. Glass hurts, but it gives. So does grass. Haystacks and bushes have cushioned surprised-to-be-alive free-fallers. Trees aren’t bad, though they tend to skewer. Snow? Absolutely. Swamps? With their mucky, plant-covered surface, even more awesome. Hamilton documents one case of a sky diver who, upon total parachute failure, was saved by bouncing off high-tension wires. Contrary to popular belief, water is an awful choice. Aim for something soft.
- 1,000 ft.: There’s nothing else to do, just relax and try to land feet first. Statistically speaking, it’s best to be a flight crew member, a child, or traveling in a military aircraft. Over the past four decades, there have been at least a dozen commercial airline crashes with just one survivor. Of those documented, four of the survivors were crew, like the flight attendant Vulovic, and seven were passengers under the age of 18. That includes Mohammed el-Fateh Osman, a 2-year-old wreckage rider who lived through the crash of a Boeing jet in Sudan in 2003, and, more recently, 14-year-old Bahia Bakari, the sole survivor of last June’s Yemenia Airways plunge off the Comoros Islands.
- 0 ft: Now that you’ve survived…find someone. Don’t stay near the crash, follow the example of Juliane Koepcke. On Christmas Eve 1971, the Lockheed Electra she was traveling in exploded over the Amazon. The next morning, the 17-year-old German awoke on the jungle floor. She remembered “to find civilization when lost in the jungle, follow water”. She passed crocodiles and poked the mud in front of her with a stick to scare away stingrays. She had lost one shoe in the fall and was wearing a ripped miniskirt. Her only food was a bag of candy, and she had nothing but dark, dirty water to drink. She ignored her broken collarbone and her wounds, infested with maggots. On the tenth day, she rested on the bank of the Shebonya River, the next day, a group of lumberjacks found her. The incident was seen as a miracle in Peru.
