Expensive Accidents in History

An interesting list of the top 10 most expensive accidents in history is featured in Wrecked Exotics. Here is # 10 and #7:

#10 Titanic:



The sinking of the Titanic is possibly the most famous accident in the world. But it barely makes our list of top 10 most expensive. On April 15, 1912, the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage and was considered to be the most luxurious ocean liner ever built. Over 1,500 people lost their lives when the ship ran into an iceberg and sunk in frigid waters. The ship cost $7 million to build ($150 million in today's dollars).

#7 B-2 Bomber Crash:



Here we have our first billion dollar accident (and we're only #7 on the list). This B-2 stealth bomber crashed shortly after taking off from an air base in Guam on February 23, 2008. Investigators blamed distorted data in the flight control computers caused by moisture in the system. This resulted in the aircraft making a sudden nose-up move which made the B-2 stall and crash. This was 1 of only 21 ever built and was the most expensive aviation accident in history. Both pilots were able to eject to safety.

Ahmed, Say Something Funny

While I was surfing through my former university's website, I found the following article that caught my attention:

CSUN Professor’s Documentary on the Life of an American Muslim Comedian to Premier at Film Festival.

(NORTHRIDGE, Calif., July 21, 2008) — The idea for the film, "Ahmed, Say Something Funny," was hatched about six years ago when Cal State Northridge cinema and television arts professor Thelma Vickroy caught a performance of comedian Ahmed Ahmed at the Comedy Store in Hollywood....."I am interested in doing stories about people who are kind of on the outside but trying to make their way and be accepted," Vickroy said. "Ahmed was born in Egypt, but came here when he was only six months old and grew up in Southern California. He’s chosen one of the absolutely hardest careers you could possibly choose—to be a comedian and actor. I couldn’t resist." Vickroy spent the next five years chronicling Ahmed’s career from the stages at the Comedy Store to his international tour as part of the stand-up comedy team known as the "Axis of Evil."

You can read the rest of the article here.

Brain Quirks You Might Not Know About

StepCase Lifehack provided this entertaining list of Nine Brain Quirks You Did Not Realize You Had:

1) Your short-term memory has a max capacity of seven.

Humans have three forms of memory: sensory, long-term and short-term. Long-term memory is like hard-drive space, while short-term memory works like a very small RAM. This short-term memory can hold only about five to nine (average is seven) items at a time.
Remembering information longer than this requires you to either compress it down into seven units or store it in long-term memory. Most phone numbers are only seven digits.

4) You have two nervous systems.

One set controls excitation and the other controls inhibition. If you hold out your hand, you might notice minor tremors. This is caused by slight, random differences in the amount each of the two systems are firing.

7) You can perceive depth with one eye.

It’s a myth that depth perception is entirely the result of having two eyes. Binocular vision does assist in making a three-dimensional picture. However, most of your ability to perceive depth comes from inside your brain. It has been wired to look at angles and proportions to judge distance.

If you required two eyes to perceive depth then most optical illusions wouldn’t work and it would be incredibly difficult to gather information from flat photographs. Not to mention a lot more one-eyed pirates walking overboard.

Human Egg Captured on Camera - Warning: Might be "Ewwy" for Some People

This is absolutely amazing. A human egg captured by accident when Dr. Donnez was preparing to carry out a partial hysterectomy on a 45-year-old woman. It surely gives me a rare glance at one of the stunning functions of the female body.

Look closely: this is history in the making. These are the clearest pictures ever taken of what is the starting point of every human life: ovulation occurring inside a woman's body.

New Scientist

Source: Neatorama.

The Mirror: A Review

Only coincidence led me to read The Mirror by Marlys Millhiser. I randomly picked the book from the library, and it proved to be very good. The story is about a mirror that changes the lives of two women on the eve of their wedding day. When their eyes meet in the mirror in one fateful moment, a grandmother and her granddaughter switch bodies and time periods to start a journey that will change their lives forever. A terrifying truth reveals itself - what was done will never be undone, and it takes the reader on a test of faith and hope for two; a woman too modern and opinionated for her time and a woman too timid for her time.

The novel explores ideas of destiny, morals, faith, and survival. The story may revolve around a paranormal idea, but it has solid events and characters with real depth and emotion. Definitely worth checking.

Unlikely Surrogate Mother

A very unique video taken from the "Eye of the Leopard" documentary. It shows a leopard attacking a baboon mother while it's giving birth. After killing the mother, the leopard finds a baby baboon attached to its mother's body. The most surprising thing happens next.

Must See for all Parents

An great video about teaching your baby how to survive in water.



For more information, check this site here.

Palacio de Cristal

The main park of Madrid, Spain, the Jardines del Buen Retiro or Parque del Buen Retiro (literally "Gardens" or "Park of the Pleasant Retreat"), or simply El Retiro, the Lungs of Madrid is a large and popular 1.4 km² (350 acres) park at the edge of the city center, very close to the Puerta de Alcalá and not far from the Museo del Prado. A magnificent park, filled with beautiful sculpture and monuments, galleries, a peaceful lake and host to a variety of events, it is rightfully one of Madrid's premier attractions. The park is entirely surrounded by the present-day city.

Wikipedia

What I love most about the park is the Palacio de Cristal. It's a glass pavilion modeled in 1887 after the famous Crystal Palace in London, and designed by Ricardo Velázquez Bosco, the same person who designed the nearby Palacio de Velázquez.

Ramon Duran posted two beautiful photos of the Palacio de Cristalon on his Flickr account:






Barrosopal also posted two beautiful photos of the Palacio de Cristalon on his Flickr account:





You can click on each photo to go to its original page on Flickr.

Floating Volcanic Stones

Fredrick and his crew discovered something really interesting: a sea of stones.

You can check the rest of the photos here.

Wedding Interrupted

A unique slide show in the New York Times about the moments that followed China's earthquake when it interrupted a wedding ceremony. You can see the slide show here.

Underwater Graves

A great article in the guardian.co.uk features The Neptune Memorial Reef as a uniques resting spot for people who loved the sea. It is also a heaven for divers:

About 14 metres beneath the ocean's surface lies a cemetery with gates, pathways, plaques and even benches.

The watery grave can host the remains of people who want to be buried underwater:

The ashes are mixed with cement designed for underwater use and fitted into a mould, which a diver then places and secures into the reef. A copper and bronze plaque is installed with the person's name, date of birth and death. There is also a line for a message.

Matthew Hoelscher (tiswango) has a great collection of photos for The Neptune Memorial Reef. You can check his whole collection on Flickr here .

100 Best First Lines From Novels

Also by American Book Review. Here are some:

1. Call me Ishmael. ~ Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. ~ Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

10. I am an invisible man. ~ Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. ~Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. ~ Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)

24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. ~ Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)

28. Mother died today. ~ Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)

32. Where now? Who now? When now? ~ Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)

37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. ~ Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. ~ C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

59. It was love at first sight. ~ Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. ~ L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. ~ Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)

The whole list is here.

For Noodle Lovers

Shinyokohama Raamen Museum is a paradise for noodle lovers, but not just because of the informative exhibits of the history of instant ramen noodles; the centerpiece here is the basement, which contains a recreation of 1950s-era Tokyo done in incredible detail, complete with operating branches of 10 famous ramen joints.

Wikipedia

To read more about it, check this interesting article here.

Photo source: Flickr. Please click on each photo to go to its original page.

100 Best Last Lines From Novels

American Book Review listed the 100 best last lines from novels. Here are some:

6. “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” –Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)

10. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. –Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)

14. Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity! –Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener (1853)

27. Is it possible for anyone in Germany, nowadays, to raise his right hand, for whatever the reason, and not be flooded by the memory of a dream to end all dreams? –Walter Abish, How German Is It? (1980)

37. P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise.–Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America (1967)

41. I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth. –Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)

63. The key to the treasure is the treasure. –John Barth, “Dunyazadiad” from Chimera (1972)

71. So that, in the end, there was no end. –Patrick White, The Tree of Man (1955)

77. “Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.” –Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1936)

100. “GOOD GRIEF—IT’S DADDY!” –Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, Candy (1958)

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits : Review

The novel, written by Laila Lalami, is a bittersweet tale of survival. I had the pleasure of reading the book this week, and it made me love and hate life at the same time. It is the story of four Moroccans who attempt to enter Spain illegally by embarking on a dangerous boat trip. We accompany them through their hellish endeavor just to see how their life changes after that. For some of them, achieving a goal comes with a hefty price: a strip of identity and beliefs, or loss of family and love. They have spent their lives pursuing a dream just to discover that it's a harsh reality. Hope can really be dangerous sometimes.

I recommend this book if you are in for something different, and I am definitely keeping my eyes open for what Lalami has in store for us in the future.

The Lion who Lived Among Humans

Incredible story from the Daily Mail about Christian, the Lion:

The furniture shop was on the King's Road in London. It sold tables, wardrobes, chairs and desks - but anybody peering through its plate-glass window on a Sunday might have noticed something rather more unusual. Amid all the pine and oak, stretched out languidly on a bench, there was a lion. And it wasn't stuffed.

For a year, the Big Cat was part of it all, cruising the streets in the back of a Bentley, popping in for lunch at Casserole, a local restaurant, even posing for a Biba fashion advert.

He eventually grew too big to be kept as a pet and was taken to Kenya, where he was rehabilitated into the wild by the 'Lion Man', George Adamson.

When his two owners visited him years later to say goodbye:

Christian stared at us in a very intense way," says Rendall. "I knew his expressions and I could see he was interested. We called him and he stood up and started to walk towards us very slowly.

"Then, as if he had become convinced it was us, he ran towards us, threw himself on to us, knocked us over, knocked George over and hugged us, like he used to, with his paws on our shoulders.

Check this amazing video of the reunion:

Feeling Reckless? Devil's Pool is this Way..

I might consider doing this if I have wings to fly with...um...in case I fall off the cliff, that is. No.. no need to rub your eyes. What you are seeing is true. These people are splashing in a small pool that hangs on the cliff of the Victoria Falls in Southern Africa, between Zambia and Zimbabwe.

How an Eagle Captures his Food

Amazing video of a golden eagle capturing its prey. What do you think? I am assuming it's real.

The Beautiful Verzasca

I was amazed by the photos I've seen of Verzasca while reading about free diving. This hidden valley in Switzerland is a piece of paradise on earth, and it is definitely going to be on my must-see-places-before-I-die list.

Verzasca Valley is a long narrow valley located in Ticino, the Italian speaking part of Switzerland. This valley offers a wild and fascinating landscape, with the Alps on one side and a lake on the other. The river has an emerald green color, and thanks to its good visibility, it is famous as a river diving destination.

Wikipedia

The photos were taken by Tom Volger. You can check the rest of these wonderful photos from Volger's Flickr account here.

Inside the Space Station

A great documentary from Discovery Channel about the lives of astronauts in the International Space Station and some of NASA's projects to improve space discovery mission . I really enjoyed watching it. You can watch Part#1 here.