The Random 411 thread

[veefer800canuck]

OK, post up something random, possibly obscure. Simply find some 411 that is random and put it here. That is all.

I will begin:

http://www.airdisaster.com/reports/ntsb/AAR78-06.pdf

Snippet:

A t 1845:12 N55VM advised Houston, "Center, five v i c t o r Mike
we're out of fuel." The center replied, "Roger, understand you'rs out
of fuel?" N55W r e p l i e d , "I am sorry, it's j u s t an indication @f it."

[Mr.Black]

During World War II, with German submarines torpedoing ships off Cape May, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in a wartime emergency act, sliced across the peninsula from the Coast Guard base to Delaware Bay, digging a three-mile canal to protect U.S. military maneuvers.

Rebuilding a beach.

[veefer800canuck]

@ Frenchie: No link to peruse?  


http://www.damninteresting.com/lake-peigneur-the-swirling-vortex-of-doom

Early in the morning on November 21, 1980, twelve men decided to abandon their oil drilling rig on the suspicion that it was beginning to collapse beneath them. They had been probing for oil under the floor of Lake Peigneur when their drill suddenly seized up at about 1,230 feet below the muddy surface, and they were unable free it. In their attempts to work the drill loose, which is normally fairly easy at that shallow depth, the men heard a series of loud pops, just before the rig tilted precariously towards the water.

[Mr.Black]

No link to peruse?  

http://www.damninteresting.com/lake-peigneur-the-swirling-vortex-of-doom#more-6

Self serving French bastards.

[veefer800canuck]

Self serving French bastards.

 Posting. You're doing it wrong.

http://www.damninteresting.com/ive-got-the-same-combination-on-my-luggage

America’s gaggle of “Minuteman” long-range nuclear missiles went on line for the first time during the Cuban missile crisis in 1960 1962. But the world was supposedly protected from mutual assured destruction by the “Permissive Action Links” (PALs) which required an 8-digit combination in order to launch. Robert McNamara, then the U.S. Secretary of Defense, personally oversaw the installation of these special locks to prevent any unauthorized nuclear missile launches. He considered the safeguards to be essential for strict central control and for preventing nuclear disaster.

[squeezer]

Thing found in people's butts.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/478/is-it-true-what-they-say-about-gerbils

[MrsCablebandit]

Each year approximately 4.5 million pounds of milk pass through the Creamery's stainless steel holding tanks. About half comes from a 225-cow herd at the University's Dairy Production Research Center.

http://creamery.psu.edu/

Anyone coming up for the Burger Run weekend at the end of the month...it's worth a stop!

[squeezer]

http://creamery.psu.edu/

Anyone coming up for the Burger Run weekend at the end of the month...it's worth a stop!

Mmmmm... The Creamery...

[SuperHans]

The state of Wisconsin rates #1 for binge drinking and has three times more taverns than most other states in the country.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/30903834.html

http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/31237904.html

[veefer800canuck]

Astronaut pee?

The beautiful trail in the sky looked like a mysterious celestial event. In reality, it was urine.

Some skygazers were treated to the unexpected view of a bright sparkling glow Wednesday night, created when astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery dumped the waste out into space.

The water dump was a scheduled task for STS-128 pilot Kevin Ford, who poured out urine and waste water stored aboard the shuttle in preparation for a landing attempt Thursday. Weather thwarted that try, but astronauts plan another landing attempt Friday at 5:48 p.m. EDT (2148 GMT) in Florida, though rain and high winds are expected again.
 
The light show Wednesday was aided by an unusually large amount of water being dumped all at once - about 150 pounds (68 kg), said NASA spokeswoman Kylie Clem. Discovery had just undocked from the International Space Station the day before, and had not been able to unload waste water during the 10-day visit.

"It would have been a large quantity because we don?t do water dumps while docked to the station now," Clem told SPACE.com in an e-mail. "That is a fairly new restriction over the last couple of flights in order to prevent potential contamination of the Kibo module."

The Kibo module is a new Japanese-built research lab on the space station that includes an external platform to expose science experiments to the space environment. Water dumps from a docked shuttle could potentially pollute the experiments.

In general, though, spotting space water dumps from Earth is common, Clem said.

Waste water usually freezes upon jettison into a cloud of tiny ice droplets. Then when the sun hits, the ice sublimates directly into water vapor and disperses in space.

A number of people in North America apparently spotted Wednesday's dump, and some sent pictures to the Web site SpaceWeather.com.

One of them, Abe Megahed, photographed the tail at 9:40 p.m. EDT (0140 GMT) Wednesday from Madison, Wisconsin.

"I just watched the shuttle and station flyover (8:40 PM CST 9/9/09) and was surprised to see that the shuttle was sporting a massive curved plume," he wrote. "What could it be? Something venting? An OMS burn? RCS thrusters? A massive, record breaking urine dump?"

It turns out he wasn't wrong about that last one.

[veefer800canuck]

Oldest operating lightbulb still on after 110 years:

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/good-news/world-oldest-light-bulb-still-burning-bright-110-174107117.html

[veefer800canuck]

According to the account given by the crew of the Dei Gratia, they approached to 400 yards from the Mary Celeste and cautiously observed her for two hours. She was under sail, yet sailing erratically on a starboard tack, and slowly heading toward the Strait of Gibraltar. They concluded she was drifting after seeing no one at the helm or even on deck, though the ship was flying no distress signal.

Oliver Deveau, chief mate of the Dei Gratia, boarded the Mary Celeste. He reported he did not find anyone on board, and said that "the whole ship was a thoroughly wet mess". There was only one operational pump, two apparently having been disassembled, with a lot of water between decks and three and a half feet (1.1 m) of water in the hold. However, the ship was not sinking and was still seaworthy.

http://www.maryceleste.net/part2.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Celeste

[satxbonneville]

This aerial photograph shows the remains of a Nike missile battery in Hampton, VA. It's a couple of miles from Langley, AFB and just about 1/2 mile from where I attended grades 7-9 (69-72). The school is in the lower right portion of the picture and is easy to pick out because of the track/football field. The missile site is about 1/3 of the way down from the top on the left hand side of the picture - there is what looks like an open parenthesis about 1 inch in the the edge of the picture (it's kinda faint) which is pretty much all that remains of the site and is the berm around the assembly and service area. Back then the area around the battery was all woods and farmers fields and the road that runs E-W through the middle of the picture stopped at the school yard.

http://msrmaps.com/image.aspx?S=10&T=1&X=1883&Y=20507&Z=18&W=2

Here is a list, with GPS coordinates of all of the Nike missile battery sites in the US. How close were you and never knew?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nike_missile_locations

[mxvet57]

The state of Wisconsin rates #1 for binge drinking and has three times more taverns than most other states in the country.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/30903834.html

http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/31237904.html

No new news here.

All the Harley's need a place to park.

[veefer800canuck]

No new news here.

All the Harley's need a place to park.

 

No random 411, no link. Fail.

Just outside Butte, Montana lies a pit of greenish poison a mile and a half wide and over a third of a mile deep. It hasn’t always been so – it was once a thriving copper mine appropriately dubbed “The Richest Hill in the World.” Over a billion tons of copper ore, silver, gold, and other metals were extracted from the rock of southwestern Montana, making the mining town of Butte one of the richest communities in the country, as well as feeding America’s industrial might for nearly a hundred years.

By 1983, the hill was so exhausted that the Anaconda Mining Company was no longer able to extract minerals in profitable amounts. They packed up all the equipment that they could move, shut down the water pumps, and moved on to more lucrative scraps of Earth. Without the pumps, rain and groundwater gradually began to collect in the pit, leaching out the metals and minerals in the surrounding rock. The water became as acidic as lemon juice, creating a toxic brew of heavy metal poisons including arsenic, lead, and zinc. No fish live there, and no plants line the shores. There aren’t even any insects buzzing about. The Berkeley Pit had become one of the deadliest places on earth, too toxic even for microorganisms. Or so it was thought.

http://www.damninteresting.com/the-pit-of-life-and-death/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Pit

[KenH]

I grew up riding minibikes and shooting critters all around this Nike site. Often stopped the security folks, who were always friendly. There were no houses nearby back then.

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=25.961667,-80.303333&spn=0.01,0.01&t=m&q=25.961667,-80.303333

[miles]

The dog is so wild, he won't let anyone pet him. He looks incredibly mangy, with fur all matted and hanging down, and only a snout sticking out. The miners believe all that insulation helps, especially during the brutal winters, and anyway, they can't get close long enough to trim the fur. One miner has earned enough trust that he was able to shear the dog's bangs, to help it see. The miners say, if you have the chance to take a close look, the dog has beautiful eyes.

http://www.hcn.org/issues/240/13599


Sadly, The Auditor died in 2003.  http://mtstandard.com/news/local/article_86f76236-a1cb-5dc2-8354-6409416f6f62.html

[veefer800canuck]

Prometheus, worlds oldest living non-clonal organism, cut down:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_%28tree%29

[veefer800canuck]

 

Auburn Calloway, a FedEx employee facing possible dismissal for lying about his previous flying experience, boarded the scheduled flight as a deadheading passenger with a guitar case carrying several hammers and a speargun. He intended to disable the aircraft's cockpit voice recorder before take-off and, once airborne, kill the crew using the blunt force of the hammers so their injuries would appear consistent with an accident rather than a hijacking. The speargun would be a last resort. He would then crash the aircraft while just appearing to be an employee killed in an accident. This would make his family eligible for a $2.5 million life insurance policy paid by Federal Express.

http://www.damninteresting.com/aches-on-a-plane/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Express_Flight_705

[stew71]

"World’s hottest pepper is ‘hot enough to strip paint"

Yes, the Naga Viper, the latest claimant to the world's-hottest-pepper crown, outdistances its predecessor, the Bhut Jolokia, or  "ghost chili," by more than 300,000 points on the famous Scoville scale of tongue-scorching chili hotness. Researchers at Warwick University testing the Naga Viper found that it measures 1,359,000 on the Scoville scale, which rates heat by tracking the presence of a chemical compound. In comparison, most varieties of jalapeño peppers measure in the 2,500 to 5,000 range -- milder than the Naga Viper by a factor of 270.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/world-hottest-pepper-hot-enough-strip-paint.html