- Wikipedia: Avondale Mine Disaster
One hundred and ten workers died in this Pennsylvania mine fire in 1869. The mine owner wouldn't allow but one tunnel to be constructed, so when the fire started, anybody below that point in the mine was trapped and suffocated. The result was that the Pennsylvania General Assembly created the nation's first safety standards for coal mining.
- Benjamin J. Balter: Analysis of Federal Executive .Govs
This grad student had the clever idea to take the OMB's list of all federal domain names and inventory them automatically. He cataloged whether the domain works, if it's running a web server, if they use a CDN, what CMS they use, and a few other bits of information. Interestingly, 29% of domains don't respond, only nine support IPv6, 13 are cloud-based, and Drupal is the most common CMS. Great stuff.
- Wikipedia: Tsar Bomba
The most powerful explosion ever created by man was "Tsar Bomba," the hydrogen bomb tested in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, in the Arctic Sea, north of Russia. The Soviet Union created this 100 megaton bomb, but realized that it would be so powerful as to be completely impractical, and cut it down to 50 megatons. The 1961 explosion was ten times more powerful than all explosives used in the whole of WWII. The heat would have caused third-degree burns in somebody 60 miles away from ground zero, and caused damage 600 miles away.
Published by Waldo Jaquith
Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Charlottesville, VA, USA. more »
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