Great Moments in Science

In 1994, 17-year-old Boy Scout David Hahn decided to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his backyard shed in Michigan. He gathered radioactive material from smoke detectors, camping lanterns, clocks and gunsights, hoping to transform them into fissionable isotopes in a hollowed-out block of lead.

He should have stuck to homework. The experiment started to emit toxic levels of radiation, and he was trying to dismantle it when the police found him and brought in the FBI and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. To his mother’s dismay, her property was declared a Superfund hazardous materials cleanup site, and the shed was moved to Utah and buried as low-level radioactive waste.

On the bright side, Hahn made Eagle Scout.

| Science & Math

Moonlighting

It’s already shaping up to be an eventful election year. Among the candidates for governor of Minnesota is Jonathon “The Impaler” Sharkey, a self-proclaimed vampire and satanist.

If elected, Sharkey promises to impale terrorists and pedophiles on the grounds of the state capitol. His Vampires, Witches, and Pagans Party is officially recognized by the United States Federal Election Committee, and he announced his candidacy on Friday, Jan. 13.

His campaign slogan is “A New Deal for Minnesota.”

| Oddities · Society

Creative Uses of Company Time

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Rail_UFO.png

Charles Osmond Frederick was a mild-mannered British engineer at the British Railway Technical Centre in Derby in the 1970s.

Or so everyone thought. Earlier this year, patent researchers discovered that in 1973 Frederick had designed a nuclear-powered space vehicle for intergalactic travel, and even got the British Railways Board to patent it. Apparently no one was paying attention.

When the plans resurfaced, a group of nuclear scientists examined them and declared them to be unworkable; Michel van Baal of the European Space Agency said, “I have had a look at the plans, and they don’t look very serious to me at all.”

But if you like, you can try them out yourself — the patent lapsed when the Railways Board neglected to renew it.

| Oddities · Technology

Medic!

What do these writers have in common?

  • Ernest Hemingway
  • John Dos Passos
  • e.e. cummings
  • Somerset Maugham
  • John Masefield
  • Malcolm Cowley
  • Sidney Howard
  • Robert Service
  • Louis Bromfield
  • Harry Crosby
  • Julian Green
  • Dashiell Hammett
  • William Seabrook
  • Robert Hillyer
  • John Howard Lawson
  • William Slater Brown
  • Charles Nordhoff
  • Sir Hugh Walpole
  • Desmond MacCarthy
  • Russell Davenport
  • Edward Weeks
  • C. Leroy Baldridge
  • Samuel Chamberlain

All drove ambulances during World War I.

| History · Literature · Trivia

Anthropodermic Bibliopegy

The Langdell Law Library at Harvard University contains a book bound in human skin. Practicarum Quaestionum Circa Leges Regias Hispaniae, a treaty of Spanish law, contains this inscription on the last page:

The bynding of this booke is all that remains of my deare friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632. King btesa did give me the book, it being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it. Requiescat in pace.

The Wavuma were an African tribe in what is now Zimbabwe.

| Oddities

Hope Springs Eternal

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22Eagle%22.crashed3.png

Too much optimism is a bad thing. In 1897, Swedish engineer S.A. Andrée planned to reach the North Pole in a leaky and untested balloon, steering only by dragging ropes. He and two companions lifted off from Svalbard in July, drifted north and disappeared for 33 years.

It wasn’t until 1930 that their last camp was discovered — they had crashed after only two days and spent three freezing months trying to walk home.

“Morale remains good,” Andrée had written before his diary became incoherent. “With such comrades as these, one ought to be able to manage under practically any circumstances whatsoever.”

| History · Oddities · Technology