Before large capacity hard drives became relatively cheap and easy to obtain, lots of government agencies, corporations, and regular folks put important archival data onto CDs, thinking they would be safe forever because they were digital.
Oops.
Turns out CDs don’t hold their data in perpetuity. Worse, there’s no real way to predict how long it will take an individual CD to break down. CDs of the same age, and kept in the same conditions, can deteriorate at different rates depending on where and how they were manufactured.
Might be a good time to put all those old baby pics and videos on a hard drive and stash it in a safe somewhere. And back it up someplace else for good measure.
How Long Do CDs Last? It Depends, But Definitely Not Forever
OK, this is just crazy. Apparently before there were public water systems, people in Europe often put eels into their community water wells to keep them clean. The eels ate all the nasty stuff that accumulated in the wells1. You can watch the video in the linked story to get an idea how it worked.
Anyway…one eel spent 155 years in a Swedish village’s water well until it recently died. One hundred and fifty-five years.
OK, first it’s just weird that people put eels into their water systems. And then it’s kind of batshit crazy that one eel had been swimming around since 1859. Apparently the same village has a 110-year-old eel as well.
Honestly, I was disappointed the guy was so small when he appears in the video. I was expecting some big, nasty thing that would give me nightmares for weeks.
Remind me to never drink the water if I visit Sweden and go outside Stockholm.
World’s oldest eel dies at 155 in Swedish well
The winter of 2013-14 keeps getting worse. There could be a Nutella shortage, or at least a big price spike, in the near future because of a late freeze in Turkey last spring that wiped out a significant portion of its hazelnut crop. I’m not sure our girls can survive without Nutella if we have to stop buying it for awhile.
Nutella shortage possible after hazelnut crop wiped out
More song of the summer stuff. Clearly I’m not the only one that’s kind of obsessed with the concept.
Perhaps that’s why certain summer songs make themselves known as such only years later, presenting themselves as personal songs of the season when we are looking through photographs and postcards, and not lists or charts. These songs that become a personal or collective soundtrack allow for summer’s wide-open potential to unfold into the air all around us; only after time has passed do they fall into patterns on a crinkled-up map of where we once were.
Finally, for years there have been complaints about how long the last couple minutes of basketball games get stretched out. It’s not uncommon for two minutes of game time to take 20-30 minutes of real time because of fouls, timeouts, free throws, substitutions, and other clock stoppages. Where once you could be confident that allotting no more than 150 minutes of your VCR/DVR to a game would capture it all, today you pretty much have to set it to record for three hours to make sure you don’t miss the final ticks.
There are always half-assed suggestions on how to fix the problem. But nothing has been changed and none of these off-the-cuff ideas would do much to solve the issue.
Here, though, is a revolutionary idea on how to change the game: get rid of the clock at the end of the game. Basically, and this is a long-winded article that takes forever to get to the point, at the 4:00 mark of the second half, the clock would be turned off and the teams would play until one or the other reached the current leader’s score, plus seven points.
It’s kind of mind blowing.
A New Beginning For Basketball’s End
- Think about that. People were worried about drinking algae and other plant matter, bugs, small animals. But were cool drinking the piss and shit the eels produced after consuming all these goodies. ↩