Barry Shell, 45, of Brampton, Ontario, walked into a Petro-Canada station in his hometown to buy a pack of cigarettes with less than $5 in his pocket—and what proved to be the winning lottery ticket for a July 2009 Ontario Lottery drawing, worth over $4 million Canadian. Overjoyed, Shell signed his winning ticket and drove to the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. headquarters in Toronto the next day to validate his ticket and claim his prize.
Unfortunately for him, the authentication the Ontario Lottery runs on its large prize winners includes a police background check, which revealed a 2003 warrant for Shell’s arrest for his failure to appear on charges of theft and possession of stolen property.
What if, instead of buying an Apple computer or iPhone back when they were released, you used the money to buy Apple stock? How would you have made out?
Kyle Conroy, a student at UC Berkeley was wondering just that and figured out just how tech stocks and tech gadgets compare as investments. If you had bought an Apple Power Book G3 250, it was originally priced at $5,700. And today in stock value, that would actually be $330,000.
via
On 28 December 1963, Randy Gardner, a 17-year-old schoolboy in San Diego, California, got up at 6 am feeling wide awake and raring to go. He didn’t go back to sleep again until the morning of 8 January 1964. That’s 11 days without sleep.
Gardner’s 264 hours remains the longest scientifically verified period without sleep, breaking the previous record of 260 hours. It was described in a 1965 paper by sleep researcher William Dement of the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, who stayed awake with Gardner for the final three days. Gardner experienced mood swings, memory and attention lapses, loss of coordination, slurred speech and hallucinations, but was otherwise fine. His first sleep after those 11 days lasted just 14 hours.
The 90’s were a golden age of cartoons. We had a blast putting together the 20 best, and we’re sure this list will inspire some discussion. Our only criteria was that the cartoon had to start in the 90’s.
20. Darkwing Duck
19. Doug
18. Talespin
17. Rocko’s Modern Life
16. Pinky and The Brain
15. The Critic
14. Tiny Toon Adventures
13. Bobby’s World
12. Animaniacs
11. King of the Hill
10. Space Ghost Coast to Coast
9. The Tick
8. Ren and Stimpy
7. Spongebob Squarepants
6. Daria
5. Family Guy
4. Futurama
3. Beavis and Butt-head
2. South Park
1. The Simpsons
All you need is a wormhole, the Large Hadron Collider and a rocket that goes really, really fast. Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank. But these days I’m not so cautious. In fact, I’m more like the people who built Stonehenge. I’m obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I’d visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens. Perhaps I’d even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.
To see how this might be possible, we need to look at time as physicists do – at the fourth dimension. It’s not as hard as it sounds. Every attentive schoolchild knows that all physical objects, even me in my chair, exist in three dimensions. Everything has a width and a height and a length.
But there is another kind of length, a length in time. While a human may survive for 80 years, the stones at Stonehenge, for instance, have stood around for thousands of years. And the solar system will last for billions of years. Everything has a length in time as well as space. Travelling in time means travelling through this fourth dimension.
