Page 8 - Best of the Month

The cargo door of a 747 once cause a decompression that resulted in 9 passengers being ejected from 22,000 ft high!

In 1989, the forward cargo door of a 747 failed and opened up. The plane was carrying 3 crew members, 15 flight attendants, and 337 passengers. The incident caused 11 seats to be ejected and nine people died.

A flight attendant in the Business Class cabin was almost pulled out of the airplane, and was seen by passengers and fellow crew members clinging to a seat leg; they were able to pull her to safety inside the cabin, although she was severely injured. Another flight attendant in the Business Class Cabin hung on to the steps leading to the upper deck, and was dangling from them when the decompression occurred.

The pilots began an emergency descent to get the aircraft down into breathable air rapidly, while performing a 180-degree left turn to fly back to Honolulu. The decompression damaged components of the on-board emergency oxygen supply system, which was primarily located in the forward cargo sidewall area, just aft of the cargo door.

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There's an open-source alternative for Coke!

Have you ever had a can of Coke and thought that it would taste better if it was open source? No? Well, some people have and they have created the world's first "open source" cola. And it's on version 1.1.3

Anybody can make the drink, modify and improve on it as they see fit, as long as the recipe is made public under the GNU General Public License. However, recipes are not copyrightable, so the legal basis for that premise is untested.

Originally released as a promotional tool to explain open source software, the drink became a success and the company that made it sold 150,000 cans, and the creators became better known for the cola than for the software they were trying to promote!

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Singapore bought billions of cubic feet of sand from Cambodia!

Countries trade resources to get what they need. One may have the land to grow a lot of crops while another has forests and can provide timber. While exchanges are not so cut and dry, this is the basic premise. However, sometimes things are just that simple.

Singapore, one of the smallest countries in the world, has a lot of money but not a lot of territory, particularly coastlines. Cambodia on the other hand has plenty of land but is poor. These circumstances lead the two countries to reach an odd agreement.

Billions of cubic feet of sand has been dredged up from Cambodia’s coastline and shipped by barge to Singapore. There, it has been turned into new cubic miles of Singapore territory. This land is now home to hotels and casinos among other structures. In return, Singapore has paid Cambodia well for this new land.

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A guy once jammed HBO's satellite signal to protest their rates.

On the morning of April 27, 1986, at 12:32am, John R. MacDougall, a satellite TV dealer in Ocala, Florida, was working at Central Florida Teleport, a company that uplinks services to satellites. He was overseeing the uplink of the movie Pee-wee's Big Adventure as part of the evening's programming for the now-defunct pay-per-view network People's Choice.

At the end of his shift, he swung the dish back into it's storage position, which aimed it at the location of Galaxy 1, the satellite that carried HBO. As a protest against the introduction of high fees and scrambling equipment, he transmitted a signal onto the satellite which overrode HBO's airing of The Falcon and the Snowman for 4½ minutes.

The text message which appeared on the sets of HBO subscribers across the eastern half of the country read: GOODEVENING HBO FROM CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT $12.95/MONTH ? NO WAY ! MacDougall chose the name "Captain Midnight" from a movie he had recently seen, On the Air Live with Captain Midnight.

After media pressure forced the Federal Communications Commission to act, MacDougall was charged and plea bargained a $5,000 fine and was placed on one year's probation. To this day, MacDougall still owns and operates MacDougall Electronics, a satellite dish dealership, in Ocala, Florida.

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Wheel guards are actually not the reason why trains stay on the tracks!

It is actually all because of the weight of the train, the angle of the wheels, and gravity! Railway wheels simply sit on the tracks and the projection of the train pushes them forward.

When there is a curvature in the track or a turn, the train doesn’t change direction because it hits a guard rail, or a flange, but rather because of the force of the train and the slight angle of the wheels. The wheels are angled slightly inward so that when the track angles to the right the outer wheel has a greater distance to travel than the inner wheel, resulting in a turn.

So why are there guards? These are actually just a last resort in case the train happens to derail. Fortunately, gravity and a slight angle usually do the trick just fine!

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