The Daily Drift

Dare to dream ... Big

Some of our readers today have been in:

Yerevan, Armenia

Pretoria, South Africa

San Jose, Costa Rica

Islamabad, Pakistan

Jakarta, Indonesia

Rzeszow, Poland

Pasig, Philippines

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Dubrovnik, Croatia

Port-Of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago

Johannesburg, South Arfica

Nakhon Pathom, Thailand

Olongapo, Philippines

Sialkot Pakistan

Nairobi, Kenya

Paris, France

Santiago, Chile

San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago

Karachi, Pakistan

Charlotte Amalie, Virgin Islands

Bridgetown, Barbados

Dublin, Ireland

Cape Town, South Africa

Chisinau, Moldova

Tbilisi, Georgia

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Today in History

1799		Napoleon Bonaparte participates in a coup and declares himself dictator of France.
1848		The first U.S. Post Office in California opens in San Francisco at Clay and Pike streets. At the time there are only about 15,000 European settlers living in the state.
1900		Russia completes its occupation of Manchuria.
1906		President Theodore Roosevelt leaves Washington, D.C., for a 17-day trip to Panama and Puerto Rico, becoming the first president to make an official visit outside of the United States.
1914		The Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney wrecks the German cruiser Emden, forcing her to beach on a reef on North Keeling Island in the Indian Ocean.
1918		Germany is proclaimed a republic as the kaiser abdicates and flees to the Netherlands.
1935		Japanese troops invade Shanghai, China.
1938		Nazis kill 35 Jews, arrest thousands and destroy Jewish synagogues, homes and stores throughout Germany. The event becomes known as Kristallnacht, the night of the shattered glass.
1965		Roger Allen LaPorte, a 22-year-old former seminarian and a member of the Catholic worker movement, immolates himself at the United Nations in New York City in protest of the Vietnam War.
1965		Nine Northeastern states and parts of Canada go dark in the worst power failure in history, when a switch at a station near Niagara Falls fails.
1967		NASA launches Apollo 4 into orbit with the first successful test of a Saturn V rocket.
1972		Bones discovered by the Leakeys push human origins back 1 million years.
1983		Alfred Heineken, beer brewer from Amsterdam, is kidnapped and held for a ransom of more than $10 million.
1989		The Berlin Wall is opened after dividing the city for 28 years.

Non Sequitur

The Classics

 

1962 Corvette

Do Dead People Outnumber Living, Or Vice Versa?

There sure are a lot of people on planet Earth - a whopping 7 billion and counting. But how does this number, which of course represents the number of people now alive, compare to the number of people who have ever lived?

Is it really true, as some folks maintain, that the number of people now alive is greater than the number of people who have lived and died since the dawn of Homo sapiens?

Random Photo

Hole-Punch Clouds

You might be familiar with contrails, those wispy strands of clouds made by jet exhaust high in the sky. But you might never have seen a hole-punch cloud. They're very strange clearings in the cloud cover - clear patches of sky, often with a circular shape. Sometimes people report them as UFOs. Some thought airplanes created hole-punch clouds - but just how they did it was unclear.

Goldbug Hot Springs

Without a doubt, the best hidden gem of Idaho are the Goldbug Hot Springs. Found at the end of a beautiful and moderately-rough hike through a canyon just south of Salmon, these cascading hot springs offer an idyllic experience, far off the beaten track.

Crocodile Faces Are More Sensitive Than Human Fingertips

Of all the adjectives you could use to describe a crocodile's face, 'sensitive' might not be an obvious one. But their huge jaws, pointed teeth and armored scales belie a surprising secret. Their faces, and possibly their entire bodies, are covered with tiny bumps that are far more sensitive than our own fingertips.

The bumps are obvious if you look carefully. Each one is a small dome, barely a millimeter wide, surrounded by a groove. There are around 4,000 of them on an alligator's jaws and inside its mouth. Crocodiles and gharials also have the bumps on virtually every scale of their bodies, giving a total of around 9,000.

Animal Pictures