Ethan Siegel, a theoretical astrophysicist at Lewis & Clark College, recently charted a graph to demonstrate that, judging by the incremental progression of the 100-meter world record over the past hundred years, Bolt appears to be operating at a level approximately thirty years beyond that of the expected capabilities of modern man. Mathematically, Bolt belonged not in the 2008 Olympics but the 2040 Olympics. Michael Johnson, the hero of the 1996 Olympic summer games, has made the same point in a different way: A runner capable of beating Bolt, he says, “hasn’t been born yet.”

There are plenty of amazing athletes in the world, but right now, none of them come close to Bolt.

The theory-called bioprecipitation-was pioneered by David Sands, a plant pathologist at Montana State University, in the 1980s. But little information existed on how the rainmaking bacteria moved through the atmosphere until Christner and his colleagues began their work in 2005. Sands told National Geographic News that the critters may even employ creative means of transportation: For instance, they could “ride piggyback” on pollen or insects. “We thought [the bacteria] were just plant pathogens [germs], but we found them in mountain lakes, in waterfalls, in Antarctica-they get around,” Sands said.

(via)

A reader writes in to Marginal Revolution to explain:

The post office doesn’t scan any DVDs for us. The envelopes come to us from the post office in standard mail cages. The envelopes are opened and inspected (currently by hand) by the nearest Netflix hub starting extremely early in the morning. After inspection, they’re scanned by a computer. It’s not until the DVD is actually scanned that it’s marked as returned.

Netflix has spent quite a bit of time hacking the USPS, as it were. They’ve found they have a much higher customer satisfaction rate, as well as being easier to get new customers, if one-way transit time is only 1 day. It’s hard to achieve in most places, but in high density areas like the SF Bay Area it’s very cost-effective.

But there are a number of military commanders who’ve held rank higher than Washington’s original position of lieutenant general:

• Admiral of the Navy George Dewey (1837-1917), March 2, 1899
• General of the Armies John J. Pershing (1860-1948), September 3, 1919
• Fleet Admiral William Daniel Leahy (1875-1959), December 15, 1944
• General of the Army George C. Marshall (880-1959), December 16, 1944
• Fleet Admiral Ernest Joseph King (1878-1956), December 17, 1944
• General of the Army Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), December 18, 1944
• Fleet Admiral Chester William Nimitz (1885-1966), promoted December 19, 1944
• General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), December 20, 1944
• General of the Army Henry H. Arnold (1886-1850), December 21, 1944 (Became General of the Air Force pursuant to Public Law 58, 81st Congress, May 7, 1949):
• Fleet Admiral William Frederick Halsey (1882-1959), December 11, 1945
• General of the Army Omar N. Bradley (1893-1981), September 20, 1950

What explains the promotions? In both World Wars, American commanders needed a rank equivalent to their European counterparts.

According to an analysis of 35 million Flickr images undertaken by Cornell students on a university supercomputer, the Fifth Avenue Apple Store is the fifth most photographed landmark in the world’s most photographed city — and the 28th most photographed landmark in the world

In terms of popularity, the Apple Store is behind Grand Central Station, but ahead of both Columbus Circle and Liberty Island.

“MRI brain scans revealed that women who drank three cups of coffee per day (or 6 cups of tea) had lost less brain tissue called white matter than those who drank less.”

Men, unfortunately, showed none of the benefits (via).

It’s the elegant arched trajectory naturally formed by any projectile, from an artillery round to a tomato, moving in a gravitational field. Parabolas have been extensively studied since people started throwing stuff at each other, and they shape the outcome of many ballistic sports, such as baseball, golf, football, shot put and more. But they reach their apex in basketball, where field goals and free throws demand precision control of parabolas.

Shot rotation is also important — in fact, engineers (at NC State) have determined that a perfect free throw will backspin at a rate of three cycles per second (via).

In a letter, he described how much he loved it:

I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions. My life and creative work are justified and completed by Blade Runner.

He believed the film would revolutionize science fiction, and he was almost certainly right (via)

We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen.

In related news, the book will soon become a movie with Lynn Shelton directing.

It turns out there’s a pretty easy fix — put the book in the freezer:

First pick the item up out of the water and hold it while it drains. Then place the item in a plastic bag, and stick it in the freezer. If you have several items of approximately the same size — such as file folders or books — you can place them upright in a milk crate or box, separated with paper toweling, butcher paper or wax paper. If you’re freezing books, stand them vertically on their spines. A milk crate is a good choice for this task because it allows air flow around the items. Use a container that won’t become water-logged. Pack the items just tight enough so that they remain upright

Freeze-dried books — it totally makes sense.

In case you’re wondering, that near-perfect four minutes of Rube Goldberg machinery wasn’t easy to pull off:

What started with a two-paragraph synopsis of the band’s vision quickly ballooned into a massive-scale project requiring 20 engineers. The work was headed up by Syyn Labs (formerly Mindshare), a collective of “creative engineers” who explore the intersection of art and technology.

The actual video took two days and nearly 60 takes to get right.

Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says he has done the calculations. Gross says the earthquake, which measured 8.8 on the Richter scale, moved large amounts of rock, altered the distribution of mass on the planet, and moved the Earth’s axis by about 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches). The change in axis directly impacts Earth’s rotation, and the rate of the planet’s rotation determines the length of a day.

Similarly, the earthquake that caused the massive 2004 tsunami measured a 9.1 on the Richter scale, which was strong enough to reduce the length of a calendar day by as much as 6.8 microseconds.

The program, which Walmart calls Heritage Agriculture, will encourage farms within a day’s drive of one of its warehouses to grow crops that now take days to arrive in trucks from states like Florida and California. In many cases the crops once flourished in the places where Walmart is encouraging their revival, but vanished because of Big Agriculture competition.

While the success of the program is far from certain, Walmart says the company hopes to revive local economies and farms communities across the country.

A 1938 edition of Action Comics No. 1, widely considered the Holy Grail of comic books, was sold by a private seller to a private buyer, neither of whom released their names. The issue features Superman lifting a car on its cover and originally cost 10 cents.

The book sold for $1 million — breaking all previous records.