Category: Lists

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Cautionary Tales Entertainment Lists Weirdness

Five Historical Figures Who Died The Weirdest Deaths

Cracked.com reports on the 5 individuals not content with just leaving their names in the footnotes of history.

Chrysippus: Death By Performing Donkey

donkey

Chrysippus (280 – 207 BC), renowned philosopher and party fiend, was boozing it up with his donkey (name still unkown) when the animal tried to eat some figs. The donkey’s attempt were so funny that Chrysippus laughed so hard, keeled over, and died.

President Félix Faure: Death by Bow-chicka-bow-wow

felix faure

On February 16, 1899 French president Félix Faure made a booty call in his own office with a gold-digger named Marguerite Steinheil. Story has it that Faure has fatal stroke right in the middle of orgasm. At least he died happy.

Aeschylus: Bludgeoned With a Turtle

aeschylus

Sicilian eagles love turtles and have a cunning way of getting past the hard shells of their prey. The eagles lift turtles up to great heights, and then drop them on rocks to crack them open.

Aeschylus, widely regarded to be the founder of Greek tragedy, was loitering around one day when an eagle mistook his bald head for a rock, and proceed to drop it’s catch onto his head. Aeschylus died but the turtle survived.

Arius: Death by Expoding Bowel

explosion

Arius one of the most prominent heretics of early Christianity, and someone obviously wan’t happy about him suggesting that there might have been a time when Christ hadn’t existed.

This is what one of this political opponents said:

“A faintness came over him, and together with the evacuations his bowels protruded, followed by a copious hemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestines: moreover portions of his spleen and liver were brought off in the effusion of blood, so that he almost immediately died.”

Herod the Great: Gangrene of the Genitalia

sausage

Herod the Great, king of Judaea, was responsible for the Massacre of the Innocents. God tends to frown upon acts involving the senseless murder of babies and thus imbued unto Herod what is known today as Fournier gangrene – a horrendous necrotizing infection of the genitalia.

Read the full article at cracked.com.

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Entertainment Lists

Best Songs Ever

Vote!

BestSongsEver.com is on a mission to find the most popular, loved songs out there, and they need your votes.

Here’s how the Top 10 (yes I’m big into lists today) stands at the minute:

  1. Led Zeppelin  – Stairway To Heaven (1971)
  2. Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody (1975)
  3. Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here (1975)
  4. Pink Floyd – Learning To Fly (1987)
  5. Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit  (1991)
  6. The Eagles – Hotel California (1976)
  7. John Lennon – Imagine (1971)
  8. The Beatles – Hey Jude (1968)
  9. Pink Floyd – Comfortably Numb (1979)
  10. Dire Straits – Sultans Of Swing (1978)

To vote for your favourite song, head on over to www.bestsongsever.com, search for the track, and rate it out of 5 stars.

Categories
Awesomeness Lists Photoworthy Science & Technology

Best Photomicrographs from Nikon Small World

A photomicrograph (or micrograph, or microphotograph) is an image taken through a microscope, and Nikon have been sponsoring the International Small World Competition since 1974, as a means to recognize the efforts of those involved with photography through the light microscope. The competition is open to anyone with an interest in photography through the microscope, professionals and hobbyists alike.

Here are some shots from the 2008 competition.

1st Place – Michael Stringer, Pleurosigma (marine diatoms)

Nikon Small World Competition Winner 2008

This image was one of a series Mr. Stringer created to illustrate a talk to a camera club on “Photography through the microscope.” His objective was to display diatoms in a modern way using super contrast and careful application of color. Rather than showing all the details, or warts and wrinkles as Mr. Stringer likes to call them, he dressed up the diatoms by manipulating the image and creating this beautiful photomicrograph.

2nd Place – Paul Marshall,  Carbon nanotubes

Nikon Small World Competition 2008 - 2nd Place

Marshall’s image was taken as part of the study of an atypical Carbon Nanotube growth run. Carbon Nanotubes are the latest material of interest and show great promise for the next generation of devices in the field of optical, medical and electronic research. He chose to submit this image to convey the hidden microscopic beauty of science and technology.

The image was created using a Nikon CoolPix E995 and a Nikon SMZ-10 Stereo Microscope. Marshall used this image as the cover of a Christmas card to his students.

3rd Place – Albert Tousson, Convallaria majalis (Lily of the Valley)

Nikon Small World Competition 2008 - 3rd Place

Tousson has been involved in photomicrography for 25 years. As a cell biologist, Tousson works to understand the complex processes that allow cells to metabolize and perpetuate.

Tousson chose to submit this image showing the plant’s tissue organization because the red cell walls and green and yellow starch granules were striking. This image was acquired using laser confocal microscopy with 3D projection as part of a test of a confocal imaging system for optical sectioning and 3D rendering. Tousson hoped the result of the test would be of a quality for submission to the Nikon Small World Competition.

See more spectacular photomicrographs at Nikon Small World.

Categories
Lists Useful/Useless Info

Twingly’s Top 100 Blogs

twinglyTwingly.com, a spam-free blog search engine that currently serves 25 millions search results per month, has compiled a Top 100 list of the most popular blogs today.

Twingly uses a concept of a Blog Rank for their metrics. Akin to Google’s Page Rank service, Blog Rank measures the web prominence of blogs only. The Blog Rank indicates how much influence and importance a particular blog has become.

Twingly can also group by language, so here are the Top 10 English blogs:

10. Perez Hilton
9. Lifehacker
8. ReadWriteWeb
7. The Official Google Blog
6. Mashable!
5. CNN Political Ticker
4. Engadget
3. Gizmodo
2. Boing Boing

And the top blog is …

techcrunch

See the rest of the list at Twingly – via Neatorama.