The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect. > They died in their sleep one by one, thousands of miles from home. Their median age was 33. All but one — 116 of the 117 — were healthy men. Immigrants from southeast Asia, you could count the time most had spent on American soil in just months. At the peak of the deaths in the early 1980s, the death rate from this mysterious problem among the Hmong ethnic group was equivalent to the top five natural causes of death for other American men in their age group.

The Great Molasses Flood of 1919. The blast and the molasses flood kill 21 people and injure 150. Molasses flood! What a way to go.

Tom Banwell’s steampunk gas masks are awesome:

Google Flight Search looks incredibly useful.

Because movies can’t take out restraining orders against their directors, it looks like George Lucas is back to tinkering with Star Wars. If true, Vader now says [noooo![](" in this totally hokey way. Having long since given up Lucas, I don’t really care if it’s true or not, I’m just happy about the fun stuff it has spawned:

• “Darth Vader ‘Nooo)’ Re-Edited into Classic Movies](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkPKZhXth7M)
  * 20 Movie Characters Screaming NO - Supercut
  * George Lucas Strikes Back

Last Tango in Tahiti. Hanging around Tahiti trying to find Marlon Brando (in 1987) hardly qualifies as Heart of Darkness material, but it still makes for a good read.

Can You Say … "Hero"?. I was never a big Mr. Rogers kid growing up, but by all accounts, including this one, he was a wonderful human being.

What People Don’t Get About My Job: From A (rmy Soldier) to Z (ookeeper). "You are the middle class! I’m helping you!" (IRS employee)

RadioLab’s mind-blowing piece on ragtime pianist Bob Milne:

In this short, a neurologist issues a dare to a ragtime piano player and a famous conductor. When the two men face off in an fMRI machine, the challenge is so unimaginably difficult that one man instantly gives up. But the other achieves a musical feat that ought to be impossible.

Absolutely worth the 20 minute listen.

The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight. Really interesting article on why it’s so hard for us to see the other side of things.

Fun Fresh Air interview with legendary stuntman Hal Needham. I have a new appreciation and respect for all kinds of stunts, but especially horse stunts. That’s on top of the appreciation and respect I already had! Definitely check out the Little Big Man stagecoach scene, and you can see the White Lightning barge jump that almost went very wrong at 7:34 of this video.

Everest at the Bottom of the Sea: On diving down to the Andrea Doria. Even READING about the thrills and the risks made me a little light-headed.

[Carbon dioxide.] The natural by-product of respiration also triggers the body’s automatic desire to replenish oxygen. When you hyperventilate—take rapid, shallow breaths—you deprive yourself of CO2 and fool the body into believing it doesn’t need new oxygen. Breath-hold divers will hyperventilate before going down as a way to gain an extra minute or two of painless O2 deprivation. But at depth (for reasons poorly understood), hypercapnia, the retention of CO2 molecules, has the same “fool the brain” effect. It’s a tasteless, odorless, warningless fast track to unconsciousness. One moment you are huffing and puffing against the current, and the next you are swimming in the stream of eternity.