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Swimmer Michael Phelps, the human submarine.
28 Olympic medals, including 23 golds. He has more gold medals than many entire countries.

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The 917 was a very small race car!

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The M1064 Grömitz is a Type 332 Frankenthal-class minehunter of the German Navy, commissioned on August 1994.
On February 21, 2007, the Grömitz struck a reef in Norway's Floro Fjord and remained spectacularly stranded until it was rescued and subsequently repaired and returned to service.

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What are some astonishing little known facts about the United States aircraft carriers?
After a few months of deployment, the non-skid coating on heavily-trafficked areas of the flight deck will wear out. The area near the arresting gear cables (and further down the landing area) are where most of the wear occurs. Additionally, various leaking fluids (fuel, hydraulic fluid, oil, etc) will build up a slippery film over time. The rubber bumpers next to each arresting cable are pretty slick as well.
The result? Aircraft skidding at alarming angles during taxi. The yellow-shirt will give a taxiing aircraft the “Stop” command, the pilot will dutifully apply the brakes . . . and the aircraft will skid 5–10 feet before stopping.
On a calm day with the carrier traveling straight ahead, it will skid in a straight line.
On a high-sea state day, or if the ship is in an aggressive turn (common after the last aircraft lands and the carrier needs to turn back downwind quickly), the skid direction and aircraft orientation can get quite . . . interesting.
Normally the pilots and yellow-shirt aircraft directors know where these spots are. Pilots will taxi extra-slowly in in these areas, and yellow-shirts will (presumably) allow for some extra stopping distance.
It’s pretty alarming for a new pilot the first time this happens, but you quickly get used to it.
I had the opportunity to take an F-15E Strike Eagle pilot for a ride off the carrier in my super-sexy S-3B Viking about half-way through a deployment. I’m sure he thought the catapult shot and arrested landing were pretty cool as expected. He was probably bored during the actual flight. After we landed, I was concentrating on the normal busy carrier ground ops, but noticed him fidgeting a lot out of the corner of my eye. He kept shifting in his seat and grabbing random (non-critical) parts of the cockpit. I was so used to taxiing on the flight deck that I forgot how terrifying it could be for someone unaccustomed - especially an Air Force pilot used to a regular air base. There are several reasons for this:
-Every inch of flight deck space counts. We taxi ALL THE WAY up to the edge of the flight deck, turn sharply, taxi even closer, turn again, and repeat until the entire back end of the aircraft is over the water. From the pilot’s perspective, it looks like you are about to taxi right into the ocean, which is all you can see in your field of view looking forward. The sea is rushing in one direction or another, always different from the direction your aircraft is traveling, which is a strange - and quite disorienting - sensation.
-You park RIGHT NEXT to other aircraft. I’m talking a couple of inches in some cases. There has to be a serious amount of trust between the taxi director and pilot. I’ve never seen an equivalent on land. It would have been shockingly close from an Air Force perspective.
-As the carrier turns, it heels quite a bit. It’s sort of like taxiing on the side of a pitched roof sometimes. The horizon can be moving all over the place as you try to pay attention to the taxi director. Another new aspect for an Air Force guy.
-A 45,000 lb aircraft skidding instead of stopping, sometimes turning as it does so (you are skidding one direction, but your nose slowly drifts 30° away during the slide). This probably REALLY got the F-15 pilot’s attention.

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On April 6, 1893, the longest boxing fight in history took place, which lasted 110 rounds, i.e. 7:19 a.m. between Andy Bowen and Jack Burke, it ended in a draw

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Originally Posted by GH85Carrera (Post 12296029)

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The 917 was a very small race car!

Many/most prototype race cars are very small. The first time I saw one of these Chevy IMSA prototype cars back in the late 80s, I was shocked at how small they were.

It makes sense, you want a race car low and lightweight, and the best way to get there is if it's as small as possible.
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Originally Posted by GH85Carrera (Post 12296108)

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I had no idea:

https://hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/remembering_porky_bickar

Recently I was lucky enough to go on a cruise of Alaska's Inside Passage, visiting towns such as Juneau, Skagway, Ketchikan, and Sitka. I'd never been on a cruise before, and it was a great experience. But, being a hoax-history enthusiast, Sitka was the location that, before the trip, I was most looking forward to seeing. After all, it was the site of one of the greatest April Fool's Day pranks of all time, the (fake) eruption of Mt. Edgecumbe.

Back in 1974, a local prankster, Porky Bickar, had air-dropped tires into the crater of Mt. Edgecumbe, lit them on fire, and made it seem as if the dormant volcano was rumbling back to life. So at last, I anticipated, I would get to see Mt. Edgecumbe and be able to imagine what it must have looked like to Sitka residents on that April 1st as they saw smoke rising from its top.

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The 20-bit General Electric GE 210 Data Processor¹ used for banking, utility billing, and inventory at First National Bank of Denver, November 29, 1965. The serial 6-digit decimal machine was designed by Arnold Spielberg² (father of Steven Spielberg) in 1959 based on the earlier ERMA³ (Electronic Recording Machine Accounting) system that used MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition) which revolutionized bank check processing. The computer could decode 124 instructions and used the General Electric Common Language with additions taking 64 µs and multiplications 550 µs. A mechanical document transport picks up magnetically imprinted documents one at a time from items in its feeder, moving the documents past a read head where a magnetic character reader then scans the magnetic ink characters and transmits the information to the central processor, sorts the documents, and inserts each one into the proper pocket. The 4.5 ton mainframe consisted of 9,998 transistors and 39,333 diodes, consumed 50 kW of power, and had 4,000 words of core memory. The buffering system permits simultaneous operation of computation, reading magnetic tape, writing magnetic tape, reading magnetically encoded documents, reading punched tape, printing with online listers and Flexowriters. GE sold 44 of these $225,000 systems from 1960 to 1964.

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Okay, so it’s 1869, and you have been building the first transcontinental railroad - laying track eastward on the Central Pacific across Utah… The competing Union Pacific has bragged about putting down four miles of track in one day. Then, you beat that by doing six miles in one day. Then, the UP did eight miles...
So now, your boss, Charles Crocker, has decided that you can do 10 miles in one day...
And, you’re going to get four day’s pay if you can do it.
Construction Superintendent Strobridge is a bit dubious, but Crocker assures him that he has it all planned out. The ties will be distributed ahead of time, the gangs will lay down the 500-pound rails, each spiker will drive home his particular spike, and the levelers and fillers will perform their tasks, all carefully choreographed with no man getting in another’s way.
Dawn comes on April 28th, and off you go. Union Pacific officials are invited to watch the work…
At midday, you’ve done six miles! You stop for an hour lunch. You know you’re going to win. The boss offers to give you the rest of the day off, and replace your gang with another. You tell him “No thanks.” You want to finish this yourself. You decide to name the spot where you stopped for lunch. What’s the perfect name?
Camp Victory.
The first photo is of Camp Victory taken a bit later. Victory (later renamed Rozel) is just a bit west of Promontory Summit. Today, it is part of Golden Spike National Historic Park. You can drive your car to it, on the original roadbed of the Central Pacific.
That day, the track gang carried 3520 rails averaging 560 pounds each, 55,000 spikes, 14,080 bolts, and other material making a total of 4,462,000 pounds.
At the end of the day, the Central Pacific ran an engine over the newly laid track at 40 miles an hour, just to prove that the work had been done properly.
The imposing man in the suit standing on the flat car is Construction Superintendent James H. Strobridge, and standing next to him is chief track layer Horace Minkler.
The most accurate book on the subject is “Empire Express,” by David Haward Bain.

I just wonder how many miles they could lay in a day with the modern methods and equipment.

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Victory (later renamed Rozel) is just a bit west of Promontory Summit. Today, it is part of Golden Spike National Historic Park.

A very common incorrect "fact" that often shows up in various history sources is that the Golden Spike ceremony took place at Promontory Point. Promontory Point is about 30 miles south of Promontory Summit at the end of a peninsula that juts out into the Great Salt Lake. Ironically the railroad now actually goes to Promontory Point after the Lucin Cutoff was constructed across the lake between 1902 and 1904. The original track that joined the two railroads in 1869 was removed in 1942.
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The "Pinball Wizard" of the "Alpine Tavern" in Portland, Oregon ..... (c.1965)

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