random 14

• Do you remember these days: hard drive

• modern church time saver
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• world stat clock: It takes yearly statistics from around the world and puts them in one easy-to-read format. For example, in the last minute 255 people were born and 115 people died , and some 60,000 barrels of oil were produced. Watch the numbers go up and silently shudder to yourself (except look how many bicycles they make!)
  
  
• world's water in graphic formt
  
  
• Time Magazine article: The Last Jews in Bagdad
  
  
• This year the Perseid meteor shower could deliver one or two visible streaks every minute during peak times, Cooke said in a statement yesterday. Urban skywatchers will see fewer due to local light pollution. The meteors in this shower all appear to emanate from the constellation Perseus. The best times to watch will be late night Aug. 12 through dawn Aug. 13."The August Perseids are among the strongest of the readily observed annual meteor showers, and at maximum activity nominally yield 90 or 100 meteors per hour," said Joe Rao, SPACE.com's Skywatching columnist. "However, observers with exceptional skies often record even larger numbers."
  
  
• The Telegraph has a list of the 50 most watched videos on YouTube.
  
  
• Take the Tedst. via addison road.
  
  
• Top 5 movie trailers that ruin the movie.
  
  
• You may have heard of and/or seen the diamond skull - It's a life-size platinum skull set with 8,601 high-quality diamonds, expected to sell for around $100 million. Then there is this - Subodh Gupta’s 1000 kilo sculpture, Very Hungry God, is made out of aluminum pots and pan.
  
  
  
  

• Catching a baseball as taxable income? As soon as 21-year-old Matt Murphy snagged the valuable piece of sports history Tuesday night, his souvenir became taxable income in the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service, according to experts.

  "It's an expensive catch," said John Barrie, a tax lawyer with Bryan Cave LLP in New York who grew up watching the Giants play at Candlestick Park. "Once he took possession of the ball and it was his ball, it was income to him based on its value as of yesterday,"

  By most estimates, the ball that put Bonds atop the list of all-time home run hitters with 756 would sell in the half-million dollar range on the open market or at auction.

  That would instantly put Murphy, a college student from Queens, in the highest tax bracket for individual income, where he would face a tax rate of about 35 percent, or about $210,000 on a $600,000 ball.