Link Banana

There’s nothing too complex to it, but I’d never actually heard the story before.

When you took the picture, the camera flash sent a lot of light into the eye in a very short time, the light reflected off the back of the eye and out through the pupil and, because the camera lens is close to the flash and able to capture images very quickly, it caught the light reflecting back out.

So why is that light red? Because the fundus, the interior surface of the eye that includes the retina, is loaded with melanin, a pigment that gives it a brownish-reddish color.

Hidden in a rather good mental_floss post called “3 Controversial Maps” is an interesting idea:

If George Etzel Pearcy had his way, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s famous song would have been called “Sweet Home Talladego.” In 1973, the California State University geography professor suggested that the U.S. should redraw its antiquated state boundaries and narrow the overall number of states to a mere thirty-eight.

Pearcy’s proposed state lines were drawn in less-populated areas, isolating large cities and reducing their number within each state. He argued that if there were fewer cities vying for a state’s tax dollars, more money would be available for projects that would benefit all citizens.

Though there are a substantial number of reasons to immediately reject this proposal, I think I could get used to this new map.

This rather brief story from mental_floss is entertaining, even as it makes me wish for both greater length and depth. Cosmopolitan is perhaps the most surprising:

It wasn’t always about sex. Actually, when Cosmo started up in 1886, it wasn’t about sex at all, nor was it targeted at women, nor was it lowbrow: In 1892, a single issue featured stories by Henry James, James Russell Lowell (the poet and founding editor of The Atlantic Monthly), and Theodore Roosevelt. Early stories, according to Charles Panati, covered “such disparate subjects as how ancient people lived, climbing Mount Vesuvius, the life of Mozart, plus European travel sketches and African wild animal adventures.

This whole list from mental_floss surprised me:

1. Cellophane was originally trademarked by DuPont.
2. Crock-Pot is actually trademarked by Rival Industries, but crock pot and crockpot are used generically.
3. Dry Ice was trademarked by the Dry Ice Corporation of America in 1925.
4. Escalator was a trademark of the Otis Elevator company.
5. Heroin was trademarked by Friedrich Bayer & Co.
6. Kerosene has been around since 1852, when it was coined by Canadian Abraham Gesner.
7. Linoleum was invented by Frederick Walton who founded the Linoleum Manufacturing Company.
8. Touch-tone was used exclusively by AT&T.
9. Trampoline was originally trademarked by George Nissen.
10. Zipper, similarly, was trademarked by an individual - B.F. Goodrich.

This (temporarily down) has rightly been getting some loving. Jamie Livingston took a Polaroid a day, from 1979 until his death from cancer in 1997. mental_floss has collected some of the most interesting and telling shots.