FancyPantsFIRE

hh, or the Bombay blood group, is a rare blood type. This blood phenotype was first discovered in Bombay by Y. M. Bhende in 1952. It is mostly found in the Indian subcontinent (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Iran).

people who have Bombay phenotype can donate red blood cells to any member of the ABO blood group system (unless some other blood factor gene, such as Rh, is incompatible), but they cannot receive blood from any member of the ABO blood group system (which always contains one or more of A, B or H antigens), but only from other people who have Bombay phenotype.

the usual tests for ABO blood group system would show them as group O.

Maybe not surprising in retrospect but blood typing is far more complex than I realized before going down the rabbit hole. The general article on blood types is also quite interesting. When you go beyond ABO and Rh typing there’s far more variety than what we typically think of for blood types.

As of June 2025, 48 blood-group systems have been identified by the International Society for Blood Transfusion in addition to the ABO and Rh systems.

My wife caught a video of this guy in our yard, I hadn’t seen one before, quite cool!

The Sega Channel was an online game service developed by Sega for the Sega Genesis video game console, serving as a content delivery system. Launched on December 14, 1994, the Sega Channel was provided to the public by TCI and Time Warner Cable through cable television services by way of coaxial cable.

By June 1994, 21 cable companies had signed up to carry the Sega Channel service. US fees varied depending on location, but were approximately $15 monthly, plus a $25 activation fee, which included the adapter. The Sega Channel expanded into Canada in late 1995, with an approximately $19 monthly fee.

The service would go on to garner as many as 250,000 subscribers; however, Sega had anticipated having over one million subscribers by the end of its first year, and had made the service available to over 20 million households.

In late November of 1997 it was announced that the Sega Channel would be shut down on June 30, 1998, but it ended up staying on for another month, finally being discontinued on July 31, 1998.

We had this when I was a kid. It came strangely late in the console's life, but it was cool. This was before cable modems were a household norm and it felt like the future in a way that console gaming didn't recapture for another couple generations. In retrospect that monthly fee was over $30 adjusted for inflation and it's wild that my parents were actually willing to pay that.

Nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll consisted of the detonation of 23 (or 24) nuclear weapons by the United States between 1946 and 1958 on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Tests occurred at 7 test sites on the reef itself, on the sea, in the air, and underwater. The test weapons produced a combined yield of about 77–78.6 Mt of TNT in explosive power.

Authorities had promised the Bikini Atoll's residents that they would be able to return home after the nuclear tests. A majority of the island's family heads agreed to leave the island, and most of the residents were moved to the Rongerik Atoll and later to Kili Island. Both locations proved unsuitable to sustaining life, and the United States provides residents with on-going aid. Despite the promises made by authorities, these and further nuclear tests (Redwing in 1956 and Hardtack in 1958) rendered Bikini unfit for habitation, contaminating the soil and water, making subsistence farming and fishing too dangerous.

The female population of the Marshall Islands have a sixty times greater cervical cancer mortality than a comparable mainland United States population. The Islands populations also have a five times greater likelihood of breast or gastrointestinal mortality, and lung cancer mortality is three times higher than the mainland population. The male population on the Marshall Islands' lung cancer mortality is four times greater than the overall United States rates, and the oral cancer rates are ten times greater.

I watched a documentary on it some years back, it's fascinating and horrifying how cavalier these tests were.

Mechanical television or mechanical scan television is an obsolete television system that relies on a mechanical scanning device, such as a rotating disk with holes in it or a rotating mirror drum, to scan the scene and generate the video signal, and a similar mechanical device at the receiver to display the picture.

Mechanical scanning methods were used in the earliest experimental television systems in the 1920s and 1930s.

In the U.S., experimental stations such as W2XAB in New York City began broadcasting mechanical television programs in 1931 but discontinued operations on February 20, 1933, until returning with an all-electronic system in 1939.

The article doesn't do much to give an idea of what mechanical television was really like but you can see something similar in action here.

The Great Molasses Flood, also known as the Boston Molasses Disaster was a disaster that occurred on Wednesday, January 15, 1919, in the North End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.

A large storage tank filled with 2.3 million U.S. gallons (8,700 cubic meters) 13,000 short tons (12,000 metric tons) burst, and the resultant wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 miles per hour (56 kilometers per hour), killing 21 people and injuring 150. The event entered local folklore and residents reported for decades afterwards that the area still smelled of molasses on hot summer days.

The program (now re-branded as AirPass) initially enabled passholders unlimited first class travel on any of the airline's flights worldwide. Lifetime membership was priced at $250,000, with the option to purchase a companion pass for an additional $150,000.

The cost of the pass was $250,000 when launched in 1981 (equivalent to $864,660 in 2024), this increased to $600,000 in 1990 (equivalent to $1,444,065 in 2024), and $1.01 million in 1993 (equivalent to $2.2 million in 2024). The airline ended sales of the unlimited passes in 1994 except for a one-time offer in the 2004 Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog at a price of $3 million (equivalent to $4,994,186 in 2024) for the pass and $2 million for a companion pass; none were sold.

The airline's investigators concluded that two AAirpass holders, Steven Rothstein and Jacques Vroom, were costing the airline more than $1 million annually.

On December 13, 2008, Rothstein checked in at Chicago O'Hare International Airport with a friend for a flight to Bosnia. A letter from the airline was hand-delivered to him at the airport informing him that the pass had been terminated due to fraudulent behavior.