Clerk's Mistake Makes Man $200,000 Richer
CONOVER, North Carolina (AP) -- A store clerk's slip-up at the cash register has paid off big time.
Wadburn Allen on Tuesday accidentally rang up two duplicate Powerball tickets for a customer in this western North Carolina town. At the end of the day, after she was unable to sell the second ticket, Allen paid for it herself.
The next day, Allen returned to the store and found the ticket matched all five numbers -- earning her a $200,000 jackpot.
When Allen went to Raleigh to claim her prize, she met the customer who purchased the original ticket. The customer also will receive a $200,000 jackpot.
Oops - Rookie Plumber Makes A $12 Million Mistake
A 17-YEAR -old rookie plumber has burned down a £5 million ($12 million) waterside mansion in southwest England, after a soldering task during his first day on the job went horribly wrong.
The historic mansion in Kingswear, Devon, was undergoing a £2 million renovation when a fire ripped through the eight-bedroom house overnight.
In just minutes it burned it down to the ground.
It is thought the fire started after polystyrene insulation caught alight from the flame of a blow torch.
The plumber was working for a firm of sub-contractors.
John Howes, of the Devon and Somerset Fire and Rescue Service, said the plumber was "very upset", according to the Daily Mail newspaper.
Kids In Maine Pay $3,400 To Liberate Lobsters
PORTLAND, Maine -- Freedom has a price. In this case, the price is nearly $3,400 for 300 lobsters.
Pete McAleney said 10 young people showed up at his New Meadows Lobster Pound in Maine and bought all of his one-clawed lobsters. He said the lobster lovers called the crustaceans "God's creatures" and vowed to free them.
McAleney said he told the group the lobsters would probably just be caught again. He said the young people said at least the lobsters would get a second chance.
McAleney said he did not know the identity of the lobster liberators.
[Via -TheDenverChannel.Com]
Colorado Inmates Sue Over Mosquitoes
The inmates at Walsenburg and Limon prisons sued, saying they were at risk of contacting West Nile virus or other diseases after they were bitten repeatedly by mosquitoes and suffered "the emotional and mental distress of whether or not each mosquito's bite would result in death or serious bodily injury."
Stephen Glover, Alan Smith and Michael Freeman said the bites caused high fever, headache, neck stiffness and muscle weakness.
But the Colorado Court of Appeals swat down their case and upheld a lower court's decision to throw their case out.
US Servers Consume As Much Electricity As 4 Million Houselolds
The findings of the study, commissioned by AMD, were presented in a keynote address at the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York, by Randy Allen, corporate vice president, Server and Workstation Division of the chipmaker.
The study, authored by Professor Jonathan Koomey, staff scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories and consulting professor, Stanford University, found that in 2006, in the US alone, data centers and their associated infrastructure consumed five million kW of energy, the equivalent of five 1,000 MW power plants.
The cost of US data centers is a large 37.5% chunk of the US$7.2 billion annual spend on global data centers.
Scientists Discover That Scientists Shouldn't Marry
Several years ago, Satoshi Kanazawa, then a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, analyzed a biographical database of 280 great scientists--mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists. When he calculated the age of each scientist at the peak of his career--the sample was predominantly male--Kanazawa noted an interesting trend.
After a crest during the third decade of life, scientific productivity--as evidenced by major discoveries and publications--fell off dramatically with age. When he looked at the marital history of the sample, he found that the decline in productivity was less severe among men who had never been married. As a group, unmarried scientists continued to achieve well into their late 50s, and their rates of decline were slower.
Man In Ohio Is Giving Away A Free House. Wanna Know What The Catch Is?
There's a man in Ohio who wants to give away his house. But there is one big catch.
It's in Bellevue, about 45 miles southeast of Toledo, and whoever takes it will have to get it out of there.
Mike Bassett's house is a big one. It's 3,600 square feet, with a fireplace, built-in cabinets, a bay window, two full bathrooms and walk-in closets. He estimates it's worth between $125,000 and $150,000, not including the land on which it sits.
One woman offered to buy it for $200,000, if Bassett would leave it in its place. But he said no. And, if he doesn't find a taker by July 1, he said he will raze the structure.
$3 Million For JFK Sniper Window
An item described as the window and frame from where Lee Harvey Oswald shot US President John F Kennedy in 1963 has been sold at auction on eBay.
A mystery bidder paid more than $3m (£1.5m) for the item, apparently from Oswald's shooter's nest at the Texas Schoolbook Depository.
The starting price was just $100,000 but bidding was brisk and the item eventually fetched $3,001,501.
The depository was owned by a local family that listed the item on eBay.
'Piece of history'
Caruth Byrd, a member of that family, says the window of the Dallas building was removed shortly after the assassination because people were stealing bits of it.
Minnesota Man Wins $25,000 Lottery Two Days in Row
MAPLEWOOD, Minn. -- An airline pilot from Maplewood won a $25,000 lottery jackpot -- two days in a row. Raymond Snouffer Jr. matched the winning numbers 11-14-23-26-31 to win Saturday's Northstar Cash drawing with odds of about 170,000 to 1, Minnesota Lottery officials said.
On Sunday, Snouffer stuck with 11 and switched to 3-7-19-28 -- and won again. Lottery officials said such a sequence was so farfetched that the odds against it were "virtually incalculable."
[Via - SFGate]
Scientist Needs $20,000 To Finish His Timetravel Experiment
The Seattle scientist who wants to test a controversial prediction from quantum theory that says light particles can go backward in time is, himself, running out of time.
It's not a wormhole or warp in the space-time continuum. The problem is more mundane -- a black hole in the time-and-money continuum spawned by today's increasingly risk-averse, "performance-based" approach to funding research.
"I guess you could say we're now living on borrowed time," wryly joked John Cramer, a physicist at the University of Washington. "All we need to keep going is maybe $20,000, but nobody seems that interested in funding this project."
