[F]or 15 years during the Cold War, the code meant to prevent unauthorized launching of the United States’ arsenal of Minuteman nuclear missiles was apparently “00000000.”

The alarmingly insecure “Permissive Action Link” (PAL) code first came to light in 2004, after Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman missile launch control officer, disclosed it in a column for the Center for Defense Information.

This has been racing across the Internet, though most of the stories I have been seeing have been neglecting a rather critical point; this code was only for the physical launch of the missiles, that is, not the arming of the actual nuclear warheads.

Meaning, if someone somehow had captured a silo, they could theoretically launch missiles, but they wouldn’t create a nuclear detonation on impact.

Then again, the Soviets wouldn’t’ve known that, so presumably would have launched actual armed nukes…hm, maybe this really was as bad as it seemed in the early articles, albeit not in quite the way originally presented.

Via Huffington Post.

A leather glove painted with a map of London landmarks, it was designed to help fashionable ladies find their way to and from the Great Exhibition held in London’s Hyde Park in 1851.

As far as we know, the glove was never produced commercially. This example survives because its creator, George Shove, chose to protect his design by registering it with the government.

This involved depositing a “representation”, which was a sample, a drawing or a photograph of the design, at the Office of the Registrar of Designs.

Via The National Archives.

The bridge shown in these photographs existed from 1901 to 1908.

During the period of the conquest of America and the beginning of the industrial revolution when the country is in dire need of railroad tracks, so sometimes they had to do it in a hurry.

Via Today’s Whisper.