Commissioned by the first Ptolemy in 280 BC, the Lighthouse of Alexandria was a monumental structure that stood around 400 ft (122 m) tall.

The lighthouse functioned through the use of large fires in the interior cylinder and a use giant mirror at the top. It's referenced throughout historical texts, and the lighthouse's image was printed on coins from the era.

The lighthouse, or Pharos, was badly damaged in earthquakes in 956, and then again in 1303 and 1323. In 1480, the Sultan of Qaitbay demolished the remnants to create a citadel.

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Although it's now off-limits to the public and currently serves as a bird sanctuary in the Harbor Heron Preserves project, North Brother Island was once a quarantine zone for people with infectious diseases.

North Brother Island held several cases of smallpox, tuberculosis, and other diseases, but the most famous resident was undoubtedly Typhoid Mary.

Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant who worked as a cook, was visibly healthy to an inspection. After following a trail of fevers and infections in 1906, researcher George Soper connected the dots to Mallon.

Mary was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever, meaning that she carried the disease without suffering from the symptoms. She was forcibly quarantined (twice) on North Brother Island until her death from a stroke there in 1938. She was 69 years old.

View a recent photo essay of the North Brother Island ruins.

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Located at this address in sunny Calgary, Canada, is the Transcanada Corp office.

Transcanada is the brain trust that is shoving the XL Keystone pipeline down America's throat via an insecure Congress desperate to prove that they can get something- no matter how ill-conceived and unbeneficial to Americans- done.

The US $12.2 billion project is set to bring tar sands oil from Alberta that is rich in sulfur and other tasty stuff to the only shit pot in North America that will process it- Houston, TX.

But what about the jobs created? The number of actual jobs gets hyper-inflated with the zealousness of the proponent, but a recent Forbes article shows that Transcanada's own applications state they expect (on the top end) only 6,000-6,500 short term jobs created for the complete construction and approximately 35 full time jobs once it's online.

In comparison, Amazon.com is hiring 80,000 short term jobs for the holiday season (view source here).

We, the energy thirsty masses, get to bear the brunt of increased air pollution from the processing and the risk of leaks, contamination, and spills that a 1,200 mile (1,900 km) pipeline brings.

But environmental disasters related to industrial energy use rarely occur, unless you count the Gulf BP oil spill, or the Exxon Valdez, or the Fukushima nuclear power plant, or Chernobyl, or Three-Mile-Island or this rather long and depressing list of recent oil spills.

And then there’s that whole global warming thing that we didn’t get to talk about...

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The only U.S. president to be born in New York City, Theodore Roosevelt began life here on October 27, 1858.

The original Roosevelt brownstone was torn down in 1916, but has since been rebuilt to reflect the period, and is now a museum managed by the National Park Service.

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Built in 1915 as a residential hotel, this building was purchased by Vienna immigrant Charles Schimmel in 1920 and turned into the Blackstone Hotel. The luxury hotel served as a point of elegance on the Lincoln Highway, and the restaurants in the building consistently received top awards.

The Reuben sandwich was invented in at the Blackstone Hotel by Reuben Kulakofsky in 1925 (as far as one popular version of the story goes). In addition, butter brickle ice cream was invented and served at the Blackstone as well.

The location is now the Blackstone Center with a number of different shops and restaurants.

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