Complex Numbers

Uncovered

My random number generator is working just fine. Randomness just sometimes leads to clustering; hence, another one from Cracked today.

    5 Secrets Found Buried at Famous U.S. Landmarks  
Until we opened a secret panel, no one realize this planned for the apocalypse

No, this article isn't a stealth ad for some new Dan Brown novel.

This Fourth of July, we want you to celebrate America by visiting one of the nation’s most famous sites. We also want you to bring a shovel with you, so you can dig for treasure.

Yes, this article has been in my queue for over two months. It happens. There are older ones. It's mathematically impossible for me to get to all of them before I leave for Europe, and I won't be doing this format there, so they'll be even older when I get back.

5 The Lost Town at the Hoover Dam

The whole point of most dams is to flood a portion of the upstream river. As it is a river, chances are people lived next to it. Some of those people lived in towns. So it shouldn't be surprising that "lost towns" exist under dam lakes.

With Hoover Dam, that reservoir is Lake Mead, and when the country flooded the area to create Lake Mead in the 1930s, there happened to be a town in a way. Fortunately, it was a town full of Mormons, and Mormons are great at moving around, so it was a simple matter to pay them all to go elsewhere.

Pay? good thing they weren't Utes or Paiutes. Because they wouldn't pay Utes.

That joke is not funny.

Of course, if you’re not interested in old Mormon buildings, there’s also the chance that you’ll stumble upon one of the several skeletons that have turned up as Lake Mead has dried up. No, there is no straightforward explanation for how those bodies got there, and investigations are still ongoing.

That's sarcasm, right? Because there's a desert city nearby that was famously run by the Mob for decades.

4 The Other Hollywood Sign

The Hollywood Sign wasn’t originally a landmark just designed to sit in the background as people walk through Hollywood.

It also serves as the only universally recognizable structure for establishment shots of Los Angeles. The area doesn't exactly lend itself to massive, easily-recognizable structures like the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower. Blame Andreas; it's his fault.

At the same time as that sign advertised Hollywoodland, a second sign advertised another housing development called “Hillside Homes of Happiness.”

I guess this was before marketing moved out there from NYC.

“Hillside Homes of Happiness” would have been too long a message to erect in 30-foot-tall letters. So, the ad consisted of just the word “Outpost,” since the land around the development was known as “Outpost Estate.” Though these letters were a little shorter than the ones in the Hollywoodland sign, they were lit in red neon, so as to be even more visible.

Okay, now I wish I'd seen that.

3 The Brooklyn Bridge’s Fallout Shelter

Yes, I thought the same thing you're thinking now: the Brooklyn Bridge was built before atomic bombs were a thing.

In 2006, workers tinkering on the Brooklyn Bridge found a vault full of provisions stockpiled by those fearing a nuclear strike. These supplies included drugs, blankets and 352,000 packets of crackers.

This makes no sense. Any nuclear strike would turn all of Lower Manhattan into a glass crater, along with that often-sold bridge.

2 The Radioactive Hazard at the Grand Canyon

In contrast to the other entries here, the Grand Canyon wasn't built by humans.

In 2019, park officials at the Grand Canyon realized that the museum contained three 5-gallons buckets of uranium ore.

Presumably, the museum was.

The uranium’s radiation wasn’t so powerful that the whole museum had an elevated radiation level, but it was powerful enough that the area near the buckets did.

Yeah, I kind of figured that would be the case when they said "ore." It's not like it's refined plutonium.

1 The Capitol’s Forgotten Bathing Area

This final discovery happened in 1936.

No wonder politics stinks. They forgot their bathing area.

If the building would only reopen and expand its baths, and if all legislators agreed to bathe communally, we could reestablish camaraderie and get around to solving everything.

You say that like it's a joke, but it seems to work in Japan.