Ancient Web: Random Useless Info Measured Everything From Gas to Hurricanes

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A normal person remembers that gasoline used to be cheaper. The person behind Random Useless Info appears to have kept the receipts, turned them into graphs and continued collecting figures for decades.

Visit Random Useless Info.

The home page describes an assortment of measurements and pictures that one friend or another might find interesting. Its index is almost aggressively specific: Texas gasoline-price history, a 1979 Corvette's fuel use, BMW 318ti tire wear, Alfa Romeo 4C maintenance, radiation measurements, light pollution, old Mac freeware and weather instruments.

That is only the beginning. The gamma-ray spectra section, last marked updated in September 2004, describes measuring emissions from household objects using secondhand instruments, then comparing readings with published reference spectra. The author does not pretend every isotope identification is correct.

The hurricane was a line graph

The site's Hurricane Rita evacuation account is a brilliant example of personal data becoming a historical record. On September 21, 2005, its author left the Houston area hoping to avoid the storm. A drive of roughly 360 miles to Fort Worth took about nineteen hours.

A car diagnostic recorder logged speed every five seconds. The resulting graphs expose the journey's misery: nine hours spent covering an initial stretch of roughly 33 miles, long periods nearly stationary and confusion about which highway would move faster.

A later Hurricane Ike page records manual wind-speed, direction and barometric-pressure readings from a weather station in League City during September 2008, including the instrument's eventual failure. Those technical limitations are preserved, not silently removed.

The homepage also lists personal photographs of Space Shuttle reentries, measurements of computer noise from 2002, and Macintosh freeware last modified in 1996. Newer car and gasoline records extend into 2026. This is a living site carrying its early work forward, not a deliberately retro-looking 2020s project.

Some scientific investigations involve radioactive materials and old equipment; these pages are historical reports, not instructions to imitate unsafe experiments. Their underlying magic is simpler: someone recorded ordinary observations so carefully that later visitors can reconstruct days most people have forgotten.

Explore the dated data index and the Hurricane Rita charts.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.