Found this thread again after watching Gangs of New York and doing a bit of post-viewing reading. Mental Floss has a nice article on the names of various NYC landmarks. Ahem.

You know, it's an interesting thing to consider - there is really a very little amount of empirical data on even something that seems cut-and-dried like this; most of the talk on both sides is really just "monkey see, monkey repeat," or anecdotal at best. I'm still a proponent of not breathing onto cartridges because the water in breath should oxidize the material; so too will the presence of salts if any carry on the breath (doesn't seem so likely though). However, the place I see rust most on gaming systems is on steel emissions cages in consoles...that must have been kept in garages. One other thing that might be a part of this: Corrosion from contact between metals. I don't know what's typical on NES cartridges versus the interior socket's connectors, but there have been cases of corrosion in computer hardware where the pins on a part connector (for example, the connector of a memory stick) meet another metal inside the connecting receptacle.
Quote Originally Posted by Frankie_Says_Relax View Post
Have any pennies in your pocket that look like this?



No. Most of them probably look like this.

I'd be really rich if all the pennies in my pocket looked like the '55 doubled die variant there. In fact I could trade my entire collection of stuff (all of it) for a handful in my pocket, and be able to buy everything back...with change left over.
Quote Originally Posted by Koa Zo View Post
It is known among photographers that even huffing on a lens to create a fog for hasty cleaning efforts will wear the coatings off of lenses. Human breath contains corrosive particles, end of story.
I'm tempted to say that's a myth. That would only be true of the older "painted-on" coatings, at most; I'm not aware of any modern coatings being degraded by what is essentially water vapor. One of the most professionally used modern cleaning tools, the Lens Pen, advocates gently blowing onto a lens surface to help the cleaning process.

Old coated lenses - the original bunch of 'em, all probably predating the introduction of autofocus systems like Canon's EF series (1987-present; a better run for a common electronic connector than the NES socket!), are simply more prone to wear than modern coatings, a bad situation which was remedied quickly. Having a coating that is easily abraded is bad for obvious reasons.