Tuesday coffee break: average salaries

From PhDcomics.com

Monday coffee break: What's the recipe?

Our hunger for cookbooks. (Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker)

Wednesday coffee break: The order by which people are admitted to heaven

Note: magazine editors only to be admitted if hell freezes over; proofreaders admitted without review by committee. (Notre Dame magazine)

Thursday coffee break: Wimps

Modern man 'a wimp', says anthropologist:

"Many prehistoric Australian aboriginals could have outrun world 100 and 200 metres record holder Usain Bolt in modern conditions.

"Some Tutsi men in Rwanda exceeded the current world high jump record of 2.45 meters during initiation ceremonies in which they had to jump at least their own height to progress to manhood.

"Any Neanderthal woman could have beaten former bodybuilder and current California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in an arm wrestle...." (The Independent)

Wednesday coffee break: Wellcome Image Awards 2009

"The Wellcome Image Awards recognise the creators of the most informative, striking and technically excellent images among recent acquisitions to the Wellcome Images collection of medical and historical images..."

Friday coffee break: Ig Nobel Prizes 2009

VIA NEAT-O-RAMA: The 19th annual Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded Thursday night at Sander’s Theater on the Harvard campus. The awards are given to "honor achievements that make people laugh, and then make them think." A few of the winners:

PEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.

VETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.

LITERATURE PRIZE: Ireland’s police service (An Garda Siochana), for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country — Prawo Jazdy — whose name in Polish means “Driving License”.

See the entire list of winners at Improbable Research.

Tuesday coffee break: The ghost fleet of the recession

"The biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history lies at anchor east of Singapore. Never before photographed, it is bigger than the U.S. and British navies combined but has no crew, no cargo and no destination — and is why your Christmas stocking may be on the light side this year..." (dailymail.co.uk)

Thursday coffee break: publish *this*

How to Publish a Scientific Comment in 1 2 3 Easy Steps: a somewhat long but entertaining read about one scientist's attempts to point out glaring mistakes in an article that was published in a leading journal.

Wednesday Coffee Break: The New Literacy

It's not that today's students can't write. It's that they're doing it in different places and in different ways. (Wired)

Wednesday coffee break: Fun with Google Analytics

Some of the keyword searches people were using over the past year when they stumbled upon our little ol' URMAblog. Feel free to use any of these as a jumpoff point for your next poem, short story, folk song, or flashback:

don't step in that
short words are words of might
break a kindle
cap'n franks nc
found that ducks may be even more comfortable standing under a sprinkler
hot housewives 2008 pictures
urma pics
redsex
was darwin wrong
bluesex
coffee makes you happy
oh evolve
best way to win a debate
chuck berry is on top
pretend restaurant
cold down
nyuk nyuk
break nut
endowment effect cartoon
good screenplay
new zealand citizenship requirements
perks for employees
the snobbishness of the learned
a&m rubber ducks
agoraphobia parrots
parrots for psychosis
black hole black coffee
coffee makes you break out
egg corns
easy ways to win a debate
evolution for dummies
feel dizzy
i hate my copy editor
jason smith breaks neck
nutjobs r us
pictures of 100 year old men
rich kids want pity
rubber ducky you're the one

Tuesday coffee break: Why I Don't Twitter

"Twitter is a bunch of friends sitting around a table, all shouting at the same time — and shouting mundanities at that... What did you do before you tweeted? It’s the social equivalent of an all points bulletin, or... a quasar or something. What did you do before when you needed to send something of little consequence or urgency to a bunch of people who may or may not want to see it? The only thing that comes to mind is skywriting." (techcrunch)

Wednesday coffee break: Never too late anymore!

Friday coffee break: the weirdest thing you will see all week

One Got Fat: Bicycle Safety, 1963. "A group of children, all wearing ape masks, rides their bicycles to the park for a picnic. Along the way, all but one are eliminated for violating basic bike safety rules. This strange film was narrated by Edward Everett Horton."



"Farewell, Mossby Pomegranate -- victim of fallen arches."

Thursday coffee break: the suprisingly cool history of ice

"Perhaps it was his Yankee entrepreneurial spirit, or perhaps monomania, but [Frederic] Tudor was obsessed with the idea that ice would make him rich. During the next decade, he developed clever new techniques to convince people that they actually needed ice, including a “first one’s free” pitch. While living in a South Carolina boarding house in 1819, Tudor made a habit of bringing a cooler of chilled beverages to the dinner table. His fellow boarders always scoffed at the sight, but after a sip or two, they’d inevitably fall in love with his ice. Tudor traveled around the country and convinced barkeeps to offer chilled drinks at the same price as regular drinks—to see which would become more popular. He also taught restaurants how to make ice cream, and reached out to doctors and hospitals to convince them that ice was the perfect way to cool feverish patients. The truth is that people never knew they needed ice until Tudor made them try it. Once they did, they couldn’t live without it." (mental_floss)

Wednesday coffee break: Inside Netflix

Not long ago, Netflix sent a 128-page presentation called "Reference Guide on our Freedom & Responsibility Culture" to Netflix employees. Here it is. WARNING: you might start wishing you worked for Netflix.

Culture

View more presentations from reed2001.

Wednesday coffee break: probably bad news

An easy mistake to make. Lots more at probablybadnews.com

Tuesday coffee break: understanding science

Why don't Americans understand science better? Start with the scientists. (Short article by the co-authors of the new book "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future," via boston.com)

Monday coffee break: to Kindle or not?

A New Page: Can the Kindle really improve on the book?
by Nicholson Baker, The New Yorker

"The Kindle edition of 'Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems,' an e-book for people who design nuclear power plants, sells for more than eight thousand dollars. Figure 2 is an elaborate chart of a reaction scheme, with many call-outs and chemical equations. It’s totally illegible. 'You Save: $1,607.80 (20%),' the Kindle page says. 'I’m not going to buy this book until the price comes down,' one stern Amazoner wrote."

Thursday coffee break: big pictures, big eclipse

Shots of the longest solar eclipse of the century. (Boston.com's Big Picture series)

Wednesday coffee break: The man who doesn't use money

Could you survive without money? Meet the guy who does:
In Utah, a modern-day caveman has lived for the better part of a decade on zero dollars a day. People used to think he was crazy... (Details magazine)