Filed under Things I Am Bad At: Judge a book by its cover. The goal of this (simple, difficult) game is to guess the average number of stars under the book’s listing on Amazon. You get a running tally of how many you guessed correctly.
As we become too lazy to do our own work, we send technologically augmented turtles and seals to be our detectives and scientists.
(via BoingBoing and NewScientist)
A sort of Netflix for magazines, Maghound has recently launched — and looks like an intriguing concept. You pay a set monthly fee, and can easily change which magazines you get from month to month (getting the same # each month, relative to your subscription level). Also, they have a great logo:
Unfortunately, the selection of magazines still seems a little limited. Hopefully they’ll be adding more magazines, and we’ll see less of the unhappy Maghound.
This is one of those ridiculous things that is, well, ridiculous. The power of the market — or stupidity, which may be the same thing — trumping common sense:
The Bush administration can prohibit meat packers from testing their animals for mad cow disease, a federal appeals court said Friday. (emphasis added)
A premium meat producer, Creekstone Farms, would like to test 100% of their beef for mad cow disease. But the US Dept. of Ag. only tests 1%. Regardless of whether 1% is a sane #, Creekstone Farms is now being prohibited from using their own money to test all of their cows because Larger Companies worry that consumer demand (or some such) will then force them to test 100% of their cows. (And that would be expensive.)
If the link between infected beef and infection in humans were more direct, more observable, more documented, would the situation be any different?
You’d tend to hope so, though given the way “science” is sometimes wielded in the marketplace (and courtroom), there’s certainly room for debate.
(via BoingBoing)
Which is, really, fortunate.
“10 other dates when the world failed to end.”
One of my favorites:
Sept 11-13 1988 - Former Nasa engineer Edgar Whisenant sold 4.5 million copies of his book 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Could Be in 1988, mostly to evangelical US Christians. Follow-up works, which revised the prediction for dates in the 1990s, failed to sell as well.
Shocking! (Emphasis added.)
Also, I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be “March 1997″ and not “Match 1997″.
(via Monochrom)
Winnie-the-Pooh, a panther, and a mouse rob a passer-by of $160.
Also questionable: the robbers were wearing their costumes on account of “they had run out of clean clothes.”
(Although… probably not actually $160, as the setting of the crime in question is Tokyo.)
Related: Winnie-the-Pooh, Soviet style.
(via Reuters: “Winnie-the-Pooh held for robbery?” [12 Aug 08])
Forget the Golden Gate Bridge and House of Nanking and Zeitgeist on a summer night — the heart of San Francisco beats loudest on the carpeted second floor of that South Van Ness building you thought was Bank of America.
…
“Thank you for calling San Francisco 311, this is Kyle speaking, how may I help you?”
Kyle Sutton is one of 50 or so customer service representatives, or CSRs, asking this question 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The free service launched in March not just to funnel 2,300 government phone numbers into a single line, but to give the city more of a service orientation. About 6,000 calls come in every day, and program director Ed Reiskin says 311 is on track to answer 2 million a year.
Officially, the purpose is to supply a handy route to non-emergency government services and information. Unofficially, it’s a glimpse into the funny inner mind of the city.
“Hello, how long does it take to build a cable car?”
“There’s cocaine all over my clothes! There’s cocaine everywhere!”
“My roommate has been passed out for two days.”
“There’s pig balls on the street.”
Ideally, every call would be like these and our city would have the best dinner parties ever. In fact, most people call about the bus. How do you get to Justin Herman Plaza? I’m on Clement and 8th Avenue, where’s the 2? My driver didn’t stop for me.
(SFGate: “Pig balls and stuck skunks: A 311 customer service rep has a window onto San Francisco’s secret heart,” by Chris Collin [4 Sept 2007])
No child should touch a gun or pistol, or on any account present one at another person. We behold a little boy shooting his sister dead!
And:
Here we see the danger of playing with lighted candles. One little girl has set the bed-curtains on fire, and the other her hair; and both are in great danger of being burnt to death, unless someone grants them speedy assistance.
From The Book of Accidents (1831), with excellent woodcut illustrations.
(via Ectoplasmosis)
With headlines like “Octopus ride accident injures two” and “Ferris wheel catastrophe kills five”, it will be hard to look at amusement park rides in quite the same light.
Not that they ever seemed on par with the safety of something like, say, bonsai gardening.
(via BoingBoing)
You can always build forts.
(via Bookslut)
Too bad about the “your property is greater than .5 acre and is unobstructed” requirement. Because otherwise I would totally buy a windmill.
It doesn’t look like much, but what you’re looking at is the number of cell phones “retired” in the U.S. every day — 426,000. View a close up, and other similar photo montages of consumption at Chris Jordan’s Running the Numbers.
(via GOOD Magazine)
Would you rather earn $50,000 a year while other people make $25,000, or would you rather earn $100,000 a year while other people get $250,000? Assume for the moment that prices of goods and services will stay the same.
Surprisingly — stunningly, in fact — research shows that the majority of people select the first option; they would rather make twice as much as others even if that meant earning half as much as they could otherwise have. How irrational is that?
Surprising, and not. But are people really that status-conscious? I mean, I know they are. But, really?
(LA Times: “Why people believe weird things about money,” by Michael Shermer [13 Jan 2008]; via Lifehacker)
Interesting enough for the subject matter — the mysterious skyjacker who disappeared from a plane1 with some gracious amount of money, never to be found again (the skyjacker that is; some of the money was found, maybe) — this article from the AP is probably best for the very last sentence:
“Maybe a hydrologist can use the latest technology to trace the $5,800 in ransom money found in 1980 to where Cooper landed upstream,” Carr said. “Or maybe someone just remembers that odd uncle.”
The FBI’s presenting, as they say, “for the first time” to the public, new & exciting information.
In case you do remember that odd uncle.
1 Which is to say, jumped.
When police asked the man what caused the accident, his one-word answer was “pterodactyl,” Smith said.
…
The man was treated and released at Central Washington Hospital, hospital officials said.
No word on the pterodactyl’s injuries.
(HeraldNet: “Man blames car wreck on prehistoric winged reptile,” by Rachel Schleif [29 Dec 07]; via BoingBoing)
Yes, it can happen to you. Well, maybe not you, but someone else:
Dropping something may have saved Joy Horton’s life. The 73-year-old woman was preparing some food in her western New York home on Monday morning when she dropped a spoon on the floor of her kitchen. When she bent down, her house exploded.
…
Fire officials said that because Horton was bending down when the explosion occurred, the kitchen sink and counter top helped keep debris from hitting her.
(via BoGlo/AP: “Spoon drop saves woman’s life” [Aug 21, 2007])
