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The idea might seem laughable now, but 11 years ago, when the US was running a budget surplus, the government did a secret study to find out what would happen if it paid off its entire debt.
The study's conclusion? Paying off the entire US debt could actually harm the global economy!
If the U.S. paid off its debt there would be no more U.S. Treasury bonds in the world. "It was a huge issue ... for not just the U.S. economy, but the global economy," says Diane Lim Rogers, an economist in the Clinton administration.
The U.S. borrows money by selling bonds. So the end of debt would mean the end of Treasury bonds.
But the U.S. has been issuing bonds for so long, and the bonds are seen as so safe, that much of the world has come to depend on them. The U.S. Treasury bond is a pillar of the global economy.
Banks buy hundreds of billions of dollars' worth, because they're a safe place to park money. Mortgage rates are tied to the interest rate on U.S. treasury bonds. The Federal Reserve — our central bank — buys and sells Treasury bonds all the time, in an effort to keep the economy on track.
If Treasury bonds disappeared, would the world unravel?
NPR's All Things Considered has the story: Link
The Azure Window is an unusual and striking coastal rock formation on the island of Gozo, which is part of the Republic of Malta. It’s in serious danger of collapsing, so visit while you can. Or just view amazing pictures of it at the link.
Link | Photo: Flickr user David365
For more than fifty years after the formation of the Indian Railways in 1857, there was one crucial element that was missing on the nation's trains: toilets.
Passengers had to wait till till the stations to answer the call of nature, and it was not until a passenger named Okhil Chandra Sen wrote this angry yet amusing letter in 1909 that toilets were installed on Indian trains.
So if you're in India, and you have to go to the bathroom aboard one of their trains, you have Mr. Sen to thank:
From the notable Letters of Note
The ducks are on the move.
All. Of. Them.
What do they know that we don’t?
-via Ace of Spades HQ
These specimens in jars look pretty nasty, and the labels make them seem even worse. But believe it or not, they are all not only edible, but tasty! They contain unfamiliar fruits, or foods cut into odd shapes. Your Halloween guests will be delighted, if they can get over the willies and try them out. Get the recipes at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. Link -via Buzzfeed
Nick of DudeFoods deep fried balls of mayonnaise. He started out by freezing baconnaise in an ice cube tray, then wrapping each cube with wonton wrappers. After deep frying and eating the balls, he referred to them as “absolutely terrible.” Presumably he means that in a good way.
Link -via That’s Nerdalicious!
Child’s Own Studio is a home-based craft business which makes stuffed toys from children’s drawings; some drawings are sent in by adults who want personalized gifts for their children, and sometimes children submit the drawings to make gifts for their parents. They have a blog, and a gallery of their creations is available on Flickr.
If your team is going to have a mascot, it has to be one that connects with people. That’s why there was a movement by Ole Miss to adopt Admiral Ackbar. ‘Cause when you think of Mississippi, you naturally think of the Admiral. It’s a common association.
And that brings us to hockey. What creatures to you associate with hockey? Wookiees, of course! So the Port Huron hockey team The Fighting (Millennium) Falcons have adopted Chewbacca as its mascot for one night.
Link -via The Mary Sue
Gordon and Norma Yeager, aged 94 and 90 respectively, were married for 72 years. They were inseparable and deeply in love with each other during those seven decades. They died an hour apart last week in a hospital. There was some confusion when Gordon left because his heart monitor continued to pulse — but that was because he was holding hands with Norma. Her heartbeat could be felt through his body:
“It was really strange, they were holding hands, and dad stopped breathing but I couldn’t figure out what was going on because the heart monitor was still going,” said Dennis Yeager. “But we were like, he isn’t breathing. How does he still have a heart beat? The nurse checked and said that’s because they were holding hands and it’s going through them. Her heart was beating through him and picking it up.”
“They were still getting her heartbeat through him,” said Donna Sheets.
At 4:38 p.m., exactly one hour after Gordon died, Norma passed too.
Link -via Kottke | Photo: Yeager Family
Image: Robert Burns/LA Times
The stimulus didn't work. The bank bailouts didn't work. Homeowner assistance and refinancing didn't work. So could the key to solving the US housing crisis be letting foreigners buy real estate for visas?
The bipartisan proposal, part of a package that also would make it easier for international tourists to visit the U.S., is similar to an existing program that puts foreigners on a fast track to a green card if they invest at least $500,000 in an American business that creates at least 10 jobs.
"Many people want to come and live in the United States," said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who introduced the legislation Thursday along with Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). "They will be here spending money and paying taxes, and the most important thing is they'll sop up the extra supply of homes we have right now compared to demand, and that's what's dragging our economy down."
The legislation would create a new homeowner visa that would be renewable every three years, but the proposal would not put them on a path to citizenship. To be eligible, a person would have to buy a primary residence of at least $250,000 and spend a total of $500,000 on residential real estate. The other properties could be rented.
Jim Puzzanghera and Lauren Beale of The Los Angeles Times report: Link
In Dr. Seuss' book The Lorax, it costs the boy 15 cents, a nail, and the shell of a great, great, great grandfather snail to hear the story of the Once-ler.
Suess never revealed who ... or what the Once-ler was, but soon, you'll be able to see the face of the Thneed industrialist, courtesy of Hollywood:
That elderly, decrepit fellow was similarly depicted in the original Seuss illustrations as a pair of eyes between the slats of a boarded up window, and those scenes in the story provided the single strongest piece of evidence that the seemingly furry-limbed villain was human.
Actually, it was his Snuvv that gave it away.
Snuvv?
This rhyme explains it (as much as any Seussian nonsense verse can.) It accompanied a drawing — seen below — of the Once-ler accepting payment from the boy before telling his tale of woe.
Then he hides what you paid him
away in his Snuvv,
his secret strange hole
in his gruvvulous glove.“If there was a clear sign this character was something other than human, we would have abided by that,” says Meledandri. “But okay, he’s wearing gloves. You’re not going to put gloves on a monster.”
The Lorax producer Christopher Meledandri went on to explain the philosophical underpinning of making the Once-ler a man instead of a monster. Read the entire story at Entertainment Weekly's Inside Movies: Link - via Buzzfeed
Geek girls who have a hard time accessorizing in a way that actually expresses their specific interests are sure to enjoy these sexy and cute Super Mario high heels from Etsy seller and Flickr user MagicBeanBuyer.
Link Via Geeks Are Sexy
If you absolutely adore Disney’s Haunted Mansion, then why not incorporate your own version of the ride’s classic Grim Grinning Ghosts for your Halloween decor this year? Instructables has all the directions you need to get your ghosts socializing.
Link Via Laughing Squid
If you’ve managed to put together a great steampunk version of a pop culture costume, but just can’t seem to find the right helmet, Etsy user Kyobb just might have what you’re looking for. Of course, even if they don’t work for your costume, they are simply stunning to look at and would make great home decor.
Link Via Geeks Are Sexy
Zombie Paperweight – $14.95
Does the Zombie infestation of the NeatoShop way heavily on your mind? Here at the Neatorama we believe in putting all good Zombies to work. After all Zombies were people too. Just check out the new Zombie Paperweight from the NeatoShop. This fantastically gruesome Zombie is ready, willing, and able to protect all your important papers from any wicked winds that might come his way.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more spooktastic Halloween items and Zombie fun!
off
Don’t make any sudden movements around this jack-o-lantern -unless you happen to have a sonic screwdriver on hand that is. Have any of you ever made pumpkins dedicated to your favorite geeky tv show?
I don’t know about you guys, but I love nighttime photography. While I may not have the skills to do it myself, photographers who are interested in improving their night shots will probably love the video tips over at Shutter Salt. For the rest of us though, the incredible images are enough to enjoy.
Shakespeare Schmakespeare. The YouTube Insult Generator, the brainchild of Adrian Holovaty, farts in the the general direction of the Shakespeare Insult Kit (sorry, John!)
Wired explains:
The simple tool, created by EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty, is a search engine that takes a term, then uses the YouTube API to find videos relevant to that term and grabs the latest 50 comments. From those 50 search results, the generator finds the ones that start with a number followed by terms such as “people,” “nincompoops” or “youtubers” (key aspects of quality comments), then replaces the number and the word “people” with the word “you.”
So far, Holovaty’s act of “poor man’s data mining,” which he said took about 45 minutes to build, only finds comments about 50 percent of the time. But some of its findings are pretty good (try “Tom Cruise,” “Michael Jackson” or even “Wired” — the results are amusing, but a little too blue to republish here).
The results for "Neatorama" insults are oddly amusing. Apparently, we are peace-, peanut butter jelly-, and penguin-hating vegetarians and tooth-fairy non-believers who fell off our unicycle and broke our bagpipes and jumped whenever a toy Xylophone is played. Oh, and we bred a pitty with a cat (huh?) and didn't get chicks. LOL!
What insults did the YouTube Insult Generator create for you?
Draw2D2 has a collection of art mashups called “Zombie/Steven Spielberg” that place zombies in Spielberg movies, or otherwise combine the two ideas. The example shown is by Alex Ryan. Go see the rest! Link -Thanks, Jason Welborn!
It’s that time of year, when we look to graveyards for tales that scare the Dickens out of us. You’ve read about 9 Creepy Places to Visit for a Good Scare and you’ve seen lists of haunted houses. Now how about cemeteries? These six stories don’t all contain ghosts -some are about vampires, poltergeists, and unidentified flying objects! Shown here is Chesnut Hill Cemetery in Rhode Island, the site of a vampire exhumation in 1892.
Chesnut Hill Baptist Church Cemetery in Exeter, Rhode Island is reported to be haunted by a vampire named Mercy Lena Brown. She was preceded in death by her mother and sister, victims of tuberculosis, and Mercy would often visit their graves. In January 1892, 19-year-old Mercy herself fell to tuberculosis and was interred with her family members. Mercy’s father George claimed she haunted him every night, complaining of hunger. His son Edwin fell sick, also with tuberculosis, but as he experienced visits from Mercy, the family and townspeople considered the cause of his illness to be the restless dead. George Brown, with the help of others, dug up the graves of his wife and two daughters on March 17, 1892. Only Mercy, who died in January, was free of decomposition. This led George to believe she was a vampire.
Read what happened then, and other tales, at mental_floss. Link
According to a study by the University of California, San Diego Division of Social Sciences, men are a teensy bit funnier than women are–but mostly only to to other men.
The stereotype
Men have long been defended as the funnier sex; a sense of humor attracts women (just ask women) and the thinking was that an inherent funniness was a biological adaptation akin to a peacock’s tail or an elaborate preening ritual in animals come mating season. Christopher Hitchens argued this point in his 2007 Vanity Fair article, “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” In his words, men “had damn well better be” funnier. “Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men,” he says with an unhumorous textual wink. In response, a 2008 article titled “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?” contends that women are in fact quite funny, and that women–especially on television–are more responsible for their own writing than before. It makes no mention of women in typical social situations, however, which is precisely where Hitchens claims men excel.
The study: Round 1
The U of C study set out to determine whether this social bias (backed up by the results of the Stanford University School of Medicine study referenced in the Vanity Fair article) is legitimate, or if we’re thinking about this humor thing in the right way.
The study team ran two separate but related experiments. The first experiment had 16 undergraduate males and 16 undergraduate females writing captions alone in a quiet room for 20 New Yorker cartoons in 45 minutes, for a total of 640 captions. All were instructed to be as funny as they could be.
This was the level-playing-field portion of the show–without the pressure of social interaction, men and women could access the full depth of their humor, rewrite if necessary, and the resulting captions could be presented to test subjects without indicating the sex of their author. To test men against women, a cartoon was diplayed with one caption written by a man and the other by a woman, then subjects chose the funnier of the two.
The number of rounds, from zero to five, that captions survived before being knocked out determined the writers’ average scores.
True to the conventional wisdom, men did better than women, but not by much: Male writers earned an average 0.11 more points than female writers. But what’s even more interesting, the researchers say, and what runs contrary to the standard explanations of why men might be funnier, is that men did better with other men: Female raters allocated only an average 0.06 more points to the male writers, while the male raters gave them a significantly higher average of 0.16 more points.
Looks like the guys are preening for each other. Biology can’t explain that!
The study: Round 2
Are men’s jokes more memorable than women’s, and can the author of a funny caption be correctly perceived as male or female given the humorousness of its contents? Enter the memory bias portion of the program:
In a second, related experiment, the researchers tested memory and memory bias to see if men are credited with being funnier than they really are.
As expected, funny captions were remembered better than unfunny ones. The authors of funny captions were remembered better too. But humor was more often misremembered “as having sprung from men’s minds,” the researchers write. And, even more telling, Mickes said, when the study participants were guessing at authors’ gender, unfunny captions were more often misattributed to women and funny captions were more often misattributed to men.
So men do win in the analytic breakdown of perceived humor and the ability to be funny on command… but only very barely, and by margins “so small that they can’t account for the strength of the belief in the stereotype,” according to Laura Mickes, a postdoctoral researcher in the UC San Diego Department of Psychology.
Well?
Well. The conclusion seems to be that there is no conclusion. By and large, men may be funnier than women, and women may be funnier than men, but there’s no way to standardize humor in a real-life scenario (or, at least, not one which has been studied). So we’ll leave the question to you:
As a whole, do you think men really are funnier than women?
Sources:
Atlas Obscura continues with their 31 Days of Halloween, featuring a new and gruesome post every day about the world’s ghosts, goblins, legends, and death rituals. This post deals with the widespread fear of being buried alive, whether by mistake or by evil intent. That fear has a long history.
Being buried alive is a fear that has been with humanity for a long, long time. As early as the Greeks one can find stories of people being prematurely pronounced dead and accidentally burned alive on their funeral pyres. At various moments throughout history, this fear, this Taphephobia, has actively gripped the Western mind. The terror wasn’t without it’s basis in reality.
One circumstance in which live burials are thought to have often taken place were during outbreaks of disease such as the black plague. Due to the rapid spread of the disease victims were buried almost immediately after death, and sometimes beforehand. These circumstances would repeat themselves again with the cholera outbreaks throughout Europe.
Throughout the enlightenment, doctors were learning more about the human body and death. As they learned to revive people who were previously considered dead (such as drowning victims via the recently invented mouth to mouth resuscitation) doctors began to question if all the people they were burying had truly been dead. With increasing reports of premature burial, by the late 1700s the fear of being buried alive had fully taken hold of the Western mind.
And then folks dreamed up many ways to avoid this horrific fate, which you can read about. Link
(Image credit: Illustrator Harry Clarke)
You go, girl! This 600 meter sprint was part of the 2008 Big Ten Indoor Track and Field Championships. Heather Dorniden of Minnesota went into the race as the favorite, but the odds changed along the way. -via TYWKIWDBI
Afniel has an intriguing but simple method of drawing fantasy maps starting with absolutely nothing. She presents it as a way to get children interested in cartography, because the results look quite like real maps. Well, it might get an adult interested in world-building as well! The map shown looks a bit like western Europe, don’t you think? Link -Thanks, Charis Michelsen!
Well, who am I to argue with a claim like that? It’s better to spend your time just looking at them! Link
(Image credit: Flickr user tom hartley)
In case you are too young to remember, macramé owls were all the rage about 40 years ago. Now rarely spotted and near the brink of extinction, there is an organization dedicated to saving this cultural landmark.
This organisation is dedicated to saving, rehabilitating and reviving the Macramé Owl.
The Macramé Owl is a rare species that is dreadfully declining in numbers worldwide. This heartbreaking situation is partly due to the difficulty in finding jute at local craft shops. It is further exacerbated by a lack of a sense of humour in humans for the sake of Seriousity.
Learn about owl watching, macrame owl hoots, the different variety of owls, and what you can do to save them. Link -via Laughing Squid
Three astronauts touch down after being cryogenically frozen for years during their space flight. This is a choose-your-own-adventure type video, where you select what happens next. Of course, if you are like me, the premise will immediately remind you of a certain Charleton Heston film from the early ’70s. -via the Presurfer
Redbox, the movie rental kiosk, has an interesting thing going on. Apparently a few people planning to dress up as the ubiquitous red boxes caught the attention of the company, who decided to give their fans a hand.
A few weeks ago, we started noticing that a lot of people were planning to dress up as redbox kiosks for Halloween. Some of the costumes are simple, and some are elaborate, but they are all amazing. So we decided to help out. No gimmicks, no strings, no costs. Just simple fun.
Broseph featured above hand-drew his letters, but if you too would like to be a certain fiery-hued DVD rental box for Halloween, head over to DressLikeRedbox and get some downloadable costume assistance, including printable stickers and templates. Link
Thanks, Michael!
Image: Nashville Metromix
During the Golden Age of Hollywood, big-budget movies were classy affairs, full of artful scripts and classically trained actors. And boy, were they dull. Then came Roger Corman, the King of the B-Movies. With Corman behind the camera, motorcycle gangs and mutant sea creatures filled the silver screen. And just like that, movies became a lot more fun.
Escape from Detroit
For someone who devoted his entire life to creating lurid films, you’d expect Roger Corman’s biography to be the stuff of tabloid legend. But in reality, he was a straight-laced workaholic. Having produced more than 300 films and directed more than 50, Corman’s mantra was simple: Make it fast, and make it cheap. And certainly, his dizzying pace and eye for the bottom line paid off. Today, Corman is hailed as one of the world’s most prolific and successful filmmakers.
But Roger Corman didn’t always want to be a director. Growing up in Detroit in the 1920s, he aspired to become an engineer like his father. Then, at age 14, his ambitions took a turn when his family moved to Los Angeles. Corman began attending Beverly Hills High, where Hollywood gossip was a natural part of the lunchroom chatter. Although the film world piqued his interest, Corman stuck to his plan. He dutifully went to Stanford and received a degree in engineering, which he didn’t particularly want. Then he dutifully entered the Navy for three years, which he didn’t particularly enjoy. Finally, in 1948, he set his sights on something he did want -to make his mark in Hollywood.
Rising from the Ocean Floor
Corman’s career began at the bottom. He started in the film business as an entry-level reader for 20th Century Fox, wading through the worst scripts at the studio. The job was thankless, but the incompetent writing inspired Corman to give screenwriting a try. He moved to Paris to focus on his craft and eventually sold a script to Allied Artists Pictures. However, the resulting film was so awful that Corman vowed never to let a studio meddle with his work again. From that point on, Roger Corman was determined to make his own movies.
more …
That's not just a pretty picture above. My friends, say hello to the 1,318 highly interconnected transnational companies (with a core of 147 "super-entities") that rule the world, as visualized by scientists at the Swiss Federal Insitute of Technology:
From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.
The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
Link - via Metafilter
