Since nothing is really going on in my life other than eating, sleeping, working and daydreaming, I’ll share some crap that I read on the Internet today:
A group of British researches claim to have proven Murphy’s Law mathematically by this equation: ((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10)). They say the equation gives some insight about factors you can manipulate to keep everything that can go wrong from doing so at the worst possible time. Their first suggestion: If you are better at stuff, things won’t go wrong as often.
This one is great:
Steven Stack of Wayne State in Detroit and James Gundlach of Auburn University in Alabama just completed a study showing that the suicide rates for whites in US metropolitan areas is higher in cities where more country music is played on the radio.
In their analysis (Social Forces, vol 71, p 311) they suggest that country music – renowned for its mournful themes – nurtures “a suicidal mood through its concerns with problems common in the suicidal population, such as marital discord, alcohol abuse, and alienation from work”.
In his acceptance speech for the IgNoble Prize for Medicine, Gundlach revealed that if you play country records backwards, your dog and estranged spouse come home and you get your job back.
Someone has filed a patent for the combover hairstyle with the US patent office. That really is unbelievable, not just that someone feels the combover is worth patenting, but that a method of combing hair could be patentable. Why not just patent hair?
And finally, according to the Washington Post, urban sprawl causes health problems. They even referenced Altanta by name: “Very spread out places, such as Atlanta, had about 100 more health problems per 1,000 people than areas that were less so, such as the Greensboro-Winston Salem area of North Carolina.”
I’m not so sure about all that. I bet 90 of those 100 additional health problems are caused by traffic accidents. That doesn’t mean sprawl causes health problems; it means car wrecks cause health problems. I hope no awards were won for that discovery.
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Isn’t the traffic argument an issue of the chicken vs. the egg? Would the traffic problems exist if the sprawl were not there. I’m sure there is research out there to answer the question, but quite frankly I’m too lazy to go look for it.