Why Las Vegas is the Suicide Capital of the U.S.

via freakonomics.com

Check out this really great podcast from Freakonomics

Will The Osama Halo Effect Help Obama Against Trump?

The devout non-jocks who feel alternately superior and intimidated by the QB reassess his past behavior and decide he’s not such a jerk after all.

The girl who brushed him off last month — he’s got a bit of acne, and he slouches sometimes, and he swears — finds herself strangely attracted to him.

The QB is the beneficiary of what’s known as the halo effect.

Photo: aflcio

President Barack Obama has just notched what might arguably be seen as the biggest victory of his presidency: the killing of Osama bin Laden. I am curious as to what sort of halo effect this might generate. How will Obama’s positions and abilities be reassessed — whether on the budget or taxes or gas prices or health-care reform or one of 100 other topics — in light of a military/intelligence victory that took place on his watch?

The halo effect is often short-lived — but will it, in this case, live long enough to power Obama through an election cycle?

via freakonomics.com

Here is an article I found on Freakonomics about Bin Laden and Obama. I wonder if Obama will use this and wipe it in Trump's face

Roger Ebert's TED Talk

via holykaw.alltop.com

Roger Ebert makes a very funny and insightful talk by making other people talk.This talk is about finding his new voice.

Pyrex Hurt the Crack-Cocaine Industry

Pyrex is valued by cooks for its sturdiness in the kitchen, particularly its ability to withstand rapid, dramatic temperature changes that typically shatter normal glassware. It turns out that people making crack cocaine valued this quality too. The process of cooking powder cocaine into hardened crack is intense, and involves a container of water undergoing a rapid temperature change. For years, Pyrex measuring cups, manufactured by Corning, were a key component of the underground crack industry.

But Corning sold Pyrex in 1998 to World Kitchen, which altered the makeup of the Pyrex material, making it less resistant to temperature changes and more prone to shattering. This, points out the Popular Science article, had a substantial impact on crack production:

[A]n entire underground industry was forced to switch from measuring cups purchased at Walmart to test tubes and beakers stolen from labs. Which just goes to show, if you think you know all the consequences of your decisions today, you’re probably wrong.

via freakonomics.com

Even drug dealers can be screwed up by cookware.

Atheist Funeral

The funeral parlors are threatened with a rising number of godless cheapskates. Undertakers hold that an atheist funeral must net at least as much money as the usual rip-offs, otherwise the religious Joneses would win: How could baby eaters possibly lose out against the Christians being on place two or three in terms of expenses? No way dude! Let's rot in diamond crusted gold boxes. Go atheism!

Internet search is my confidence booster. Whenever I am lacking confidence, uncertain whether what I wrote is good enough to escape deletion, I hit ‘the internets’ and look at what is written on the issue. Usually, all my worries disappear, replaced with quite different ones about the state of the human mind.

The following is what I suggest as somebody who has basically only one person who would notice my absence – so, take away the message and adapt to your own situation. My dear loved one; here is how the removal of my bodily remains is going to go down:

Look at the most expensive Christian funeral that you would possibly be successfully pressured into if I were a grumpy old Torah thumping Moslem. Did I just mix something up? Well who gives, can’t be anything important.

Say that funeral or cremation or dissolving in holy acid plus ceremony and golden shrine add up to ten kilo bucks (read:expensive). This is how much my funeral will cost you! No chance of guilty feelings about having dishonored me via a cheap funeral. Now you get rid of my stinking remains the cheapest way possible: Donate me to research, pay a few bucks to have me dumped in a pit, pretend not to know me and let the cops deal with it, whatever. So, say this sets you back 400 bucks.

Now you put the 10 grand minus 400 bucks into a savings account or some such, maybe buy a piece of gold, too. Why? Because graves or urns are there not to contain my matter but for you to have some place, some object that relates to my spirit. Spirit? Yes, just as much as the true spirit of the wasteful religious is actually present, presented by that wasteful tomb, so my rational spirit will be in fact present with you, presented by an object you can touch to be touched by.

Without some object left, nothing left at all but some of my possessions maybe, transporting an eerie emptiness rather than my spirit, you may regret having thrown my body into the dumpster; you may get the feeling of having or having been abandoned. That’s how we humans are. But you can hold that account book, and the remains of my rational spirit are right there, what made me me comes back to you.

When you get sick and need that money to get the medicine, when disaster strikes and that piece of gold maybe saves your behind, my spirit will be there with you as a matter of fact rather than some obscure ‘spirituality’. I will be right by your side.

via science20.com

One more reason to be an atheist. Check the full article on Science 2.0

Seth Godin's Road Trip - Part 1

via vimeo.com

Seth Godin always manages to write good books, but he also has this speech online. The password to this video is on his blog, but I will tell you anyway. The password is iboughtthebook

You are missing out if you don't check this video Part 2,3 and 4 is on Vimeo with the same password