Most depressing day of the year: Third Monday of January
“Not sure if this research passes the peer-review process. British psychologist Cliff Arnall claims that, according to a complicated equation he devised in 2005, the third Monday in January is the most depressing day of the year. He calls it Blue Monday. We’re so blue, Arnall says, because of the weather, the Christmas holidays being over, and already-failed New Year’s resolutions, among other things he takes into account. But Arnall’s formula was created as part of a publicity campaign for Sky Travel, a British TV channel that shut down in 2010. “The fact is that Cliff Arnall’s equations are stupid, and some fail even to make mathematical sense on their own terms,” psychiatrist Ben Goldacre wrote in his “Bad Science” column in The Guardian, and other scientists have dismissed the formula.” Read more…
(source: NY Daily News, via The Daily Beast)
Now this is how to draw on the back off a dirty car
(via: uberhumor)
Live animation of a bicycle wheel
(source: Visual News, via BuzzFeed)
Coming soon: Caffeine you can inhale?
“If you need a fog-clearing jolt of caffeine in the morning but dislike the taste of coffee, you may be in luck. A Harvard University professor has come up with a new product, AeroShot Pure Energy, that delivers a dose of caffeine in an energizing, lime-flavored puff.” Read more…
(source: The Week)
Jay Leno: Idiot of the day!
Jay Leno jokes about accidents at Love Ride Motorcycle Rally, two bikers soon die
“Every year, [the organizer] says, ‘Drive safe’ I’m gonna say, ‘Don’t drive safe.’ I wanna see somebody go down. So it’ll be fun. I want it to be in front or behind me and see a whole row of bikes go down. Get drunk, fall off the road. We’ve all become too damn polite … we haven’t had one incident.”
During the ride, two riders in the rally crashed into a truck and were killed. Read more…
(source: Huffington Post)
(via uberhumor)Stages of life
Japanese man calculates pi to 10 trillion digits
“Two years ago, I speculated that a computer in Kyoto or Osaka would calculate the value of pi to 10 trillion digits. I was wrong. The computer that apparently just clinched that record is in Nagano, Japan. And unlike the T2K-Tsukuba System that charted the irrational number in 2009 to 2.5 trillion digits, the latest number-crunching champ isn’t a supercomputer—it’s a hacked-together PC.” Read more…
(source: CNET)
10 words you might think came from science (but are really from science fiction )
- Blast off
- Robotics
- Genetic engineering
- Zero-gravity / zero-g
- Deep space
- Ion drive
- Pressure suit
- Computer virus
- Computer worm
- Gas giant
(source: io9)
British coffee-powered car breaks world record
“A bunch of crazy, tea-drinking northern Brits have set a new land speed record for a gasification-powered vehicle, fueled only by coffee beans. The car, which you can see in the image above alongside its engineer Martin Bacon and with the most awesome license plate in the world, is called — you guessed it — The Coffee Car, and it was created by the Teesdale Conservation Volunteers of Durham, England.” Read more…
(source: ExtremeTech)
Hypothetically, suicide by roller coaster
“Want to enjoy the ride of your life along with the last ride of your life? That’s what Julijonas Urbonas envisions with his Euthanasia Coaster. The three-minute ride involves a long, slow, climb — nearly a third of a mile long — that lifts one up to a height of more than 1,600 feet, followed by a massive fall and seven strategically sized and placed loops. The final descent and series of loops take all of one minute. But the gravitational force — 10 Gs — from the spinning loops at 223 miles per hour in that single minute is lethal.” Read more…
(source: Discovery)
Five shirts to buy after your $85 Starbucks coffee-stained shirt
“To celebrate its 40th year nuking our insides with caffeine, Starbucks has worked with designer Alexander Wang on an $85 T-shirt that looks like you spilled coffee all over it.” Read more…
(source: Dallas Observer)
Why do women do this?
(via uberhumor)
Analysis of e-mail signature styles
(via BuzzFeed)
