Ever wonder who is singing on the Honda Accord ad (it’s ELO) or at the end an episode of Gray’s Anatomy (may have been the Teddy Bears)? This site has it all and links to the songs.
Month: January 2008
Food Price Inflation Fuels Hunger
A New, Global Oil Quandary: Costly Fuel Means Costly Calories – New York Times
The food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, based on export prices for 60 internationally traded foodstuffs, climbed 37 percent last year. That was on top of a 14 percent increase in 2006, and the trend has accelerated this winter.
In some poor countries, desperation is taking hold. Just in the last week, protests have erupted in Pakistan over wheat shortages, and in Indonesia over soybean shortages. Egypt has banned rice exports to keep food at home, and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs. According to the F.A.O., food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
No category of food prices has risen as quickly this winter as so-called edible oils. Cooking oil may seem a trifling expense in the West. But in the developing world, cooking oil is an important source of calories and represents one of the biggest cash outlays for poor families, which grow much of their own food but have to buy oil in which to cook it.
Escape From Cuba – Go Mexican
A Deadly Turf War Over Cuban Illegals – TIME
Mexico certainly appears to have become the most popular route for Cubans seeking to reach the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 11,487 Cubans entered the U.S. over the Mexican border in the fiscal year 2007. Over the same period, 4,825 Cubans successfully crossed the Florida Straits, while 2,861 were caught by the Coast Guard and turned back.
A Mexican official not authorized to speak on the record explained that gangs running the lucrative Cuban smuggling route into the U.S. charge between $10,000 to $12,000 per head, compared to the $2,000 Mexicans pay “coyotes” to take them over the desert into the U.S. And it is the high profits have driven the killings, officials say, with rival groups allying with Mexican gangsters to fight over the spoils of the trade.
How Voters Think
How Voters Think – New York Times
After seeing a candidate for 100 milliseconds, voters make certain sorts of judgments based on expressiveness, facial structure, carriage and attitude. Alexander Todorov of Princeton has found that he can predict 70 percent of political races just by measuring peoples’ snap judgments of candidates’ faces.
Then, having formed an impression from these thin-slice appraisals, voters rack their memory banks. Decades ago, Kahneman and Amos Tversky argued that human judgment is less a matter of calculating probabilities and more a matter of trying to fit new things into familiar patterns. Maybe John Edwards reminds one voter of the sort of person he disliked in high school. Maybe Barack Obama evokes the elevated feeling another voter felt watching John F. Kennedy. Continue reading “How Voters Think”
Kayak & SideStep Merge Reservation Systems
Cheap Flights, Cheap Airfare, Airline Tickets, Travel Deals – SideStep
The best on-line flight reservation systems just merged, as pointed out by intrepid traveler Jeff Ullian. Not too long ago, two companies – Kayak.com and SideStep.com – independently hit upon a new way to shop for travel. Both Kayak and SideStep allow you to search multiple travel sites at once, compare the results, and then buy from whatever travel site you choose. The idea of a “travel search engine” was quickly embraced. Kayak and SideStep have now become the preferred tools of savvy travelers.
Recently Kayak and SideStep decided to merge! We’re combining our strengths and resources – which means a better travel search product for you. Take a look at our new sites at www.sidestep.com or Kayak.com.Now that Kayak and Sidestep have merged, you will notice some new features, such as flight fare history charts or map and photo views of hotels.
Start School Late To Get Ahead
The Early Bird Gets the Bad Grade – New York Times
Research shows that teenagers’ body clocks are set to a schedule that is different from that of younger children or adults. This prevents adolescents from dropping off until around 11 p.m., when they produce the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, and waking up much before 8 a.m. when their bodies stop producing melatonin. The result is that the first class of the morning is often a waste, with as many as 28 percent of students falling asleep, according to a National Sleep Foundation poll. Some are so sleepy they don’t even show up, contributing to failure and dropout rates.
In 2002, high schools in Jessamine County in Kentucky pushed back the first bell to 8:40 a.m., from 7:30 a.m. Attendance immediately went up, as did scores on standardized tests, which have continued to rise each year. Districts in Virginia and Connecticut have achieved similar success. In Minneapolis and Edina, Minn., which instituted high school start times of 8:40 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. respectively in 1997, students’ grades rose slightly and lateness, behavioral problems and dropout rates decreased.
Feeding Frenzy
As the Dorado (Mah-Mahi) & Swordfish feed, you can also see the Shearwaters diving in to grab a bite, in this amazing underwater photo that captures a feeding frenzy. Thanks to Darryl Edwards
3D Virtual “Rube Goldberg” Music Machines
This incredible 3D computer animation was created by Wayne Lytle and his team at Animusic in Austin, Texas. No such machine exists in the real world. They sell DVDs of their musical work. Here is an example. Thanks to Roland Webster
Will The Real Mona Lisa Please Smile?
German experts crack Mona Lisa smile | U.S. | Reuters
Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, has long been seen as the most likely model for the sixteenth-century painting.
But art historians have often wondered whether the smiling woman may actually have been da Vinci’s lover, his mother or the artist himself.
Now experts at the Heidelberg University library say dated notes scribbled in the margins of a book by its owner in October 1503 confirm once and for all that Lisa del Giocondo was indeed the model for one of the most famous portraits in the world.
Super Staph the New HIV?
Drug-resistant staph found to be passed in gay sex | U.S. | Reuters
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, is beginning to appear outside hospitals in San Francisco, Boston, New York and Los Angeles.
Sexually active gay men in San Francisco are 13 times more likely to be infected than their heterosexual neighbors, the researchers reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
“Once this reaches the general population, it will be truly unstoppable,” said Binh Diep, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco who led the study. “That’s why we’re trying to spread the message of prevention.”