Even Chuck Norris can’t beat that…
| February 10, 2012
Author: luapo
Facebook, Twitter More Addictive Than Alcohol, Tobacco and Sex
| February 9, 2012
What’s more addicting than alcohol, tobacco, and coffee? Apparently, your desire to check social networks and to stay employed trumps all else, including urges to sleep and have sex.
People’s daily desires make it harder to resist the urge to check social networks like Facebook and Twitter for updates than to turn down an alcoholic drink or a cigarette. Sleep and sex were the two things people most longed for during the day, but the urges to keep on top of social networks and work were the hardest to resist.
Researchers from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business fitted 205 participants between the ages of 18 and 85 with BlackBerry devices in and around the German city of Würtzburg. Seven times a day over 14 hours for seven consecutive days, the participants were asked to message whether they were experiencing a desire at that moment or had experienced one within the last 30 minutes, what type it was, the strength of it, whether it conflicted with other desires, and whether they resisted or went along with it. 10,558 responses and 7,827 “desire episodes” were reported.
Alcohol, tobacco, and coffee prompted much lower levels of desire despite their addictive properties. Furthermore, people were relatively successful at resisting sports inclinations, sexual urges, and spending impulses. Resisting the desire to work (when it conflicts with other goals such as socialising or leisure activities), which was the hardest along with checking social networks, may be difficult because your job defines your identity, dictates many aspects of your life, and invokes penalties if important duties are not completed.
Snowboarder Survives an Avalanche By Floating On an Airbag – Video
| February 9, 2012
This footage was caught on January 25th, 2012 in the backcountry near Montezuma, Colorado. It features pro snowboarder Meesh Hytner being caught in a sizeable (~class 3) avalanche and deploying her BCA Float 30 avalanche airbag before taking a long ride.
The Simpsons Are Already Making Fun of Steve Jobs
| February 9, 2012
You probably missed this among the CES clusterskgjhaskjgh: the Simpsons made fun of Steve Jobs on this week’s episode, titled Politically Inept, with Homer Simpson. As Homer is being interviewed on TV, “Steve Jobs unveils iGhost” crawls across the news ticker.
In the episode, Homer becomes a Glenn Beck type after Bart uploads a video of him having an Alec Baldwin-ish airplane meltdown moment. At one point, he gets interviewed in a Fox News program. At that point, the news ticker runs several funny fake headlines, like “Europe puts Greece on eBay,” “Congress postpones end of the world to 2013,” “Satan tweets support for Santorum” and the aforementioned “Steve Jobs unveils iGhost.”
The episode is actually funny (surprise!) but is it too early to make fun of Jobs?
Coulrophobia – Are You Afraid of Clowns?
| February 8, 2012
Did you find Heath Ledger as The Joker scary? Then perhaps you suffer from coulrophobia, the abnormal fear of clowns. Join a self-confessed coulrophobic for a look at these guys and see if you are too. Like you don’t already know!
‘Cloaking’ a 3-D object from all angles demonstrated
| February 8, 2012
Researchers have “cloaked” a three-dimensional object, making it invisible from all angles, for the first time. However, the demonstration works only for waves in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. It uses a shell of what are known as plasmonic materials; they present a “photo negative” of the object being cloaked, effectively cancelling it out.
