And now for the next installment from the chronicles of confusingly awesome geekery:

via

One in three employees with a commute longer than 90 minutes say they have had recurring neck or back pain within in the past 12 months. Just about the same amount say they have been diagnosed with high cholesterol. Only 20% of employees with a commute shorter than 20 minutes report high cholesterol or back/neck pain.

A fascinating look at how a little girl walking in the sand of the African desert could cause a hurricane 4000 miles away in the USA.

Those cheap earphones you keep buying year after year? The ones with the cool designs? They all kinda sound the same, huh? There’s a pretty good reason for that: They actually are all the same earphones.

“The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” he said. This struck me as the mother of all Emily Litella moments. Did the leader of the Revolution just say, in essence, “Never mind”?

I asked Julia to interpret this stunning statement for me. She said, “He wasn’t rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under ‘the Cuban model’ the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country.”

When I first saw this photograph of a man’s hand submerged in liquid nitrogen at somewhere below -320° F, my immediate thought was, “That guy must be crazy! One second in that stuff, and you’re shopping for new skin!” My shock was tempered only slightly by the fact that it was my hand, and we’d taken the picture just a minute earlier.