The Onion is reporting on a new bi-partisan Congressional report which says that the nation’s economy is in dire straits because the nation is built on top of ancient Indian burial grounds. From the video, “Republicans want the curse to hold in order to paint Obama as being soft on poltergeists”.
Report: Economy Failing Because U.S. Built On Ancient Indian Burial Grounds
From The Onion
Waterspouts are a kind of tornado that forms over water, and an Australian news helicopter got some great footage of them off the coast of Sydney.
Via Neatorama
There are three schools of thought on why going to college is good:
Those last two reasons are no good to researchers because their effectiveness is largely immeasurable, so the ones at Georgetown decided to look at the trade-school aspect of college and see what the return on investment is for a college degree. Then they wrote a big report on the subject, or so The Chronicle of Higher Education will have us believe.
It turns out — and this will be shocking to all of you who just arrived from Papua New Guinea — different degrees command different salaries! Generally speaking, the more practical a degree is, the higher the salary will be and the more abstract, the lower. So the arithmetic stuff (engineering, business, health, science) gets paid more than the reading/writing stuff (arts, policy, social work). Huge surprise, right? The researchers admit that it’s not, but the value of this data is the large number of majors they cataloged, which shows for example, the difference in earnings between a Geography major and a Criminology major. So you’re pretty interested in two sort of different things, you can now easily find out which will have the bigger financial payoff.
One caveat of the study is that it only compared bachelor degrees — doctors, lawyers, psychologists, etc are left out of this study and most of them would probably make more than the math-y bachelors.
Bottom line: even a social work bachelor degree is worth it, because on average even the people with the lowest-paying bachelor degrees earn about 150k$ more over the length of their career than high-school-only graduates. For other majors it’s a few hundred grand more, topping out with engineering at about a million dollars more.
From Georgetown University, via The Chronicle Of Higher Education and Slashdot
Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me found these two gems among last week’s headlines:
Ever wonder what all the people around you are listening to on their iPods? Someone in New York did, and asked them.
Via Laughing Squid
The Palm/HP Touchpad is all but confirmed for a June release at least at Walmart, according to PreCentral; OfficeMax will get it in July. It’ll sell for about the same price as comparable iPad models. Since this is the first and much awaited (by Palm fans) webOS tablet, and supposedly has legendary integration with the elegant webOS phones (like the Palm Pre), and not only one but two iPads have been out for over a year now, the device is way overdue. And given the way Android tablets have flopped, the market is ripe for a proper open competitor to Apple’s iron-fisted iOS family.
Hopefully the also much-awaited Pre 3 will be released around the same time. That’ll be a good way to get people to drop a grand all at once.
Update (August 29th, 2011) — the TouchPad did arrive in June, but was discontinued 48 days later, along with the Pre 3, which never saw the light of day.
Via PreCentral
Zipcar has been providing an hourly car rental service for a few years, and now there’s a crowd-sourced competitor called Getaround. If you have a car you don’t use that much, it lets you rent it out to random people for whatever price works for you. If you need a car, you can see what cars are around you and get in and go, all by using your smartphone.
Getaround, via Laughing Squid
Facebook Overlord Mark Zuckerberg has taken on a new challenge this year: to only eat that which he personally kills. Now, I know what you’re thinking and no, he’s not doing this because he gets morbid pleasure out of watching the life fade from an innocent animal’s eyes. He’s doing it for the opposite reason: to learn to appreciate the fact that in order for him to eat meat, a living being has to give its life. Because of this new emotionally taxing and time consuming policy, he’s thus far only been able to free the souls of a goat, a pig, a chicken, and a lobster; in case you’re not familiar with what these animals look like, Buzzfeed has provided some photographic examples, a couple of which are reproduced below. For his first foray into steak-making, I do hope Zuckerberg goes to the trouble of procuring the cattle gun used by Javier Barden’s character in No Country For Old Men.
