1. The Horror and Hilarity of Noseblowing
2. WordCount
3. When Sloth Meets Gluttony
4. Antarctica, 1961: A Soviet Surgeon Has to Remove His Own Appendix
I worked without gloves. It was hard to see. The mirror helps, but it also hinders — after all, it’s showing things backwards. I work mainly by touch. The bleeding is quite heavy, but I take my time — I try to work surely. Opening the peritoneum, I injured the blind gut and had to sew it up. Suddenly it flashed through my mind: there are more injuries here and I didn’t notice them . . . I grow weaker and weaker, my head starts to spin. Every 4-5 minutes I rest for 20-25 seconds. Finally, here it is, the cursed appendage! With horror I notice the dark stain at its base. That means just a day longer and it would have burst and . . .
5. 50 Photos Of Basset Hounds Running
6. 10 Historical Characters and their Unusual Pets
7. Weird News of the Week: Police raid the wrong man’s house more than 40 times
Bungling police have wrongly raided innocent man Matt Jillard’s home more than 40 times in the past 18 months. Riot vans and patrol cars have repeatedly raced to Mr Jillard’s home because of a mix-up over his address.Officers even tried to kick down his door at 3am on Christmas Day – then called again just 14 hours later. The 38-year-old said: ‘I could see the funny side at first but 18 months on, I’m getting really annoyed.’
8. A Brief and Incomplete Timeline of T-Shirt History
n 1734, David Hume, a bookish 23-year-old Scotsman, abandoned conventional career options and went off to France to Think Things Over. Living frugally and devoting himself to study and writing, he returned after three years with a hefty manuscript under his arm. Published in three volumes in 1739 –40 as A Treatise of Human Nature, it attracted little attention. Reflecting on the event near the end of his life, Hume joked that it “fell still-born from the press.”Hume soon rallied, going on to enjoy a long and successful career as an historian and political essayist (the accomplishments for which he was best known in his lifetime) and as an important contributor to the infant science of economics. But from time to time he returned to the Treatise, stripping out extraneous material and sharpening the arguments. The results he published as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), which works brought his philosophical views to a wider audience.
10. 10 Everyday Fruits And Vegetables That Are Poisonous
11. Could A Layperson Land A Jumbo Jet?
Possibly, but only with a lot of luck and some autopilot assistance. Amateurs have landed smaller private planes after the pilot became incapacitated, but outside of 1970s disaster movies, it has never happened with a commercial passenger aircraft.Simply getting to the controls is going to be very difficult. After 9/11, all commercial aircraft have secure cockpit doors designed to prevent anyone from entering during a flight. If you did manage to get inside and get in touch with a control tower or, more likely, the radar room (the control tower takes over only after an airplane is within 10 miles of landing), it’s crucial that there be a pilot on hand who has flown that specific type of plane (or someone else very familiar with it) to give instructions. In most cases, the controller in the tower would instruct you to input basic adjustments to altitude, airspeed and direction into the aircraft’s autopilot system.
12. Image of the Week: Swingset on a Billboard
13. 10 Things You Probably Don’t Know About Star Trek
14. “Fear of Missing Out” and Social Media
OMO is a great motivator of human behavior, and I think a crucial key to understanding social software, and why it works the way it does. Many people have studied the game mechanics that keep people collecting things (points, trophies, check-ins, mayorships, kudos). Others have studied how the neurochemistry that keeps us checking Facebook every five minutes is similar to the neurochemistry fueling addiction. Social media has made us even more aware of the things we are missing out on. You’re home alone, but watching your friends status updates tell of a great party happening somewhere. You are aware of more parties than ever before. And, like gym memberships, adding Bergman movies to your Netflix queue and piling up unread copies of the New Yorker, watching these feeds gives you a sense that you’re participating, not missing out, even when you are.
15. Cool Castles Located on Cliffs
16. U.S. Millionaires Say $7 Million Doesn’t Make You Rich
A million dollars ain’t what it used to be.More than four out of ten American millionaires say they do not feel rich. Indeed many would need to have at least $7.5 million in order to feel they were truly rich, according to a Fidelity Investments survey.
17. Infographic of the Week: 17 Things You Didn’t Know About ‘Seinfeld’
18. Robot pains and corporate feelings
. . . [O]rdinary people find it much more natural to say that “The Acme Corporation is upset about the court’s recent ruling” than to say that “The Acme Corporation is feeling upset.” Similarly, people find it more natural to say that “The Acme Corporation regrets its recent decision” than to say that “The Acme Corporation is feeling regret.” One might conclude from these findings that ordinary people distinguish the sheer possession of an emotion from the experience of what it is like to have that emotion. The idea is that ordinary people hold that while a corporation can have an emotion, it cannot experience what it is like to have that emotion, and as a consequence it cannot properly be said to feel the emotion. This conclusion is consistent with the speculation that ordinary people and philosophers conceive of subjective experience similarly.
19. 10 Animals That Made Significant Contributions to Research
20. Red is irresistible to heterosexual females of all species
If you’re a vertebrate female, chances are that you’re attracted to the color red, and that includes humans. It’s one of the oddest facts in all biology - no matter what the species, women seem to love red.That’s what a bunch of University of Rochester researchers discovered last year when they took the already well-documented nonhuman attraction to red and tried to apply it to human females.
21. How to advertise your business: trap thousands of cockroaches in a sign that says E. Coli
22. HistoricalLOL of the Week
23. Does Your Name Dictate Your Life Choices?
What’s in a name? Letters. And psychologists have posited that the letters — particularly the first letter of our names — can influence decisions, including whom we marry and where we move. The effect is called “implicit egotism.”
24. 10 most beautiful waterfalls
25. How the Japan Earthquake Shortened Days on Earth
The massive earthquake that struck northeast Japan Friday (March 11) has shortened the length Earth’s day by a fraction and shifted how the planet’s mass is distributed.A new analysis of the 8.9-magnitude earthquake in Japan has found that the intense temblor has accelerated Earth’s spin, shortening the length of the 24-hour day by 1.8 microseconds, according to geophysicist Richard Gross at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
26. 10 Things Hotels Won’t Tell You
27. Better Book Titles of the Week - Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
28. How-To of the Week: Make Pop Rocks
29. Why Charging the Homeless for Shelter Is a Good Idea
The operator of a homeless shelter in Los Angeles’ Skid Row has hit upon an idea that’s both economical and therapeutic: charging residents.Sure, it’s $7 a night ($2 of which is saved for the resident), but in these tough economic times every bit helps. As Sandy Banks of the Los Angeles Times recently pointed out, Union Rescue Mission director Andy Bales wants to change the “three hots and a cot” culture of homeless shelters so that residents don’t get too comfortable. Moreover, he had little choice.
30. Seven Water Towers Transformed into Houses
31. 10 Unusual Things I Didn’t Know About Google
The “I’m Feeling Lucky” button probably costs Google about $110 million a year. When you click on that button it just takes you to the top search result. In other words, you skip all the ads that Google makes money on. So why don’t they just take that button off? Focus groups apparently show that people feel more comfortable with the button on there.
32. The World’s Most Beautiful Sports Arenas
33. A Brief History of Title Design
While I have you, can I ask you something? I’ll be quick.
Twenty-five thousand people subscribe to First Things. Why can’t that be fifty thousand? Three million people read First Things online like you are right now. Why can’t that be four million?
Let’s stop saying “can’t.” Because it can. And your year-end gift of just $50, $100, or even $250 or more will make it possible.
How much would you give to introduce just one new person to First Things? What about ten people, or even a hundred? That’s the power of your charitable support.
Make your year-end gift now using this secure link or the button below.
