Rotundus.com

Seemingly random piles of wood cast perfect human shadows on the wall

Some interesting art.

Elephant Dung Coffee: World's Most Expensive Brew Is Made With Pooped-Out Beans

Apparently a cat isn't the only type of animal you can have pre-poop your coffee for your - elephant and bird poo are two other options. The quality of cat-poop coffee manufacture is also in decline according to NPR.

Who needs casual sex!

A devotee of hookup culture goes on her "first for-real date ever" - "After spending most of my 20s hooking up, I'm shocked to find that traditional courtship is pretty great."

Smoother dashboard typefaces might enhance driver safety

"In recent tests, researchers with MIT’s AgeLab have found that dashboard displays using the more open and differentiated lettering found in the “humanist” family of typefaces are easier for people to read quickly than displays using the more uniform and tightly spaced letters of the “square grotesque” style. Male drivers, in particular, can process messages in humanist lettering about 10 percent faster, on average. That might not sound like a lot, but under highway conditions automobiles will cover about 50 feet in the time it takes drivers to process the less user-friendly messages." Guess that, given ~10% improvement this means a 5 foot advantage in stopping distance?

From an interview with the author of Colbert's America: Satire and Democracy:

FOX411: Do both Republicans and Democrats think he’s funny, or is Colbert’s humor partisan?

SM: Colbert appeals to a much broader political spectrum than Stewart…. Colbert’s charisma also helps him. Stewart will annoy people who disagree with him, but Colbert is the kind of person that most people just want to be around.

I watch the Colbert Report most days but the Moment of Zen is about the only part of Stewart's show I find interesting.

NHS makes patients wait 'to lower expectations’

"At least 10 primary care trusts (PCTs) have told hospitals to increase the length of time before they see patients in order to save money, an investigation by The Daily Telegraph has found. In some areas, patients endured delays of 12 or 15 weeks after GPs decided they needed surgery, even though hospitals could have seen them sooner." There are also reports of people in British hospitals dying of dehydration or starvation though some of that could be due to medical conditions preventing nutrients from being supplied.

What Would a Utopian 15 Hour Work Week Really Look Like?

A fairly skeptical response to John Quiggin's fairly positive article on the topic.

Lies You’ve Been Told About the Pacific Garbage Patch

The most common photo associated with it is from the Manila harbour, not the mid-Pacific. What it's actually like - "There are millions of small and microscopic pieces of plastic, about .4 pieces per cubic meter, floating over a roughly 5000 square km area of the Pacific" - and how it's impacting the environment.

Loy Mauch, Arkansas Lawmaker, Defended Slavery In Letters To The Editor

An Arkansas Republican who's remarks include that slavery "may have been a blessing." Roughly 2003 is where this starts to become explicit - he'd made more generic pro-Confederacy comments prior to that though.

An early progress report from John Gurdon, one of the two awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine: