- Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Feel-Good Waste of Money
- "In a paper published in March in the journal Optometry and Vision Science, four researchers compare the full costs of delivering used glasses to the costs of instead delivering ready-made glasses in standard powers (like my drugstore readers, but for myopia as well). The authors find that recycled glasses cost nearly twice as much per usable pair."
- Keep on truckin’
- "One of the leading firms in the field, SpaceX, has already notched up a string of successful flights (and a few failures, too) with its Falcon rockets, pictured above. This month it will attempt its most ambitious mission yet: a rendezvous with the space station." - the US may soon be no longer dependent on Russia to deliver stuff into space.
- Green Infrastructure Could Save Cities Billions
- "Looking at 479 case studies of green infrastructure projects around the U.S., the report finds that the majority of projects turned out to be just as affordable or even more so than traditional "grey" infrastructure. About a quarter of projects raised costs, 31 percent, kept costs the same and more than 44 percent actually brought costs down."
- How Researchers Came Up With Nutrition Requirements
- ""Volunteers," by which we mean prisoners, were deprived of nutrients and then given the bare minimum they needed to be restored to health."
- Entry 6: Elisabeth Badinter’s job is to increase sales of baby formula. Why is no one talking about her laughable conflict of interest?
- Found the link in the comments section in the G&M's piece 'The good mother doesn’t exist. She’s a myth'. "The fact that the author of a major new book asserting that breast-feeding “enslaves” and “undermines” women also personally holds controlling interest in the agency of record for the three companies that collectively control much of the infant formula market share in the United States is glaringly disturbing."
- I’ve got “baby fever”
- "Could there be real science behind the old cliche of a woman's biological clock? I didn't believe it -- until now." One particular interesting comment: "Brase, who has studied the issue for nearly a decade, found that beliefs about gender roles — for example, a woman’s conviction that her proper place is in the home — were not strong predictors of baby fever"
- Only a Mad Woman would call the 50s a golden age: No career. No mortgage. No bank account. A husband who wouldn't lift a finger. A new book says forget the nostalgia
- Oh the irony. She claims "Similarly, you would never catch a man changing or washing nappies, or even pushing a pram." Funnily enough, in the background of a photo in the article of her with her mother and brother Richard on holiday in Skegness in 1954 you find not merely one but what appears to be two men doing exactly that. (Interestingly, the majority of the Mad Men audience is female).
- Elephant, lion, tiger on Quebec highway
- Not what you see on the side of the road everyday in this country.
- Move on Oil Company Draws Praise in Argentina, Where Growth Continues
- "So many nervous citizens have taken their money out of the country that Argentina’s tax agency now uses Labrador retrievers trained to detect the ink used to print dollar bills in an effort to stanch capital flight at the airports, ferry terminal and bus terminal in Buenos Aires." The article also notes that following the nationalization, Argentina went from a net energy exporter to a net energy importer. (HT: CB)
- The Mighty Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of
- The article mentions that "Scientists are a famously anonymous lot, but few can match in the depths of her perverse and unmerited obscurity the 20th-century mathematical genius Amalie Noether." Overkill? How many famous historical mathematicians can the average person name let alone tell you of their life story?
- US and UK to collaborate on 'floating' wind turbines
- "The UK and US will work together to develop "floating" wind turbines to harness more offshore wind power at a potentially lower cost." It mentions that this is for turbines "in deep waters that are currently off-limits to conventional turbines." Windspeeds are likely higher there I'd guess - not sure if this will be used for turbines closer to the shore as well.
- Is it a sin to fly?
- "The Bishop of London thinks so. What's your view?" Why am I not surprised that the bishop in question was Anglican?
- Mobile Service in Canada: Overpriced and Anti-Competitive [Study]
- "Seabord suggests that the implementation of mobile services in Canada cost around $196 per user from the beginning of operations until 2000 versus $292 per user in the US. In 2008, mobile operators Bell and Telus indicated that they would invest around $500 million in a new HSPA network. However, in New Zealand, a country 37 times smaller than Canada, a similar network cost $400 million. Thus, the arguments of higher operating costs due to geography are not accurate."
- No alternative to austerity
- "Mr Hollande says that he will replace austerity with growth. Why didn’t anybody think of that before? ... If building great roads and trains were the route to lasting prosperity, Greece and Spain would be booming."
- Tackle the pension problem now
- "the average assets to liabilities ratio of Canadian pension funds is 63%, which is well below fully funded levels". This seem to be a pro-defined-benefit-pension article. However, unless you were to do something like index the retirement age to some percentile of life expectancy, as people live longer a defined-benefit system doesn't seem particularly sustainable.
- Study of the Day: Women Are Much Happier When Men Feel Their Pain
- ”According to recent research, men and women derive satisfaction from their partner's ability to empathize in vastly different ways.”
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