Rotundus.com

"It’s funny how people will watch the Food Network but then be like, ‘Let’s order a pizza!’ he said with a small grin. And now to avoid all that hard work in the kitchen, they’re not only watching food shows but also playing food games.

Source: Chicago Tribute: Video games: Now they’re cookin’

President's Choice killed an average of 54.6 per cent of microbes on the kids' hands. Purell killed about 60.4 per cent. And Soapopular killed 46 per cent. So why did CBC's results differ so much from the claims on hand-sanitizer bottles and websites? According to Tetro, the companies are not deliberately misleading consumers. They've had to test their products in accredited labs before Health Canada would allow them to make the 99.99 per cent claim.

... "The claim is based on these very controlled laboratory tests and we do those tests here at the lab," he said. When hand sanitizers undergo testing, the hands they're tested on are first sanitized in the lab, then sprinkled with microbes in a controlled situation. "We wash the hands. We make sure they are clean and devoid of any germs, then we artificially put the germs on their finger pads. Then we test to find out whether the product kills or eliminates it," said Tetro.

- Excerpted from CBC News

Of course, a bit of grime might not be so bad for kids after all.

• The Graduated Licensing system appears to have reduced crashes in BC - at least after they modified the system to have actual restrictions
• Air traffic controller audio from the 777 crash - no fatalities - at Heathrow in January 2008
• Computer programmers sometimes use 1/0 and true/false interchangeably when talking about variables. Do that and you might wind up with 28,000 tonnes of coal on your doorstep.

The study below deals with one type of gratuitous content, but of course there are other types of stuff gratuitously used in films. Gratuitous use of special effects, alongside abandonment of a concept called "plot", is another thing that I find annoying about a lot of recent movies.

According to a new study published in the November journal of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, sex does not sell mainstream cinema. Crunching data from 914 films released between 2001 and 2005, researchers Dean Keith Simonton from the University of California, Davis, and independent Vancouver-based researcher Anemone Cerridwen discovered sex and nudity have a negligible impact on the box office.

If anything, too much hard-core action could actually hurt a film's performance. On average, the less sex and nudity, the higher the gross. The more sex and nudity, the lower the gross — by approximately 31 per cent. "All in all, it appears that sex may neither sell nor impress. This null effect might suggest most cinematic sex is in fact gratuitous," write the authors.

- Excerpted from the Calgary Herald

Interesting to find an article like this in a secular source.