“JDate lists the following relationship status choices: Single, Divorced, Separated, and Widowed. It seems that most young adults on the site seem to shy away from meeting widows. If you ask me, ‘Separated’ sounds like it would be more trouble.” ShaBot 6000
“Today the world grows twice as much food as it did a generation ago, but it uses three times as much water to grow it. Two-thirds of all the water abstracted from the environment goes to irrigate crops. This use of water is massively unsustainable…” New Scientist
“When you heat up leftovers in the microwave, what time do you enter? 2:30 or 2:22? One is close enough and much faster.” Fly on the Wall, Signal vs. Noise
“Steak or Lobster?” Neowin Poll
“American’s increasing acceptance of religious diversity doesn’t extend to those who don’t believe in a god… From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in ‘sharing their vision of American society.’ Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry. Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public.” News release of a national survey by University of Minnesota’s department of sociology
“Adam Gopnik just emailed me to tell me that, for some strange reason, a debate that he and I did for the Washington Monthly on the Canadian health care system… has now been resurrected on various blogs… In our debate, Adam vigorously defended the Canadian system, and I attacked it. But wait! That was six years ago! I’ve now changed my mind. I now agree with virtually everything Adam said and disagree with virtually everything I said. In fact, I shudder when I read what I said back then.” Malcolm Gladwell
“The Canadian health-care system is a health-care system for women. The American health-care system is a health-care system that is perfectly situated for men. It’s the male health-care system. This whole debate about what is better, the American system or the Canadian system, is essentially a variant on the gender war.” Blink author Malcolm Gladwell, on healthcare
“The mean duration of urinal use by men was 41 seconds, whereas women spend 75 seconds in their little stalls.” Reporter Francine Kopun, citing a 1975 study by the National Research Council