Thirty Three Things (v. 17)

1. Cashvertise

The average 100 USD Note is circulating for 7.4 years, it changes hands on average 3x per week, so each ad on a 100 USD note is seen by more then 1000 persons. I would say, this can easily be sold at 5 USD/note. The other notes are much shorter in circulation:

$1: 1.8 years
$5: 1.3 years
$10: 1.5 years
$20: 2 years
$50: 4.6 years

On average an ad on a bill might only be sold for 1 USD, however, given the fact that each day the bureau of engraving and printing produces 38 Million USD bills, this could result in 14 billion USD, more then the actual printing costs. If the design is well chosen, it would not change much of the bill´s appearance as we know it, look at some examples . . .

(Via: MIT Advertising Lab )

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2. The Real People Behind 10 Literary Characters

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3. In a Computer Worm, a Possible Biblical Clue

Deep inside the computer worm that some specialists suspect is aimed at slowing Iran’s race for a nuclear weapon lies what could be a fleeting reference to the Book of Esther, the Old Testament tale in which the Jews pre-empt a Persian plot to destroy them.

That use of the word “Myrtus” — which can be read as an allusion to Esther — to name a file inside the code is one of several murky clues that have emerged as computer experts try to trace the origin and purpose of the rogue Stuxnet program, which seeks out a specific kind of command module for industrial equipment.

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4. Fact of the Week: The longest doctoral program in the nation is the music program at Washington University in St. Louis, with a median length of 16.3 years, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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5. Back from the dead: One third of ‘extinct’ animals turn up again

A study has found that a third of all mammal species declared extinct in the past few centuries have turned up alive and well.

Some of the more reclusive creatures managed to hide from sight for 80 years only to reappear within four years of being officially named extinct in the wild.

(Via: Vox Popoli )

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6. Weird News of the Week: New Zealand School Holds Dead Possum Throwing Contest

The SPCA plans to talk to a rural Manawatu school after receiving complaints about a possum throwing contest.

Last week, the Fairfax Media-owned Manawatu Standard ran pictures of the children and parents at Colyton School participating in the contest, in which pupils grabbed possum carcasses by the tail and lobbed them through the air to see how far they could toss them.

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7. Scholar says ancient Israelites drank beer as well as wine

Ancient Israelites drank not only wine but also beer, according to a biblical scholar at Xavier University, a Roman Catholic school in Louisiana.

“Ancient Israelites, with the possible exception of a few teetotaling Nazirites and their moms, proudly drank beer - and lots of it,” said Michael Homan, in his article for the September/October issue Biblical Archaeology Review, Religion News Service reports.

While English translations of the Bible do not mention beer, the original Hebrew does, he said.

Homan, an archaeologist, said the Hebrew word “shekhar” has been mistranslated as “liquor,” “strong drink” and “fermented drink,” but it translates as “beer” based on linguistic and archaeological research.

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8. Quote of the Week: “Talent is not when your friends tell you they love your work, but when people who don’t like you have to admit it’s good.” — James Danziger

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9. The Vision of a Blind Architect

Two and a half years ago, [Chris Downey] had just started running the architecture practice at a stylish green-design firm. A few weeks after he took the job, he noticed something wrong with his vision. A tumor was wrapped around his optic nerve; he needed surgery right away. When he woke up, everything was blurry, but he could see. “Five days later,” he said, “it all went black.”

Shortly before he was laid off, Downey had found a blind computer scientist who had devised a way to print online maps through a tactile printer; it worked for architectural drawings too. Meub would take Downey’s hand and guide it to details on the plans, as they talked. “He can’t just look at a drawing at a glance,” Meub told me later. “At first I thought, Okay, this is going to be a limitation. But then I realized that the way he reads his drawings is not dissimilar to the way we experience space. He’ll be walking through a plan with his index finger, discovering things, and damn, he’s walking through the building!”

(Via: Neatorama )

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10. Top 15 TV Miniseries of all Time

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11. Germany Makes Final Reparations Payment for World War I

The final payment of £59.5 million, writes off the crippling debt that was the price for one world war and laid the foundations for another.

Germany was forced to pay the reparations at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 as compensation to the war-ravaged nations of Belgium and France and to pay the Allies some of the costs of waging what was then the bloodiest conflict in history, leaving nearly ten million soldiers dead.

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12. Image of the Week: Pig learns to walk on two legs

The 10-month-old porker is known by villagers as “Zhu Jianqiang” (Strong-willed Pig) after it was born with only two front legs and learned to balance on them well enough to walk.

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13. The Real Life Inspirations For 14 Simpsons Characters

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14. Narcissists Think They Are Highly Creative

sychologists Jack Goncalo and Sharon Kim of Cornell University and Francis Flynn of Stanford University paired up 76 college students and asked one person to develop and pitch a concept for a movie to the other. The ideas were not stellar; one of the more creative, Goncalo says, involved a mafia family run by a young woman. But when pitched by the most narcissistic students (as evaluated by a 16-item questionnaire called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory), the ideas impressed the person evaluating the pitch roughly 50 percent more than did those from the least narcissistic pitchers. (The researchers judged the response to the ideas by how strongly the evaluator agreed with statements such as “it is unlikely that anyone has come up with a movie idea like this before.”) . . .

The difference, the researchers say, was in the pitch itself: narcissists were more enthusiastic, witty, and charming—all traits, according to past research, that people associate with creativity.

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15. Ad of the Week: From a Penguin Malaysia “Unputdownable” ad campaign

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16. Long-Lost Footage of Apollo 11 Mission Surfaces

Long-lost footage of Neil Armstrong descending the ladder of the Apollo 11 lunar module will be screened in public for the first time in Sydney next week, a prominent astronomer told AFP.

The footage runs for a few minutes and is considered to be some of the best footage of the historic 1969 moonwalk, but the film was lost in archives for many years and was badly damaged when found, said John Sarkissian.

(Via: Kottke )

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17. Infographic of the Week: U.S. States Renamed for Countries with Similar GDPs

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18. American Aristocracy

I had an epiphany today while reading Aristotle’s Politics, and it is that Aristotle would probably not classify the United States as a republic but as an aristocracy. He does think that the two have a great many similarities, because they are both fusions of democratic and oligarchic tendencies. What distinguishes the two is that aristocracies tend more oligarchic and republics tend more democratic. We have democratic elements, of course, but we have way too many features that Aristotle would clearly consider oligarchic to be counted as a republic. And many of the features that we think of as intrinsically democratic, especially favorable to the rule of the many, Aristotle would consider obviously oligarchic, favorable to the rule of the few.

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19. Doctors share 15 secrets for glowing skin

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20. Medieval Scholar Resisted Printing Technology

The invention of printing was not the work of scholars. Scholars in the fifteenth century had all the books they needed: their attention was directed to the borrowing, copying and bargaining necessary to obtain more texts. It required hard, practical men, often men of little education, to see the potential of a new method of copying that would bring many hundreds of texts simultaneously to the marketplace. It was also men of this stamp who perceived how the techniques of medieval craft society could be applied to achieve this . . . .

It was swiftly becoming clear that it was the centres of trade, rather than of learning, that would provide the best locations for production of printed books in the fifteenth century. Rather against expectations print did not flourish in many places that boasted a distinguished medieval university. There was virtually no printing in Tübingen or Heidelberg; in England it would be London, rather than Oxford or Cambridge, that monopolised print. Large commercial cities proved more fertile territory.

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21. Hacks to Help You Stay Healthy

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22. HistoricalLOL of the Week

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23. Should Friends Share Secrets or Lend Money?

When you look at friendship cross-culturally, there are many surprises! Consider the fact that in societies around the world, close friends will sanctify their relationships with elaborate public ceremonies not unlike American weddings or that parents or elders can arrange their children’s friendships in much the same way that marriages are arranged in many parts of the world.

I think one of the more interesting findings, and one that reveals our own American preferences and taboos, concerns the kinds of things that friends are expected to help each other with. For example, in the U.S., we often expect friends to talk through personal problems and disclose deep secrets. Indeed, U.S. researchers often impose this criterion on definitions of friendship.

However, there are many places in the world where such verbal, emotional support is only a minor concern in friendships. And it turns out that our American ideal doesn’t even fit very well in the U.S., where many people are involved in close friendships in which such talk therapy doesn’t play a role. Conversely, in the U.S., there are strong taboos against lending large sums of money to friends. But, in many societies, such costly material aid is the sine qua non of close friendship.

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24. America’s smartest cities

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25. The Fighter Pilot Who Shot Himself Down

On Sep 21, 1956 Grumman test pilot Tom Attridge shot himself down in a graphic demonstration of two objects occupying the wrong place at the same time—one being a Grumman F11F-1 Tiger [138260], the other a gaggle of its own bullets..

It happened on the second run of test-firing four 20mm cannon at Mach 1.0 speeds. At 20,000’ Attridge entered a shallow dive of 20°, accelerating in afterburner, and at 13,000’ pulled the trigger for a four-second burst, then another to empty the belts. During the firing run the F11F continued its descent, and upon arriving at 7,000’, the armor-glass windshield was struck, but not penetrated, by an object.

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26. Incredibly Depressing Mega Millions Lottery Simulator

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27. US Army to End Bayonet Training

US troops hadn’t launched a bayonet charge since 1951 during the Korean War. And new soldiers preparing for an increasingly violent war in Afghanistan already need to learn far more skills than the 10 weeks of basic training allows, says Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, head of initial entry training and the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command.

So he made a change, substituting skills drill sergeants reported that they wanted to teach new recruits in favor of dropping the time-honored practice of the bayonet charge.

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28. How-To of the Week: Detect a Photoshopped Image

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29. What Pop Songs Make Men Cry?

According to a survey by PRS for Music, the top ten:

1. R.E.M - Everybody Hurts
2. Eric Clapton - Tears in Heaven
3. Leonard Cohen - Hallelujah
4. Sinead O’Connor - Nothing Compares 2 U
5. U2 - With or Without You
6. The Verve - The Drugs Don’t Work
7. Elton John - Candle In The Wind
8. Bruce Springsteen - Streets of Philadelphia
9. Todd Duncan - Unchained Melody
10. Robbie Williams - Angels

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30. 8 Vampire Myths Explained

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31. India: “Super Monkeys” defend Game Event

Delhi authorities are to deploy a contingent of langurs — a large type of monkey — at Commonwealth Games venues to help chase away smaller simians from the sporting extravaganza.

From Wednesday, 10 langurs will be put on duty outside Games venues in the Indian capital, with the boxing and hockey stadiums seen as particularly vulnerable to monkey misbehaviour, an official said.

The New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) has a regular team of 28 langurs which are used to scare away their weaker brethren in VIP areas of the city, but 10 more have been brought in from the neighbouring state of Rajasthan.

Four of them will be posted outside the boxing complex with their handlers, while another four will patrol the hockey complex. Two have been kept in reserve to respond in the event of an emergency.

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32. 15 Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About Bananas

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33. The Latest from the Standup Economist

(Via: Greg Mankiw’s Blog )