I wonder what would happen if you gave directions for making ^U^U

never mind, it's already out there:
doctorwhoscarf.com provides knitting instructions.

If you read closer, it says that the study by Croft was double blind, which isn't to say that the rooms was extra dark, but means that neither the subjects nor the researchers attaching the telephones knew which were active.

I don't know how much longer it will be up, but the inflation for the past year is presented in a neat style chart here:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/05/03/business/20080403_SPENDING_GRAPHIC.html

It's a bit like a pie chart, but with bubbles instead of wedges. Color indicates increases and decreases.

Some of you might be wondering why I brought up risk.

Actually there was a comment that said that police have the worst job on account of the danger involved. That post seems to have disappeared, leaving mine as somewhat of a non-sequitor.

I based the gardner comment off of BLS numbers. The fatality rate for police is around 13 per 100,000. For groundskeepers it's 14. Fishing and logging have more than 100, and garbagemen come in around 90. Average for all jobs is a bit over 4.

Part of that, of course, is that they are well trained on keeping safe.

Being a police officer is less dangerous than being a gardener, yet I expect that the gardeners are very unlikely to get out of a ticket on the basis of professional courtesy.

Admittedly, it's three times as dangerous as being a cubicle jockey, but it's far from the worst.

This phenomenon was the winner of the 2004 Ig Nobel prize for Psychology.

The paper had a great title, "Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events" (Simon and Chabris, Perception, vol 28, p 1059)

There are videos of the original floating around on the web.

It was great to hear "Summer of '68" again.

My favorite one is the Escher hands operating on each other.