Link Banana

I link to this mainly to pointlessly say: I thought of this first. Like, when I was 14. That is not to say, I should note, that I think the idea’s completely correct. In any case, the idea:

“In ancient times half our children would have died by the age of twenty. Now, in the Western world, 98 per cent of them are surviving to the age of 21. Our life expectancy is now so good that eliminating all accidents and infectious diseases would only raise it by a further two years. Natural selection no longer has death as a handy tool.”

(via Ideas)

Blake Hounshell points to a handful of images of the DAX — Germany’s stock exchange — in decline that all feature the same woman. The Independent even interviewed her.

Essentially, The Independent cited (probably) false information from Sacha Baron Cohen’s Wikipedia page, and them became the cited source for that very information. A truly impressive thing to fathom.

(via Slashdot)

The Independent has a rather long grouping of excerpts from Robert Frank’s The Economic Naturalist. They’re essentially questions answered with straight-forward but verbose (and sometimes questionable) economics. An example:

Why are DVDs sold in much larger packages than CDs, even though the two types of disc are exactly the same size?

Making the CD cases a little less than half as wide as the album sleeves they were replacing thus enabled retailers to avoid the substantial costs of replacing their storage and display racks.

Similar considerations seem to have driven the decision regarding DVD packaging. Before DVDs became popular, most film rental stores carried videotapes in the VHS format, which were packaged in form-fitting boxes that measured 135mm wide and 191mm high. These videos were typically displayed side by side with their spines out. Making DVD cases the same height enabled stores to display their new DVD stocks on existing shelves while consumers were in the process of switching over to the new format. Making the DVD package the same height as the VHS package also made switching to DVDs more attractive for consumers, since they could store their new DVDs on the same shelves they used for their VHS tapes.

(via Gems Sty)