ty.rannosaur.us

According to the BBC, Nepal has an interesting way of fighting corruption:

Staff at Nepal’s main international airport are to be issued with trousers without pockets, in an attempt to wipe out rampant bribe-taking.

Link.

Then Denny’s is the place for you! Where else can you hang out with the likes of Rascal Flatts and Good Charlotte? According to the WSJ:

To stem the loss of customers, Denny’s last year created the “Allnighter” program, which includes adopting emerging musicians and offering a “rockstar” menu for night patrons. It gives adoptees $1,000 in Denny’s gift cards so they can eat while touring. Then, Denny’s uses Twitter and MySpace to inform its target market of 18- to 24-year-olds when and where the adopted bands’ after-parties will be held and when new menu items are added.

How does it work?

Good Charlotte, a band led by twins Joel and Benji Madden, created a pair of burritos, one made with a veggie burger, the other with smoked chicken. Country band Rascal Flatts offered a biscuit topped with country-fried steak, eggs, cheese, gravy and three strips of bacon.

I mean, who doesn’t want a Good Charlotte burrito?

Link. Via.

The WSJ has an article over how China’s “one child” policy led to a higher rate of savings in China and may have played a part in our own financial bubble:

One possible reason for the jump in savings: The dearth of women is making China’s marriage market extremely competitive, and families with boys are accumulating wealth to make their sons more attractive matches.

In a paper recently posted to the National Bureau of Economic Research’s website, economists Shan-Jin Wei, at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, and Xiaobo Zhangk, at the International Food Policy offer evidence why this might be so. They find that in areas where the male-to-female sex for young Chinese is high, savings rates are higher, too.  And they find that households with sons save more in high male-to-sex ratio regions.

Link. Via.

(PS: Hello again.)

A lot of animals have pretty awesome collective defenses against predators. For example, sea lions will pile up in large groups to keep killer whales at bay. But the Eastern (or Japanese) honey bee has the best collective defense against its natural predator, the Asian giant hornet, ever: body heat.

If you’ve ever seen this famous YouTube video of a few hornets rampaging through a bee hive, then you know why bees are always threatened by hornets. But the Eastern honey bee has developed a defense that involves exploiting the hornet’s upper lethal temperature through their flight muscles:

As a hornet approaches the nest in an attempt to kill honeybees, a hundred or so will guard the nest entrance in an attempt to draw it on.  When the hornet enters the nest, it is immediately mobbed by a clump of approximately 500 honeybees, which, surprisingly, do not sting the hornet to death as previously thought (Schmidt-Nielsen 2001).  Instead, the bees heat themselves up to 47 degrees C very quickly using their flight muscles.  As the hornet’s upper lethal temperature is 44-46 degrees C, it is killed quickly, effectively baked to death by the large clump of bees.

Check out a YouTube video of this happening:

And another one.

Hope you enjoyed this short update. A more serious one will follow whenever some free time opens up. Credit where credit is due: idea via.

Everyone enjoys a good hoax regardless of their personal beliefs about the paranormal. The following are examples of famous hoaxes that captivated the personal interest and imagination in their time, only to let everyone down once the truth emerged. Some still believe that these are true. Read the rest of this entry »