Friday Fatigue

Man. It's hard to have a full time job, move across town/the country, write a dissertation, try to have a semblance of a social life,* AND keep up with this blog.

I've been bookmarking things to write about here, but let's be honest: I won't get around to most of it. So here's a list of things I've found interesting recently.

1. WATCH YOUR HEAD! I was informed yesterday that there's a satellite falling to earth that is going to clear orbit today, and that there's a 1 in 3200 chance it could hit a person (a statistic I have verified in an extremely detailed NASA PowerPoint). While this doesn't precisely translate into a 1 in 3200 chance that it could hit ME, I'm not taking any chances. I think I'll work from the subway today. They have wifi down there, don't they?

(Side note: In my brief research on this satellite-maybe-hitting-me business, I discovered that NASA has an entire office dedicated to studying things that fall from space and might hit me. They think of everything!)

2. The world's (allegedly) deadliest volcano might erupt soon. Not a good time to plan a trip to Indonesia, I guess.

3. Ever wonder how breakfast cereal is made? Wonder no more! (Also, eat cereal no more...ick.)

4. Speaking of icky industrial food, the first two parts of this piece have rather disturbed me. Wood pulp in our food, and tasteless OJ? Guess I'll be fresh-squeezing my juice from now on, and trying to avoid chemically-treated pulverized wood.

More on food-grade wood pulp here and here. (Worth reading about, in my opinion.)

5. More tax, more happy?

6. And finally, some fun. Researchers have analyzed male dance moves to discover what the ladies like the most. The results might surprise you, so I'll quote directly from the abstract [try here for the full article]: "Three movement measures were key predictors of dance quality; these were variability and amplitude of movements of the neck and trunk, and speed of movements of the right knee."

More specifically, the following aspects of dudes' dancing seems to account for most of the variability in ladies' ratings: neck internal/external rotation (head shaking), trunk abduction/adduction (sideways bending), and right knee internal/external rotation (twisting).

Not to be a hater, but there is literally no attractive dance I can imagine that involves shaking one's head while bending sideways and twisting the right knee rapidly. But what do I know.

Do you guys remember this guy? Check out that trunk abduction/adduction!

Happy Friday.


*I am blatantly failing at my goal of making no new friends until the dissertation is done. Shame on me.