Yes, Ohio Drivers Really Do Suck

Every time I come back to the PNW, I'm struck by just how well everyone drives.

Yes, yes, I know we have a hatred for drivers in every state (everyone's a bad driver who isn't us!), but after living in Ohio and Illinois and driving around Indiana a lot, I learned a new appreciation for PNW drivers. But how much of this was just my own bias? So I decided to look up the states with the top 10 worst driving records. AND LO AND BEHOLD....

Here are the states with the worst rate of traffic accidents, in order:

1.) Pennsylvania
2.) Michigan
3.) Illinois
4.) Ohio
5.) Georgia
6.) Minnesota
7.) Virginia
8.) Indiana
9.) Texas
10.) Wisconsin

See, I am not just biased! Ohio and Indiana really *are* full of bad drivers! 

"How many real adult times have you been in love?"

Inquiring minds want to know.

Drinking the Kool-Aid

I'm watching Obama's Denver speech about the stimulus bill. I've read the pros and cons. I've listened to the GOP arguments (largely summed up by, "Soooooooooociiiaaaaaaaaliiiiiiiiiissssssssm!"). I understand everybody's fears.

Yet we happily invested trillions of dollars into foreign wars over the last eight years while our own country failed. Wars that killed tens of thousands of innocent people.

And we're not willing to invest in our own infrastructure? Our own country? Our own people? We'll spend billions to rebuild Iraq... but not our own country?

There's a great TED talk by Bill Gates where he points out that there are huge, important initiatives that will never be addressed by the free market. His example was malaria. Hundreds of thousands die of malaria in poor countries. There's no free market drive to prevent these deaths... because there's no money in it.

I was reminded of what Lyndon B. Johnson said when he desegregated schools. To paraphrase, "Sometimes we don't do things because they're popular. We do them because they're right."

(Also, why does the president have to sign the bill ten times? That was a neat bit of trivia)

5 Scariest Insects in the World

No shit, man.

Four Suns

Definately the star system I'll use for The Burning Fields.

"Funky Things You Discover While Living in Africa"

Yup.

Real Age Calculator

Even with diabetes, this odd little hippie test insists I shall live until 90.

This is mainly because all of my grandparents and great grandparents are in their 80s and 90s.

Diabetes genes + Logevity genes = me.

I have no idea what the "real age" part of this test means. Apparently, I have the body of a 10 year old. No idea.

(via jlundberg)

A Little Something for the Space Pirates

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has announced the discovery of a mass of crystallized carbon formerly known as star BPM 37093, now known as the biggest diamond in the galaxy, fifty light years away from Earth in the constellation Centaurus. The diamond is estimated to be 2,500 miles across and weighs approximately 10 billion-trillion-trillion-carats – a one, followed by 34 zeros.

Occupation: First Lady

Little-known fact: most presidents since the 70s release some form of their tax returns to the public.

Here's George W. Bush's tax return for last year. I'm not terribly surprised that he somehow managed to get a refund of over $19,000 while I owed over $500 this year, but whatever.

The part that amused me, however, is that Laura Bush's occupation is listed as "First Lady."

It is, indeed, a position that requires a shitload of work. It's also an unpaid position, however. Do stay-at-home moms list their occupation as "homemaker"? I'm honestly curious.

But I Have 15K in Credit Card Debt!

$5700.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth

Man, I'm never going to break even!

Real Life!

The Origins of "OK"

So if OK stands for "all correct," wouldn't it be "AC"? Not exactly, says linguist Erin McKean, who points out that the word was intentionally misspelled. Much like the way people on the Internet shorten or abbreviate words when typing, OK was misspelled on purpose.

"For instance, a lot of kids online spell "cool," "k-e-w-l," says McKean, senior editor for U.S. dictionaries at Oxford Press. "They know how to spell cool, but it just looks cooler to spell it "k-e-w-l."

It was cool in certain East Coast cities in the mid-19th century to substitute OK for "all correct." McKean says it was common for people of that day to use inside lingo -- shorthand full of puns, purposeful misspellings and abbreviations. For example, they'd use "SP" for "small potatoes," or "TBFTB" for "too big for their britches."

Because it Doesn't Always Have to Be That Way

Whenever people start arguing about biological roles and restrictions and "that's just the way it's always been" and "it'll always be that way," it always pissed me the fuck off, not only because things could be really differet, but because sometimes, things are really different (fast foward to about minute 4 if you're impatient).

It'll just "always be that way" until a bunch of you decide that it isn't.

Conjugating French Verbs

Where does this other "s" come from????

.........

It's still here!!!!

Interrobang

It sounds vaguely dirty and illegal, don't you think?

In the End, Everybody DIES

Not exactly uplifting, is it? (wait for the gifs to begin scrolling - it's a little slow)

And Then There Were Some

Some stuff you don't often hear about being done by women.

Women Gladiators:

Wiki

Gladiatrix

Journal of Combative Sport

Women Bullfighters:

La Diosa Rubia

A Few Fighters

Marie Barcelo

Some Seasonings

Star Wars Wiki.

Bullshit bingo for the workplace (something to do during all those meetings!)

Seahenge.

Cryogenic frogs.

The Miracle Fruit.

Universal doormat.

Writers' Rooms

Theirs.

And mine: old and new.

Names I've Given My Hardware

I was never one of those people who had names for my cars, mainly because I never actually owned them - my parents did. I got my first laptop as a graduation present when I finished highschool, and though I never named it at the time, the person I gave it to when I upgraded starting calling it "The Beast" because it weighs something like ten pounds (it also, unlike two of the three laptops that followed it, still works).

I had a nice, big-screened Gateway computer after that, which also went unnammed, though I certainly whispered many and varied terms of endearment over it when it actually managed to store 20 gigs worth of music.

When that one blew up on me, I bought one of those tablet PCs and called it "bird" because of it's small size (I think it weighed 2lbs).

When that one gave out on me last year or the year before, I bought this new Sony Vaio with the slick looking screen and comfy keyboard. It's reasonably light, but far from compact, and I've got a big wide screen for watching movies and a big keyboard for comfortably typing up a lot of fucking books.

It also just so happened that I was hip-deep in God's War about that time, and when I had to type in a name for this computer, the first one that popped into my head was the name of GW's heroine: Nyx.

My ipod, which I got soon after, has the name of Nyx's female sidekick: Anneke (that's the little name that shows up next to the drive letter and everything. It always makes me snicker).

If I keep burning through computers like this, I may have to shelve the old shells on the ego shelf with the actual books whose characters I named the hardware after and whose pages were typed on the same machines.

Books and dead laptops filed away on the same shelves feels very Gibson.