vice guys finish first

From: The Fedora Lounge Store

"Would you have guessed that, one fine day, health insurers will regret the demise of big tobacco and its contribution to health care costs? Would you have guessed that, when that day arrives, health insurers would also learn to love other frowned-upon-vices of their policy holders, such as getting fat and lazy? Your answer is probably 'no, I wouldn't have guessed that in my dreams.'
     And also very probably this answer is based on what you typically read in the media, such as this piece of news titled 'Obesity Adds More to Health Care Costs Than Smoking, Study Suggests.' released on April 3, 2012, on sciencenews.com. The article text wraps the title message into a substantially larger amount of unsubstantial words, before it concludes what you would probably subscribe to blindfolded: the  '...study [1] provides new insights into the long-term costs of obesity and smoking, showing that both risk factors lead to persistently higher health costs throughout a seven-year follow-up period.' Dah, what else is news?
     Well, for one, that the Joe Camels and the lardbuckets, with all their vices, cost their health insurers actually LESS money than Mr. and Mrs Healthy. For one simple reason: the 'vice guys' die earlier." — chronic health
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checked baggage

Buster Keaton -1940's (from: Invisible Agent)

"So what makes the mean premium possible? It's not entirely clear — the study investigated some possible reasons such as that disagreeable people find their way into higher status or more complex jobs, but the data didn't support that conclusion. They did find that disagreeable people place more importance on pay and less on communal relationships than others, which sheds light on their priorities but not on how these are achieved. Some possibilities include agreeable people being more prepared to compromise and concede, for example on pay negotiation, or for decision-makers to falsely place warmth and competence as two ends of a continuum (rather than independent factors) and conclude that a people person may be less capable. Highly agreeable men would not only lack those edges, but, as [Timothy] Judge and colleagues point out, are doubly disadvantaged, as they are operating against gender stereotypes by being a soft male. Conversely, the edge that a disagreeable woman gains is blunted by their operating in ways that aren't socially sanctioned. The authors reflect that 'exhortations for women not to be nice...might be overblown,' and the solutions to gender pay inequality lie foremost with decision-makers."
— Occuptional Digest
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"According to new research on body language out of the University of British Columbia, women find happy men—in this study, men who were smiling in photos—significantly less attractive than men portraying other emotions. In a survey of 1,000 adults, women generally preferred men who looked strong and proud, arms raised into the sky, or sullen and ashamed—in that order. Happy men were rated the least attractive. Interestingly, when it came to male preferences, things were reversed: Men rated happy women the most attractive and proud, strong women least attractive. [...]"
— Good Culture
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"You've seen the meme, now read the book. If you haven't gotten your fill of sullen, mopey, emo-esque Keanu Reeves, he's taken the whole Sad Keanu concept to a new level with a book called Ode to Happiness. The hand-stitched book, which sounds absolutely RIVETING, is essentially one poem written by Reeves. One line is printed on each page, along with inkblot drawings (designed to evoke the appearance of being—I am not making this up—blurred by tears) created by Los Angeles artist Alexandra Grant. Apparently Reeves was inspired to create this literary masterpiece while listening to a radio station that was playing sad, nostalgic music. He says, 'I just started to write on this piece of paper, because I had this image of, you know, that moment when you take that bath, you light that candle, and you're really just kind of depressed.'"
— Linda Sharps, cafemom
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sucking at the teat of the public purse part two... yes, it is a mixed metaphor but the public purse is a grossly fat, leaky, living thing

From: Wikimedia Commons

"California’s corporate tax rate is 8.84 percent. Nevada’s? Zero.
     Setting up an office in Reno is just one of many legal methods Apple uses to reduce its worldwide tax bill by billions of dollars each year. As it has in Nevada, Apple has created subsidiaries in low-tax places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands — some little more than a letterbox or an anonymous office — that help cut the taxes it pays around the world.
     Almost every major corporation tries to minimize its taxes, of course. For Apple, the savings are especially alluring because the company’s profits are so high. Wall Street analysts predict Apple could earn up to $45.6 billion in its current fiscal year — which would be a record for any American business.
     Apple serves as a window on how technology giants have taken advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age and ill suited to today’s digital economy. Some profits at companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft derive not from physical goods but from royalties on intellectual property, like the patents on software that makes devices work. Other times, the products themselves are digital, like downloaded songs. It is much easier for businesses with royalties and digital products to move profits to low-tax countries than it is, say, for grocery stores or automakers. A downloaded application, unlike a car, can be sold from anywhere."
― Charles Duhigg and David Kocienniewski, The New York Times
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"This past month, there was much outrage over the fact that General Electric, despite making $14.2 billion in profits, paid zero U.S. taxes in 2010. General Electric actually received tax credits of $3.2 billion from American taxpayers. At the same time that General Electric was not paying taxes, many undocumented immigrants, who are typically accused of taking advantage of the system while not contributing to it by many on the right, paid $11.2 billion in taxes. A new study by the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy shows that undocumented immigrants paid $8.4 billion in sales taxes, $1.6 billion in property taxes, and $1.2 billion in personal income taxes last year. The study also estimates that nearly half of all undocumented immigrants pay income taxes."
— ThinkProgress
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killing us softly

From: merisinomblackandwhite

"If it were a novel, people would criticize the plot for being too far-fetched – thriving colonies disappear overnight without leaving a trace, the bodies of the victims are never found. Only in this case, it’s not fiction: It’s what’s happening to fully a third of commercial beehives, over a million colonies every year. Seemingly healthy communities fly off never to return. The queen bee and mother of the hive is abandoned to starve and die.
     Thousands of scientific sleuths have been on this case for the last 15 years trying to determine why our honey bees are disappearing in such alarming numbers. 'This is the biggest general threat to our food supply,' according to Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s bee and pollination program.
     Until recently, the evidence was inconclusive on the cause of the mysterious 'colony collapse disorder' (CCD) that threatens the future of beekeeping worldwide. But three new studies point an accusing finger at a culprit that many have suspected all along, a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids. [...]
     Honey bees have been likened to the canaries in the coal mine. Their vanishing is nature’s way of telling us that conditions have deteriorated in the world around us. Bees won’t survive for long if we don’t change our commercial breeding practices and remove deadly toxins from their environment. A massive pollinator die-off would imperil world food supplies and devastate ecosystems that depend on them. The loss of these creatures might rival climate change in its impact on life on earth."
— Richard Schiffman, Reuters
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"In the past months, three separate studies—two of them just out in the prestigious journal Science—have added to a substantial body of literature linking widespread use of neonicotinoids to CCD. The latest research will renew pressure on the EPA to reconsider its registration of Bayer's products. The EPA green-lighted Bayer's products based largely on a study funded by the chemical giant itself—which was later discredited by the EPA's own scientists, as this leaked memo shows.
     When seeds are treated with neonics, the pesticides get absorbed by the plant's vascular system and then ;expressed' in the pollen and nectar, where they attack the nervous systems of insects. Bayer targeted its treatments at the most prolific US crop—corn—and since the late 1990s, corn farmers have been blanketing millions of acres of farmland with neonic-treated seeds."
— Tom Philpott, Mother Jones
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"A new kind of genetically modified crop under the brand name of 'Enlist' ― known by its critics as 'Agent Orange corn' ― has opponents pushing U.S. regulators to scrutinize the product more closely and reject an application by Dow AgroSciences to roll out its herbicide-resistant seeds. The corn has been genetically engineered to be immune to 2,4-D, an ingredient used in Agent Orange that some say could pose a serious threat to the environment and to human health. Approval by the United States Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Agency would allow farmers to spray it far and wide without damaging their crops, boosting profits for the agribusiness giant."
― Lucia Graves, Huffington Post
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fifties felt and faux fur fads

From: Poodle Skirt

"Juli Lynne [Charlot] didn’t set out to be a clothing designer; she had a beautiful voice and studied for the opera. Along the way she sang with Xavier Cugat’s orchestra, was soprano with the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera Company, and played straight 'man' to the Marx Brothers while performing at military bases during WWII.
     As a performer, Juli Lynne had strong ideas about how she wanted to look. She designed her stage wardrobe even though she could not sew. She hired a professional dressmaker to bring her designs to life. As the war came to a close, Juli Lynne met and married Philip Charlot. She gave up performing to be a post-war wife. In 1947 two seemingly unrelated events came together to start her career in fashion.
     First, fashion changed dramatically with the New Look. WWII fabric restrictions were lifted and hemlines dropped and skirts got full. About the same time, Philip Charlot lost his job. Juli Lynne was a young woman who wanted to be in fashion but she had no money for the new styles. So she decided to make her own skirt for Christmas that year. Since she could not sew, she got some felt. It was the only fabric wide enough to cut a full circle skirt without making seams.
     Fortunately, her mother owned a factory which used felt, so she had a free source of it. Juli Lynne added some Christmas motif appliques and the result was so attractive that she made three more which she took to a Beverly Hills boutique. The store put them on the floor, and they quickly sold.
     The store reordered."
— The Vintage Traveler
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When I was five or six Davy Crockett was hot, even for kids in the U.K. While visiting our relatives in Abertillery, South Wales my brother and I found an old fur coat at the local dump site known as "the tip"; this mountain of coal mine tailings had become a dumping ground for all sorts of discards. We took the threadbare coat back to Aunty Vi's house and coaxed my dad into making Davy Crockett hats out of it. He did such a great job I was offered a part in our school Christmas pageant. I'm sure it was the swell hat that got me the gig and not my singing voice:

          Davy... Davy Crockett.

          King of the wild frontier...

From: Fur Hat World

"[Davy] Crockett's new popularity initiated a fad among boys all over the United States as well as a Davy Crockett craze in the United Kingdom. The look of the cap that was marketed to young boys was typically simplified; it was usually a faux fur lined skull cap with a raccoon tail attached. A variation was marketed to young girls as the Polly Crockett hat. It was similar in style to the boys' cap, including the long tail, but was made of all-white fur (faux or possibly rabbit). At the peak of the fad, coonskin caps sold at a rate of 5,000 caps a day."
— Inner Toob
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about face

Stephen Fry (sourse image from: E-Verse Radio)

"The authors [Kelsey Blackburn and James Schirillo from Wake Forest University] explain: 'Our results suggest that posers' left cheeks tend to exhibit a greater intensity of emotion, which observers find more aesthetically pleasing. Our findings provide support for a number of concepts – the notions of lateralized emotion and right hemispheric dominance with the right side of the brain controlling the left side of the face during emotional expression.'
     Participants were asked to rate the pleasantness of both sides of male and female faces on gray-scale photographs. The researchers presented both original photographs and mirror-reversed images, so that an original right-cheek image appeared to be a left-cheek image and vice versa.
     They found a strong preference for left-sided portraits, regardless of whether the pictures were originally taken of the left side, or mirror-reversed. The left side of the face was rated as more aesthetically pleasing for both male and female posers."
— Springer Read more...

"What you see in the mirror in old age may reflect more than your features. According to researchers publishing in a July, 2011 issue of Economics and Human Biology, the symmetry of those features can trace your early history. Studying a group of octogenarians, David Hope, Timothy Bates, and colleagues found that being poor in childhood led to greater irregularities in facial symmetry many decades later, but not in body symmetry.
     The researchers measured the facial and body symmetry of 292 people who are part of the Lothian Birth Cohort 1921, one of two birth cohorts under study at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The year 1921 is of interest because almost every schoolchild in Scotland born in that year took a mental ability test known as the Moray House Test."
— Emily Willingham, EarthSky
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"For those of you who have one side of your face bigger than the other, I used to have the exact same problem. I'm not exactly sure what caused it, but my face used to be perfectly symmetrical. Then, after two and a half years of braces, my mom started noticing that my left side, namely the cheek along the jawline, was larger than my right side. I rarely noticed it, but it's a lot more pronounced in pictures. This went on for several years, and I began to worry whether this was going to be permanent. My mom's theory was because I always rested my face on my right hand when listening to lectures in class and over time this caused an indentation.
     So, I tried sleeping on my left side all the time and also resting my face on my left hand. It didn't seem to work. What was interesting was sometimes my mom would notice the asymmetry getting better, but then it would go back to the way it was. I was starting to think about cosmetic surgery, when one day I decided to start chewing on my right side. I'm right handed, and all my life I have favored chewing on the left side. Over time, it progressed to me chewing only on my left side and never on my right. Immediately afterwards, my mom noticed a difference that would not revert back to the original asymmetry.
     After about 3-4 months of chewing solely on my right side, my face went back to being symmetrical again (it's still not 100%, but it's no longer noticeable). I was so happy, and I couldn't believe the solution was as simple as developing the right jaw muscle by exercising it. All those years of neglecting the right masseter caused it to shrivel from disuse. Now, I make sure to alternately chew on both sides.
     For those of you who also chew heavily on one side, I strongly encourage you to try what I did. You never know, a possible solution to the asymmetry could just be a couple months away. Another idea asking a doctor what sort of exercises you could do to develop the muscle on the side of the face that is smaller. Good luck."
— Guest, (In a discussion about "corrective measures for asymmetrical face") Steady Health
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See a related article here...

love is blind

"Each woman watched three videos while having her brain imaged by positron emission tomography, better known as a PET scan. These scans detect minute changes in radioactivity in the brain that correspond to the amount of blood flowing to any given region. Regions with more blood flowing to them are considered more active.
     One of the videos used in the study was a simple nature documentary about marine life in the Caribbean. The other two were selections from ;women-friendly' pornographic movies, one depicting only foreplay and manual stimulation and the other depicting oral sex and vaginal intercourse. Earlier studies had shown that the higher-intensity video showing intercourse produced stronger physical arousal in women than the foreplay-focused movie clip.
     The scan results revealed that the high-intensity erotic video — and only the high-intensity erotic video — resulted in far less blood being sent to the primary visual cortex. The region is still active, just much less so. Usually, that effect is only seen when people are asked to conduct a nonvisual task, like remembering words, while also watching some sort of visual stimuli.
     To [Gert] Holstege [a uroneurologist at the University of Groningen Medical Center in the Netherlands] those results suggest that the brain is focusing on sexual arousal as more important than visual processing during these erotic films."
— Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience
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