useful to know

http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwasteless/downloads/pdf/materials/ChecklistFlyer.pdf has no big surprises on what you can recycle, but it's good to know that you cannot recycle plastic things like caps & lids, cups, wrap, bags, yogurt containers, deli/salad bar containers, or paper (chinese) take-out containers. I think I've been cheating with caps for a while.

department of "really?"

From an NYT article:

Britain is particularly isolated because the country is cut off from continental land routes by the English Channel.

I think the word you're searching for is "island." Maybe "islands" if you want to be more careful, but honestly.

europe stranded

Major European airports are closed because of volcanic ash. What I don't get is why the planes can't fly under the ash, since they say it starts at 18,000 feet. Can't they fly at 10,000 feet until they're out of danger? Obviously not, since there are going to be a million passengers with canceled flights, but it seems weird.

why i never believed deborah tannen

She says, in http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/why-do-educated-people-use-bad-words/:

People who speak more than one language report that they always curse in their native tongue; they can say swear words in a second language but they don’t feel them — the gut link to emotions just isn’t there.

This is emphatically not true. Cursing, in my experience, is one of the easiest things to change. My father curses only in English (although he'll say it's only because he never cursed in Tamil). Lots of people curse in the language they happen to be speaking. Incidentally, Birbal was wrong about this too.

wow

From an article on China exporting rail technology:

China’s long-term vision calls for high-speed rail routes linking Shanghai to Singapore and New Delhi by way of Myanmar, and someday connecting Beijing and Shanghai to Moscow to the northwest and through Tehran to Prague and Berlin, according to a map that Mr. Zheng keeps on a bookshelf behind his desk. He cautioned that there were no plans to start construction yet outside China.

onion intern

The Onion's "Weekender" magazine's headline is "I'm Kinda Getting The Hang Of Filling Tori Spelling Up With Babies: We Chat With Dean McDermott." The image mouseover text (and page title) read instead "Babys" and "Dylan McDermott." If you're the kind of person who can't copy the word "babies" correctly, shouldn't you at least be the kind of person who knows which McDermott Tori Spelling is married to? Seems unfortunate to fail on both counts.

how many Americans have seen avatar?

Let's give up on that question and focus on a simpler one -- how many tickets have been sold in the U.S. to see Avatar? If you search for this online, you'll always come down to Box Office Mojo's numbers -- everyone just cites them. They say 93 million tickets, based on revenue of 709 million and an average ticket price of $7.61. This might work for most movies, but for Avatar it's obviously crap. The average ticket price for Avatar needs to be adjusted to include IMAX and 3d showings. Box Office Mojo, while not doing this, helpfully has an article about the breakdown of Avatar's ticket sales: around 64% 3D, 16% IMAX, and 20% 2D. The average price of an IMAX ticket is $14.58, and the article guesses that there's a $10 average price for 3D tickets. 709m/(.64*10+.16*14.58+.20*7.61) is around 69.1 million tickets. This puts it somewhere around Independence Day, Spider Man, and Love Story in number of tickets sold. Note that other movies' ticket totals on Box Office Mojo's list should be correctly calculated because they don't have these large 3D and IMAX components. For future reference, the "real" average price for an Avatar ticket, given Box Office Mojo's prices and breakdowns, is $10.25. So as a rough approximation, just divide Avatar's gross ticket sales revenue by 10 to get the actual number of tickets sold.

blindingly obvious

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/business/global/03toyota.html says that the U.S. may require that pressing the brake pedal make your car stop (even if you're stepping on the gas). Why hasn't this been a feature since, I don't know, forever, is baffling to me. If you don't have a stick shift, when do you ever want to brake and keep gas going to the engine at the same time? Even then, once you're moving there's no reason to brake and keep gas going.

navel-gazing

Paul Krugman posted http://gawker.com/5482309/stereotyping-people-by-their-favorite-new-york-times-writer, which is good, and funnier because he posted it. With some public figures, I routinely imagine them watching/reading the things about them that I do. For instance, I imagine Obama watching the Daily Show a lot. He doesn't. The nice thing about Krugman is, I think he actually does do a lot (though more) of the stuff I do, so he actually sees this stuff.

liberal elite

The Daily Show has diversified its correspondents to the point that there is now exactly one white American male on the show -- Jon Stewart. If you throw in Christian, zero. Impressive. Of course, it also points to the smaller number of correspondents in regular rotation. John Oliver does like 60% of the reporting, with Cenac, Mandvi, and Bee doing the rest, and Jones doing voiceovers. So it's still usually two white men talking.