"Speculative ad of the year"

 

YouTube link.

Voted such by the Association of Independent Commercial Producers.

Via Buzzfeed, where there is a similar, real, advertisement from ten years ago

Donut-flavored beer !!

New and interesting foods are a powerful incentive for people to go to state fairs.

Lift Bridge Brewing Co. is launching a mini donut-flavored beer for the Minnesota State Fair. The Stillwater brewery teamed up with Dan and David Thiesen, co-owners of the fair’s Ball Park Café, to create the beer. It will have a warm tan color, like the exterior of a mini donut, and a sweet, malty taste. As an added touch, it will be served in a glass with cinnamon and sugar on the rim...

The Minnesota State Fair runs Aug. 22 through Sept. 2. 

From the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal, via Stuff About Minneapolis.

Correlation of fracking and groundwater contamination

In Pennsylvania, the closer you live to a well used to hydraulically fracture underground shale for natural gas, the more likely it is that your drinking water is contaminated with methane. This conclusion, in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA in July, is a first step in determining whether fracking in the Marcellus Shale underlying much of Pennsylvania is responsible for tainted drinking water in that region.

Robert Jackson, a chemical engineer at Duke University, found methane in 115 of 141 shallow, residential drinking-water wells. The methane concentration in homes less than one mile from a fracking well was six times higher than the concentration in homes farther away. Isotopes and traces of ethane in the methane indicated that the gas was not created by microorganisms living in groundwater but by heat and pressure thousands of feet down in the Marcellus Shale, which is where companies fracture rock to release gas that rises up a well shaft.

For relevant background, see my 2011 post on fracking (with videos "My water's on fire tonight" and a trailer for "Gasland.")

From Scientific American, via Reddit.

The "Racial Dot Map" of the United States

This map is an American snapshot; it provides an accessible visualization of geographic distribution, population density, and racial diversity of the American people in every neighborhood in the entire country. The map displays 308,745,538 dots, one for each person residing in the United States at the location they were counted during the 2010 Census. Each dot is color-coded by the individual's race and ethnicity. The map is presented in both black and white and full color versions. In the color version, each dot is color-coded by race.

All of the data displayed on the map are from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2010 Summary File 1 dataset made publicly available through the National Historical Geographic Information System. The data is based on the "census block," the smallest area of geography for which data is collected (roughly equivalent to a city block in an urban area).

The map was created by Dustin Cable, a demographic researcher at the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. Brandon Martin-Anderson from the MIT Media Lab deserves credit for the original inspiration for the project. This map builds on his work by adding the Census Bureau's racial data, and by correcting for mapping errors.

The embedded image is for the area where I now live (Madison, Wisconsin).  You can see your home area at The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, via Neatorama.

If you could travel back in time...

When asked "If you could travel back in time, which decade of the 20th century would you most like to see?", Americans most popular choice is the 1950s, which was selected by 18% of Americans...

Americans' time travel preferences relate strongly with their age. 35% of those over 65 would want to return to the 1950s and 18% would want to go back to the 1960s, the decades when they would have experienced their adolescence and early adulthood...

For those 18-29 years-old, the top two choices are a mix of personal and societal nostalgia. 19% would choose the 1990s - when most of those in the age demographic were kids. 19% also would select the 1920s - a time well before they were born, but celebrated in American culture, most recently by this year's film adaptation of the Great Gatsby.

Text and graphs from YouGov, via The Dish.

"A blizzard of horseradish" explained

I had not heard this phrase before, but I had heard of "horsefeathers."  They are related, as noted at World Wide Words:

Most examples from newspapers imply that a blizzard of horseradish is a torrent of unhelpful or irrelevant political verbiage:

All the righteous indignation which drifts down Capitol Hill like a blizzard of horseradish is simply partisan politics.

The News and Tribune (Jefferson City, Missouri), 3 Feb, 1974.

Horseradish is on record from the 1920s meaning arrant nonsense or rubbish, a relative of horsefeathers. Both terms are euphemisms for horseshit or bullshit. It’s possible that an unbowdlerised alliterative form blizzard of bullshit could already have been in use around that date; it’s recorded only within the past decade, but that doesn’t mean a lot as it would have been considered too rude to print much before then...

A few sources suggest where it comes from:

The death of Ho Chi Minh has left policy-makers at the State Department, and the men who convey their thinking to the public, lost in what Groucho Marx once called “a blizzard of horseradish.”

Naugatuck Daily News (Connecticut), 10 Sep. 1969.

You learn something every day.  Now I have a new euphemism to use.

A billion ants live in New York City

These are, needless to say, big numbers. We have made a bunch of assumptions with this simple math, but the one most likely to be wrong seems to be the assumption that there are no ants in the places that are not green. Ants sometimes make it into apartments in New York (though the ants of New York City apartments have never been studied). At least three ant species, the cornfield ant (Lasius neoniger), the pavement ant (Tetramorium species E) and Monomorium minimum can nest under cement. Just how many of these ants are under cement is something you can guess at as well as I can, but whatever the number it would increase our estimate of the number of ants in New York by at least a billion and maybe much more. Nor do we consider the species that nest up in trees, species such as Camponotus pennsylvannicus. We have also not included baby ants, eggs, larvae and cocoons. Including their numbers would probably about double the number of ants in the city overall. Amazingly, because the estimates in Table 1 are so high it means that even some of the very rare ants in New York City, species that no one has ever studied and that we know essentially nothing about, may be more common than human New Yorkers.

More details at Your Wild Life, via Scientific American.