The BBC has highlighted a report which shows how old computers are being picked apart in China and the Third World with inadequate safety controls. The report says electronic waste is the most rapidly growing waste problem in the world, with toxic ingredients such as the lead, mercury or cadmium being released into the environment.

Some large companies like IBM offer to recycle their old equipment themselves (though there doesn’t seem to be an IBM recycling centre in the UK).

It appears that money can buy you happiness – up to a point. “Winning just �1,000 can be enough to change a person’s outlook on life”, the BBC reports, based on an academic survey. “However, less than �1m is unlikely to have a lasting effect on a person’s happiness and experts found a strong marriage and good health were more likely to make people feel content than money.” Certainly I’ve been wealthier than I am now but thanks to my finding a wonderful woman to marry I have never been happier.

Other statistics provided at the end were even more interesting – “The research found that women tended to be happier than men, and people in their 30s were least likely to be content… happiness followed a U-shaped pattern, with people beginning life happy but becoming discontented in their early 30s, before their happiness recovered and continued, increasing into their 60s.” I wonder what accounts for that? Being in my mid-30s I suppose I should find this cheering!

Take a look at this as well from my archive – another study of happiness around the world.amature sex grayveeall anal girls likeamatuerpornweb porn reviews adult site3d sex virtualairplane sexfree amateur sex8teens Map

Ed Deiner studied global happiness and finds that (adjusting for income) Asians tend to be more unhappy and Scandinavians seem to be the happiest (so why do they kill themselves so often?). Also, interestingly:

“We find that people become more satisfied with life when they have a baby, but then drop back to their previous levels after a year or two, and perhaps even go a bit lower than their previous baseline.”

…and other real old wives tales clueless teens believe… [free registration required to view]amateur home wife moviesfor movies auditions for teensmovies babysitterpussy movies blackmovies teen blackmovies christine youngcindy sex movieswomen mature amature drunk moviesmovies whipping femalejob foot movies

Study Casts Doubt on the Placebo Effect Could it be that sick people given placebos get better simply because sometimes people’s health improves on its own? It appears from this that the placebo effect has become over the years so “obvious” that nobody thought to question the methodology used to demonstrate it. No more “take two asprin and call me in the morning”?

Thanks to the Follow Me Here weblog for the linkmovie history of makingsex wife homemade moviesquizzes movie horrorspot hot moviehot movie teenporn movies illegalinspector gadget moviesample interacial movies Map

Am I Going Down? As the site itself put it, this was “a guide to your likelihood of personally experiencing full loss equivalency” – in other words, given your origin airport, destination and your airline this site will calculate how likely you are to die in a plane crash. Fun for the paranoid…

Update: That site is no longer live and can’t be accessed via the Internet Archive. Sorry to everyone who has been looking for it!

Thank you memepool.com for the link

An interesting survey of How much information is produced annually. The short answer is 250Mb for every person on earth – 93% of which is in digital format. The authors (from Berkeley) offer a lot of supplemental data as well. For example, until 1992 most TV stations broadcast no more than 9.5 minutes of advertising per hour in prime time – now the average is 15 minutes. Ouch! I thought things were worse there – here in the UK the terrestrial channels can only show 7.5 minutes an hour and cable only 9 minutes an hour (plus, of course, the BBC is completely ad-free).