Category: Story

As reported on Businesinsider.com by Geoffrey Ingersoll In the wake of the horrific, tragic shootings at Sandy Hook school last week, some people have suggested that our culture of super-violent video games are at least partially to blame. The Sandy Hook gunman, Adam Lanza, reportedly spent hours playing a game called “Call of Duty” every day. Those who have not played “first-person shooter” games like this may not understand how realistic they have become in recent…

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As reported on LifeHacker. by Peter Bregman Is writing a quick “thank you” email a proper form of business etiquette, or just another frivolous piece of inbox clutter we could do without? In this piece, Peter Bregman of the Harvard Business Review examines how important thanking others via email can be. John, the CEO of a sales organization, sent an email to Tim, an employee several levels below, to compliment him on his performance in a…

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As reported on Wired. BY SPENCER ACKERMAN Guns for sale at a Houston, Tx. gun show, 2007. Photo: Flickr/M Glasgow   Updated, 5:35 p.m. Suspected terrorists can’t fly on planes, but they can buy guns. The feds can track sales of fertilizer, but not semi-automatic rifles. Brick-and-mortar gun dealers perform background checks, but online ones often don’t. These are three of the many odd aspects of the gun trade that are now being reconsidered after the massacre…

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As reported on Polygon. By BRIAN CRECENTE Consider it a moment of silence. A group of gamers is asking players of the many nonstop virtual wars of online shooters like Call of Duty, Battlefield and Halo to put down their controllers for a day in a moment of gamer solidarity out of respect for the lives lost in Connecticut last week. The 24-hour Online Cease Fire isn’t meant to draw any links between the very real violence of…

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As reported on TechCrunch. by JOHN BIGGS Like Scrooge after discovering the True Spirit Of Christmas, AOL is offering a shiny half-crown (worth $1,056) to the little boy (its employees) as thanks for bringing the prize Turkey from the Poulterer’s this holiday. The $1,000 cash bonus is a celebration of the company’s $1.056 billion patent sale it made earlier this year. I rarely, if ever, comment on internal AOL stuff but this is a nice gesture at…

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As reported on Businessinsider.com by Dina Spector and Kim Bhasin Rich Kaszeta/Flickr The McDonald’s McRib is back, hitting restaurants nationwide today.  The legendary boneless pork sandwich, famously molded to resemble a rack of ribs, is both a feat of modern engineering and shrewd marketing. It garners almost as much attention for its pseudo-meat shape as its impermanence on restaurant menus. The barbecue-sauce-smothered sandwich was supposed to return at the end of the October, but was pushed back due to…

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As reported on LifeHacker. by Alan Henry The DASH Method (short for Direction, Acceleration, Strength, and Health) was designed to help people who write—whether it’s technical writing, novelists, or bloggers—get things done faster and better, but the principles can be applied to almost any type of creative work. The end result is that you work smarter, and come away feeling better about what you do. The four principles are fairly straight-forward. Direction implies that you always…

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As reported on Wired. BY DEBORAH BLUM By the end of the 1920s, scientists already knew that tobacco smoke contained a small encyclopedia’s worth of risky chemical compounds: carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide, hydrogen sulfide and formaldehyde, ammonia and pyridine (a component in industrial solvents). I discovered that list when I was researching my book about early 20th century toxicology, The Poisoner’s Handbook. And I remember being surprised because I had believed that it wasn’t until the…

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