n2doc

n2doc's Journal

June 4, 2013

Tuesday Toon Roundup 1- Students

June 4, 2013

Photographer Captures Rare Photograph of a Sprite with an Aurora

Check out this aurora photograph captured last Friday night by photographer Mike Hollingshead. See those small red squiggly lines in the sky? That’s an extremely rare form of lightning called a sprite. This photograph is one of the only times a sprite and an aurora have been captured in the same frame.

A couple of weeks ago, NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website featured a sprite/aurora photograph by photographer Walter Lyons, and wrote at the time that Lyons’ image may be the first ever color photo of those two phenomenon together.

This photograph by Hollingshead may very well be the second.

June 3, 2013

Edible Anus Chocolate Gives a New, Uncomfortable Meaning to ‘Brown-Nosing’

By: Dominique Zamora

Meet your anus. He might not get much attention during your day-to-day, but this fancy, artisan, preservative-free Belgian chocolate from the UK totally looks like him. I mean, I’m guessing.

Dubbed the “Edible Anus,” this totally cracked-out treat is handmade and preservative free, made using a mold “crafted from the posterior” of the company’s “stunning butt model.” Which means you are literally eating out of somebody’s ass.

It’s not all bad though. Imagine giving a pack of these to your dad for Father’s day, or your favorite professor for graduation. If you’re going to be a brown-noser, you should do it shamelessly, tastefully. Go on, don’t be an arse.

Available in white, milk chocolate and dark chocolate, as well as a new special edition silver version @ edibleanus.com.

http://foodbeast.com/content/2013/06/03/edible-anus-chocolate-gives-a-new-uncomfortable-meaning-to-brown-nosing/

June 3, 2013

Woman dumps cheating boyfriend by leading him on hunt for all his belongings she's hidden

Breaking up is so very hard to do goes the old Burt Bacharach song, yet the writer of this letter seems to have done rather a good job of compartmentalizing her emotions as she writes to her lover to inform him that it’s all over.

An armchair psychiatrist could have a field day trying to decipher if the jilted lover writing the letter has taken the end of the relationship well or is perhaps overacting to what she has discovered.

What we do know is that when the writer accesses her boyfriend’s Facebook account she notices he has received a message from another girl, called Kelsi.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2334466/Is-best-breakup-letter-Woman-dumps-boyfriend-bizarre-note-finding-girl-contacted-Facebook.html

June 3, 2013

Wealthy countries are creating more jobs by creating worse jobs

By Tim Fernholz

The UN’s International Labor Organization released its annual “World of Work” (PDF) report today, and boy are the results depressing.

The employment rate won’t return to pre-crisis levels in emerging markets until 2015, while advanced economies will have to wait until 2017 for their work woes to end. But even then, the number of unemployed people is still set to grow 4% to 208 million in 2015. How can the employment rate and unemployment levels rise simultaneously? Because the unemployed are dropping out of the work force: In more than half of the countries surveyed, labor force participation declined largely due to discouraged workers giving up the job hunt.

Perhaps worse: job quality is worsening around the globe, even where the unemployment rate is falling. The study’s researcher made the chart below to compare “job quality,” measured by average wages, benefits and hours worked, and job creation, between 2007 and 2011. Basically, the place to be is in the top right quadrant (where countries are creating more and better jobs) and not the bottom left (where economies are creating fewer, worse jobs):

Worth noting: for most advanced economies, the new jobs being created are of lower quality, with the exceptions of countries like South Korea, Norway and Poland. The United States has fewer jobs, but is creating better ones—a finding that reflects growing inequality in the US. The emerging markets, on the other hand, are finding it easier to create more and better jobs because they’re starting from a low base. (In other words, it’s easy to improve job quality in a country where most people make less than $10 a day; it’s much harder in a country where the median income is $50,000 per year.)

more

http://qz.com/90243/wealthy-countries-are-creating-more-jobs-by-creating-worse-jobs/

June 3, 2013

Former BP CEO John Browne says gay marriage is good business and of strategic importance

By Steve LeVine

Former BP CEO John Browne was so private about his homosexuality that he resigned when an estranged lover divulged their relationship to a tabloid. Now he is carrying his new openness into politics. Browne, a member of Great Britain’s House of Lords, came out forcefully today in favor of a proposed law making gay marriage legal in the country.

Browne first spoke openly about his sexuality in a 2010 book called Beyond Business. But his political push, made in an eloquent piece in today’s Financial Times, is the first such forceful defense of gay rights by a major figure in the global oil industry, in which a homophobic environment persists. On May 29, ExxonMobil shareholders rejected an explicit company ban on discrimination against gays, the sixteenth such vote at the oil company’s annual meetings.

In his FT piece, Browne writes that he kept his sexuality secret for decades “out of fear” that disclosure could damage his career and the company. He was regarded as his country’s greatest businessman, but he hid his personal life as a grave threat that could bring everything down.

It all went back to growing up in a different time, in which “homosexuality was illegal. Men went to prison, boys were expelled and individuals would disappear, leaving hushed speculation,” Browne says.

more

http://qz.com/90288/former-bp-ceo-john-browne-says-gay-marriage-is-good-business-and-of-strategic-importance/

June 3, 2013