Random links
- Happy Meal Ban: McDonald's Outsmarts San Francisco
- In San Francisco "In order to include a toy with a meal, restaurants must now comply with city-generated nutritional standards." McDonalds' approach, allow you to purchase a toy for 10 cents (which is then entirely donated to charity), available only with the purchase of a happy meal. Before you could just buy the toy for a bit of money - now you need to buy the happy meal to get that option.
- Crematorium May Generate Electricity
- Reminds me a bit of soylent green. I suppose that it does make some sense though. Now to bring on the crazed environmentalist serial killer conspiracy theories...
- 'Yes, I'm a virgin': B.C. women hunt for spiritual purity online
- Somewhat surprising to find this one on top of the headline stack at the moment. It does note that "actually one confesses to being a 'born-again' virgin who wants to start over" - suggesting that they're somewhat trying to redefine a word, albeit for a good cause. I was a bit astounded by the phrase that one of the 29/30 year-olds involved who is described as being "unaware until the last month that many U.S. evangelical churches have advocated sexual abstinence outside marriage for more than a decade" - hopefully that's a misquote or I wonder what kind of rock they've been living under. And, if you're curious, the blog is here.
- Did “race” cost Obama many votes?
- Using the number of racially charged Google searches in an area, the author concluded that Obama's race had "significant and robust effects in the 2008 presidential election. The estimates imply that racial animus in the United States cost Obama three to five percentage points in the national popular vote in the 2008 election." I wonder how much of an effect the reverse might have had - i.e. voters voting for Obama just because he was black? (It seems that there was both record-high turnout amongst black voters and a record-high percentage of them voting Democrat).