Fun with self-control
“Some would argue that our ability to [exert] self-control is on the wane as increasing ranks of obesity and substance abuse permeate our society,” Psychcentral.com reports. “However, a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research says there’s hope – we just need a little help to see self-regulation as fun. ‘Self-control failures depend on whether people see activities involving self-control (e.g. eating in moderate quantities) as an obligation to work or an opportunity to have fun,’” says Juliano Laran of the University of Miami and Chris Janiszewski of the University of Florida. The researchers report that, in a study, individuals with low or high self-control showed self-control success when the word “fun” was included in the instructions for a task.
A worm in the eye
Doctors in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, found a worm had taken up residence in a man’s eye, Associated Press reports. “John Matthews said he sought medical help after he noticed two spots obscuring his vision in his left eye. … The Telegraph Herald newspaper in Dubuque reported doctors shot two rounds of laser blasts into Matthews’s eye to kill the worm. Matthews said he ‘could see it from behind, moving, trying to dodge the laser.’ Matthews said doctors think he got the worm either when he was in Mexico or while turkey hunting.”
Sleep, and rest too
U.S. sleep specialist Dr. Matthew Edlund suggests in his new book, The Power of Rest: Why Sleep Alone Is Not Enough, that if you can’t sleep a rest can be just as curative, the Daily Mail reports. “Even when he helped patients get more and better sleep, sometimes their health remained poor. He discovered that rest plays a very important – and often neglected – role in the rebuilding and rejuvenation of the body, and now believes rest is as important as sleep to our long-term health.”
Attention grabbing
“Brands are flocking to Facebook because their users are flocking to Facebook,” Peter Kafka blogs for All Things Digital. “But the more crowded it gets, the harder it is to get people’s attention. Some tips on how to stand out” gathered in a study by Vitrue, a social-media marketing shop:
– Posts with images get clicked on 22 per cent more often than video posts, and 54 per cent more often than text-only posts.
– Posts published before noon get clicked on 65 per cent more often than those published later.
– Posts published on Friday do best; weekends are the worst.
Well done, Cumming
“British intelligence services experimented with using semen as an invisible ink to write top-secret letters, it has been disclosed,” The Daily Telegraph reports. “A diary entry belonging to a senior member of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) has revealed that during the First World War it was discovered that the bodily fluid could act as an effective invisible ink. In June, 1915, Walter Kirke, deputy head of military intelligence at GHQ France, wrote in his diary that Mansfield Cumming, the first chief (or C) of the SIS was ‘making enquiries for invisible inks at the London University.’ In October he noted that he ‘heard from C that the best invisible ink is semen,’ which did not react to the main methods of detection. Furthermore, it had the advantage of being readily available.”
Parking yoga
“Drivers annoyed by parking tickets in Cambridge, Mass., are getting some calming advice from city officials – try yoga,” Associated Press reports. “The city’s parking tickets include instructions on the reverse on how to bend into some simple yoga positions. The city, which is home to Harvard and MIT, printed 40,000 of the tickets as part of a public art project by artist-in-residence Daniel Peltz. Cambridge parking enforcement officers hand out about 340,000 tickets per year. Susan Clippinger, the city’s transportation chief, tells the Boston Herald the purpose of the tickets is to ‘debunk the idea that all parking tickets are a hostile action.’”
Extreme sibling rivalry
“An argument between a brother and sister quickly escalated from a shoving match to a stabbing Monday evening,” The Gazette in Colorado Springs, Colo., reports. “[P]olice said the [teenaged] girl started pushing her brother around while her boyfriend looked on. Her brother pushed back and then left the residence. The girl then started taunting her brother, asking him to come inside. When he did, she stabbed him in the back of the head with a knife. The brother suffered non-life-threatening injuries, police said.”
Thought du jour
“There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but man is perpetually unfinished. He is both an unfinished animal and an unfinished man. It is this incurable unfinishedness which sets man apart from other living things. For, in the attempt to finish himself, man becomes a creator. Moreover, the incurable unfinishedness keeps man perpetually immature, perpetually capable of learning and growing.”
– Eric Hoffer
