Recently, a University of Arizona microbiologist named Charles Gerba, author of hundreds of scientific papers about household microbes, gave a terrifying lecture at the offices of the Food and Drug Administration. Gerba—who, incidentally, has a child with the middle name Escherichia—that’s what the “E” in E. coli stands for—explained that a kitchen sponge and sink are home to thousands of times more bacteria than a toilet seat. Plus, 10 percent of household dishrags contain salmonella. After playing with other children, toddlers have more fecal bacteria on their hands than does a person exiting a public toilet stall. Those toilets, by the way, aerosolize so many droplets with each flush that Gerba compares their dispersion to “the Fourth of July.” And every public swimming pool he’s ever tested has contained disease-causing viruses.
On March 9th, Starbucks is dramatically changing the way they serve traditional brewed coffee in every company owned and licensed concept store in North America. During the afternoons, Starbucks baristas will shut down their automatic drip coffee makers and utilize new manual pour-over bars, effectively brewing coffee on demand. It’s a move that will drastically decrease coffee waste and ideally improve the quality of the cup.
There’s this enormous misconception out there that Please Rob Me has something, anything, to do with home addresses. It doesn’t. Nothing could be further from the truth.It simply crawls Twitter looking for “4sq -@foursquare” which helps it find tweets from people who have broadcast their Foursquare locations.
But you can send any tweet with “4sq” in it and Please Rob Me will pick it up. You don’t even need a Foursquare account. Don’t believe me? Try it.
As a computer savvy person, it’s easy to forget how different the average joe is from you. This disparity is the source of much frustration and inefficiency in the world. And it’s only going to get worse, unless we do something about it.
Even though we’re in the same fucking time zone as the Games, the Pacific Coast still gets a poorly executed replay. How many times do I have to hear that outta tune Arab Strap mumble, or get told that if I eat MacDonald’s or drink Coca-Cola I’ll totally be like an Olympian rather than die of hardened arteries and/or type II diabetes? Oh wait, clearly not enough. Nothing-But-Commercials is like the George W. Bush of broadcasting. So not amused.
