"What song has made you the most money?
Probably "Mr. Blue Sky." It has been in a lot of films, and they pay fortunes. When I wrote it [in a [in a Swiss chalet] it had been mist and fog, and I was up in the mountains. I couldn't see bugger all for a week and didn't come up with any songs. Then the sun came out, and I wrote "Mr. Blue Sky" as kind of a joke. It turned into a really nice song."
"Follow-up surveys — at ages 18, 23, 33 and 48 — backed up his hunch. A 2013 analysis5 found a correlation between the number of patents and peer-refereed publications that people had produced and their earlier scores on SATs and spatial-ability tests. The SAT tests jointly accounted for about 11% of the variance; spatial ability accounted for an additional 7.6%.
The findings, which dovetail with those of other recent studies, suggest that spatial ability plays a major part in creativity and technical innovation. "I think it may be the largest known untapped source of human potential," says Lubinski, who adds that students who are only marginally impressive in mathematics or verbal ability but high in spatial ability often make exceptional engineers, architects and surgeons. "And yet, no admissions directors I know of are looking at this, and it's generally overlooked in school-based assessments.""
"the government can neither discriminate against certain religions nor license certain religions to discriminate against others"
Gizmodo: New Simulation Extends Possible Crash Site of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwoIbWzCw
"Thanks to Nepartak's large size and Taiwan's unique geography, some parts of the island could see as much as 52 inches (1,330 mm) of rainfall over the next day or so."
Here's a story from The New York Times I thought you'd find interesting:
Books to get you caught up on influential deal makers, activist shareholders, the failings of the modern economy and the habits of highly successful people.
Read More: http://nyti.ms/29rBrdi
From The New York Times:
In Europe and the West, Islamic State operatives have been instructed to kill at random, but more care is seemingly taken to plan attacks in majority-Muslim nations like Bangladesh.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/world/middleeast/isis-muslim-countries-bangladesh.html
""It's a very stark difference in approach," says Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who studies jihadist groups. "Al Qaeda wants Muslims to believe that its terrorism is morally justifiable, whereas the Islamic State argues that only its followers have moral legitimacy.""
"In the Finnish and Estonian infants, where Bacteroides dominates, the gut microbiome is immunologically very silent," Kostic adds, and continues, "We believe that, later on, this makes them more prone to strong inflammatory stimuli."
The researchers suspect that the LPS immune activation by E. coli seen in the Russian Karelian infants is reflective of the relationship humans developed with microbiota over the course of human evolution. The prevalence and dominance of Bacteroides, in contrast, is a more recent phenomenon related in some way to improved sanitation and standard of living."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160429095038.htm
"Plans for the $5.5 billion Shanghai Disney Resort, which opens Thursday, were in limbo until Disney dialed back its demands to the Communist Party."
There are 300 million people within a 3 hr train or bus ride of the Shanghai Park, whereas there are "only" 22 million people in Southern California.
Read More: http://nyti.ms/1UrYwf8
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/opinion/sunday/yes-there-have-been-aliens.html
"Specifically, unless the probability for evolving a civilization on a habitable-zone planet is less than one in 10 billion trillion, then we are not the first."
"teen drivers were distracted in the six seconds before an accident in 59 percent of crashes. In 15 percent of those, drivers were distracted by passengers; teens who talked, texted or browsed on their phones made up 12 percent of the crashes."
"Fanyi Translation and Fanyi Creation Translation. Fanyi's website, fanyishop.com, became inaccessible May 23. It had carried the motto "diligently creating value."
Its specialties include writing papers for students. "We have native English speakers from the UK and the US who can guarantee the quality of the writing," the site said. Fanyi charged 5 cents a word for "polishing" an existing piece of writing and 21 cents a word for "gold medal expert service" – editors writing bespoke pieces for the student. Fanyi also said it would create documents for students going abroad, including personal statements and recommendation letters."
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-cheating-iowa/
Here's a story from The New York Times I thought you'd find interesting:
Provocative new research leads to the hypothesis that infections may produce a fierce reaction that leaves debris in the brain, causing Alzheimer's.
Read More: http://nyti.ms/1salSv3
Actors like Daniel Dae Kim, Constance Wu, BD Wong and Aziz Ansari have become frank critics of their industry, calling out Hollywood for "whitewashing."
Read More: http://nyti.ms/25gwTsX
Online stores like Material Wrld, the RealReal and other resale sites aim to make "refreshing" your possessions ever easier.
Read More: http://nyti.ms/1s0AywO
http://gizmodo.com/teen-discovers-lost-maya-city-using-ancient-star-maps-1775735999
"I did not understand why the Maya built their cities away from rivers, on marginal lands, and in the mountains," explained Gadoury in Le Journal de Montreal. "They must have had another reason, and as they worshiped the stars, the idea came to me to verify my hypothesis. I was really surprised and excited when I realized that the most brilliant stars of the constellations matched the largest Maya cities."
