In this issue: WALKING SPEEDS BURIAL PLOTS SLEEP DIETS BACN And much, much more... --------------------------------- BRAINMAIL BRAINMAIL BRAINMAIL BRAINMAIL BRAINMAIL BRAINMAIL BRAINMAIL BRAINMAIL BRAINMAIL BRAINMAIL BRAINMAIL BRAINMAIL BRAINMAIL BRAINMAIL BRAINMAIL BRAINMAIL BRAINMAIL BRAINMAIL *Feeding hungry minds since 2004 --------------------------------- Issue 95 --------------------------------- Brainmail is a free monthly (usually) newsletter dedicated to intellectual miscellany and ephemera. A file of hand picked curiosities, cerebral snacks and fortuitous facts. To subscribe or unsubscribe (or to search the whole ten year brainmail archive) visit: http://brainmail.nowandnext.com/ Like it? - then surely share it on Twitter and Facebook. --------------------------------- : INSIGHTS & IDEAS > Plus-sized burials A graveyard in South Holland, Lincolnshire, is being built with an area for larger coffins. The 30 plus-sized plots will cater for plus-sized coffins, which funeral directors are resorting to in an increasing number of cases. Data from the Department of Health says that 72.2 per cent of people living (and dying) in South Holland are either obese or overweight. Ref: Daily Telegraph (UK) > Lonely + lonely = happy The idea of students bunking up with lonely OAPs isn't exactly new, but in Paris Le Pari Solidaire, which pioneered the concept more than ten years ago, is being inundated with requests to match elderly people living alone with recently-arrived students alone in the city. Rents tend to be cheap, but the real attraction, it seems, is human connection. Ref: The Times (UK) > Online goodbyes One Room, a New Zealand-based business, is offering UK funeral parlours the chance to livestream funerals to mourners. Ref: The Times (UK) > Foam that saves lives Rapid blood loss is a major problem on battlefields. One new solution is the use of foam that's sprayed into injuries to absorb and clot blood. Arsenal Medical, a start-up based in Massachusetts (US), is one company developing a product that combines liquids that rapidly expand and then solidify, resulting in a cast that can be removed later. Ref: Economist Technology Quarterly (UK) > No workers Foxconn, a Chinese electronics assembly company, is building a factory in Chengdu that is totally automated - no human workers involved whatsoever. Ref: The Economist (UK) > Bright young things The fashion designer Elizabeth Bigger has created a set of clothing embedded with flexible LED lights. The clothing can be programmed to change colour in time to music in a club, or wearers can use an app to take a photograph of another piece of clothing or jewellery that they want the lights to match. Ref: New Scientist (UK) > Sleep your way thin A study suggests that regular sleeping could make people slimmer. Sleeping for less than 6.5 hours - or for more than 8.5 hours - is related to higher body fat, as is any variation of more than 90 minutes in sleep time. Ref: American Journal of Health Promotion (US) > Dissolving electronics Scientists working at the University of Illinois have developed a series of silk-silicon gadgets that dissolve in liquid environments after use. Apart from being easy to dispose of, gadgets made this way could be implanted or injected into the human body. Ref: New Scientist (UK) > Press 2 to say goodbye Employees at Coca-Cola will no longer have access to voicemail in a move to boost productivity. Staff in Atlanta, where Coke has its HQ, were asked whether they'd like to keep voicemail and only six per cent said yes. Ref: The Times (UK) > Instantly interesting Greg Lee, a sports fan at the University of Alberta, has developed an artificial intelligence system than can instantly find anecdotes for sports commentators to feed into their commentary of games. Ref: New Scientist (UK) --------------------------------- : THE NUMBERS A 2011 study of four million books by Harvard University found that fewer than half the words used in the books were to be found in dictionaries. The rest were what the researchers referred to as "lexical dark matter". Ref: Financial Times (UK) A study of walking speeds in 34 major cities around the world found that the average walking speed is now 3.27 mph, a ten per cent increase since the mid-Nineties. Fastest on their feet are Singaporeans; slowest are the people of Malawi. Ref: Daily Mail (UK) Between 1988 and 2003, the effectiveness of computing rose 43 million-fold. Ref: Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee - Race Against the Machine By 2025, we'll have added another billion people to the planet, reaching about eight billion, with the over-65s the fastest-growing age group. But there will be sharp regional variations: Africa's population is projected to double by 2050, while Europe's is expected to shrink. Ref: PWC (UK) The United Nations forecasts that Sub-Saharan Africa's population will almost triple by 2050 to 2.7 billion. Ref: The Economist (UK) The top 1% of bands and solo musicians earn 77% of revenue from recorded music. Ref: The Atlantic (US) In 1988, 45% of 16-year-old Americans had a driving licence. In 2008, this figure had fallen to 30%. Ref: Financial Times (UK) In 1900, around 40% of Americans worked in agriculture and around 40% of a typical household budget was spent on food. Today, around 5% of the workforce works in agriculture and roughly 10-20 per cent of the household budget is spent on food. Ref: The Economist (UK)/USDA (US) Face recognition is expected to be a $20 billion industry by 2020 according to Janice Kephart, founder of Siba - the Secure Identity & Biometrics Association (but she would say that wouldn't she?). Ref: Newsweek (US) The average age that people in the UK suffer from depression is 14. In the 1980s it was 30. Ref: Facts and statistics about mental illness (UK) By 2020, around 25% of cars will be online. Ref: McKinsey & Company (US) In 1872, New York was the third largest German-speaking city in the world after Berlin and Vienna. Today its population is roughly 50% African decent, 20% Latino and 10% Asian. Ref: Financial Times (UK) The city of Dhaka in Pakistan has just 67 public toilets for 15 million residents. Of these 67 toilets, only five were fully functional in 2011 according to a study. Ref: New York Times (US) --------------------------------- : WORD DETECTIVE Bacn: A non-personal, non-spam email that you've signed up to but never read, not because you are unwilling, but usually because you don't have the time. Ref: Wordspy.com --------------------------------- : QUOTE OF THE MONTH "There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them." - Joseph Brodsky (quoted in the Wall Street Journal) --------------------------------- : BOOK OF THE MONTH Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything by Salvatore Basile --------------------------------- : WEB SIGHT OF THE MONTH Forgotify: A site that randomly plays one of 4,000,000 tracks that have never been listened to by anyone on Spotify. Not even once. Not recommended to get the party started. http://forgotify.com/ --------------------------------- : CHARITY OF THE MONTH I popped in to see a charity called Headway Hurstwood Park in East Sussex recently. They offer non-residential rehabilitation and support for people with brain injuries. They're after money, obviously, but especially need some old iPads (not minis) and some free branding assistance. If you can help get in touch. http://www.headway-hp.org.uk/ --------------------------------- : AND FINALLY... OMG, Brainmail is on Facebook. Well sort of. Actually Jasper, the Labrador that's the muse behind brainmail, now has his own Facebook page and says you'd be barking mad not to like it. Find it here: https://www.facebook.com/ brainmailnewsletter --------------------------------- : STILL HUNGRY? Not a lot of people know this, but brainmail is put together using some of the leftover bits from the What's Next trends report. So if this snack-sized newsletter is leaving you a bit hungry, go to nowandnext.com for something more substantial (and that's free too). --------------------------------- : BRAINMAIL LIVE If you are looking for an interesting speaker for your next conference, workshop, or event ask your speaker agency about Richard Watson or contact him direct via nowandnext.com. Richard, who is based in London, is the creator of brainmail (along with Matt Doyle and Phil Beresford, both of whom had the good sense to stay in Australia). --------------------------------- : SMALL PRINT The material appearing in brainmail is sourced from a variety of usually reliable publications worldwide. However, we cannot guarantee the truthfulness of stories and a degree of commonsense should be applied before quoting or using any material in a commercial context. If something appears to be too good to be true it probably is.