Some household appliances cost us while they sit around and collect dust. They suck energy just by being plugged in, even if they aren’t turned on. This wickedly wasteful phenomenon is commonly known as standby power, but Good Magazine calls it Vampire Energy. jmj

It's Draft Day! Deadspin's Big Daddy Drew returns with his Draft Day Jambaroo. jmj

Paste Magazine reports rumors are circulating that Al Gore will make a sequel to his 2006 Academy Award winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Paramount Pictures, however, deny the plans to make the film. How convenient. jmj

Bored AND miss the winter season? Make a snowflake. jmj

Professional panhandling is alive and well. The karma police are most certainly watching. glc

A 66 year old triathlete training off the coast of San Diego County was attacked and killed by a shark. Authorities believe it was a Great White. glc

The Freakonomics guys take a look at the economics of happiness. Their findings? That the Easterlin Paradox isn't real. What can we conclude from that? Money does buy happiness. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Consider me wary of their conclusions. glc

Seed Magazine performs a little scientific disection of the word 'so'. Particularly the 'so' that introduces a sentence. As in, "So as we can see, modified Newtonian dynamics cannot account for the rotation of any of the three observed galaxies." I wonder, is the word 'now' in the same family? glc

Former Microsoft engineer Alex Barnett wrote on his blog that "so" was a "delaminater" word. To him an idea was a concrete object, much like an onion. "So" was the word a speaker used to convey that another layer was peeling back. This metaphor implies that ideas have a kernel that one could reach with enough "so"s, a notion surely enticing to the problem-solvers and the goal-oriented. I prefer to think of "so" as a vehicle across a landscape of knowledge. It lies not so much in between points on a terminal trajectory, but more on perpetual journey across points of understanding. In this sense it shares some qualities with the infinite "why"s of a two-year-old. Another "so" can always follow the end of a thought. The trajectory is endless; the rabbit hole has no bottom. There will always be more questions for science to answer.

One more from Seed Mag. Scientific research is showing that inside of us there is a biochemical scar that links Earth's greatest extinction to a single substance: hydrogen sulfide. Why is that important? Because of what other questions it brings about of course. Particularly, how did some creatures survive while most perished? The answer may just lead to a dramatic medical revolution in the near future. glc