…World’s Most Expensive Cars, our Favorite Saint, a Miracle in the Kitchen, and Dance for Evolution’s Sake!

As we in New York City today see herds of cheap-beer-carrying suburban teenagers arriving early via the Long Island Rail Road, Metro North or New Jersey Transit, and before the huge annual St. Patrick’s Day parade kicks off, historians once again are protesting in vain.

That’s because the guy later known as St. Patrick was against pretty much everything that’s celebrated on this day.

Once a humble saint’s day for Ireland’s Catholics, as Sploid notes, the alcoholic debauchery of St. Paddy’s Day is “a slap in the face for the ancient Christian extremist who tried to strip the Irish of their drunken, fornicating pagan ways.”

Quick history rundown:
Maewyn Succat was born a Roman citizen, though where he lived is considered a mystery — perhaps the coast of Wales or Scotland or maybe even the coast of Brittany in modern-day France.

His family’s estate was raided by Irish pirates; thousands of slaves were taken back to Ireland and sold to wealthy pagans. Maewyn was put to work as a slave for a powerful Druid priest. While enslaved, he learned the Irish Celtic language and all the ways of his pagan masters. However, at some point he suffered a nervous breakdown, began hearing voices and then escaped to England. His religious training continued for at least a dozen years, and eventually he was sent back to Ireland by order of Pope Celestine I. This time the former slave was a bishop of Rome, and his new name was Patricius.

Although Patricius did not introduce Christianity to the island, he did extend its reach by making it more palatable to the pagans: he introduced bonfires for “Christian” festivals and a Celtic sun on the Roman cross. Otherwise, alcoholism, dancing and sex parties aggravated him.

Anyhow, his story is a long one. Needless to say, he likely had nothing to do with shamrocks, corned beef, Guinness or, oddly enough, the Irish Tenors. And his banishing of all snakes from Ireland? Not literally, no, as post-glacial Ireland never actually had snakes; rather, the “banishing of the snakes” likely was a metaphor for the eradication of pagan ideology from Ireland and the triumph of Christianity. (Serpent symbolism of the Druids of that time and place was strong at that time in history.)

UnFortunately, while St. Patrick would have hated the current form of his namesake’s holiday, the rest of us prefer it.

Bottles O’ Green
Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, Bud Light last week introduced a new green aluminum bottle decorated with shamrocks* in honor of the holiday.

The 16-ounce bottles will be available at select bars, restaurants and convenience stores across the country for a limited time.

*See previous item.

How to Survive Extinction: Dance!
According to new research, reports LiveScience, the ability to dance may have been a factor in survival for our prehistoric ancestors.

A study published in a recent issue of the Public Library of Science’s genetics journal suggests that today’s creative dancers actually share two specific genes, both of which are associated with a predisposition for being good social communicators.

As such, scientists believe this gave early humans who were well coordinated and rhythmic a distinct evolutionary advantage.

DNA was obtained from 85 elite dancers and their parents to compare with a group of people lacking any distinguishing characteristics, as well as a group of athletes. The studied genes dictate two well-known social and behavioral chemicals in the body: serotonin and vasopressin.

As researchers suspected, both chemicals were found in much larger quantities among the dancers. This innate ability was crucial in prehistoric times, according to Steven J. Mithen, and archaeologist at the University of Reading in the UK. “Cooperation would have been essential for survival during the last Ice Age and this would have been facilitated by the social bonds that develop through communal dancing and singing,” Mithen told LiveScience.

(Apologies for the lousy quality here, but isn’t a pic from the movie Encino Man inherently lousy quality?)

You Mean Employees Don’t Like it When Spoken to As If Children?
A workplace etiquette-themed survey released Tuesday found that thirty-two percent of employees considered “condescending tones” as one of their biggest pet peeves in the office.

Workforce solutions company Randstad USA’s survey found that behaviors that interfered with work performance rated high among employed U.S. adults as their biggest “pet peeves” in their place of business.

Harris Interactive surveyed 2,318 employed adults online for Randstad’s monthly Job Bites survey on workplace etiquette.

A staggering 91 percent of employed adults do not think profanity is acceptable in the workplace. (What the #~@*?!)

Top pet peeves:

• Condescending tones (44 percent)

• Public reprimands (37 percent)

• Micromanaging (34 percent)

• Loud talkers (32 percent)

• Cell phones ringing (30 percent)

• Speakerphones in public areas (22 percent)

• Colleagues engaging in personal conversations (11 percent)

• Use of PDAs during meetings (nine percent)

• What are your biggest business-related pet peeves?

A Teeny-Tiny Oragami Smiley
A nanotechnologist has created the world’s smallest and most plentiful Smiley, a tiny face measuring a few billionths of a meter across that is assembled from strands of DNA. Fifty-billion Smileys, each a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, can be made at a stroke under the technique pioneered by Paul Rothemund at Caltech, reports NanoTechWeb.org.

Until now, nano-assembly has been a complex atom-by-atom procedure that is also costly, because it is carried out in a vacuum or at extremely cold temperatures. However, Rothemund, writing in yesterday’s issue of journal Nature, describes a far simpler and much cheaper process in which long, single strands of DNA can be folded back and forth to form a basic scaffold.

Then the basic structure is supplemented by around 200 shorter strands, which both strengthen it and provide a shape that can bear a complex pattern. (Using his so-called DNA origami technique, Rothemund’s strands act kind of like pixels of a computer- or TV-screen image.) According to a Caltech press release, Rothemund has been working on flat, two-dimensional shapes, but he says that 3-D structures in DNA should be quite feasible with this technique.

Apparently there could be huge potential benefits from this apparently whimsical work, as it provides a major new tool for putting molecular-level machinery together.

(via NanoTechWeb.org)

TechEBlog’s Top 10 Strangest Lego Creations
… we say “Top 10 Coolest”…

10. Lego iPod Case
9. Han Solo Frozen in Carbonite
8. Lego Volvo XC90
7. Lego NES Case
6. Lego Harpsichord
5. Lego Pinhole Camera
4. Lego Knitting Machine
3. Lego Difference Engine
2. Lego Air Conditioner
1. Lego Pinball Machine

Click here for accompanying images.

This Site is a-Maze-ing!
A productivity enhancer:

“This site contains one billion mazes in high-quality printable PDF format. You may view, print and solve these mazes…and yes, there are exactly one billion mazes!”

Mapping Mars
Google Inc. expanded its galactic reach by launching Google Mars on Monday. The Web browser-based mapping tool gives users an up-close, interactive view of the red planet with the click of a mouse.

The Martian maps were made from images taken by NASA’s orbiting Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor. And while it doesn’t provide driving directions, Google Mars allows enables users to see the planet in three different formats:

Reports CNN:

The Martian elevation map is color-coded by altitude; the visible-imagery map shows the surface in black-and-white pictures; the infrared map indicates temperature, with cooler areas dark and warmer areas bright.

Users also can zoom in on any of the three maps to view mountains, canyons, dunes and craters. The up-to-date maps also pinpoint the locations of unmanned space probes that have landed on Mars.

Elsewhere In Space…
Alien cow abduction continues to be a serious problem.

Countless bovines have disappeared from dairy farms everywhere. And the numbers of missing cows are on the rise.

“A rapidly growing collection of alien cow abduction evidence and documentation” has been posted to CowAbduction.com.

Or perhaps there is some dark vegetarian conspiracy at work here?

(via CowAbduction.com)

…Better than a Pinto…
Forbes’ list of the world’s most expensive cars, 2006:

10. Maybach 57 S ($367,000)
9. Porsche Carrera GT
8. Maybach 62
7. Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren
6. Koenigsegg CCR
5. Saleen S7 Twin Turbo
4. Leblanc Mirabeau
3. SSC Ultimate Aero
2. Pagani Zonda Roadster F C12S 7.3, Clubsport version
1. Bugatti Veyron 16.4 ($1,192,057)

Slideshow

(via University of Southern Maine’s “Ugliest Car on Campus” contest . . . the lawn jockey on the driver’s side is more attractive than this.)

A Miracle!
On Monday, the Associated Press reported that a woman named Haldis Gundersen, in Norway, turned on her kitchen faucet to find that water had turned into beer.

Meanwhile, two flights below her, employees and customers at the Big Tower Bar were horrified when water poured out of the beer taps.

Fifty-year-old Gundersen told AP, “I turned on the kitchen faucet and beer came out.”

Via clumsy plumbing, someone at the bar in Kristiandsund, western Norway, had accidentally hooked the beer hoses to the water pipes for Gundersen’s apartment.

Unfortunately for Gundersen, however, the beer was flat. Bah.

Cheers.