Plus: Up is Down and Down is Up, NASA’s Earth Day Celebration and Free Coffee in Canada.

Happy 40th, Peter Principle
When first published in the late 1960s, former teacher Laurence J. Peter and playwright Raymond Hull’s book The Peter Principle was a bestseller. The humorous treatise on workplace incompetence, about to be reissued in honor of its 40th anniversary, formulated the concept that, in a hierarchy, “every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”

The Peter Principle holds that members in a hierarchy are promoted so long as they work competently. Basically, someone does a good job and then gets promoted into another job. If the worker is successful in that job, he may get promoted again. Sooner or later, he is promoted to a position at which he is no longer competent — reaching his level of incompetence — and there he remains, unable to earn further promotions and staying in a job doing marginal work.

So, happy birthday, Peter Principal. Without you we’d likely be without Dilbert, Office Space and a number of other real-world-mirroring entertainment that has made us laugh while also making us aware of the importance of basic workplace competence.

Pedal Power
To honor Earth Day on Wednesday, Jones Soda Co. powered its headquarters with electricity generated entirely by nine bicycles.

PSA for Readers in Canada
McDonald’s on Monday said it will give away a small coffee to its customers during breakfast hours at its 1,400 locations across Canada until May 3 — and you don’t have to buy anything to get one, according to the Canadian Press.

John Betts, president of McDonald’s Restaurants of Canada, said the promotion is an attempt to lure in customers “and those who haven’t been visiting for a little bit.”

“[W]ith Canadians drinking 36 million fewer cups of coffee in the last 12 months, the battle for a larger share of a declining coffee market is heating up,” the Toronto Star says.

Up is Down, Down is Up
A Seussian observation that sounds like it should come from a Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist rather than a Nobel Prize-winning economist:

Citigroup is profitable because investors think it’s failing, while Morgan Stanley is losing money because investors think it will survive. I am not making this up.

Said one commenter: “The saddest part is that none of this is shocking anymore.”

Better Beer Through Bioengineering?
To the laboratory! An article in this week’s issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology offers a new, more systematic approach to constructing biological “circuits” — “one that makes it easier to predict how they will behave before they are synthesized,” MIT’s Technology Review reports.

“The researchers used the technique to engineer yeast for brewing different kinds of beer more precisely, but the approach could also be used in the production of biofuels and therapeutic drugs and for other applications.”

High-Def Views from Space Station
In celebration of Earth Day, NASA presented images of Earth captured by cameras aboard the International Space Station.

“Traveling at an approximate speed of 17,500 miles per hour, the space station orbits Earth every 90 minutes from an altitude of approximately 220 miles, and can be seen from Earth with the naked eye. Its crew experiences 16 sunrises and sunsets each day,” according to NASAtelevision.

Cheers.