Month: December 2016

Landing your first job after college can be a difficult, stressful process, and not many college graduates feel their university’s career services offices gave them the help and support they wanted, according to a Gallup poll spotted by The Atlantic. Only 16 percent of graduates of all ages (from the 1940s to the class of 2016) say their experience was “very helpful,” and only 27 percent say it was “helpful.” In total, about two in five graduates think visiting the career counselors at their school was useful. Another 16 percent found it “not at all helpful.”

Even if they had a good experience, students didn’t think career services really prepared them for the real world. “Graduates who visited their career services office are not much more likely than those who did not to believe their university prepared them well for life outside of college, to say their education was worth the cost and to recommend their university to others,” according to Gallup.

Recent college grads in the U.S. have an unemployment rate of 5.6 percent, and a 12.6 percent underemployment rate (meaning they might be working as a barista instead of putting that sociology degree to use at work). College career services have an important duty, then, to help students get jobs and launch careers, so it’s important that the experience be helpful.

The results are based on online surveys of 11,483 people with at least a bachelor’s degree between August and October of 2016.

[h/t The Atlantic]

Is it possible that murderous crustaceans have a softer side? A new video shows cannibalistic deep-sea crabs grooming one another the same way chimpanzees do.

Austinograea williamsi is not generally a snuggly critter. This pale, eyeless crab makes its home in the darkness near hydrothermal vents thousands of meters below the ocean’s surface. Its previous appearances on camera have all been a lot less aww-inspiring and a lot grislier, featuring feeding frenzies in which everyone eats everyone else’s legs.

But family members aren’t A. williamsi’s only food source. It also eats snails, anemones, and algae. Given the opportunity, it may also eat bacteria scraped off undersea surfaces. Researchers aboard the R/V Falkor believe that that may be what’s going on in this video they captured at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean thanks to a robotic submarine:

“He was literally grooming this smaller shell, just in the same way that you would see chimpanzees for instance picking bugs off of the hair of a mate,” Falkor biologist Amanda Bates told New Scientist.

Bates and her colleagues can’t say for sure why the crabs are doing it. Grooming may be a lazy way to score a snack, or it may be as much a social activity for crabs as it is for primates. Either way, Bates said, “it’s incredible to see that same type of behaviour in crabs that are 3,500 metres under the sea.”

[h/t New Scientist]

The 20-sided die you see above could have been built by ancient Egyptian Dungeons & Dragons players, but it wasn’t. Rather, it was made by an unknown craftsperson at some point between the second century B.C.E. and fourth century C.E.—a relic from an age when casting the dice often had higher stakes than hit points.

Made in the shape of an icosahedron (a polyhedron with 20 faces), the die is constructed out of serpentine, which ancient Egyptians often used for their amulets and vessels. The die could have been made during Egypt’s Macedonian period, during which it was a major center of Greek trade and culture, or during its later time as a Roman province, when Egypt kept its strong trade ties with Greece. That would explain the Greek letters carved into the faces of the die. 

Historians aren’t entirely sure why such dice exist, but it’s thought they were sometimes used for divination. The die could even be an example of an alphabet oracle—a text-based divination tool that could stand in for a flesh-and-blood oracle or seer when needed.

In an alphabet oracle, each letter of the Greek alphabet had a corresponding phrase that you could use to determine your fortune. One such alphabet oracle was found on an inscription discovered in the ancient city of Olympos. Although it’s thought that shards of pottery were used with that oracle, the process is just as doable with dice. Roll the Greek letter lambda, for example, and the oracle would tell you that “the one passing on the left bodes well for everything.” A zeta told you to “flee the very great storm, lest you be disabled in some way.”

Unfortunately, the die you see here didn’t come with a corresponding guidebook, so it’s impossible to know if it was associated with an oracle or not. Another possibility is that such dice were used for games. Ancient Egyptians are known to have used dice for senet, a popular board game thought to have been kind of like backgammon. The game has been found in the tombs of Egyptian royalty, and gameplay has been linked to the mythological Egyptian journey through the underworld.

The 20-sided die is far from the first of its kind, of course. Dice are thought to date back millennia, and the oldest known example was associated with a 3000-year-old board game of the ancient Near East called the Royal Game of Ur.

These days, 20-sided dice are most familiar to role-playing gamers. As games historian Jon Peterson writes, 20-sided dice became commercially available around the early 1970s—right when table gamers were beginning to recognize the need for dice that would allow for more outcomes and make games more realistic. Among those gamers was Gary Gygax, who ended up creating Dungeons & Dragons with Dave Arneson in 1974.

Ancient fortune-telling tool or remnant of a centuries-old D&D predecessor? You can visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and speculate for yourself—the die is on display in Gallery 138.

If you’re struggling to get more done in a day, it might be because you’re thinking of productivity as a one-size-fits-all endeavor, says Carson Tate, author of Work Simply. “We each have a productivity style, influenced by how we think and process information,” she says. “If you’re not customizing your strategies to that style, they’re not going to work for you and you’re going to get frustrated.” She breaks down the four styles and corresponding strategies that can turn you into an efficient, to-do-list-killing machine.

1. THE PRIORITIZER

Style Traits: You’re analytical and competitive. Long-winded explanations set your teeth on edge, and when coworkers start swapping stories about what they did over the weekend you start silently watching the clock (so much wasted time!). “Prioritizers are very focused on the outcome or goal—not the soccer game your kid had over the weekend,” says Tate. “They want people to make their point and back it up—they never met a piece of data they didn’t like.”

Productivity Boost: Play to your natural competitive streak by timing yourself as you run through routine tasks, suggests Tate. How quickly can you prep lunches before work? How many minutes does it take to clear out your inbox each morning? Trying to beat your own time will spur you to stay focused, but it can also nudge you to streamline—like prepping a week’s worth of veggies at once or setting up templates for emails you send again and again.

2. THE PLANNER

Style Traits: You’re hyper-organized, detail-driven, and thrive on deadlines. You have every appointment and reminder possible in your calendar, and you relish making action plans. Your biggest pet peeve is when people are running perpetually late. “These are the people who turn their work in early and will add an item to their to-do list even if it’s already done, just for the satisfaction of crossing it off,” says Tate.

Productivity Boost: Batching should be your new best friend, says Tate. That means scheduling time to knock out all of your phone calls at once or cranking through spreadsheet set-up, assembly-style. “Grouping similar tasks together lets you get into a flow state and not waste any time switching between tasks,” she explains.

Another trick that works particularly well for planners is creating a to-do list of things that can be done in 15 minutes or less. “There are so many microsegements in the day, where you finish one meeting and have another starting in 15 minutes,” says Tate. “Instead of defaulting to email, a 15-minute list lets you actually execute.”

3. THE ARRANGER

Style Traits: A natural born facilitator, you’re highly intuitive and communicative. You do your best work with people and on teams, and you tend to understand instinctually what needs to get done to wrap up a project. “They’re the people who will color-code their calendars, because color is important, or have certain types of pens for certain tasks,” says Tate.

Productivity Boost: Spending the entire day holed up in an office will actually backfire for Arrangers. “They need to intersperse solo work with group work,” says Tate, or their energy and focus will start to flag. Schedule a coffee break with coworkers, or break up a big work project with quick trips to the water cooler. Those minutes aren’t wasted—they’re recharging your efficiency and focus. Sunshine can also have a surprisingly big impact on productivity with this group, says Tate. Even standing near a window for a few minutes will perk you up to get more done.

4. THE VISUALIZER

Style Traits: Post-its and white boards are your go-tool tools, and even though your cubicle may seem like it’s in disarray you can locate anything in less than a minute. “Visualizers are big-picture thinkers and risk takers,” says Tate. “They’re great at juggling a large variety of work, and they work very quickly.” They’re also the ones who are most likely to squeak in just seconds before the deadline, and to chafe at lengthy processes. “Too much structure drives them crazy, because they want time and space to think and brainstorm.”

Productivity Boost: Stop thinking you can knock out a project in one long marathon work session. “Visualizers crave novelty, so to keep your energy and momentum high you need to break up the boring work with more interesting work,” says Tate. While ping-ponging between tasks might slow other styles down, it can actually fuel this group—so think of yourself as a sprinter, working on one thing for 20 minutes before moving on to something completely different.

As we get deeper into winter, getting dressed to go outside becomes an ordeal. Not only do we have to worry about wearing enough layers to stay warm, we also have to deal with static electricity giving our garments a life of their own.

If you’re hoping to tackle static cling head-on this season, it helps to first understand the science behind why it happens. TIME recently spoke with two experts, Rutgers University biomedical engineering professor Troy Shinbrot and George Mason University professor of Earth sciences Robert Hazen, about why this sticky phenomenon becomes so pervasive once the temperatures drop.

According to Shinbrot, the culprit is an excess of either positive or negative electrical charge. All atoms contain both positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons. When balanced in number, these charges cancel each other out; but when two objects make contact, electrons can come dislodged from their original atoms and jump to another, disrupting the object’s “neutral” charge.

The “cling” part comes in when these imbalanced atoms start sticking together. Opposites attract, atomically speaking, so when wool tights with too much positive charge are introduced to a dress with a neutral or negative charge, the protons in the tights will adhere to the electrons in the dress. Like charges, on the other hand, repel each other. If you get a bunch of positively charged atoms in one place the protons will push away from one another. This is why your hair sometimes acts like it wants to float off your head after you brush it. “Like people on a crowded beach who want to put space between themselves, they all stand up and spread out,” Hazen told TIME.

But that still doesn’t answer the question of why static cling is at its worst in the winter. For that we’ll need to shift gears briefly from atomic physics to meteorology: According to WCCO Minneapolis meteorologist Chris Shaffer, cold air means dry air (anyone who’s gone through multiple bottles of hand cream in January can attest to this).

In the summertime, water molecules in the air attract most surplus protons or electrons around you, so charges on your clothes or hair rarely stay imbalanced long enough for you to notice them. But when the air outside is cold and ill-equipped to retain moisture, these charges can quickly get out of control.

That doesn’t mean you’re forced to live with static cling until spring rolls around. There are ways to take the seasonal annoyance into your own hands: When getting dressed in the morning, keep a spray bottle filled with water and a tablespoon of fabric softener nearby. A spritz or two should be enough to tame sticky fabrics when the air is dry. For static that disrupts your ‘do, a little hair spray will work to the same effect. And it’s important not to underestimate the power of dryer sheets. The positively charged material combats the negative charges that build up as your clothes dry, and they can even be used outside the laundry room to wipe down unruly hair.

How much would it cost to be Santa Claus?

Kynan Eng:

It will cost $24.3 billion to make the toys, plus $683 million to deliver them by ocean and road freight (delivery time 2 months). Or, if it absolutely, positively must be there overnight, air freight will cost $95.8 billion before discounts. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough planes in the world to deliver everything in one day and airport capacity is limited, so it will take around 5 days if every commercial and military plane in the world (40,000 planes total) is pressed into service. Further details below.

How many kids in the world? Where are they?

Around 27 percent of the world’s population is aged 0–14, according to the CIA. As a crude approximation, we can extrapolate that to 32.8 percent of the world being aged 0–17. People are spread out around the world as shown in the list below, as of August 2016. Note that some regions of the world have a higher proportion of kids, but we will ignore this factor for the purposes of the calculation.

Population by Regions in the World (2016)

• North America: 579 million (190 million kids)
• South America: 423 million (139 million kids)
• Europe + Russia: 887 million (291 million kids)
• Africa: 1216 million (399 million kids)
• India: 1252 million (411 million kids)
• East Asia/Oceania: 3043 million (988 million kids)

TOTAL: 7.4 billion (2.43 billion kids)

How expensive to produce a toy?

In 2000, one McDonald’s Happy Meal toy cost 43 cents to produce. Let’s be generous, and say that we expend a production cost of $10 per child on toys, including packaging and wrapping paper. We will also assume that these toys weigh a total of 2 kg per child and a volume of 0.01 m3, including packaging. So our toy budget is $24.3 billion and we have to ship 4.86 billion kg, with a volume of 48.6 million m3.

Where are we shipping from?

Depending on who you ask, Santa Claus lives in one of several locations:

• Alaska, USA
• Rovanemi, Finland
• Kakslauttanen, Finland

However, in reality, modern Santa produces in and around Shenzhen, China. His northern residence serves mainly as a theme park, marketing headquarters, and tax haven. So everything must be shipped from Shenzhen or nearby Hong Kong.

Shipping cost: Ocean + road freight

The most cost-effective way to send stuff is by ship and then road. The data here comes from an online freight calculator. A standard 40-foot shipping container has an interior volume of 67.6 m3, of which about 60 m3 is usable after accounting for fork lift pallets, etc. So we can fit 6000 presents into each container. Therefore we will need to ship 405,000 containers. The world’s largest container ships can each carry upwards of 9000 containers, so we will need only 45 ships to carry all of the presents. The ocean shipping costs are broken down below ($cost/container x number of containers):

• North America: Hong Kong – Los Angeles: $1400 x 31667 → $44.3 million
• South America: Hong Kong – Panama: $1450 x 23167 → $33.6 million
• Europe + Russia: Hong Kong – Rotterdam: $750 x 48500 → $36.4 million
• Africa: Hong Kong – Port Said (Egypt): $625 x 66500 → $41.6 million
• India: Hong Kong – Mumbai: $600 x 68500 → $41.1 million
• Asia: Hong Kong – Shanghai: $400 x 507167 → $39.5 million

For the road shipping cost, we will make a wild assumption that the average road distance is about 2400 miles, which is about the distance from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. This costs around $1100 per container in the USA, which we will use as the overall cost. So we get:

Total ocean + road freight cost = $236M + $446M = $683M

Shipping cost: Air freight

The point of origin will be either Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport or Hong Kong International Airport, which are very close to each other. Air freight requires two air legs (Hong Kong → regional hub → destination city) and one road leg. The exception is within Asia, which requires just one flight. The first-leg air freight costs are as shown below (cost quoted per present).

• North America: Hong Kong – Los Angeles: $19 → $3.61 billion
• South America: Hong Kong – Panama: $20 → $2.78 billion
• Europe + Russia: Hong Kong – Frankfurt: $19 → $5.53 billion
• Africa: Hong Kong – Port Said (Egypt): $22 → $8.78 billion
• India: Hong Kong – Mumbai: $25 → $10.28 billion
• Asia: Hong Kong – Beijing: $21 → $20.7 billion

Total first leg: $51.7 billion, plus second leg ($18/present): $43.7 billion, plus road: $446 million = $95.8 billion

Do we have enough planes? In short, no. In 2015, FedEx shipped 16.02 billion tonne-km of air freight, while the top 10 companies combined shopped 85.528 billion tonne-km. This works out to shipping our load 17600 km—so it would be possible to do it only if every air freight company could delivery their annual capacity in one day. Modern cargo aircraft range in capacity from around 39,780 kg (Boeing 757–200 freighter) to 134,200 kg (Boeing 747–8F). If we take an average payload of 80,000 kg per plane, we will need 60,750 long-haul flights, plus the same number of short-haul flights. The world has about 20,000 civilian aircraft and 20,000 military aircraft, but most of them are not long-haul—so we will need some sort of well-organized short-hop relay system.

Another bottleneck is the number of airports. The capacity of a modern airport is around one take-off every 60 seconds, which is 1440 flights/day. There are 10 civilian airports within 300 miles of the area, so we can start around 15,000 flights/day. So it will take around four days to get all of the stuff out by air. After that, regional and local airports can handle the traffic easily—the world already handles around 100,000 scheduled flights per day.

This post originally appeared on Quora. Click here to view.

A long-lost Christmas song has been discovered at Oxford, and yes, it’s about drinking. The score by George Butterworth, an English composer who died in the trenches of World War I, was uncovered at the university’s Bodleian Libraries, whose researchers believe it to be the only surviving copy.

Butterworth, who was born in 1885, was an avid collector and composer of folk music as well as an early adopter of new recording technologies. His work was relatively popular by the time he enlisted in the infantry in 1914, and according to the Bodleian Libraries, he was considered one of the most promising English composers of his time. He was killed in battle at 31 years old, and most of his compositions were lost. He had destroyed much of his music before he left for the war, thinking it wasn’t worth preserving, though after his death his surviving compositions came to be lauded as masterpieces

The three-page score for the lost Christmas song was found by Martin Holmes, a music curator at the Bodleian Libraries, in a collection of uncataloged music that made its way from the university’s music department to the university’s Weston Library. The library isn’t sure where it came from, but it might have been donated by the composer’s father to Butterworth’s friend from Oxford, Sir Hugh Allen, who later became a music professor at the school. Allen’s papers were donated to the Oxford Music Faculty Library after his death in 1946.

According to the library, the song “begins with the words ‘Crown winter with green, And give him good drink To physic his spleen…’ and ends with the lines ‘And merry be we This good Yuletide.’” In the vein of his other folk-inspired songs, “he wrote the musical setting for this poem in the style of a drinking song, for voice and piano,” the library’s press release continues. The song was probably written early in Buttterworth’s career sometime in the early 20th century. It’s not a masterpiece, but it can provide scholars with a better idea of how his compositional talents evolved.

The manuscript score is on display at the Weston Library at Oxford through this weekend, where you can also listen to a recording of the song.

 
Thanks to warm waters and an assist from La Niña, this year’s hurricane season was an active one, and coastal residents have been on edge all summer. But now the winds of winter are slowly winning the battle between the Arctic and the tropics, forcing the Atlantic Ocean’s hurricane season to finally calm down. In honor of 2016’s season, here are some things you might have missed about this year’s storms.

1. THE 2016 HURRICANE SEASON WAS THE MOST ACTIVE SINCE 2012.

 
If it seemed like we had to deal with a lot of storms this year, it’s only because the past couple of years have been relatively quiet. A “normal” hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean produces 12 named storms, six of which you’d expect to strengthen into hurricanes and three of those hurricanes would reach Category 3 intensity (115 mph) or stronger.

The 2016 Atlantic Hurricane Season, which officially ran from June 1 through November 30, saw 15 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes. The season began with an unusual hurricane in January, an early-season storm in May, and a string of storms that formed throughout the warm summer and fall months. But Hurricane Otto, which formed toward the end of November, was likely the last storm to form in the year.

2. LA NIÑA HELPED ATLANTIC STORMS THRIVE.

 
One of the major factors that allowed one storm after another to percolate in the Atlantic was the presence of mild La Niña conditions in the eastern Pacific Ocean. It seems odd that cooler-than-normal waters in another ocean would have an impact on the hurricane season across the continent, but everything is connected. La Niña—the presence of abnormally cool waters near the equator in the eastern Pacific Ocean—keeps thunderstorm activity in this part of the world to a minimum, reducing the strong winds that flow east over the Caribbean and typically tear apart tropical cyclones before they have a chance to form. The absence of these winds allow storms to build.

The past couple of hurricane seasons were stifled by the opposite phenomenon—an El Niño—which created unusually high levels of wind shear over the Atlantic. Many of the storms that formed this year also had to battle strong wind shear, but it usually let up enough for most of them to strengthen before hitting land.

3. THE SOUTHEAST TOOK A BEATING THIS YEAR.

The United States only saw a handful of landfalls over the past couple of years, but this year was different. Five of the ten storms that made landfall somewhere around the Atlantic Ocean this year hit the United States, and all of those storms came ashore either in Florida or South Carolina. There’s no particular reason that storms kept targeting the same areas this year—each storm was different and they all took advantage of different environmental factors that allowed them to hit the same spots over and over again.

Unfortunately, none of the five landfalling storms took the right track to help alleviate the historic drought that’s plaguing interior parts of the southeast. Tropical cyclones that come ashore along the northern Gulf Coast or the southern Atlantic coast are a big source of rainfall for states like Alabama and Georgia, but this year drought-stricken areas have had to go without this plentiful supply of tropical moisture.

4. BERMUDA GOT HIT HARD, TOO.

It’s not just the southeastern United States that got it bad this year. Bermuda is a tiny island—just a little smaller than Manhattan—that sits a few hundred miles off the coast of North Carolina. They’ve had some pretty close calls in the past, but it’s hard for the center of a hurricane to hit this small speck in the middle of a vast ocean.

Hard as it is, Hurricane Nicole managed to do just that this year, with the eye of this major hurricane passing directly over the island and its 65,000 residents. The entire island experienced wind gusts of more than 100 mph while the eye passed overhead. Thankfully, Bermuda is resilient and well-prepared for bad storms, so damage from this storm was relatively minimal.

Nicole wasn’t the only storm to hit Bermuda in recent years. Hurricanes Fay and Gonzalo both made landfall on the island nation during the same week in October 2014; this back-to-back blow caused extensive damage across the island. Hurricane Joaquin in October 2015 also came perilously close to the island, causing some minor damage as it passed the west of the island.

5. HURRICANE MATTHEW WAS HISTORICALLY HORRIFIC.

 
The worst storm of the year was Hurricane Matthew, a monstrous Category 5 hurricane that exploded in the Caribbean and came within miles of causing a catastrophe in the United States. Matthew was originally forecast to remain a minimal hurricane as it entered the central Caribbean Sea at the beginning of September, but the storm took advantage of calm winds, ample moisture, and record-warm ocean waters to exceed forecasts beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.

Matthew rapidly grew from a strong tropical storm with 70 mph winds to a scale-topping beast with 160 mph winds in just 24 hours, and it maintained that strength as it closed in on the Greater Antilles. The hurricane crashed into Haiti on October 5 as a strong Category 4 storm, causing unspeakable destruction to the small towns that dot the hillsides on the country’s western shores. Entire towns were leveled by Matthew’s intense winds and storm surge, and some estimates figure that more than 1000 people died as a result.

It looked like Hurricane Matthew would repeat its destruction by making landfall in Florida as a major hurricane, but the powerful core of the storm stayed just a few miles offshore as it paralleled the Florida shoreline, sparing most coastal communities from the worst effects. Matthew eventually came inland in South Carolina, where the main threat transitioned from wind to flooding. Even still, eastern parts of North Carolina were devastated by the worst flooding in recent memory after the storm dropped more than a foot of rain in some locations. The floods killed dozens of people and caused so much damage that some school districts couldn’t restart classes until nearly three weeks after the hurricane.

6. HURRICANE OTTO MADE AN UNUSUAL MOVE.

The last storm of the season was also a bit surprising in that it strengthened far beyond what forecasters initially expected. The hurricane developed from an area of disturbed weather that sat off the coast of Nicaragua for a week, then quickly spinning itself into a borderline major hurricane before making landfall near the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

Most storms dissipate when they move inland, but Otto retained its hurricane strength as it moved across Nicaragua, and its eye emerged in the eastern Pacific Ocean a day later. Hurricane Otto is only the seventh storm in recorded history to move across Central America from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and only the second storm to maintain its strength as it crossed land. The most recent storm to accomplish this feat was Hurricane Cesar-Douglas, 20 years earlier in 1996. Cesar-Douglas has two names because convention at the time was to rename a storm once it crossed ocean basins—it was called Cesar in the Atlantic and renamed Douglas once it moved into the Pacific.