Laura Branigan Dead At 47

Laura BraniganCNN reports that Laura Branigan died last Thursday of a brain aneurysm at the age of 47. Laura Branigan was best known for her musical career during the 1980’s, especially for hits like “Gloria,” “Self Control,” and “The Power Of Love.” Her official website has a section devoted to her passing and is a good resource for information on her life and career. I was very shocked to hear about this; such an untimely death is all the more tragic…

Alternative Olympic Medal Counts

Athens 2004 Olympics logoThe Australian Bureau of Statistics has “released an alternative view of the traditional Olympic medal tally to take into account the populations of competing nations.” The resulting list ranks the medal count at Athens by Population Per Medal, rather than a raw numerical count, and is updated daily; right now Bahamas is in the lead. The Per Capita Olympic Table similarly ranks nations’ olympic medals since 1948; Liechtenstein leads this list. It’s pretty cool to see smaller countries recognized in this way…

Tricks Of The Trade

The Morning News has a very interesting article entitled The Tricks Of The Trade, which contends that “For every occupation, there is a catalog of secrets only its employees are aware of—such as how waiters with heavy platters know to look straight ahead, and never down.” The article lists a slew of these “occupational secrets” for different jobs, which are both insightful and a little bit alarming in some cases. The MetaFilter thread has some interesting comments and additions…

GMail Notifier

For those of you who are using GMail, Google is offering GMail Notifier, a very useful utility that regularly checks your GMail account for new mail in an applet that resides in your system tray, eliminating the need to keep a GMail session open in your browser.