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Transparency: The Effects of Bike Commuting on Obesity

The average American is both overweight and spends more than 100 hours per year commuting, that vast majority of those hours...

Good Is
By Good IsNov 20, 2009
Good Is
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The average American is both overweight and spends more than 100 hours per year commuting, that vast majority of those hours being spent in a car. Are those numbers correlated? Could we help reduce our societal weight gain by encouraging more commutes by bike or foot? Our latest Transparency is a look at the number of active commutes in several countries, as compared to those countries obesity rates.A collaboration between GOOD and Lamosca.

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Photo credit: James Eastham (with comments from Instagram)

Meet Gary, the Internet's most famous and adorable adventure cat

Any time my wife and I take our furry little feline, Tony, on a stroller ride through our downtown square, we’re mobbed with smiling children and laughing old ladies and confused college dudes rolling their eyes. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be James Eastham: proud guardian of Gary, the 10-year-old domestic longhair who’s become Internet-famous for his adorable outdoor adventures. Together, they’ve amassed over 600,000 loyal Instagram followers, who flock to their catalog-worthy photos of hiking, skiing, and paddling excursions around the Canadian Rockies.

In a time of extreme political divisiveness and social-media toxicity, cute-cat profiles are one of our few remaining sanctuaries. And it’s impossible not to fall in love with the handsome and gung-ho Gary, whether he’s looking all zen on the water or resting on his dad’s shoulders while zooming down a snowy hill, decked out in badass goggles. But the account, greatgramsofgary, is more than just feel-good fluff—he’s also inspired people to be more active and mindful with cats, rethinking preconceived notions of how to enrich their lives and ours.

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100-year-old Gaston Pettigrew got more than what he asked for.

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WWII veteran wanted 100 cards for his 100th birthday. The response was overwhelming.

The night before his 100th birthday, World War II veteran Gaston Pettigrew put on his Royal Canadian Navy uniform and enjoyed a birthday celebration in the dining hall with the friends, family, and staff of the Maison Paul-Triquet home in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. All he wanted for his birthday was 100 cards for him. He was greeted with a box full of 1,700 cards and more are still on the way from around the world.

Weeks prior, Pettigrew’s request was posted on a Facebook community group dedicated to military history by Jordan Proust. Since then, among the hundreds of likes and reacts the post got, the birthday cards kept coming in. Pettigrew’s residence expects him to receive over 2,000 cards by the end of his birthday week.

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Eric Idle says The Beatles were "just as funny" as Monty Python.

Photo credit: Conan O'Brien YouTube screenshot (Eric Idle), The Beatles YouTube screenshot (The Beatles)

Eric Idle says this classic Beatles moment shows they were 'just as funny' as Monty Python

The Beatles’ cultural impact extends beyond music into film, TV, fashion, literature, and even comedy. And if you ask Eric Idle, member of the influential British comedy troupe Monty Python, the band’s sharp wit was crucial to ushering in the Beatlemania craze in America. He even argues that The Beatles (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr) were equally funny to his own crew.

"When The Beatles first arrived in America, what made everybody love them is they were funny," he said on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast. "There was this guy called Ringo with a big nose, a funny name, the funny haircuts. Everybody knew Ringo first. That’s the first name they knew. But it was their humor at the airport conference that broke them in America—I’m convinced of it. In a way, they were just as funny as we were.

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An ancient petroglyph is opening up the possibility that early humans knew more about dinosaurs than we thought.

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Stunning 9,000-year-old rock carvings suggest ancient people may have studied dinosaur tracks

Researchers in Brazil have uncovered a remarkable discovery that spans across millennia—dinosaur footprints found alongside ancient rock art dating back over 9,000 years. This significant find occurred in Serrote do Letreiro, located in the Sousa Basin, and the research has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

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Orange cats have become a meme over the last few years, known for the “orange cat behavior” that often calls into question their number of brain cells. In fact, there’s an entire subreddit with 805K members called r/OneOrangeBraincell dedicated to their delightful derpiness. However, sometimes out of that derpiness comes something more. The amazing Trident the cat recently proved that while not all heroes wear capes, some heroes do wear orange.

Alana Falk, Trident’s mom, shuts the door to her bedroom at night. Sometimes Trident, whose fur appears as a dapper orange and white tuxedo with little white socks, will want to come in for “one more pet,” Newsweekreports. What would typically start as a request for “one more pet” quickly escalated one night, however. Trident was “meowing, scratching at the door, and trying to get in,” Falk wrote on TikTok in a video that now has over 276K views. Trident refused to let his owners sleep. Seeing this was unusual, Falk got up to open the door. Trident practically fell inside the room with all the vigor of his scratching and meowing, and ran to the stairs, still meowing, Falk shared. She realized shortly after that something in the house wasn’t right. There was a burning chemical smell in the house that hadn’t been there when Falk and her husband went to bed.

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A study at Ohio State University found that if background music at the workplace doesn’t fit well with what workers need to do their jobs, it doesn’t just impact their moods or energy, but their job performance overall. Bad songs may have killed the mood in the room, made it hard for workers to concentrate, or just didn’t feel “in sync” with the work being done. “Music misfit,” as the researchers called it, didn’t just make work less pleasurable for the workers, but was shown to cause fatigue and make it more difficult to concentrate. This is a big deal since 13.5 million people work in occupations in which background music is common—and for the most part, the music is chosen with customers in mind rather than the workers.

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If you have ever entered a public men’s restroom, you are aware of a frequent and gross problem: urinal splash back. When the typically designed urinal is in use, it’s not uncommon for droplets spraying and splashing onto the floors, walls, and the pants of the users. This has caused not just a health hazard but great expense and water use in cleaning up these messes so frequently. Thanks to physics and engineering from the University of Waterloo in Canada and Weber State University in Utah, this splashing problem will be flushed to the past and create cleaner men’s rooms.

Current methods to clean or prevent urinal splashing are better than nothing, but still aren’t very efficient. Targets in the urinal, absorbing mats, and frequent cleaning schedules don’t address the root of the problem. According to the published study from UW and WSU, there are approximately 56 million urinals in businesses, government buildings, and other non-residential areas across the United States, leading researchers to conclude that more than 350,000 liters of urine splash onto their floors every day. That leads to a lot of time, money, and water to clean up pee.

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