10 things to learn on June 2nd

10 things to learn from the almighty WWW today:

Top 10 Rarest Languages | Top 10 Lists | TopTenz.net

Most of the time when thinking of language, people will automatically think about English, German, French, Spanish, and maybe others like Japanese, Arabic, Russian, and possibly Latin. Language is something that many people today take for granted. Without it, there’d be no communication, and no way to connect with others in the world. Imagine a life without a common language that at least a few others around you know. Sure people could write books and novels, but it’d be rare for someone else to understand. Language plays a huge role in everyone’s life, whether we think about it or not.

Despite the fact that language seems to be a necessity, the United Nations stated that on average, a language disappears every two weeks. Around the world, almost 6,000 or more languages are in danger of becoming extinct.

Lifehacker – Lifehacker Pack 2009: Our List of Essential Free Windows Downloads – Lifehacker Pack 2009

We feature downloads of all kinds every day at Lifehacker. Today, however, we're bundling all the best free downloads for new computer owners, re-installers, would-be geeks, or anyone who wants to save time installing the best stuff out there. This is our 2009 Lifehacker Pack for Windows computers.

The idea is the same as when we first introduced the Lifehacker Pack more than three years ago—a single, handy list that we think improves the computer lives of Windows users. We're also providing a utility to download some or all of these applications at once—more on that after the list.

You can head directly to each application's download page from the [Download] links following their write-ups, and see what Lifehacker originally wrote about them at the [LH Post] link. If there's a portable version of an application that you can run off a thumb drive and/or test out without installing, we've linked to that at [Portable], or added a "+Portable" to the main download link.

Cause+Capitalism: The Paul Newman Way to Buy Office Supplies: The 'Give Something Back' Story

Give Something Back, an office supply company with an unusual business model, won two accolades from Inc. Magazine in the same year; it was billed as one of the country's fastest growing companies and lampooned as the worst corporate name in America. I spoke with Give Something Back's Mike Hannigan about a new set of stakeholders, marketplace competition and spaghetti sauce.

Founded in 1991 by Mike Hannigan and Sean Marx, Give Something Back has grown into the West Coast's largest independent office supplier with corporate offices in three cities and 12,000 clients and 40 distribution centers nationwide. You're reading about Give Something Back now, not because of the company's overnight delivery or tremendous selection of recycled products, but because it donates all after-tax profits to nonprofits through a balloting system that involves GSB's customers and employees. Based on Newman's Own business model, Give Something Back has donated more than $4 million

almost.at – Following People at Real-World Events in Real-Time

With its real-time search and growing hordes of users, Twitter has become one of the best ways to stay up to date on current events and breaking news (assuming of course, its search function is actually working). But one of the conventions Twitter users have adopted to associate their tweets with a certain event — the hash tag — can be an incredibly inefficient way to spread what’s actually going on. This is because Twitter users have grown accustomed to tagging any tweet somehow related to an event with its corresponding hashtag, even when they aren’t actually attending. This helps spur conversation, but it becomes much harder to weed out the news from the noise, and occasionally leads to propagation of false information. Almost.at, a very slick web application built by freelance iPhone developer David Cann, may be the answer to this problem.

People Quit Managers, Not Companies : Slacker Manager – Management and Leadership Advice – How to Be a Good Manager

I’ve been working since I was 12 years old. That’s 23 years if you’re counting at home. In all my time working, I’ve come to realize 1 major truth:

I’ve only quit my managers, not any companies.

I said it, and I feel a little better.

What I Learned as a Car Czar – WSJ.com

When the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu decided in the mid-1960s that he wanted to have a car industry, he chose me to start the project rolling. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I knew nothing about manufacturing cars, but neither did anyone else among Ceausescu's top men. However, my father had spent most of his life running the service department of the General Motors affiliate in Bucharest.

My job at the time was as head of the Romanian industrial espionage program. Ceausescu tasked me to mediate the purchase of a minimum, basic license for a small car from a major Western manufacturer, and then to steal everything else needed to produce the car.

Only in Bollywood » Bollywood Spice

Bollywood is full of great surprises and normalcy. While song, dance, fight and romance make up the majority of Bollywood films, every so often, Bollywood fans are treated to a few unusual occurrences that leave them speechless. However, for the most part, we are more than happy with the clichés too. In fact, it is that very inanity that makes Hindi cinema what it is. Secretly, fans all over the world fantasize of instances that…happen only in Bollywood. To Hindi cinema's credit, over time, they have managed to create a vast list of "Only in Bollywood" moments. Take a look as BollySpice covers the Top 20 Only in Bollywood sequences which are now monumental.

Ezra Klein – What Does Ben Bernanke Believe About the Financial Crisis?

Ben Bernanke recommends that we read Yale University professor — and former AIG consultant — Gary Gorton's papers for insight into the financial crisis. It's not a bad recommendation. Gorton's latest paper, "Slapped in the Face by the Invisible Hand," is very good. Brilliant, even. But it contains a lot of sentences like "If securitization debt is informationally-insensitive, it can be an input into the repo system of creating a kind of transaction medium, i.e., collateral that can be rehypothecated." So let's try to clean this up a bit.

I should warn you that this post is, by blog standards, a bit long. But I can also promise that it's much, much shorter than Gorton's paper.

Gorton's basic argument is actually pretty elegant. "The period from 1934, when deposit insurance was enacted, until the current crisis is somewhat special in that there were no systemic banking crises in the U.S," he writes. "It is the 'Quiet Period.'"

New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets – Conversation Starter – HarvardBusiness.org

Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women. Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other. This "follower split" suggests that women are driven less by followers than men, or have more stringent thresholds for reciprocating relationships. This is intriguing, especially given that females hold a slight majority on Twitter: we found that men comprise 45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55%. To get this figure, we cross-referenced users' "real names" against a database of 40,000 strongly gendered names.

Even more interesting is who follows whom. We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity

Why Women Have Breasts

Many people may suppose that the question of the title is a stupid one, given that the answer is so obvious: women have breasts for feeding babies. In fact, the question is a good one, because it is a mystery why the vast majority of women have breasts. Most women are, at this moment, not lactating, and yet they have breasts. If breasts were merely for feeding babies, then most women would not have them. They would develop them only during pregnancy, and would lose them again when they stopped breast-feeding. Humans are unique in the animal world, in that they develop breasts at puberty and retain them into old age, whether or not they ever get pregnant. This requires an explanation.

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