The ingenuity of mankind knows no limit. Even in these recessionary economically disastery times of crime-ridden misery, nothing is getting in the way of the human urge to push the boundaries of knowledge and explore the mysteries of unknown. For just last week, we saw the first of a new kind of space mission; a voyage to the heavens the like of which had never been seen before.

Yes, humanity has just managed, kind of, to create the first space flight by a piece of cheese.

The Poorhouse is a big fan of acronyms, and here's a new one that surely is about to take the world by storm: WILB. Researchers (well, a researcher) use it to mean "Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing". You might have heard of it under other guises - perhaps "skiving", or "taking another break", or "squandering company resources, you're fired."

Only perhaps you shouldn't be. In fact, maybe you should be promoted. Raw hard science (kind of) proves it. Thank you Dr Coker, and your University of Melbourne study.

The Poorhouse is a big lover of pop-economics, the sort of stuff famously published in tomes such as The Undercover Economist or Freakonomics. The quantitative inter-relation of sometimes disparate-seeming topics, but mostly concentrating on cold hard money, is a fascinating insight into how the world really works. The more popularised writings on such topics may be a little dumbed down for the masses, but on the other hand they are actually interesting to read.

Nonetheless, there are some activities that at first it is hard to see that they would innately relate to financial incentives such as taxation in a consumer-driven way. The truly mortal stuff, births and deaths, one can see easily would relate strongly to wealth - if you have the money for good medical care, you'll likely live longer - but at the end of the day generally people don't have a lot of active choice over exactly which day they are born or die in a way that they can choose their brand of cola...or do they? Work by Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh indicates maybe there are more active - financially incentivisable - choices going on that one might expect.

Well, clearly the above could be answered in a single word, with one syllable and two letters, but hey, let's give it a chance. A strange amount of tarnish has fallen from the pens of certain newspapers on "social networking websites". Often the example they use is Facebook, presumably because it's the biggest, baddest and all, with a population of considerably more than quite some countries using it.

There seem to be a couple of main stories, both of which could be plot-lines for a horror film.

Apparently it's not just the Poorhouse who upon receiving an email that that features some handwriting-esque cursive font has a physical inability to be arsed to read it, let alone act on it. Of course this produces issues here and there with his corporate masters, but then again, so does the policy of auto-binning anything marked with the red exclamation mark of urgency.

Anyhow, this month's Scientific American reports results of an interesting study on the psychology of typeface. Now, that description makes it sound really fascinating, doesn't it?

Whilst doing his usual hardened research into what substances can be semi-legitimately used to water down beer should his nearest and dearest get a bit too greedy, the Poorhouse came across a fabulous booze study. Any study whose published write-up includes:

Our first three experiments were conducted at two local pubs: The Muddy Charles and The Thirsty Ear.

can't go far wrong.

No, the Poorhouse is neither dead or so poor he can't pay the hosting bill. So many sorries for lack of updates, I know I shouldn't take those micropennies of google ad income for granted. However the situation (extreme busyness, lack of internet freedom) is in no danger of resolving itself anytime soon.

So, in the mean time, baffle yourself with this apparent fact.

If you divide the length of a river from source to mouth across a gently sloping plane by its direct length "as the crow flies", you'll find pi.

We all use math (sic) everyday! - so says the intro to the geek fantasy that is Numb3rs, the US maths/FBI/unrequited love show. Apparently we should, according to Chen et al., when experiencing the irksome decision of "shall I wait for a bus or just walk there?".

For those of you who find this a challenging decision to make, there's an easy answer. Simple solve this funtastic equation:

Ladies! You might be nice to look at, and a dab hand at the old housework, but really - you do know you are responsible for the ever-more imminent end of the world?

Yep, the Government's chief scientist has blamed your shallow, shallow attitudes to the important things in life for global warming, no less.

Researching the mental effects of chemicals on humans is notoriously difficult and complicated, not least because of the immense amount of ways that a certain person may react to any given substance, the huge number of external factors that may be involved in a psychological outcome, and the difficulty in quantifiably measuring many mental effects. Add to this the sometimes extreme politicisation and bias of results that comes when researching controversial topics like the use of illegal drugs and one can see that researching the mental effects of banned-but-fun substances is especially troublesome.

This trouble is often seen in mass-media reports of such experiments. Often, presumably in order to make the "news" exciting and dramatic for their readers the "shock horror - you will die if you even look at illegal drugs" conclusions are heightened to the max, and any opposing conclusions, grey areas and other interpretations of the same data are ignored. Not only does this undermine any sensible attempt at presenting results with potentially important public health conclusions to the public at large, but research suggests that it could be this very style of reporting that causes some of the mental problems it shouts about so loudly.