Do you want to care about something boring and dull but important? Sure you do! While the budget is being hammered out for our fine country's 2011 fiscal year, so far the House has suggested they'd be happy cutting $1.6 billion from the National Institutes of Health. What's that you say? We pay money from our taxes to go to health research? How disgusting! But it turns out that when legislators actually know what the NIH does, they want to give it more money, not less. Also? Unlike much of the government, the NIH makes money [PDF] for America. Through science! While they are, you know, curing [...]

Some excerpts from Ohio State University's Disaster Research Center's Working Paper #71, "Looting in Disaster," by Jane Gray and Elizabeth Wilson, August 1984, prepared for a conference discussion on the topic of the sociology of disaster.

A six-month review of "every article on lesbian and gay economics" published since the early 1990s has been published. Would you like the takeaway? "The vast preponderance of economic research shows that gay men earn less than straight men." This research project was undertaken to counteract years of work by marketers, who for some time now have created the idea of the "gay market" as an "untapped gold mine" of discretionary, brand-conscious income—since, to be fair, somewhat tapped!

The time Americans spend surfing the web-which rose to twelve hours a week over a five-year period-has leveled off, according to Forrester Research. The firm suggests that reasons for the halt in growth include better broadband speeds, greater familiarity with how to navigate the Internet, and sheer disgust with the whole "Rickroll" phenomenon.

BREAKING: Kids sure are messy! Luckily, there's a blog devoted to that very fact, in case you weren't sure! (And even more luckily for its author, she's friends with a Times writer who can give said blog a glowing comparison to Erma Bombeck in the Grey Lady's hallowed pages, thus paving the way for Yet Another Crowdsourced Blog That Might Become Something Resembling A Book. Hooray, Internet! Keep breaking down those walls!)