Medical researchers from Knifecrime Island are concerned about a resurgence of rickets, the bone-deforming disease last popular in those precincts during the Victorian era. Rickets’ big comeback is blamed on Vitamin D-deficiency in children, mostly due to the fact that kids today rarely venture out into the light of the sun, what with the all modern world’s sedentary pleasures. But this is not just a British problem; even in civilized nations like our own the disease is becoming more prevalent. I blame that lady who told everyone to wear sunscreen.

This morning, someone asked: what the heck should one do with my Twitter account? She was afraid she was doing it wrong, that it had gone all stale or whiny or boresies. (That may be the case, but really, only you can decide if you are doing Twitter wrong! Let your conscience be your guide.) We have a few pro tips on shaking things up.

• Turn that puppy into your Dream Journal.No, literally. Seriously. Just speed-type your dreams out, first thing in the morning. This has the added benefit of auto-discarding followers who don’t really know you, or who don’t care about your dreams. If they don’t care about your very dreams, do they really care about you?

• Take some time out from your bloody lifecasting and lurk around as an amplifier. You know what? You have fun friends, or “friends,” probably. (Are Twitter friends “friends”? Sometimes! Sometimes not.) Take a break from putting your “original” “thoughts” on it and just become a (gross word alert) “reTweeter” of things that You Find Of Interest.

• Remake it as a place for fiction. Or start working as an invented character, or some weird alternate universe version of yourself. See also: Fireland, Jim Windolf.

• Restrict yourself-and go deep on a niche topic. Sometimes bad things happen when Twitter gets used as a broadcaster of recent pet activities and pet peeves. Why not a pet project? Why not focus it on a topic of serious interest to you or to your actual “life work,” and allow no other type of chatter? Whether a category of things (long-form journalism) or a topic (Russian books? 80s pop music?), putting some structure up on your business cuts out regrettable, morning-after Twittering. (See also: Wears the Trousers, Long Reads. )

• Delete your account. Not in like a big dramatic “I HATE YOU GUYS AND MYSELF” way. Just kill it! What’s the worst that could happen? And, if you want to go back a week or a month or a year later, you can always start a new account. Twitter, just like HPV, will wait silently for you.

“Passengers disturbed by another passenger’s actions led to a US Airways flight from La Guardia Airport to Louisville being diverted to Philadelphia this morning.” TERROR IN THE SKIES! The 17-year-old passenger was, it turns out, praying. “An officer said the passenger was ‘wearing a device on his head’ that had straps hanging from it.” So yeah: “disruptive passenger,” praying teen, whatever.

I don’t care HOW late we are to this: If there is a Mini Daddy bandwagon, we are so fully on it. [Via]

For the first time since no one is sure when, Goldman Sachs has altered its general formula of close to a 50/25/25 annual net revenue allocation (in which, give or take, 50% goes to the employees, 25% is (sort of) set aside for taxes and 25% is retained for the company). This year? In what is being described as a PR move, just a bit over 35% is going to bonuses. (2009’s net revenue comes to $45.2 billion, so $16.2 billion is set aside for employees.) In the last ten years, the compensation rate has never dipped below 44% of net revenues.

Ignoring the “Book Value Of Equity Per Share” and the “Earnings Per Share” in the graph above, because we are not bankers, this graph shows employee compensation outpacing, over time, the company’s annual net revenues from 1999 to 2007.

So this year’s downturn in employee revenue percentage can also be seen as a (severe) correction to that trend (a trend that continued in 2008, thanks to extremely low revenues).

Now, as for the tax number, in relation to net revenue? This year, they’re back to a fairly-appropriate 32.5% tax rate.

Lest we forget? In 2008, with $2.3 billion in profit, and $22 billion in net revenue (about half of 2007’s net revenue), and while dispensing $10.9 billion in employee compensation, Goldman had planned to pay almost exactly 25% in taxes-but, thanks to their fourth quarter, in the end expected to “pay $14 million in taxes worldwide for 2008, compared with $6 billion in 2007.” That was a tax rate of 1%.

“The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations may spend freely to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, easing decades-old limits on their participation in federal campaigns.” Campaign finance law supporters expect the 5–4 vote in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to result in “a flood of corporate and union money in federal campaigns as early as this year’s midterm congressional elections.” So that’s exciting.

Your filibuster math explained: “Senators representing 63 percent of the public vote for the bill; those representing 37 percent vote against it. The bill fails.”

Stolen: The Skull Of 14th Century German Pirate Klaus Störtebeker

The 600-year-old skull of the famed German pirate Klaus Störtebeker, has disappeared from Hamburg’s history museum. It’s a valuable item. The guy was a total rockstar.

Störtebeker means “empty the mug with one gulp” in old German. In the late 1300s, he sailed around the Baltic Sea kicking ass and taking names and gold and provisions from merchant ships. Legend has it that when was caught in 1400, and set to be executed with 73 of his men, he made a deal with the Mayor of Hamburg: however many of his fellow pirates he could run past after his beheading would be set free. After the blade fell, his body got up off the ground and ran, headless, past eleven men. But then the executioner tripped him and executed all 73 anyway. (The executioner was from Wales, apparently.) Störtebeker’s head was put on a stake on an island in the Elbe River to ward off other would-be buccaneers. It was discovered there in 1867, the metal spike still protruding from the top, and has been displayed at the museum since 1922. The German punk band Slime immortalized Störtebeker in song in 1983, and now, apparently, Glenn Danzig has stolen his skull.

It’s a little depressing that they only needed a year before they had to dust off this headline, right? In vaguely related news, here’s an interview with Barack Obama by Time’s Joe Klein. Now, I’m no political strategist, but can somebody please tell the president to stop talking in lettered lists? You read something like this-”And my theory, Joe, has always been, A: A lot of peoples’ skepticism is entirely justified. B: That there’s no reason why government should inherently be inefficient. C: At a time when we’ve got such enormous problems and such limited resources, people are going to be looking to government for help.”-and halfway through you’re already making mental bets on how far down in the alphabet he’s going to go. (See also.) I hate to say it, but I’m ready for a president who treats us all like very dull children again. Apparently, it’s what works.