Welcome to Friday and the first day of February! What I’ve found interesting since last week!

1) Some hard facts about the economy. We all need to take a hard look at ourselves. Well, here’s the thing about 2006: the economy was in better shape than today, but it still wasn’t working for the majority of Britons. And unless we’re honest about just how crocked our economy is, how the private sector doesn’t create jobs and hasn’t done serious investment for decades, we won’t get out of this mess.

2) The Birthday Dinner. Last one I did was about five years ago, I ask people over for Friday Night Cocktails and go out for family dinner for those reasons.

Seems like a nice idea, the birthday dinner. It is not. It is a tedious, wretched affair. It is also an extravagantly expensive one. In these wintry economic times, we need to scale back. I hereby propose that the birthday dinner go the way of the $4 cup of coffee, the liar’s mortgage, and the midsize banking institution.

3) How childhood helped the species. 

In the nasty and brutish prehistoric world our ancestors inhabited, arriving prematurely could have been a very bad thing. But to see the advantages of being born helpless and fetal, all you have to do is watch a 2-year-old. Human children are the most voracious learners planet Earth has ever seen, and they are that way because their brains are still rapidly developing after birth. Neoteny, and the childhood it spawned, not only extended the time during which we grow up but ensured that we spent it developing not inside the safety of the womb but outside in the wide, convoluted, and unpredictable world.

4) The Circular Tube map. My mind is blown. It seems to make more sense geographically but whoa..for comparison see the current one TfL use.

5) Three Lies about Celery. I happen to love celery but this was really funny!

Celery eater Martha Rose Shulman writes: “I’m a big fan of celery, both raw and cooked, as the main ingredient or as one of several featured ingredients in a dish,” and then proceeds to instruct her readers on how to cook and eat the thing, as if celery were capable of being eaten and digested, when everyone knows it just rolls around in the mouth, becoming more and more fibrous, until one is obliged to spit it out in a napkin.