Come Home To The Simpsons from devilfish on Vimeo.

Lost as a Friends-esque sitcom? The Simpsons as real people? It could have all happened if only producers had edited their opening credits a little differently. Check out these and a few more over at Shortlist. I didn’t quite buy the Lost as Friends, but I was amused. And the Gorillaz soundtrack coupled with original The Walking Dead comic book art is nothing short of amazing.

Link via Flavorwire

Are we supposed to believe that Harry and Sally were once satisfied with friendship, or that they always harbored romantic feelings? Option 2 seems more likely: Their friendship was actually a courtship all along. Like Harry and Sally’s friends, the viewer expects and wants the couple to get together. And even first-time viewers with the most basic understanding of plotting must realize that, narratively, romance is inevitable.

The upshot is that truly platonic cross-sex friendships appear to be easier in real life than in Hollywood movies. Link

I just discovered this, and it should prove a handy and effective tool for answering questions in the future.  From Lifehacker:

If you’re a power searcher, or other people think you are, and you’re getting tired of constant requests for answers to questions that a quick Google search would provide, try Let me google that for you. Enter a search term, click the Google Search button, and a link appears that you can copy, paste and send to your friend. When they click the link, an animation displays the complicated process of searching Google for information, and then directs the user to the actual search results page from Google.

Here’s a dry run I easily did that took almost no time.  Say someone asked me where I could find the neat side of the web.  Here’s my reply – http://lmgtfy.com/?q=where+is+the+neat+side+of+the+web%3F (tinyURL also available).

Link

They found loneliness is catchy with three degrees of separation. So a person’s loneliness depended not just on his friend’s loneliness but also on his friend’s friend and his friend’s friend’s friend. Participants were 52 percent more likely to be lonely if a person to whom they were directly connected (one degree of separation) was lonely. For two degrees of separation, the number drops to 25 percent and 15 percent for three degrees.

The number of family members had no effect on loneliness scores.

Over time, lonely individuals become lonelier and transmit such feelings to others before severing ties. “People with few friends are more likely to become lonelier over time, which then makes it less likely that they will attract or try to form new social ties,” they write. Such friendless individuals ended up on the outskirts of their social networks.

Link -via Digg

(image credit: Flickr user ~Oryctes~)

Research by medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis and colleague at the Harvard Medical School in Boston revealed how oher people’s happiness, depression, and obesity can affect you:

Recent research shows that our moods are far more strongly influenced by those around us than we tend to think. Not only that, we are also beholden to the moods of friends of friends, and of friends of friends of friends – people three degrees of separation away from us who we have never met, but whose disposition can pass through our social network like a virus.

Indeed, it is becoming clear that a whole range of phenomena are transmitted through networks of friends in ways that are not entirely understood: happiness and depression, obesity, drinking and smoking habits, ill-health, the inclination to turn out and vote in elections, a taste for certain music or food, a preference for online privacy, even the tendency to attempt or think about suicide. They ripple through networks "like pebbles thrown into a pond", says Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has pioneered much of the new work.

At first sight, the idea that we can catch the moods, habits and state of health not only of those around us, but also those we do not even know seems alarming. It implies that rather than being in charge of where we are going in life, we are little more than back-seat drivers, since most social influence operates at a subconscious level.

Link

Previously on Neatorama: 14 Habits That Make You Fat (which also noted the study above)

Here’s a really neat trick to impress your friends. I practiced it for about 10 minutes and I get the hang of it rather quickly. Give it a try… Link