In the experiment, a group of men and women (on the younger side, with an average age of 21) were given the opportunity to donate money to a fund, knowing they would get nothing in return other than the pride of their selflessness. Whether they were watched or not, women donated at the same rate. But men, when watched by women, donated at higher rates. They didn’t donate at higher rates when men watched.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m sure flabbergasted by this one. Who would have guessed?

Link Via The Jane Dough

Are Women People?

I went into a factory
to earn my daily bread:
Men said: “The home is woman’s sphere.”
“I have no home,” I said.

But when the men all marched to war,
they cried to wife and maid,
“Oh, never mind about the home,
but save the export trade.”

For it’s women this and women that, and home’s the place for you,
But it’s patriotic angels when there’s outside work to do,
There’s outside work to do, my dears, there’s outside work to do,
It’s patriotic angels when there’s outside work to do.

Read the rest of it, and more poetry of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, at The Hairpin. Link -via Metafilter

Wake immediately went to work for the French resistance, hiding and smuggling men out of France and ferrying contraband supplies and falsified documents. She was once captured and interrogated for days, but gave no secrets away. With the Nazis in hot pursuit, Wake managed to escape to Britain in 1943, and joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British intelligence agency. After training with weapons and parachutes, she was airdropped back into France -as an official spy and warrior. Wake had no trouble shooting Nazis or blowing up buildings with the French guerrilla fighters known as maquis in the service of the resistance. She once killed an SS sentry with her bare hands.

Read what happened to Wake and ten others in this list of eleven at mental_floss. Link

During battles Anne and Mary fought side by side, wearing billowing jackets and long trousers and handkerchiefs wrapped around their heads, wielding a machete and pistol in either hand. “They were very active on board,” another victim later testified, “and wiling to do any Thing.” The summer and early fall of 1720 proved especially lucrative for Rackam’s crew. In September they took seven fishing boats and two sloops near Harbor Island. A few weeks later, Anne and Mary led a raid against a schooner, shooting at the crew as they climbed aboard, cursing as they gathered their plunder: tackle, fifty rolls of tobacco and nine bags of pimento. They held their captives for two days before releasing them.

Even when Rackam surrendered, Anne and Mary held out against the governor’s forces. Read how they came to be pirates and friends, and what happened to these famous seafaring women at Smithsonian’s Past Imperfect blog. Link

We’ve already featured Chicks With Steve Buscemi Eyes, but now there’s chicks wearing Steve Buscemi eyes. As a girl, I would be super creeped out by the thought of wearing this, but what do you gents think? Would you be creeped out if you saw someone in this?

Link

I don’t know about you guys, but I have a serious girl-crush on Tina Fey. It’s hard not to when the woman in question is unbelievably talented, smart, funny and beautiful. That’s why I’m so happy to get to write this Neatorama article about one of my biggest idols, who will be celebrating her forty-first birthday today. So for all you other SNL and 30 Rock fans, please join me in wishing Tina Fey a very happy birthday by enjoying these fascinating facts about one of the world’s most influential women (and that’s not just me speaking, see fact #7 for more details).

Image via David Shankbone [Flickr]

1) She Didn’t Start Out As “Tina”

Liz Lemon’s first name is actually Ms. Fey’s real first name. “Tina” was actually born Elizabeth Stamatina Fey. To be fair, at least Tina isn’t a complete stage name, it’s just not her real first name. In case you’ve ever wondered, she was born to a brokerage employee of Greek descent and a university grant proposal writer of German and Scottish descent.

2) She Has One Scary Scar Story

If you’ve ever looked closely enough at one of her movies or shows, you may have noticed that Tina has a fairly large scar on the left side of her cheek. While she refuses to talk about it, her husband finally revealed the story during a 2009 interview with Vanity Fair –and the story is a little terrifying.

According to Tina’s husband, she was playing in the front yard of her house when she was five years old and someone randomly came by and slashed her face with a razor. It happened so fast that when it happened, she thought someone marked her with a pen.

Tina says she doesn’t like to talk about the incident because she doesn’t want to seem like she is exploiting the trauma for attention. She’s also said that talking about it upsets her parents.

If you watch 30 Rock (or pretty much any of her work), you’ll notice the show overwhelmingly features her standing with her right side to the camera –that’s why.

Image via Vivanista1 [Flickr]

3) She Fell in Love With Comedy At An Early Age

As a youngster, Tina’s parents let her watch all kinds of classic comedy television including Monty Python, the Marx Brothers and The Honeymooners. Her dad was such a big fan of The Honeymooners that he refused to let her watch The Flintstones because they were a rip off of the show.

Funnily enough, she even watched two of the shows that she would later work on, SNL and Second City Television (although Tina would only appear on the stage version of The Second City, not the television program, which was cancelled before she joined the improv group).

By middle school, she had already decided that she wanted to be involved with comedy when she grew up.

4) SNL Wasn’t Her First Notable Comedy Troupe

For those of you that haven’t heard of The Second City, it was a popular improv group in Chicago where many SNL alumni got their start, including John Belushi, John Candy, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner. Tina Fey joined their ranks when she moved to Chicago after graduating from the University of Virginia with a bachelors in drama.

She took night classes with the group while working at the front desk of a YMCA to pay. Eventually, she was asked to join the cast of the improve troupe in 1994, where she performed eight shows a week for two years straight.

Second City didn’t only give her the big break she needed to get into SNL, it also introduced her to Jeff Richmond (above), a fellow actor and her future husband. He also moved to SNL (as a member of the music team) and after eight years of dating, the couple was married in a Greek Orthodox ceremony in 2001.

Image via Nick Step [Flickr]

5) She Didn’t Start Off Acting At SNL

While still working with Second City, Tina started submitting scripts to Saturday Night Live at the request of former-Second-City-performer-turned-SNL-writer Adam McKay. She was soon picked up as a writer in 1997. She wasn’t even on the show until 1998, when she appeared as an extra in one of the sketches. When she saw herself on TV, she didn’t like how she looked, so she went on a diet and lost 30 pounds. She continued to write during this period and was even promoted to the position of head writer in 1999 –making her the first female head writer on the show.

After thinning down significantly, Tina started appearing in sketches in 2000, eventually becoming a co-anchor with Jimmy Fallon on the Weekend Update segment, which is where her acting talents really started to get her noticed. After Jimmy Fallon left the show, Amy Poehler took over in his place, making it the first time in the show’s history that two women co-anchored the segment. She stayed with the show for two more years before leaving to work on 30 Rock.

6) 30 Rock Wasn’t Originally Intended to Be Auto-Biographical

When Tina first created the pilot for the show in 2002, 30 Rock was supposed to be a behind the scenes sitcom based around a cable news show. It wasn’t until NBC rejected her first attempt that Tina based the show around her experience as the head writer of a sketch-comedy show. While this pilot was accepted in 2003, the show was still put on hold until Tina finished her work with SNL, which lasted until 2006.

7) She’s Kind Of A Big Deal

Most actors and writers are considered lucky to win even a few awards for their work, but Tina Fey has won tons of them. She’s gotten seven Emmys, three Golden Globes, four Screen Actors Guild Awards, four Writer’s Guild of America Awards, one Comedy Award, one Teen Choice Award and she’s been nominated for countless others.

Entertainment Weekly named her one of their Entertainers of the Year in 2001 and 2007, and as number five in their 2009 15 Entertainers of the 2000’s list. In 2008, the Associated Press voted her the AP Entertainer of the Year as the performer with the greatest impact on culture and entertainment. The New York Post named her as one of New York’s 50 Most Powerful Women and Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in both 2007 and 2009. She also was the youngest recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, and has been named three times as one of Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Celebrities.

As if all that weren’t enough, Tina will be getting her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame some time this year.

Image via Capital M [Flickr]

She’s Undeniably Sexy.

Despite all of the 30 Rock jokes about how unattractive Liz Lemon is, there’s no denying that most of the world thinks Tina Fey is one hot milf. And she’s got the awards to prove it. In 2002, she was number 80 in Maxim’s Hot 100 List. In 2003, 2007, 2008 and 2009 she was named one of People’s Most Beautiful People. Lesbian-oriented website AfterEllen.com put her in seventh in their 2007 Hot 100 List and in 2008, she was ranked in first place on their list.

9) Her Daughter Starred In Her Own Meme

Tina Fey isn’t a stage mom and it seems unlikely that her daughter, Alice Zenobia, will appear on the big or small screens any time soon, but that didn’t stop her little girl from becoming the star or her own internet meme. The whole thing started when a paparazzi photo of Tina and Alice made its way onto the internet. Alice’s adorable swagger in the picture made her an instant star as Redditers started captioning the pic and Photoshopping Alice into other pictures. See more here and here.

Since Tina just announced that she is pregnant with her second child, it’s hard not to wonder if her new bundle of joy will ever end up making the internet rounds like little Alice has.

Image via Reddit

10) She Has No Intention of Slowing Down

To be fair, if you know much about Tina Fey, you probably know this. Although she is going to take a short break from work because she’s pregnant, she’s still got a busy schedule. 30 Rock is scheduled for another season in January 2012, she’s still busy promoting her book, Bossypants, which just came out and and she only recently hosted SNL. With so much going on for her, it’s impossible to say how much she’ll accomplish in the next few years.

Sources: Wikipedia #1, #2, #3, IMDB

Got any good Tina trivia I’ve left out? Just want to share your love for the media mogul? Feel free to share your contributions in the comments.

As the 19th century turned into the 20th century, woman tried their hands at sports that they were previously prohibited from participating in. See vintage photographs of women playing soccer, baseball, cricket, bowling, tennis, and other sports. The boxing match pictured here took place on March 7th, 1912 between Mrs. Edwards and Fraulein Kussin. Link

(Image credit: The Library of Congress)

Flopsy, Mopsy, and Flammulina Velutipes

Beatrix Potter may be known mainly as the mother of adorable anthropomorphized animals, but the British author and illustrator also used her skills for some decidedly less cuddly work. Around the turn of the 19th century, scientists had no way of photographing images under a microscope, so Potter found herself churning out watercolor paintings of fungi in labs. Pretty soon, she’d become a well-respected mycologist and was one of the first scientists to study lichens. At the time, women were barred from attending scientific meetings, so Potter’s uncle had to present her papers for her. Eventually, she had to settle for a more “appropriate” profession, and thus Peter Rabbit was born.

“No Nobel” Burnell

As a graduate student in Cambridge in the late 1960s, Jocelyn Bell Burnell builtr a radio telescope with her thesis advisor, Antony Hewish. While taking readings, she noticed a regularly repeating radio signal from a segment of space. Confused, she and Hewish labeled the phenomenon “LGM” for “little green men”. Later, the scientific community renamed them “pulsars,” for “one of the biggest astronomy discoveries in modern history”. In 1974, Hewish received the Nobel Prize. The ever-observant Burnell, however, wasn’t even mentioned during his acceptance speech.

Computational Error

Even though men used to have a hard time sharing their labs with ladies, they seemed more than happy to let women crunch the numbers. In 1946, after John Mauchly and Presper Eckert finished building the world’s first electronic digital computer, known as the ENIAC, they solicited the aid of six women to program and run the thing. Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman subsequently became the world’s first computer programmers. Sadly, their work was considered “clerical”, and their station “sub-professional”. In 1997, however, those words were amended, and all six women were inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame.

________________________________

The article above, written by Hank Green, appeared in the Scatterbrained section of the September – October 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission.

Don’t forget to feed your brain by subscribing to the magazine and visiting mental_floss‘ extremely entertaining website and blog today for more!

Fannie Drummond spent six weeks traveling through Europe in 1920. Her great-great-granddaughter found her diary of the trip, and is posting each entry on a blog exactly 90 years to the day after they were first recorded.

Some of our fellow passengers are disgruntled ex-saloon keepers and their families going back to the old country where they can pursue their business unmolested. Others are Belgians and others in sympathy with them. We enter into no arguments but look pleasant and smile, and gradually the ice is melting and they begin to think that we are pleasant people after all.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Stargazer7777.

While these definitely qualify as stereotypical, the results are pretty funny; just remember that grain of salt.

Best – Librarian
She’ll be pretty smart about lots of random things, great at Googling and a good connection for free books. Bonus: say goodbye to those nasty overdue charges. Plus, everyone knows librarians are sexual dynamos waiting to explode. Right?

Worst – Singer/Entertainer
There may be potential perks if she makes it to the big-time, but it’s statistically likely she’s not very good at what she does and you’ll have twice the fibbing to do in your relationship, answering not only “How does this look?” but the frequent “Did you like my show?”

Link to Asylum.  Link to Lemondrop.

Congressman Joe Wilson - you know, the guy who skyrocketed to fame for yelling "You lie" during a speech by President Obama - is technically correct. Kind of.

According to this new "study" by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. It finds that men lie an average of six times a day - twice as much as women:

Researchers found the average man tells six fibs a day to their partner, boss and work colleagues - a total of 42 each week.

That amounts to 2,184 a year or a staggering 126,672 over the average lifetime.

Top ten lies men tell:

1. Nothing's wrong, I'm fine
2. This will be my last pint
3. No, your bum doesn't look big in that
4. I had no signal
5. My battery died
6. Sorry, I missed your call
7. I didn't have that much to drink
8. I'm on my way
9. It wasn't that expensive
10. I'm stuck in traffic

Go to Daily Mail to read the story and find out the top 10 lies women tell: Link

A spokesman for home hair colour brand Clairol Perfect 10, which carried out the study of 4,000 women, said: "Everything in life hits its peak at some point, and nearly reaching your thirties isn’t so bad now.

"The age of 28 has been pinpointed as the time in a woman’s life their hair looks the best, body shape is at its peak and confidence is at an all-time high.

"The security of your job, having a steady income, being in a relationship and having strong friendships all help create the perfect point in our lives when everything comes together. Reaching and surpassing your twenties no longer triggers the downward spiral of your looks and self-confidence.

Link

Holding a person for ransom makes big headlines, but years later or in another placec, you may not be familiar with these stories that gripped the public in their time.

The kidnapping and murder of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., son of aviator Charles Lindbergh occurred in 1932 and was one of the most horrific crimes of its time, prompting the “Lindbergh Law”, which made kidnapping a federal crime. (Prior to, it was classified as a local crime.)

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by smellslikepurple.

Weird.

Link via Slashfood

There’s something delightfully fun about these semi-retro and slightly-sexist female merit badges created by Artist Mary Yeager.

My female merit badges illustrate female “rites of passage” as well as the myriad physical manipulations women undergo to achieve cultural ideals of beauty, such as weight watching, whether or not to shave or wear makeup, etc. I’ve created tiny replicas of female products, such as a birth control pill pack and a pregnancy test. The miniature scale and meticulous, hand-embroidered surfaces convey my impressions of growing up female in our culture.

Link