Unemployment can make it harder to get a job. That sounds strange, but it's a truism in the placement and recruiting industry. Once you spend any amount of time without a job, getting one at all become more difficult. Even though corporation have unfilled job openings, they tend to not hire the unemployed.

According to 36 percent of recruiters, it becomes “difficult” for an applicant to find a job if he or she is unemployed for as little as six months. Twenty-one percent say that spells of joblessness shorter than six months could kill your hiring prospects. In short, “unemployment can lead to being unemployable.”

In a slack labor market, many workers survive by hopping from job to job. But even that makes an applicant look bad. The survey reports that a 55-year-old with steady employment will find it easier to find a new job than a 30-year-old who has left a company before one year of work. And that’s despite the fact that 70 percent of recruiters say that candidates in their 30s are the easiest group to place.

I think I'm starting to see why these job opening go unfilled. Maybe we need some "new blood" in these recruiting positions. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Andreas Klinke Johannsen)
 

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The cat is just trying to get comfortable. I think he eventually succeeded. -via The Daily What

The public facilities at the Standard Hotel in New York City offers a breathtaking view. But don't assume that those floor-to-ceiling windows can't be looked into as well!  

Restroom users at the Boom Boom Room club on the 18th floor are completely visible from the street below as they do their business, thanks to 10-foot, floor-to-ceiling windows.

The toilet-sitters get wondrous skyline views. But the windows work both ways — much to the chagrin of relief-seekers after they’re told what could be seen from the street.

“The view outside is exciting, but the view inside is frightening,” said David Langdon, 55, from Melbourne, Australia. “I saw people waving at me! Sitting on the royal throne, you don’t expect a public viewing!”

The hotel offers no warning and no explanation for the restroom design. Is it meant to be a free peep show? Is it design mistake? Or is it a subtle way to encourage guests to use the restroom somewhere else? Link -via Arbroath

Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss is a lot of fun whether you know the answers or not. For each question, you're given the cast of a movie, minus the star. Can you name the film for each cast? All I will say about my score is that I was correct for the movies that I had actually seen. Which wasn't many of them! You will, of course, do better. Link

Do you recognize the actor under the werewolf makeup? You might be surprised to know which familiar TV actor starred in the cheesy monster movie I Was a Teenage Werewolf, the subject of our feature article today at the Neatorama Halloween blog. Link

You should be checking the Halloween blog every day for imaginative decorations, adorable kid's costumes, and other Halloween fun. And prepare yourself for the holidays by reading up on the proper movies to watch -or avoid!

Oh, look! She's got folk art murals all over her house! But look closer -those pixels that make up the murals are common bottle caps! Olga Kostina, of the Siberian village of Kamarchaga, Russia, collected the bottle caps and created the artwork by hammering in each cap over many years. See lots more pictures of her work at Oddity Central. Link -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: Reuters/Ilya Naymushin)

Redditor PaintedTears loves her cross-eyed cat, and has him all ready to celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day. She says he can see just fine to do all the things cats need to do. Link

Update: The cat's name is Spangles, and he has a Facebook page.

Honeybees in a hive have fairly identical genes. The queen is the mother, a very few drones are the fathers, and those drones are closely related to each other anyway. But "epigenetic" changes in the DNA, those that switch genes on or off chemically, differ among bees that do different jobs. And bees can change those chemical switches themselves, when needed. Under normal circumstances, young worker bees are nurses in the hive, and turn into foragers as they age, when a chemical changes which genes are expressed. Scientists can track those changes by the amount and pattern of methyl (CH3) molecules in their DNA.

Led by Andrew Feinberg of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and Gro Amdam of Arizona State University in Tempe, the researchers coaxed forager bees back into nursing roles by removing all the nurses from the hive while the foragers were out looking for pollen. When the foragers returned, they noticed the lack of nurses, and about half of them took on nursing roles. Examination of the methylation patterns in DNA from their brain cells showed that these too had switched back to the pattern associated with nurses.

“What is exciting is that the genes that change back are the same genes that changed in the other direction initially — and the same ones that would regulate epigenetic behaviour,” says Feinberg.

Gene Robinson, a bee researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who was not involved in the research, says that although the paper does not necessarily prove that epigenetic mechanisms cause behavioural differences, “it demonstrates for the first time that if behaviour is reversible so is the methylation”.  

Further research may determine exactly what triggers the correllation. Link -via Metafilter

Want to wrap your cold feet in a Tiger 1 Panzer tank? Amagurimi maker Miligurumis will put you in business! You do the crocheting yourself, with the pattern sold at Etsy. Or if you wait, she might make some for you to buy, but they will be in high demand when that happens. Link -via Everlasting Blort

by Meghan L. Bellows, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Princeton University, and J.D. Luc Peterson, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton University

EDITOR’S NOTE: The authors submitted this article, which was written long prior to the wedding. Somehow we managed to not see it until long after. The only benefit is that the article now can and does include photographs taken at the wedding.

Every year, millions of brides (not to mention their mothers, future mothers-in-law, and occasionally grooms) struggle with one of the most daunting tasks during the wedding planning process: the seating chart. The guest responses are in, banquet hall is booked, menu choices have been made. You think the hard parts are over, but you have yet to embark upon the biggest headache of them all. In order to make this process easier, we present a mathematical formulation that models the seating chart problem. This model can be solved to find the optimal arrangement of guests at tables. At the very least, it can provide a starting point and hopefully minimize stress and arguments.

Model
The model describes the problem by maximizing the number of connections a particular guest has at their table. In other words, the model will seek to place guests who all know each other at the same table. A user must provide the total number of guests (m), the total number of tables (n), the total number of people each table can seat (a), the minimum number of people each guest should know at their table (b), and a connection matrix describing which guests know each other (Cjk). Table 1 provides descriptions of all the sets, variables, and parameters used in the model.



The model itself is written mathematically as:

Your children have plenty of opportunities to learn about gambling that are dressed up as something else. The problem is that they may be learning about it backwards, if those who profit from virtual worlds, claw machines, and collectible fads have their way. So many "games" seem innocuous, as they are aimed at children, but end up costing something for just a chance at winning. And sometimes you must look deep to see how it works.

Well here’s a thing. Panini Sticker books are gambling for kids. There’s no doubt that’s a fair representation of them. Collect stickers! Oh god collect them now! But do so by giving us money for random stickers you may or may not need or want! Swap them with your friends by all means, but lets be honest, some stickers will just be rare. So you have to be lucky. And you are not lucky. So buy more!

You could substitute baseball cards, Beanie Babies, or Pokemons in that last paragraph. Collecting is fine when you love the things you collect and know your limits. But collecting things that are manufactured to be collected in hopes of reaping a profit is troubling. Do your kids engage in the activities in the linked article? You may want to have a discussion with them about chance, odds, and long-term cost. Link -via Metafilter

TJ Fink has been writing up summaries of the TV show Breaking Bad in rhyming verse. Now that the first half of season five has been aired, you can read the poetic version at Unreality. Sure it contains spoilers for those who haven't seen it, but I don't think the last verse gives anything away:

But it’s not over yet. Walter might be the king
There’s just one small detail, just one tiny last thing:
When this saga concludes at the end of part five
It’s quite likely that few of Walt’s crew might survive
‘Cause his darkness delves deeper inside this finale
Like roots on a lily from down in the valley

If you get a kick out of it, there's also a link to the rhymes of season four. Link

One of the biggest made-up holidays we love to celebrate on the internet, if not in real life, is Talk Like a Pirate Day, which is this Wednesday! You don't have to be an "Arrr-tist" to leave your mark with a little pirate cartoon. It's easy to draw, thanks to a tutorial by Mark Anderson of Andertoons. Link

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This animation was made by people opening and shutting window shutters on the 11-story HESAV (Health High School Vaud) in Switzerland. It was produced by Guillaume Reymond for NOTsoNOISY. The second half of the video shows what making this was like from the other side. -via The Dailiy What

Previously: More animations by Guillaume Reymond.

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Dutch artist Diddo created a work called The Cure For Greed, consisting of a gold-plated syringe containing ink collected from U.S. currency. Read the artist's statement and see photographs at his site. Link

Previously: Designer Gas Mask by Diddo Velema