Jon Stewart is retiring from The Daily Show. Suzanne Vranica took a look at how much it cost to buy ad spaces on his show:

• While the show doesn’t have the largest audience, it is popular with wealthy left leaning youths which is a lucrative demographic.
• Usually 30 second spots on the show cost about $46,200.
• However during the show’s final episode that has spiked to $230,000.
• One of the buyers of a finale advertizing spot is Arby’s which Stewart has spent the last two years making jokes about, once saying that going there was for “when you’re wondering what it tastes like when a cow dies”.
• In the ad the restaurant chain will announce a new sandwich named after the show: “The Daily Deli”

Read more here.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

The finale of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is tonight. You should watch it.

Which country does the most to save the world? There is a case to be made for Bangladesh writes Laura Secorun Palet who explained why the country contributes the most troops to United Nations peacekeeping operations:

• Bangladesh notes that it has topped the list of contributor nations to peacekeeping missions for 26 years due to its interest in seeing peace around the world.
• The country may also want to keep the military – which is prone to orchestrating coups – far from the country where they pose less of a threat.
• There is also the hope that these missions will spread democratic ideals among the troops.
• It is a source of revenue for the government. Bangladeshi troops have a starting salary of $193, while the UN pays $1,028 for their services. The government keeps the difference.
• This is estimated to have contributed $1.28 billion to state coffers between 2001 and 2010.
• It’s unclear if Bangladesh can keep it up though. The UN increasingly wants soldiers trained in using sophisticated equipment – something that Bangladeshi troops aren’t the best at.

Read some of the ethical questions this arrangement raises, other countries that contribute personnel to missions, and more over here.

Source: Ozy/Yahoo News

James Whitbrook took a look at the history of Star Wars merchandising:

• Due to pre-reviews nobody expected Star Wars to do particularly well which is why George Lucas was able to negotiate a contract that allowed him to get revenues from merchandising, a move that would make him immensely rich.
• However it was difficult to get anybody to make merchandising in the first place. Several major toy companies passed on the movie until one finally agreed.
• The movie’s success was unprecedented. So much so that despite coming out in May, the company making the toys couldn’t supply enough for the all-important Christmas period.
• So the company began to literally sell empty boxes. The boxes showed pictures of the figurines on the outside, and kids were encouraged to mail in a coupon that let them get the real toys months later.
• For the prequels the maker of the toys was Hasbro and they found a new way to generate both revenues and to drum up interest in the film: action figures of Samuel L. Jackson as Mace Windu and a Battle Droid speeder were the first look fans got at the characters.
• For the second prequel movie, episode 2, Hasbro experimented with releasing toys at midnight, which got fans to line up in costume hours in advance in order to be the first to get the toys.

Read about the struggle to balance between the demands of children and collectors, the controversial Boba Fett action figure, and what toymakers have planned for the next set of films, as well as other details, over here.

Source: io9

Olivia Coy looked into the long, slow decline of Neopets, the virtual pet care and gaming community:

• The Neopets site was once a Wall Street darling. Millions of users visited every day and each stayed for, on average, close to 20 minutes, longer than most others.
• This time was profitable. Games such as “Spider-Man Cheese Nips Hunt” meant that advertizers could target kids while they were having fun with games.
• Neopets was also able to harvest data on its underage users and sell them to advertizers.
• However the site got ahead of itself. It was pressured to release an increasing number of sponsored games which helped the company’s finances but destroyed the in-game economy.
• The games increased the amount of cash available which led to hyper-inflation that meant that new players were priced out of the marketplace.
• While the company tried to institute deflationary monetary policies other problems such as outdated content or overall site neglect kept players away.
• Now Neopets has been sold to an educational software company and may possibly see a revival.

Read about the company, its history, the scientology influences, and much more over here.

Source: The Kernel

Single women in Korea are increasingly deciding not to get married. Some are instead opting for weddings without husbands:

• Single wedding packages include wedding dresses and photo shoots.
• The idea behind them is that photos from a day as important as a wedding should be taken when the bride is in her prime.
• Some hope to add a husband in the future – perhaps at a time when a wedding photographer would’ve captured a few more wrinkles around the eyes.
• Friends are sometimes invited to the photo shoot since weddings are family experiences.
• It is even possible to hire a male model to stand in as the groom.

Read more here.

Source: The Economist

The writers at Cracked took a look at how some of our most famous bits of culture were partly driven by financial motives:

• Batman and Superman first started working together because DC Comics needed to save on paper costs during the Great Depression.
• Instead of printing two separate comics with the two heroes, it was cheaper to bring them together to tell one big story over fewer pages.
• Hip Hop got its start in inner-city New York because instruments were too expensive for families living there.
• Teenagers would take the records that they had, scratch them, merge beats together, and experiment until Hip Hop was born.
• The Lord of the Rings is a trilogy because paper shortages during World War Two meant that it was impossible to release it as one big volume, the way that J.R.R. Tolkien originally intended.

The full article takes a look at why Darth Vader is Luke’s father and how George Carlin got his start. You should read it here.

Source: Cracked

Mark Wilson wrote about a creative way that one resident of Manchester, England, used to fix the potholes in his city:

• The vigilante draws official attention to potholes by drawing giant – often graphic – penises around them.
• Every superhero has a tragic origin story, and this caped crusader was inspired to fight the disease in his city when he saw his friends get injured in a bicycle accident caused by potholes.
• His tactics work. Potholes are usually fixed within about 48 hours after the drawings appear.
• City officials are unamused. They point out that they have to clean the chalk off the streets which diverts money away from actually fixing more potholes.
• But of course city officials could just let the chalk wash away in the rain if they wanted to.

Read more about the superhero name this mysterious warrior has chosen for himself, the international fan base that he is building, photos of his handiwork, and more over here.

Source: Fast Company

Meg Miller wrote about the newest terminal at New York City’s JFK, designed exclusively for animals:

• 70,000 animals including dogs, cats, and horses, go through JFK every year and they will now be routed through the new terminal.
• It will be known as the ARK terminal – after Noah’s Ark – and will cost $48 million to build.
• It will include climate controlled dog stalls, a penguin corner, and showers for cows.
• If pet owners are willing to spring for it, dogs can stay in hotel suites built into the terminal for $100 a night.
• Dogs will also get to enjoy a bone-shaped pool, a doggy spa which offers massages and pawdicures, and flat-screen TVs for light entertainment.

Read about how the terminal will work, how it will handle manure, and other details over here.

Source: Fast Company

You may never have noticed but basically every meme uses the same font to write on a picture. Phil Edwards took a look at why:

• The font is called “Impact” and was created in 1965 with hand cut metal letters.
• Because it had thick letters it was known for its legibility, even when it was superimposed onto pictures.
• The font was sold to a company that then licensed it to Microsoft which made it a default font in its Windows products, massively increasing its distribution.
• Then Impact had its threshold moment when it was used in the genre defining meme: the “I Can Has Cheezburger” cat meme.
• Now it has become so associated with memes that any that don’t use the font just won’t look right.

Read more about the history of the font (or strictly speaking, typeface), chart its rise in old brochures and iconic memes, and other details here.

Source: Vox

About a third of our lives we spend asleep. Does this affect the waking two thirds? Here are a few of the findings of the Freakonomics bloggers:

• Laboratory studies, say David Dinges (professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania), show that lack of sleep undoubtedly leads to weight gain.
• A large study (15,000 people) showed that African-Americans sleep longer per night than white Americans.
• There is however considerable spread in the data. African Americans are more likely to sleep less than average, and also more likely to sleep more than average. Interestingly, it was also found that African Americans’ blood pressure doesn’t drop at night as much as it does for white Americans.
• By the age of 5, kids with a bedtime routine (i.e. reading bed-time stories) outperform kids without bedtime routines in cognitive tests.
• Alcohol helps a person to fall asleep, but the quality of the sleep is reduced.
• A test was done asking volunteers to go to sleep in a laboratory. Before they went to sleep they all read the same book, half in paper form and half in iPad form. The iPad readers found it harder to sleep, and once asleep their sleep was lower quality.
• People at opposite sides of the same time zone get up for work at the same time, but tend to go to bed at different times (because of when the sun sets, earlier in the East, and our body clocks tend to follow the sun). This gives us a massive data-set to study the effect of different amounts of time spent sleeping per night.
• Sleeping for an extra hour per week means a wage increase of 4.5%. Sleeping for an extra hour per night, means a wage increase of 16%.
• Ten year ago in Denmark, those who preferred to get up early earned on average 4-5% more than those who preferred to get up late. This was explained by most businesses insisted on workers arriving at 8 am. In the last ten years many businesses have introduced flexible working hours; and the wage gap has decreased considerably.

The two podcasts draw on a great range of academics and studies…that don’t always agree with each other, even over the deceptively simple question of “do people who sleep more earn more?”  For more insights, read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Source: Freakonomics