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

It’s The Daily Mail which means it should probably be taken with a grain of salt, but Becky Pemberton wrote about a fairly legitimate looking service to help children build sandcastles:

• A travel company is offering to dispatch butlers to various locations in Europe in order to design and construct sandcastles.
• It starts with a brainstorming session to help the patron understand what they want their finished project to look like.
• Then blueprints are created, and the butler will find a good location with high quality sand to build the castle.
• The butler will take the lead in building the castle, and, if so inclined, the patron can help as appropriate.

Read more about the service, see some photos of how it works, and get some tips to build sophisticated sand castles here.

Source: The Daily Mail

Via: Marginal Revolution

Michele Petruzziello looked at some interesting facts about the fashion industry:

• The fashion industry is expected to double in size to $5 trillion in the next ten years.
• As a whole fashion employs more people in the United States than automobiles, fast-food, and video games.
• Other countries get a big boost from it as well. 88% of Haiti’s exports relate to clothes.
• Sadly there is still sexism in the C-Suite. Less than 20% of the major fashion brands have female heads, and only about a quarter of all board members are women.
• The industry is thirsty. A t-shirt “costs” 1,083 gallons of water to make when things such as land for grazing or agriculture is considered.
• It also leads to a lot of waste. The average American throws out 70 pounds of clothes a year.

Read about Fashion Revolution day, why millennials give the industry hope, and more over here.

Source: Agenda – World Economic Forum

Every image or video we see has its colours altered. Annie Sneed wrote about how these changes affect your emotions:

• Warm orange-yellowey colours are friendly while blue is usually considered to be more distant.
• This is why in political ads candidates have an orange glow around them while their opponents are depicted with hues of blue.
• Green can be a mixed bag. Outdoors it’s a positive colour and so if the aim is to create a somber outdoor scene then greens are desaturated.
• Indoors however it elicits a sense of disgust and so the green is ramped up – as in The Matrix films.
• To indicate a dream sequence or a flashback contrast is added which creates a sense of distance from reality.

See what colourists do to create foreign worlds, why we have these colour associations, and visual examples here.

Source: Fast Company