I grill a lot. Especially love doing ribeyes. I found an article which addresses 7 myths about cooking steaks. I learned a lot.

One myth is that it’s bad to cut into a steak to see if it’s done. I’ve heard this many times, but flagrantly disobey it. I will now do so with reckless and unrepentant abandon.

Fort Gordon, an Army base in Augusta, Georgia, upgraded its land-mobile radios. Since then, nearly 500 residents have complained that their garage doors won’t open.

Suddenly in a grumpy mood, Steve the Editor wants to remind everyone (despite knowing he will once again be ignored):

1. Do NOT type two spaces between sentences. That has never, EVER, been appropriate anywhere except on typewriters with monospaced fonts. So just quit it. Now.

2. An elipsis within a sentence has 3 periods…not 4. Put the fourth at the end of the sentence.

3. Don’t underline text, especially in email or on the web. Underlining indicates a hyperlink, which people can click to go someplace else. On a typewriter, to emphasize something you had two options: underline, and all-caps. But now you have other options: bold, italics, larger font size. If it’s a book title or something else that would be underlined on a typewriter, use italics.

4. Don’t put apostrophe’s in plural’s. I mean, just stop it, okay? You’re embarrassing yourself.

There are plenty of other literary transgressions, children, for which I could castigate you. But I’ll stop here.

You’re familiar with the “Six Degrees of Separation” concept–that any two people are no more than six acquaintance links apart. A knows B, who works with C, who is related to D, who lives in the same town as E, who attends church with F. The idea actually traces back to a short story by a Hungarian author in 1929.

In the 1960s, a study asked 296 volunteers to send a message to a specific person living in Sharon, Mass., routing it through personal acquaintances. The average number of “hops” was 5.2, which pretty much confirmed the whole “six degrees” thing (with no Kevin Bacon involved).

Facebook developed some algorithms to test the theory with Facebook users. They found that the average distance between users, worldwide, was 5.3 hops in 2008. With the growth in number of Facebook users, it had dropped to 4.7 hops by 2011. That’s on a global scale. When limiting persons to a single country, the average was just 4 hops.

Newly discovered in Sri Lanka: a giant tarantula with a leg span of eight inches. It lives in trees, it’s fast, and it’s very poisonous.

So you’re walking through the forest and stumble into a spider web. Out of the corner of your eye you see, scampering toward you through the trees, an ugly spider as big as your face. You know, something EXACTLY like one of those things in the Alien movie.

Enjoy your day. And don’t go anywhere near Sri Lanka.