land O links

I haven’t had time to read the news much in the last few weeks, but I found a few good links to share this week.

• Worrying is good for your health. A massive longitudinal study on longevity finds some counter-intuitive (causal?) relationships between what we do and how long we live.
• Can cities be described by a set of equations? The answer to this ridiculous-sounding question is actually yes.  This Wired article qualitatively describes what these equations mean.  Both the good stuff in cities  (productivity, income, intelligence, innovation) and the bad stuff in cities (violent crime, drug consumption, disease outbreaks, shoplifting) scale superlinearly at a rate of ~1.15.  The NY Times magazine also featured an article about this story.
• Fellow operations researcher Sanjay Saigal is a guest blogger at the Atlantic this week. His first post was about operations research (woo hoo!).  I enjoyed his post on Indian English.  Check this page for Sanjay’s latest posts.
• The illustrated guide to the PhD is an amusing visual comic about how getting a PhD makes a small dent in human knowledge.
• This visual made my day:  If Monet painted Darth Vader (Thanks John D. Cook for the link!)