Things that amused/intrigued me over lunch

• Los Angeles is attempting to reduce dangerous car chases by instituting the use of tracer darts to allow GPS tracking of offenders instead. For some reason, this conjured images from my childhood of Wild Kingdom... just wait for the tranquilizer to take effect!
  
  
• An innovative program in Maine allows senior citizens to trade in their car keys for access to a ride service. It reduces the temptation for unsafe drivers to keep driving, turns undriven vehicles into community equity, and offers seniors some independence from friends and relatives. Pretty spiff.
  
  
• An interesting study indicates that song popularity, much like blog influentiality, is an imbalanced winnings game, with people favoring songs that others before them have rated highly.

  [P]articipants who could see how often a song had been downloaded tended to give higher ratings to songs that had been downloaded often, and were more likely to download those songs themselves. That created a snowball effect, catapulting a few songs to the top of the charts and leaving others languishing.

  In fact, there was almost no correlation to the rankings given to individual songs across different isolated trials of the experiment. Insert cynical joke here.

(all via Rebecca's Pocket)