why is the atomiser worth so much money?

It's crystal... and it gets its power from the souls of orphans?

I hope these are hard-to-find orphans, because, in general, they're neither hard to obtain nor create.

not orphans then...37-year-old virgins.

So apparently, believing that a ghost is watching you makes you less likely to cheat.

At first I thought you meant "cheat" sexually. And I thought, well, yeah, it would be a mood-killer.

From that article:

The "representational concern" theory of the purpose of supernatural agents predicts that participants primed to think about a dead graduate student in the room will act as though someone is watching them, and therefore be less likely to cheat than participants in the control or in memoriam conditions.

I'd have been more interested if they had had 3 groups: one with the regular test, one with the in memoriam message, and one with the message and the ghost story. Because honestly, that little message by itself reminds people that the test is the result of someone's hard work. I think that makes a lot people less likely to cheat. It's the opposite of the "it's okay to steal from a faceless corporation" effect.

And looking at the study, all of the participants were students in an intro to psychology class. If none of them guessed that it wasn't REALLY a spatial intelligence test, I'll be quite depressed.

I'd have been more interested if they had had 3 groups: one with the regular test, one with the in memoriam message, and one with the message and the ghost story.

They did, actually. It was only the "message and ghost story" group that had significantly less cheating.

Oh, oops. Then... never mind! Ghosts made me skim!

I'll look at the paper again.

but getting someone else to do it is silly, and why is the atomiser worth so much money?

Getting someone else to do it is completely silly. Even if I were inclined to pay $1000 for a brownie in the first place, I'd far rather mist my own port than have a waiter standing over me while I eat.

Also, streetcars from: St. Louis, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Kyoto, St. Petersburg, Milan and the English coast

I like the one from Nagasaki. It's from the 1920s, right? Or is that the one from Milan?

We've got quite a few from Milan - it's the livery I see the most, probably because I live & work in the more touristy areas.

It's fetishizing (word?) food, at great expense, when food is something everyone needs. I have a cut off in my tolerance of the-good-life sort of stuff, I think. I don't think I'd make a very good rich person.

I love Cindy.

FNL is airing straight through March -- and ending in April, rather than May.

Uh oh.

Hm. Well, people who got the ghost story were faster at clearing answers that were "accidentally" displayed. But all 3 groups did the same at answering those questions correctly, so there's no clear evidence that any group actually cheated more or less more than another. There's a lot of rationalizing near the end about how maybe the other groups intended to cheat at those questions, and just weren't very good at it, which is sorta pathetic.