Besides being the most awkward moment of your life, the sex talk is also a staple of television. See if you can match the following talks with the characters and shows they came from. And pay attention- these lessons are important! –>Click here to take our genius intern’s latest quiz.

In case you’re feeling overwhelmed by the unnameable lately, you’re in good company. Scientists just discovered a swath of universe in which there’s really, well, nothing:

The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That’s an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday.

“This is 1,000 times the volume of what we sort of expected to see in terms of a typical void,” said Minnesota astronomy professor Lawrence Rudnick, author of the paper that will be published in Astrophysical Journal. “It’s not clear that we have the right word yet … This is too much of a surprise.”

Hopefully it won’t galvanize…Or else we might need the assistance of Falcor, Bastian, the Childlike Empress, et al.

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One of my all-time favorite documentaries is Errol Morris’s 1997 film Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. As a punctuation nerd, I disagree with the lack of a serial comma in its title, but we’ll let that slide. Anyway. This film is about humanity, the nature of life on earth, and how humans interact with their world. It covers a lot of ground.

One problem with Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is the naive marketing that surrounds it. The DVD box seems to think the film is a wacky look at some kooks — it reads “…a fascinating portrait of four obsessed eccentrics. … [A] kaleidoscopic look at the very thin line which separates madness from genius.” Well…no. First, dismissing the interview subjects as “obsessed eccentrics” devalues the insight they have (and it’s also a bit offensive). Second, this is a movie about how humans understand other forms of life — animals, plants, even robots. This movie asks what it means to be human, and what separates humans from animals, plants, and robots. The line between madness and genius doesn’t have anything to do with it.

Much more, including video clips, after the jump.

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I’m traveling today, which means this Friday Happy Hour was definitely the most hastily thrown together of the series. But good parties don’t necessarily require great planning. We’ll see how it goes.

Today’s topic is multiple email accounts. While trying to get back in touch with an old friend, I sent several emails to what I thought was his address. No Fatal Errors came back telling me this account didn’t exist. So, I rightfully assumed he was ducking me. The jerk.

Eventually he replied back, via Gmail, to say his Yahoo! account is “now just for spam.” I have no idea how many email addresses the average person has. (If you know, or want to do some quick Googling, that’d be fantastic.) According to our focus group of one (me), the average person has 7.

• Hotmail. I signed up for a Hotmail account just as my college address expired. After a year, my spam-to-email ratio was roughly 3:1. I moved on, but keep the address for emails I don’t really want to receive. If you ask for my email address and get this one, you should rightfully be offended.

• Yahoo! Mail. This is my primary address. I have years of my life in my Yahoo! Mail archive. If you comment on this post, that comment is sent to this address. (Fascinating, I know.)

• Gmail. I’ve got Gmail, but I don’t care for their lumping together of emails by “conversation.” Some threads are like 80 messages long. I can’t scroll through all that. But if Google is taking over the world, I want to be on the right side.

I have three other work email addresses, including mentalfloss.com, plus an @alumni.duke.edu forwarding address. But let’s hear from you guys. How do you measure up to this faux national average? How many email addresses do you maintain? And, you know, why?

My friend Omegamom and her family recently moved from Arizona to Alaska. Since they were flying to their new home, the plan was to ship their pet turtles separately. It wasn’t as easy as they thought. My first thought was to just plop the turtles in your carryon bag and be done with it. Last year, I flew to Denver beside a woman who brought her dog in her purse, and the airline never found out. This was after security made me leave my cup of coffee behind. But the risk in this case wasn’t worth missing the plane, or the trauma to Omegadotter. FedEx will ship horses, but not household pets. I guess that would include turtles. The UPS website says they will ship turtles, but Omegamom ran into a clerk who didn’t like the way she packed them. From what I’ve seen, she packed them exactly as the turtle experts recommend. The story had a happy ending, when Air Alaska allowed them to bring the turtles as baggage on their flight.

Turtle Rescue of Long Island recommends DHL for shipping, and has a photo tutorial on turtle packing. Turtle Homes suggests you use Airborne Express, as does the World Chelonian Trust. The Mid-Atlantic Turtle and Tortoise Society has displaced and unwanted turtles for adoption, and they will ship them to you (via DHL), but only between April and October, and only if the turtle weighs less than 15 pounds. All the turtle sites I checked advise against shipping turtles in winter. Then I found out that DHL bought Airborne Express in 2003. So if you need to ship turtles, that would be the carrier to contact.

It was almost like living near the ocean. Inside the apartment, the sound washed over you in an undulating, neverending wave, punctuated by the occasional honking cry of the Skylark or Mustang. At rush hour came the frequent squeal of brakes, and at least once a day, the dull thudding whine of a metal-on-metal meeting. Yes, I’ll never forget our first apartment in Hollywood, the double-paned “soundproof” windows of which were only ten feet from the 101 Freeway overpass, where you couldn’t see the traffic but you could never stop hearing it, even while you slept.

The other bonus was the view: there was a wide embankment built up against the freeway just outside our never-used “porch,” where the residentially-challenged would congregate to catch 40 winks, engage in battle with bottles and sticks (I believe the internet hath dubbed them “bumfights”), and even pursue more amorous objectives ‘neath double-wide sleeping bags. As it turned out, it was easy enough to not look out the window — but the one thing you can’t shut off is your ears. It seemed to affect me more profoundly than my wife, who at one point claimed she “hadn’t heard the freeway for months” (liar!) and even now prefers to have the television on in the background while reading or writing, which continues to baffle me.

I had to face up to the fact that perhaps I was just more sensitive to sound than she, even though by any objective standard, my hearing is no better. Was there something wrong with me? Why weren’t my double-paned windows enough? Well, according to a groundbreaking new study detailed in New Scientist and The Daily Telegraph (I wonder if they still use a telegraph there), noise pollution is a problem for everyone, and not only does it have a “huge impact on health,” it may even be responsible for three in every hundred deaths traditionally blamed on heart attack and stroke. Here’s why:

Noise is linked with heart attack and stroke because it creates chronic stress that keeps our bodies in a state of constant alert. Research published last year by Germany’s Federal Environmental Agency in Berlin shows that even when you are asleep, your ears, brain and body continue to react to sounds, raising levels of stress hormones. However, if these stress hormones are in constant circulation, they can cause long-term physiological changes that could be life-threatening. The end result can be anything from heart failure and strokes to high blood pressure and immune problems.

They go on to estimate that since nearly 7 million people die from heart disease in Europe every year, that equals about 210,000 deaths attributable to noise pollution every year. Furthermore, even if it doesn’t kill you, it can have other negative impacts: when schools are built in especially noisy areas, information retention and test scores go down. Chronic exposure to noise can cause tinnitus. And people who haven’t slept as well during the night are more likely to have accidents during the day (thereby creating the sort of freeway noises that give other people noise fatigue — a vicious cycle!)

Since that first infamous apartment in fabulous Hollywood, we’ve intentionally sought out the quietest parts of LA, and lived in blissful peace for lo these several years. But I’ll never forget what it was like to live with constant noise — and that millions of people (and millions more each year, as our cities grow) still live with it every day. What does your neighborhood sound like?

If you missed the news, my wife and I named our son Jack Nathaniel. We really did take all your comments into consideration, especially those who talked us out of Maximilian/Maxim/Max/etc. (Apologies to those named Max who love their names: nothing personal—it just didn’t work well with Israel.)

As already discussed, original names are becoming harder and harder to decided on and come by. To wit: a couple in Beijing recently settled on the @ symbol for their son’s name. The AP covered the story and reminded us that, “Written Chinese does not use an alphabet but is comprised of characters, sometimes making it difficult to develop words for new or foreign objects and ideas.” They also dropped this curious factoid: “As of last year, only 129 names accounted for 87 percent of all surnames in China.”

Apparently, the couple thought @ was a cool name because @=at, and “at,” in Chinese, can be pronounced in a way that sounds a lot like the phrase “love him.” (ed note: rolling eyes)

Okay, so we have the artist formerly known as Prince using the old unpronounceable glyph (combination of male and female symbols)(though no longer because, let’s face it, that was a terrible marketing decision), and we have a baby in China known as @. Of course, Prince wasn’t the first musician to associate with a symbol. Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page branded himself back in the early 70s with what has become known as Zoso (or Zofo, according to some). The symbol, reprinted below, was penned by 16th century hermeticist J. Cardan in a 1557 work called Ars Magica Arteficii.

So I open the floor to you loyal Wrap readers: what other people have associated with special symbols or used them as a name? I can’t think of another right now, but I’m sure there are plenty more where Prince, Page and @ come from.

Thank you, Shanghaiist for letting us know what’s going on in certain Chinese education circles.

The principal of the 150-student Henan Child Prodigy School (河南神童学校), Zhang Xuexin (张学新) says he has devised a revolutionary method of training the right brain of children to make them child prodigies. His students can not only memorise their textbooks and ancient poetry, they can actually recite them backwards. Throughout the school and around classrooms, one sees banners such as “China’s first school that teaches education of the total brain” (中国第一所全脑教育学校), “Today’s child prodigy, tomorrow’s talent” (今日东方神童，明日世纪天才) and “I am a child prodigy, I am a memory expert” (我是神童，我是记忆天才).

My only question is–recited backwards phoenetically, or just sequentially? I was always of the phonetically school: being backwards at the most elemental level seemed superior. If only this had been my school growing up; my backwards recitations and signatures (”Ykceb”) were always greeted with barely contained annoyance. And encouragements to try out for whatever regional poor man’s Star Search happening to be begging for talent. Doing things backwards seemed like just another fun supplement (e.g. Opposite Day) to an intensely regimented schooling. Anyone else go through a retrograde phase?

I know, I know. I promise I won’t be posting any more pics of animals in water today, but TheCellar had these terrific photos on their site, and I just couldn’t resist. The snaps are of a day spa in China where people come to have their dead skin cells gobbled off by “nibble fish.” Thoroughly skeptical, I looked it up and was stunned to see how popular the treatment is worldwide. The Garra rufa, alternately known as the doctor fish, the kangal fish and the reddish log sucker, only dines on the dead areas of skin, leaving healthy cells to grow. Amazingly, the fish are used everywhere from Turkey, to England, to Japan, and are especially good for polishing your feet and helping to cure psoriasis. Reportedly, bathers feel no pain from the treatment, just some “pleasant tingling,” and a lovely post-spa glow. Of course, I’m already the type of person who dips his toe in the water and contemplates at length before jumping in. I’m not sure the thought of flesh-eating fish is going to speed that process up any. Images via TheCellar.

The Daily Mail has this great photo of two little orphaned ducklings being nursed back to health. According to the article, the pair had been washed out to sea during a storm, and were being tossed about when a canoeist plucked them out of the water and “saved [them] from a watery grave.” I had no idea ducks even came in this size (they’re barely a few centimeters tall), but I’ve decided they’d go great with my tea cup collection. Or in it. In any case, you can see more here at the Daily Mail. Link via TheCellar.