Sometime between the lauded-but-unwatched one season of Freaks and Geeks and the breakout success of The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Judd Apatow went to college. The school, University of Northeastern California, embodied neither the raunchfest that was Faber College nor the watered-down, contrived fluff of Pennbrook University. Rather, UNEC was a place where the often banal realities of higher education got the Apatow treatment. That is, it was a particularly humorous sketch of collegiate life that embraced, rather than sidestepped, the bursts of sentimentality and awkwardness that arise from an honest depiction of freshman year. Like Freaks, Undeclared survived only one season on FOX and, just like Freaks, that one season is available for your thorough enjoyment on the ‘flix. [Read more →]

Looks easy enough, right?

If you’re a procrastinator student, you probably already know all of the possibilities of intrigue that BuzzFeed has to offer. Among the multitude of cuteness-overloads and eye-opening trips down memory lane, I was delighted to find an article on the site that would, with all success, satisfy my taste-buds as well as my desire for shameless entertainment.

Similar to how everyone wants to learn how to open a beer bottle without touching it, we all want to be able to cook something delicious without having to spend excessive amounts of money or time to do so (in reality, there’s not really a more relevant audience for either of these things than college students). Taking this up a notch, BuzzFeed compiled an extensive list of “34 Insanely Simple Two-Ingredient Recipes,” yes, two-ingredient recipes that actually work. Skeptical? Me too.

Logically, I decided that the best way to verify the truth in this claim was to test out a couple of them myself. No off-campus food shopping was necessary, no recipes were expected to take longer than 30 minutes, and the final products looked promisingly delicious. Sure, the results weren’t exactly what I expected, but you never quite know what you’re going to get when diving into the unknown abyss that is the Internet. Check out the results after the jump.

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It’s been midterm season for a few weeks now (and it will be until December, judging by what I’ve heard about some classes), and I know I’m starting to lose the studious edge I had back at the beginning of the semester. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Lots of students are finding themselves on three different subreddits at once, with BlogDailyHerald (of course) and last night’s episode of The Daily Show up on other tabs. Adderall is a no-go, so how are you supposed to keep focused? You could, of course, pay someone to literally slap you whenever you procrastinate. Maneesh Sethi has done just that, and at $8/hour too! He says his productivity shot up from 36% to 98% once he had a dedicated face-slapper focus consultant.

And no, we are not missing the irony in talking about this in a time-waster.

Image via.

It’s reading period. We’re supposed to be studying. So why I am watching episode after episode of Secret Life of the American Teenager? I don’t even like this show! I can literally feel my brain cells dying. 

Procrastination: We all do it. It’s a blessing and a curse. So how do we combat it during finals? Here are some tips and tricks:

1. Deactivate your Facebook. I used to get a friend to change my password so I couldn’t use it. On the first day of summer, I relogged onto Facebook only to find my profile picture changed to this: [Read more →]

With love, from the BlogDH staff:

The computer: helping college students procrastinate since 1990.

Attention Brown Students: It’s about to be finals period, and chances are, you’re looking for a new way to put off writing those 10-15 page final papers and contributing to group Google Doc exam study guides. As if they knew it was crunch time on college campuses, according to recent articles from the New York Times’ Bits blog and The Wrap, YouTube and Facebook —probably some of the most frequented procrastination sites–are both about to expand their services by launching new ventures that may look somewhat familiar.

According to the The Wrap, YouTube has plans to offer instant movie streaming services, much like Netflix Instant or Apple movies. Depending on how it goes, our Netflix Files may be turning into YouTube Files.   [Read more →]

Sitting at your computer screen, refreshing Facebook, procrastinating from doing your work as the long weekend approaches? Why not procrastinate by reading an article about procrastination? Not only will you be able to procrastinate for a decent amount of time (it’s around 4 pages), but it’s also a New Yorker article, which means that you not only might actually learn something interesting about what procrastination really means, but the people sitting around you at the SciLi might think that you’re actually doing something intellectual. Procrastinate away!

© Copyright SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan)

If you’ve seen a bill from Brown, it won’t surprise you that the US spends a ton of money on higher education. But what about other countries? Check out the map above, which presents countries’ size as a function of their spending on tertiary education (college, law schools, etc.)

At Worldmapper, visual leaners and dataheads alike can find this and over 700 other maps addressing issues from vegetable consumption to condom use.