This isn't a long story, but damn, it's a great one: students at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom recently came together to celebrate one of the best things about where they go to school: a Janitor named Herman Gordon. Running into Gordon on campus, by all reports, is a bright, shining high point in the day of many of the University's students. According to one individual, quoted by the BBC, Gordon "...is the epitome of happiness."

Considering the fact that Gordon spends his days cleaning up after the thousands of folks that roam the university on a daily basis, his great attitude is just that much more amazing. My father was a janitor and he was a miserable prick. Anyway, one of the University of Bristol's students thought that it was time that those that know and appreciate what the cleaner brings to their lives on a daily basis showed their appreciation to him. So, a fundraising campaign to send Gordon and his wife on a vacation to visit family in Jamaica was launched. The campaign managed to raise £1500 – more than enough to send the couple on their way.

From The Daily Mail:

According to an admin from the Bristruths Facebook page - an anonymous 'truth' page for Bristol University - the idea for Mr Gordon's trip came from a Facebook post.

'It all started with this post on the 19th May,' they said.

The initial post called Mr Gordon 'the jolliest man I have ever met' and said 'if you wanna reason to smile, go talk to him for a min or two'.

The Pineapple Fund was started by some nice person whose early acquisition of bitcoins made him a multimillionaire. He's donating $86 million to different charities, including the EFF (who gets $1 million)

FAQ

Who are you, and why?

Sometime around the early days of bitcoin, I saw the promise of decentralized money and decided to mine/buy/trade some magical internet tokens. The expectation shattering returns of bitcoin over many years has lead to an amount far more than I can spend.

What do you do when you have more money than you can ever possibly spend?Donating most of it to charity is what I'm doing. For reference, The Pineapple Fund is bigger than the entire market cap of bitcoin when I got in, and one of the richest 250 bitcoin addresses today.

How many bitcoins do you have?

The Pineapple Fund represents a majority of my cryptocurrency holdings.

Why are you remaining anonymous?

Publicity has never been the point of this fund.

I'm an individual. Can I get some bitcoins?

The answer is no. Pineapple Fund is charity, but not that kind of charity.

Please do not apply or email. We have never funded an individual request and we never will.

Why the name, Pineapple Fund?

I like pineapple. The only bad thing about pineapple is you can't eat too much :(

Last Sunday, an older woman in the drive-thru line at McDonald's in Scottsburg, IN told the cashier she wanted to pay for the $36 order of the man behind her. She didn't know him, but he was in a van with four children. She told the cashier, Hunter Hostetler, to tell the man "Happy Father's Day!"

When the man received the free order of food including four Happy Meals, he told the cashier he wanted to pay for the two cars behind him. And so the day went, until by the end of the day, 167 customers had paid it forward, buying someone else's meal.

So who was the woman who started the good samaritan chain?

“I keep looking for her, hoping I see her and can tell her what happened,” Hostetler told ABC News. “I don’t know if she knows, but I hope to see her again so I can tell her.”

Image: Mike Mozart Read the rest

Research suggests that people who do nice things for others, often at a cost for themselves, are more sexually attractive. From an evolutionary perspective, this might be because altruism indicates that a potential mate is more cooperative and caring. Evolutionary psychologists Steven Arnocky, at Nipissing University, and Pat Barclay, at the University of Guelph, conducted a fascinating study to explore whether altruistic people really do have more sexual partners. From Scientific American:

This theory suggests that altruism may serve, in part, to convey one’s value as a mating partner, including one’s concern for others and likelihood of cooperating with future mates. Research has shown that we prefer altruistic partners, all else being equal; especially for long-term mating (the evidence for altruism being preferred in short-term mates is mixed). Not surprisingly, then, the pull to demonstrate one’s altruism can be strong. Some research has shown that men will actively compete with one another (termed competitive altruism) by making charitable donations to women. Interestingly, these charitable donations increase when the target of one’s altruism is physically attractive...

Previous findings from hunter-gatherer populations have shown that men who hunt and share meat often enjoy greater reproductive access to women. But do these links hold up in other cultural and contextual arenas, such as in contemporary North American society? To find out, we conducted a set of two studies. In our first study, undergraduate men and women completed an altruism questionnaire (involving questions like “I have donated blood”), along with a sexual history survey. Participants also completed a personality inventory, given the possibility that those with certain personality characteristics (such as being extroverted) might happen to engage in both more altruism and more sexual activity.