Reader Ian Thompson has found some excellent advice for SMB owners this week from HP, “How to stop working and go home”.

The advice runs to 837 words, which might suggest that one of the things keeping you at work is reading overlong articles on the interweb. Ian has also found some other gems of insight from HP, including “6 tips to get your Facebook posts seen in newsfeeds”, which he suggests could be shortened to “Sign up to Facebook” and “Add some friends”. If all this is too technical, his final recommendation (“Break out the crayons” he advises) is HP’s advice on “How to Organize Your Inbox with Color”.

Does anyone else need HP’s business advice – tying shoes, using a fork, how to know if you’re sexually harassing an event hostess – that sort of thing? You suggest it to us, we’ll suggest it to them.

We’re gutted to have missed comedy science gig Festival of the Spoken Nerd last week at the Bloomsbury Theatre because, now it has a bigger stage (it normally performs over a pub), it has the chance to blow stuff up. The reviews talk of “sound waves control a tunnel of flame and an enormous tube of nitrous oxide is ignited”.

Boom! Bang! Flash! This is better than the X Factor. There’s another show been added on 2 Feb at the Theatre Royal, and more shows later in the year.

From the boundaries of science this week, we bring the news that someone just cut an electron in half, which we thought wasn’t possible.

In an operation that makes the Large Hadron collider look like a bunch of kids playing marbles, Duke University physicist Matthew Hastings, Sergei Isakov of the University of Zurich and Roger Melko of the University of Waterloo in Canada made a simulated electron using three supercomputers, chilled it close to pretend absolute zero, and found that under certain conditions their electron split in half, a bit like hitting the world’s smallest frozen nut with the world’s largest virtual sledgehammer.

Our admiration is tempered only by the realisation that this isn’t a real nut, sorry, electron. Their paper didn’t say if the boys cleared up after themselves, or just went to the pub leaving bits of broken electron all over the simulated floor, forcing their pretend girlfriends to get the tiny hoover out.

As many Backbytes readers are hopeless romantics, we pass on the news of research from Drexel University in Philadelphia to show that, depending on the site you visit, you have a wildly different conception of what “success” is in an online dating experience.

We thought that guys had exactly one definition, but we’re meant to leave the smutty jokes until the end. So 84 per cent of users who reported successful experiences on eHarmony were referring to marriage, slightly under half of successful experiences on match.com were marriage, and less than one in four of OkCupid’s successful visitors were referring to marriage.

We’d point out that the clue is in the name, perhaps. You could try surveying whether successful online experiences on xxxhotcheerleaders.com led to marriage and get an even smaller figure – though it would be tricky to do the survey, because visitors tend to stay for no more than five minutes at a time. And they’re a bit distracted.

Backbytes is perhaps the smartest desk at Computing, rather like being the world’s tallest dwarf, and we have a lot of data and a laptop. We should be natural customers for this week's gadget, but whether we would pay two hundred quid for a wearable 2GB memory stick plus Wi-Fi is another matter.

“These incredibly chic cufflinks feature 2GBs of USB-friendly storage,” says Firebox.com, “and, get this, a built-in Wi-Fi hotspot. They’ll also secure your shirt cuffs. Awesome or what!”

"What!" we reply, in unison.

“Ludicrously cool”, decides the web site. We agree with the first half of that description.