"History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives." - Abba Eban

***

A Story of the Image - "The Plantin – Moretus House - Workshops Museum Complex... [is] so highly significant that it is now one of the very few sites in Western Europe to have qualified for inclusion of the World Heritage List."
Copywriter FAIL

Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island - "In just a few decades the 5-inch-long (13-centimeter-long) lizards have developed a completely new gut structure, larger heads, and a harder bite... the lizards developed cecal valves—muscles between the large and small intestine—that slowed down food digestion in fermenting chambers, which allowed their bodies to process the vegetation's cellulose into volatile fatty acids... Such physical transformation in just 30 lizard generations takes evolution to a whole new level, Irschick said. It would be akin to humans evolving and growing a new appendix in several hundred years, he said. "That's unparalleled. What's most important is how fast this is," he said."

Cashiers Allegedly Forced to Wear Diapers - "Supermarket cashiers in Argentina are being forced to wear diapers to keep them from taking toilet breaks at work, a union says... "The truth is, it's difficult to imagine a line of 20 adult cashiers wearing diapers for eight hours," said Varela, who is investigating the matter. "In 17 years as a labor lawyer, I've never heard anything like this before," she added."

Emails aid sub-prime detective - "At the credit-rating agencies that did so much to prop up the sub-prime industry, someone seemed to have a clear sense of what was coming. 'Let’s hope we’re all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters,' an analyst wrote in a candid e-mail to a colleague."

Unusual new enclosure revealed at Bristol Zoo - "Zoo visitors and staff have been surprised by the addition of a new and unexpected enclosure at Bristol Zoo Gardens. A mysterious sign has appeared on the side of the Zoo’s popular Coral Café, designating the area as a place to spot one of the world’s most widespread species - Homo sapiens. The notice, which appeared without warning this week, shows humans ‘on display’ inside the café and includes tongue-in-cheek description of the species and its characteristics... Dr Jo Gipps, Director of Bristol Zoo Gardens, said: “This is definitely not one of the Zoo’s own signs, it is clearly a prank and a very good one too. It looks completely genuine. We think it’s great sign and we have absolutely no intention of removing it, however I think one of them is probably enough""
Of course, it would be removed in less civilised countries.

YouTube - "Does God exist?" -- Social campaign on education (TV commerc - "New Moment New Ideas Company TV commercial for the Government of the Republic of Macedonia, Ministry of Education and Science... Headline of commercial: Religion is knowledge, too. Bringing religion back to school. Headline of campaign: Knowledge is power."
This is the latest incarnation of some old Christian nonsense. The multiple philosophical problems are one thing, but the thing that really pisses me off is that they are painting Einstein as a defender of religion by putting words into his mouth.

Schoolgirl 'wanted to lose virginity before Large Hadron Collider caused end of world'

Biliteracy in Singapore: A Survey of the Written Proficiency in English and Chinese of Secondary School Pupils - "The aim of this study is to explore the extent to which the SAP school pupils learning two first languages are symmetrically bilingual in writing... Chinese played an important role in daily communication. Those who conversed in Chinese with their friends comprised 72.9%, and those who used English constituted a smaller number (25.4%)... the majority (47.5%) of the pupils preferred to watch television in Chinese... While 69.2% of the pupils read in English, only 6.7% read in Chinese... the subjects had displayed significantly higher written proficiency in English than in Chinese... As expected, our subjects had great difficulty in writing the Chinese script... A main feature of the writing system in Chinese is that it is a script which, unlike an alphabet, does not register sounds but in one way or another indicates some elements of meanings... With such a characteristic of the writing system, it is only natural that when a character is lost in memory, another one which represents the same syllable (and usually the same tone) will be substituted by the language learner. Moreover, he/she is inevitably prone to make mistakes when a syllable associates with two or more characters which share the same tone and at the same time resemble each other in script"

The war on drugs is immoral idiocy. We need the courage of Argentina - "Last week the Argentine supreme court declared in a landmark ruling that it was "unconstitutional" to prosecute citizens for having drugs for their personal use. It asserted in ringing terms that "adults should be free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state"... The doctrine is adumbrated by a regime only 25 years from dictatorship... Three years ago, Mexico concluded that prison for drug possession merely criminalised a large slice of its population. Drug users should be regarded as "patients, not criminals"... America spends a reported $70bn a year on suppressing drug imports, and untold billions on prosecuting its own citizens for drugs offences... this week's "good news" [was] that the 2009 Afghan poppy harvest had fallen back to its 2005 level... depriving Afghan peasants of their most lucrative cash crop somehow wins their hearts and minds and impoverishes the Taliban. The Afghan poppy crop is largely a function of the price of poppies compared with that of wheat... the war on drugs can be seen only as a total failure, a vast self-imposed cost on western society. It is the greatest sweeping-under-the-carpet of our age"
Surprisingly, a watered-down version of this was in Today

Time to silence phones, game consoles and headsets on trains - "The bigger audio headsets often give off loud noises and these should be banned... This problem is getting worse because the culprits have been getting away with it. It is time the SMRT takes strong action to stop this nuisance. The culprits should be fined because, as in case of eating and drinking, warning them is not good enough."
Doesn't this belong in the Straits Times Forum?

Confucians say, women now welcome - "For the first time in more than 2,500 years the family tree of the ancient Chinese philosopher, Confucius, is to include women descendants."