From the New York Times: Team-Building With a Twist.

It was the waiter's missing shirt button, and the tattoo of a snake and a lizard on his bicep, that clinched it.

Fifteen employees, from managers to plant workers, of the Gates Corporation, a Denver maker of automotive and industrial rubber belts and hoses, had already lifted fingerprints near the chalk outlines of two bodies in an alley and a parking garage and found clues like hair, blood, the steak-knife murder weapon and notes about the killings.

Then, over dinner in a restaurant, one of them remarked that the waiter's appearance matched evidence that they had gathered during the day. So the group asked Tim D. Keck, a consultant and retired police chief who was leading the exercise during a quarterly team-building conference in Poplar Bluff, Mo., the location of a company plant, to "arrest" him.

Corporate trainers have always had a knack for coming up with offbeat exercises to teach teamwork and build leadership skills. Rope courses and other military-inspired Outward Bound-like tests of endurance have been around for decades. But in the last few years, there has been a shift away from physically demanding and intensely competitive exercises toward more creative and cerebral undertakings, according to the American Society for Training and Development in Alexandria, Va.

The new wave of team-building adventures varies from cooking contests à la "Iron Chef" and arts-related activities like playing percussion instruments, staging plays and dancing to outside ventures like sailing and crime scene investigating. [continue]

From New Scientist: Erotic images can turn you blind.

Researchers have finally found evidence for what good Catholic boys have known all along - erotic images make you go blind. The effect is temporary and lasts just a moment, but the research has added to road-safety campaigners' calls to ban sexy billboard-advertising near busy roads, in the hope of preventing accidents.

The new study by US psychologists found that people shown erotic or gory images frequently fail to process images they see immediately afterwards. And the researchers say some personality types appear to be affected more than others by the phenomenon, known as "emotion-induced blindness". [continue]

From newKerala.com: Ancient abacus techique adopted by Goa parent sharpens kids' mental skills.

Eight-year-old Vinay and his five-year-old sister, Priya, are seated at a kitchen table in front of two abacuses - box-shaped manual calculators made of beads. "Ready?" asks their mother, Mrs. Riya Ganguly. Ready, the children answer.

"Six, plus one, plus two, minus four, plus one, plus two, minus six, plus five, plus two, minus four, plus two." As Mrs. Ganguly recites the numbers, the two children rapidly push the abacus beads up and down, using only their thumbs and forefingers. "The answer is seven," says Vinay. "Right," says Mrs. Ganguly.

The children, who otherwise love to watch cartoon network and read Harry Potter books, are getting mathematics lessons in the modern age of mechanical calculators through manual calculators, in use for ages.

Mrs. Ganguly’s logic for using abacus to teach children is, "I'm very angry about the use of calculators in this country. With the calculator, kids just punch in the numbers. With the abacus, we have to use all our functions as human beings: eyes, fingers, ears."

A manual calculator introduced to Japan from China in the 1500s, the box-shaped abacus is made of beads that serve as counters, which users push back and forth along metal rods, clicking their way through addition and subtraction, long division and multiplication.

In many Asian countries, the abacus is still used to teach mathematics to elementary school children. Advocates argue that the use of the abacus is one of the main reasons why children in these countries consistently rank at the top of international mathematics competitions. [continue]

From Wired: Unorthodox Chess From an Odd Mind.

Two dozen programmers from around the world have signed up to compete in Germany next month in the first computer chess tournament devoted to Chess960, a game variant invented by fugitive chess genius Bobby Fischer that's slowly gaining rank among grandmasters.

The rules of Chess960 are mostly the same as orthodox chess -- but the setup incorporates something once considered anathema to the game: chance. Pawns begin where they always do. However, the pieces behind them on the white side are arranged at random, with the proviso that bishops must end up on opposite colors, and the king dwell somewhere between the two rooks. The black pieces are lined up to mirror the white.

That makes for 960 different starting positions in the game, instead of just one. The point of Chess960 is to free chess from the yoke of memorization.

The opening phase of a chess game as currently played has been subject to a hundred years of scholarship and play, and today players are hard pressed to find so much as a viable pawn push within the first 20 moves that hasn't been thoroughly analyzed. [continue]

Chess-related content on Mirabilis.ca:
Roman board games
Birth of the Chess Queen
Science secret of grand masters revealed
Archaeologists tackle chess puzzle
Chalkboards? Try using chessboards

Related stuff elsewhere on the web
Chess 960 - Wikipedia

From the print version of today's National Post:

Some would say the boy was asking for trouble.

Walking alone at night through a park in Belfast where Catholics and Protestants collide. On this occassion, the child is Catholic and the Protestant crowd has a beating in mind.

But a child in the group speaks up. Leave that boy alone, he tells his Protestant friends.

They once spent a summer together in Canada.

It's a true story, a small example of the difference one Canadian project has made on the deeply divided lives of Catholics and Protestants in Belfasat.

The two boys are past participants of the Belfast Children's Vacation project, a month-long retreat organized by a group in St John, New Brunswick.

The National Post article doesn't seem to be on the web, but there's more about the Belfast Children's Vacation Project at BelfastKids.ca, and in this Neutral Ground page at the CBC site.

Related:
Northern Ireland Chidren's Enterprise - nicekids.org

From the BBC: Smart eyewear for keen swimmers.

Smart goggles that help swimmers log lengths have been designed by a UK engineering student.

The Inview goggles display a lap count and time elapsed on their lenses so swimmers can track their progress.

Invented by industrial design student Katie Williams, the goggles use an in-built compass to spot when swimmers complete lengths.

Ms Williams said the goggles would let swimmers concentrate on improving their strokes rather than count laps. [continue]

From the National Post: New forensic technique looks at victim's atoms.

Anthropologist Henry Schwarcz is a master at reading the signatures left by food in people's bodies.

He can trace life histories through atoms laid down in a body, deducing where someone lived, what they ate and how they moved around.

The researcher from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., usually studies human remains from archeological digs and ancient graveyards.

But his work has just been used in an entirely different way, and the results promise detectives a powerful new crime-fighting tool. [continue]

Now here is a fine rant from Karen Von Hahn, printed in today's Globe and Mail:

To the girl at Blockbuster who saw me searching through the foreign films: Thank you for noticing that I was having trouble finding a movie. It was sweet of you to come over and offer your assistance. But no, Fellini's Amarcord is not a new release. It is an old, famous foreign film by a major Italian director. And if you don't know that, then how is it that you feel you can be of any help to me whatsoever?

To the people at the checkout counter at Staples: Thank you for asking so politely whether I had found everything I was looking for. I must admit that I lied when I told you that yes, of course, I had found all I wanted. If I had confessed that I wasn't able to locate my favourite type of erasable gel pen, we both know what would have happened.

I would have been forced to wait by the cash desk like a demanding child for hours while you got on the speaker system to flag down the ballpoint-pen expert, who would have then checked the stockroom, the main warehouse ("What was that pen again?") and other outlets before telling me that if I didn't see it on the shelves, it wasn't available. So thanks for your concern, but isn't it quicker and easier for everybody if I just lie and leave? [continue]

Well, exactly.

I find this article very refreshing, because all of the annoyances the author lists are things that vex me, too.

From csmonitor.com: New libraries spring up in Nepal's furthest corners.

TUKUCHE, NEPAL — Seven-year-old Pratikshaya Pariyar pushes away the hand of her 3-year-old sister, Beshy, from a picturebook full of kittens. "She doesn't even know how to turn the page of a book without bending it back," laments Pratikshaya.

But Pratikshaya knows a lot about books. She spends every afternoon after school in the library in Tukuche, a remote village in the Nepali Himalayas.

"It's my favorite place in the world," she says as she studies Richard Scarry's "Big Book of Things," repeating to herself the names of all the objects in both Nepali and in English.

Foreigners come to Nepal expecting a land of magic, mountains, and Brad Pitt.

But Nepal, in the midst of a standoff between Maoist rebels and the king, is short on resources and infrastructure, and largely dependent on foreign aid and foreign tourists.

Until two years ago, many Nepali districts had no public libraries where a child like Pratikshaya could rifle through a shelf of books or look things up in an encyclopedia. [continue]

From Wired: Tyke's Trike Becomes a Bike.

A new dual-mode tricycle-cum-bicycle promises to make learning to ride a bike truly easy, according to its inventors.

Called Shift, the three-wheeler bike transforms into a bicycle and back again depending on how the person riding it distributes his or her weight.

Shift has two wheels in the rear about an inch wide. When riding slowly, the two wheels splay out at an angle to provide stability.

But as the bike moves faster, a spring-loaded hub in back shifts the rear wheels inward and together until they form a single rear wheel.

The spring-loaded hub is triggered by the rider's weight, which shifts forward as the bike gains momentum and balancing becomes easier. [continue]

From Paperpenalia: Tips for improving your handwriting.

People who inevitably have trouble with handwriting and calligraphy write with their fingers. They "draw" the letters. A finger-writer puts the full weight of his/her hand on the paper, his fingers form the letters, and he picks his hand up repeatedly to move it across the paper as he writes.

People for whom writing comes more easily may rest their hands fairly heavily on the paper, but their forearms and shoulders move as they write. Their writing has a cadence that shows they’re using at least some of the right muscle groups. They don’t draw the letters with their fingers; the fingers serve more as guides.

This exercise may help you determine which category is yours: Sit down and write a paragraph. Doesn’t matter what. Pay attention to the muscles you use to form your letters. Do you draw each letter with your fingers? Pick your hand up repeatedly to move it? Have an unrecognizable scrawl? Does your forearm move? Chances are, if you learned to write after 1955-60 (depending on where you went to grade school), you write with your fingers. [continue]

Link found here at Blogdex.

From the Times Online: Music is key to piano man's name.

Investigators are seeking clues in the music of the man found unable to speak but with the talent of a piano virtuoso.

The musician, whose photograph was being broadcast around the world yesterday, has a repertoire ranging from Tchaikovsky to the Beatles but has not uttered a word since being found last month. Staff at the National Missing Persons Helpline and West Kent NHS and Social Care Trust received more than 160 calls in connection with him yesterday.

When he was found, the designer labels of his black dinner suit, sodden with seawater when he was discovered by the police on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, had been ripped out. He was dripping wet and wearing a white shirt and tie beneath an evening suit.

The man drew a picture of a grand piano. Michael Camp, his social worker, showed him a piano in the hospital chapel and the stranger delivered a stunning four-hour performance. "I cannot get within a yard of him without him becoming very anxious," Mr Camp said. "Yet at the piano he comes alive. When we took him to the chapel piano it really was amazing. He played for several hours, non-stop, until he collapsed." [continue]

Thanks to Ross at Stryder.com for writing to let me know about this story.

Odd, isn't it? This reminds me of the fellow who showed up in Vancouver with amnesia a few years ago.

Related:
Shine reflected in piano man mystery - The Australian
Fantastic response to 'piano man' -BBC

Update, July 6th, 2005:
Ex-students recognize 'Piano Man' - aftenposten.no

From csmonitor.com: How almost everyone in Kerala learned to read.

At the Janaranjini preschool in the state of Kerala in rural southern India, children aren't building castles in the sand. Instead, as they sit cross-legged in front of a thin layer of sand, they are learning the fundamentals of reading and math.

Three-year old V. S. Madhav twirls letters of his native Malayalam - the language of Kerala - into the sand with his left forefinger while his classmate, 4-year old Neethu Saji, writes Arabic numerals more quickly than her teacher can call them out.

"I also learned like this. My father also like this," says N. Revindhran. Mr. Revindhran is a volunteer at the public library that runs this preschool, locally referred to as a kalari. "This is the ancient model [of schooling]," Revindhran explains.

Education in Kerala represents a success story that many nations might wish to emulate.

Kerala, located in the southern tip of India, is an agrarian state with a per capita income of only $265. Yet its literacy rate of 91 percent puts it closer to the United States than to any other Indian state. (The national literacy rate in India is 65 percent.) [continue]

Today I've been listening to The Essential Tallis Scholars, particularly Allegri's Miserere. It's exquisite.

There's lots of interesting stuff about this piece over here at classical.net. Here's an excerpt:

The next famous story concerning the Miserere involves the 12-year-old Mozart. On December 13, 1769, Leopold and Wolfgang left Salzburg and set out for a 15-month tour of Italy where, among other things, Leopold hoped that Wolfgang would have the chance to study with Padre Martini in Bologna, who had also taught Johann Christian Bach several years before. On their circuitous route to Bologna, they passed through Innsbruck, Verona, Milan, and arrived in Rome on April 11, 1770, just in time for Easter. As with any tourist, they visited St. Peter's to celebrate the Wednesday Tenebrae and to hear the famous Miserere sung at the Sistine Chapel. Upon arriving at their lodging that evening, Mozart sat down and wrote out from memory the entire piece. On Good Friday, he returned, with his manuscript rolled up in his hat, to hear the piece again and make a few minor corrections. Leopold told of Wolfgang's accomplishment in a letter to his wife dated April 14, 1770 (Rome):

"...You have often heard of the famous Miserere in Rome, which is so greatly prized that the performers are forbidden on pain of excommunication to take away a single part of it, copy it or to give it to anyone. *But we have it already*. Wolfgang has written it down and we would have sent it to Salzburg in this letter, if it were not necessary for us to be there to perform it. But the manner of performance contributes more to its effect than the composition itself. Moreover, as it is one of the secrets of Rome, we do not wish to let it fall into other hands...."

Wolfgang and his father then traveled on to Naples for a short stay, returning to Rome a few weeks later to attend a papal audience where Wolfgang was made a Knight of the Golden Spur. They left Rome a couple of weeks later to spend the rest of the summer in Bologna, where Wolfgang studied with Padre Martini.

The story does not end here, however. [continue]

From the Hindustan Times: Catapult plant is world record-breaker. [Update: article no longer available.]

A tiny Canadian shrub is the quickest-moving thing in the plant world, using a catapult mechanism to eject its pollen at a speed hundreds of times faster than a launched rocket, scientists have found.

The plant, bunchberry dogwood (Cornus canadensis), grows in thick carpets in the vast swampy, spruce-fir forests of the North American taiga.

Growing to a height of only 20 centimetres, the bunchberry needs the explosive push to get its pollen into the forest breeze so that it maximises its chance of fertilising other shrubs. [continue]

The Telegraph has more, including photos of the explosion.

Related:
Fastest Plant: Bunchberry Dogwood - discovery.com
World's fastest plant pulls 2,400 Gs - scotsman.com

From the CBC: The best way to skip a stone.

Wiling away a summer afternoon at the cottage has taken on a technical edge thanks to researchers at Tohoku University in Japan.

They have perfected a simulation of the magic angle for skipping stones across a lake.

Throwers should tilt stones about 20 degrees to the lake's surface, an angle first predicted by French researchers last year.

Shin-ichiro Nagahiro and Yoshinori Hayakawa of the Tohoku University Department of Physics in Sendai, Japan, created a mathematical formula to confirm the French experiment.

The Japanese researchers used a numerical method called smoothed particle hydrodynamics to simulate the skipping stone. [continue]

From news.com: Dotty old message beats out teen texting.

Thnk ur gr8 @ txt msgng? You may think you're saving time cutting out all those pesky vowels when sending text messages to your buddies, but Gordon Hill, a 93-year-old Morse code specialist, just might prove you wrong.

In a competition staged by an Australian museum, Hill, a telegraph operator since 1927, was pitted against 13-year-old Brittany Devlin in a battle of the messengers. Hill was armed with nearly a lifetime of experience using Morse code; Devlin, with two years of text messaging experience and a slew of slang popular with chronic texters. A sentence was chosen at random from a teen magazine, and both contestants had to transmit the message as quickly as possible. [continue]

Too bad we didn't all get invited to this one. From The Slovak Spectator: My big fat Slovak wedding.

In front of the hotel, a crowd of about 100 guests gathered, the band played, and one of my wife's uncles handed me a saw with its blade turned upside down. Symbolizing the teamwork required in marriage, I required my wife's assistance to saw a board into two pieces. The MC then shattered a plate on the ground because shards in Slovakia symbolize good luck. My wife and I then tried to sweep up all the shards, but others foiled our efforts by kicking the pieces around. Finally, the MC asked the two of us to put our heads in an Ox's yolk. We were now joined together as a team but we would have to pull a big plough to overcome life's many challenges. (...)

Suddenly, the lights dimmed and this haggard looking old lady entered the room. She claimed to be my mistress and demanded money from me, ostensibly to support illegitimate children. As I tried to profess my innocence, the MC grabbed the woman, and pulled off her disguise: she turned out to be one of my wife's uncles. [continue]

From the BBC: Robots to help out blind shoppers.

Computer scientists in the US have developed a robot that could help blind people to shop or find their way around large buildings.

It uses radio frequency identification tags to locate items and a laser range finder to avoid collisions. [continue].

On the dilbert.com website, Scott Adams writes about Dilbert's ultimate cubicle:

"Over the years, DILBERT fans have e-mailed me on all sorts of topics. And after a while, I began to realize that a common theme among the majority of them was the fact that most people are highly frustrated with their cubicles. So I started to think, ‘What would DILBERT want in a cubicle? And how could that in turn translate into a solution for every employee?’ And I think the result is that we've figured out a possible way to do that." [continue, see photos]

Link found at Plep.

Wikipedia explains Chinese knots:

The Chinese knot or Chinese traditional decorative knot is a kind of characteristic folk decoration of handicraft arts. It appeared in ancient times, developed in the Tang and Song Dynasty (960-1229 A.D.) and was popularized in Ming and Qing Dynasty (1368-1911 A.D.). The Chinese knot has now become a type of elegant and colorful craft, removed from its original practical use.

The Chinese knotting site has photos of a flower knot, a treasure knot, a Chinese button knot, and a connection knot. Some directions, too.

Other knotty things on Mirabilis.ca:

The Why Knot? tie-tying machine
A better shoelace knot
Incan Counting System Decoded?
Inca used knots to record information

Hey, did you read about the Hipster PDA a while back on 43folders.com? Today the Globe and Mail has an article about it: Salvation in Pen and Paper.

On BlackBerry-addicted Parliament Hill, NDP press secretary Ian Capstick turns heads with his newest organizational gadget: a stack of 3 x 5 index cards held together by a black bull clip.

His Hill-issued BlackBerry was starting to annoy him. He was drowning in unreliable notes at his desk. So when he stumbled upon a simple stack of index cards in a filing cabinet one day, he tried them out.

"I started to keep a few cards in my back pocket to write press requests on," the 24-year-old says. "Soon, it evolved into a way to keep the entire day's activities in order. Now, people are pretty used to seeing it in my hand."

A month into using his new system, he found an on-line community at a blog called 43 Folders (http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/introducing_the.html). There, the file-card-and-clip system has been dubbed the "hipster PDA."

The site is a fetishization of all things analogue -- Moleskine diaries, index cards and other office-supply classics -- and an ode to a book called Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Site founder and self-proclaimed "Web nerd" Merlin Mann, 38, has his tongue only partly in his cheek in recasting index cards and clips as the gadget du jour. [continue]

From the New York Times: Chalkboards? Try Using Chessboards.

The games drew about 15 chess enthusiasts to a windowless conference room at City College in Harlem, where pawns and rooks were moved with such intensity of purpose that the scene could have passed for yet another high-stakes tournament.

The grandmaster and bona fide chess luminary Maurice Ashley was there, calling out commentary as he often does when championship matches are broadcast around the world. He is known to use lines like, "Pawns are attacking mercilessly!" and "The bishop is slicing and dicing!"

But what Mr. Ashley had to say about chess on this night was more academic. Literally. "A lot of times in education we try to teach kids the one right answer and that leads, in my opinion, to robotic thinking," he told the players, encouraging them to think of multiple possible moves before choosing the best play. "Real life isn't like that. Is there ever one right answer? Generating alternatives for the sake of alternatives is a good thing."

The players, mostly New York City public school teachers, nodded. This routine, the playing of chess followed by deep thoughts on education, happens every Wednesday night during a new class Mr. Ashley is teaching called "Introduction to Logical Thinking Through Chess" for the mathematics department at City College. Mr. Ashley and the dean of the college's school of education, Alfred S. Posamentier, organized the class with a lofty goal: improve teaching by guiding a group of teachers through the problem-solving strategies that are part of a good chess player's arsenal. [continue].

From the BBC: Fidgeting children ‘learn more’.

Children who fidget with their hands in class learn more quickly than those who stay still, say researchers.

Psychologists found that children who could move their hands around freely were better at learning than pupils who were not allowed to move.

They believe that hand movements and gestures can help children to think, speak and learn. [continue]

Three kids spent eight summers filming their version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and oh my, the dedication they had. From the Globe and Mail: Backyard remakers of the Lost Ark.

Strompolos daydreamed about the swashbuckling archeologist. He lay in bed recreating Indy's fabulous adventures fighting Nazis with ex-flame Marion. Then one day, Strompolos decided to take his Indy fixation to a new level. He recruited two Christ Episcopal Day School pals (and fellow geeks) -- Eric Zala and Jayson Lamb -- to help him remake, shot by shot (649 in all), Spielberg's famous film.

For the next eight summers, they used every cent of birthday, Christmas and allowance money to make props and sets to recreate Spielberg's beloved film. Zala's backyard was the Peruvian jungle, a dirt farm was the Sahara, and the Zala's basement was converted into a Nepalese bar that was set on fire. (The boys were grounded for that stunt, and production was halted for the rest of that summer.) [continue]

Now a production company has bought the rights to the kids' story, so you may just be hearing a lot more about this.

Childhood dream graces Vanity Fair - sunherald.com
Playing Indiana - thestranger.com
Interview transcript - abc.net.au

From news.com: Teachers leave grading up to the computer.

A computer program developed at the University of Missouri may take some of the tedium out of teaching -- it grades papers and offers students writing advice.

Ed Brent, professor of sociology at the Columbia, Mo., university, spent six years developing the program, which is called Qualrus, and has been testing it on his pupils for the past two. It works by scanning text for keywords, phrases and language patterns. Students load papers directly into the system via the Web and get nearly instant feedback. (...)

With up to 140 students enrolled in his writing-intensive, introductory sociology course, Brent estimates he's saved more than 200 hours of work per semester with Qualrus. The final papers, which he does read, are usually much better as a result of Qualrus, too. [continue]

From the Globe and Mail: That's it, I'm outta here.

Midway through a murder trial, midway through my life, I decided to quit practising law. I resigned by e-mail, giving two months notice, enough time to finish prosecuting the case. I didn't quit because of that case, although working each day from early morning to midnight crystallized my thinking. Nor was my decision a repudiation of the role of the prosecutor. Provided the law is just, provided the prosecution is done in the spirit of justice for all people, the role of the prosecutor is no more, no less, honourable than that of the defence counsel.

I agonized many unhappy hours wondering if I should quit. The work was interesting, important, with a good pension -- if I could survive 20 more years. Yet the job was immensely stressful, with hundreds of split-second judgments to make daily, a ridiculously heavy caseload, and a wearying, never-ending, assembly line of files. No wonder so many Crown prosecutors burn out. The volume of work takes over your whole life. Assembly line, high-volume work is one of the key problems of our time for everyone. It turns good work bad, and bad work into hell. [continue]

How much do you know about the Islands of San Serriffe? Let's find out with this little quiz.
What's the capital city?
Who's the prime minister?
What language is used on ceremonial occasions?

The answers:
Bodoni is the capital city.
The prime minister is Angelico Pica.
Caslon is the language used on ceremonial occasions.

If all this sounds a tad suspicious, perhaps you know too much about type, too much about the world, or maybe you're quick to spot a scam on April Fool's. But you know, I didn't make this one up - The Guardian newspaper did, back in 1977, and thousands of people fell for it. Here, go look at Return to San Serriffe from the Guardian. The Island of San Serriffe page at Metal Type has more details, including a map.

Related links:
San Serriffe - Wikipedia
Pica - Wikipedia
Caslon - MyFonts
Bodoni - MyFonts
San Serriffe - Museum of Hoaxes
San Serriffe - Typographica

From Aish.com: Orphan No More.

A few months ago, Sima, the cashier in our local grocery store got engaged. She is a quiet and shy young woman, so I wished her a hearty "Mazal Tov" and made a mental note to buy her a nice wedding gift.

Things would have ended with that if not for my son, Yosef, who enlightened me about Sima's situation. He had heard from other boys in our local park that Sima was an orphan who had emigrated from Russia at age 10. I looked at him skeptically. But Yosef patiently explained that Sima had no parents and lived in an orphanage a few blocks away. I was mystified. How could there be Jewish children in the 21st century living in orphanages? [continue]

Articles about the things kind-hearted people do for strangers always make me sniffle over my newspaper, even if it is the electronic edition.

From The Walrus: Poetsmart.

Just like people, poets can develop unhealthy, adverse, and sometimes dangerous habits. Poets are cute but, let's face it, they can disrupt a household. Like children, they need guidance and discipline to live happily and healthily with the "adults" in their lives. From fundamental manners to problem solving, anything is possible with a good education.

POETSMART's professional Poet Training Instructors can help you teach your poet a variety of skills, from the basics of good behaviour to complicated tricks and everything in between. Developed by the world's leading poet trainers and behaviourists, this gentle and effective approach is fun for both poets and their families. Regardless of your poet's age or skill level, we have a course that will help him learn new, desired behaviours. Choose from the following three levels: [continue]

From Tales of the underworld in the Guardian.

The Romans had a goddess of sewers, Cloacina; Titus Tacitus, who reigned with Romulus, erected a statue to her. The French, too, have long taken pride in their sanitation: tourist trips around the Paris sewers, still an attraction today, began as early as 1858, when sightseers were transported in hand-pushed carts. (Thames Water opens London's sewers for a week in May but prefers not to advertise the fact too widely, for fear the demand would be too great.) Victor Hugo made Paris's sewers central to the plot of Les Misérables. "Paris has another Paris under herself," he wrote, "a Paris of sewers, which has its streets, its crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries, and its traffic, which is slime." Sewers, he added, were "the conscience of the city" - they tell all: "no more false appearances, no plastering over ... filth removes its shirt ... there is nothing more except what really exists."

The Victorians were inventive in denying "what really exists", and in polite modern society that practice has continued, with euphemisms for the place where we go (loo, restroom, little boys' or girls' room) and for what we do there (pay a visit, spend a penny, wash our hands, powder our nose). But the Victorians did address the practicalities of sewage, in numerous parliamentary commissions and debates. A key figure was Edwin Chadwick, whose Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1848) sold 20,000 copies and led to widespread reform throughout the country. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a stimulus, too - 827,000 people used the WCs specially installed for the occasion in Hyde Park. In the 1850s and 60s, new sewerage systems were constructed in towns from Brighton to Birmingham (a trip to the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry will show you what was done there). In London, the task was entrusted to Joseph Bazalgette - one he began in 1859 and completed in 1875. [continue]

This article isn't for the gentlest of readers, but rather for the more hardy ones.

From Time: Secrets of the Shy.

It's hard to get much lower-tech than the laboratory of psychologist Sam Putnam at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. The equipment here is strictly five-and-dime--soap bubbles, Halloween masks, noisemakers--but the work Putnam is doing is something else entirely. On any given day, the lab bustles with toddlers who come to play with his toys and be observed while they do so. Some of the children rush at the bubbles, delight at the noise toys, squeal with pleasure when a staff member dons a mask. Others stand back, content to observe. Others cry.

Those differences are precisely what Putnam is looking for. What he's studying during his unlikely playdates is that elusive temperamental divide between those of us who thrill to the new and those of us who prefer what we know--those who seek out the unfamiliar and those who retreat into the cozy and safe. It's in that divide, many scientists believe, that the mysteries of shyness may lie. [continue]

Link found at Rebecca's Pocket.

From a review on Gear Live:

The SLEEPTRACKER watch is unique in that while it tells you the time and has a built-in alarm like every other digital watch, this one actually monitors your sleep and wakes you at the moment that your body would best adjust from moving from a sleeping state to being awake. [continue]

Link found here at the Guardian's Online Blog.

Related:
Sleeptracker.com

From MIT: Clocky.

Clocky is, quite simply, for people who have trouble waking up.

When the alarm clock goes off and the snooze button is pressed, Clocky will roll off the bedside table and wheel away, bumping mindlessly into objects on the floor until it eventually finds a spot to rest. Minutes later, when the alarm sounds again, the sleeper must get up out of bed and search for Clocky. This ensures that the person is fully awake before turning it off. Small wheels that are concealed by Clocky's shag enable it to move and reposition itself, and an internal processor helps it find a new hiding spot every day. [continue]

Link found here at Slashdot.

This is very cool. From Rick Garlikov's The Socratic Method: Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling.

The following is a transcript of a teaching experiment, using the Socratic method, with a regular third grade class in a suburban elementary school. I present my perspective and views on the session, and on the Socratic method as a teaching tool, following the transcript. The class was conducted on a Friday afternoon beginning at 1:30, late in May, with about two weeks left in the school year. This time was purposely chosen as one of the most difficult times to entice and hold these children's concentration about a somewhat complex intellectual matter. The point was to demonstrate the power of the Socratic method for both teaching and also for getting students involved and excited about the material being taught. There were 22 students in the class. I was told ahead of time by two different teachers (not the classroom teacher) that only a couple of students would be able to understand and follow what I would be presenting. When the class period ended, I and the classroom teacher believed that at least 19 of the 22 students had fully and excitedly participated and absorbed the entire material. The three other students' eyes were glazed over from the very beginning, and they did not seem to be involved in the class at all. The students' answers below are in capital letters.

The experiment was to see whether I could teach these students binary arithmetic (arithmetic using only two numbers, 0 and 1) only by asking them questions. None of them had been introduced to binary arithmetic before. Though the ostensible subject matter was binary arithmetic, my primary interest was to give a demonstration to the teacher of the power and benefit of the Socratic method where it is applicable. That is my interest here as well. I chose binary arithmetic as the vehicle for that because it is something very difficult for children, or anyone, to understand when it is taught normally; and I believe that a demonstration of a method that can teach such a difficult subject easily to children and also capture their enthusiasm about that subject is a very convincing demonstration of the value of the method. [continue]

Link found here at Snarkout.

Remember that NY Times article on coping with life's annoyances? Writer Ian Urbina has come out with a follow-up story, which consists of readers' tactics. I like this one:

Dena Roslan was sick of a co-worker who kept helping himself to her lunch cookies. So Ms. Roslan, 30, a clothing designer who works in Manhattan, bought a bag of dog biscuits that looked like biscotti. "My only remorse was not being able to see his face after he ate the bait," she said. [continue]

I don't think you'll need a password to view this NYT article. If you do, BugMeNot will help.

From Aish: The Flower of David.

It's known as the ultimate survivor. It grows wild in Israel, thriving in the harsh dry conditions that would kill many other plants.

And what do the cells of this hardy survivor -- a native Israeli Persian buttercup -- look like under a microscope?

A Star of David.

"It really is symbolic," says Dr. Rina Kamenetsky, a researcher at Israel's Volcani Institute, who made the surprising discovery while trying to understand the survival mechanisms of this resilient bulb, known in Hebrew as nurit, and in Latin as Ranunculus asiaticus. [continue]

From csmonitor.com: Forget spandex, it's saris for Bangalore joggers.

BANGALORE, INDIA – Many wear saris. Some don salwar kameezes, knee-length Indian tunics with loose pants. Others sport track pants and tees. One or two can't leave their burqas behind for religious reasons.

These women have come to a 300-acre wooded haven in the heart of congested Bangalore to walk and jog - minus any contour-hugging lycra or spandex.

The concern for modesty rubs off on men as well. They're attired mostly in baggy shorts and tees, though some wear slacks. One or two are wrapped in an Indian white dhoti, the costume favored by Gandhi. [continue]

From the New York Times: No Need to Stew: A Few Tips to Cope With Life's Annoyances.

When Seth Shepsle goes to Starbucks, he orders a "medium" because "grande" - as the coffee company calls the size, the one between big and small - annoys him.

Meg Daniel presses zero whenever she hears a computerized operator on the telephone so that she can talk to a real person. "Just because they want a computer to handle me doesn't mean I have to play along," she said.

When subscription cards fall from magazines Andrew Kirk is reading, he stacks them in a pile at the corner of his desk. At the end of each month, he puts them in the mail but leaves them blank so that the advertiser is forced to pay the business reply postage without gaining a new subscriber.

Life can involve big hardships, like being fired or smashing up your car. There is only so much you can do about them. But far more prevalent - and perhaps in the long run just as insidious - are life's many little annoyances.

These, you can do something about. [continue]

Link found here at Linkfilter.

(I doubt you'll need a password to read the NYT article, but if you do, get one here.)

From Wired: Need a Building? Just Add Water.

In a world with millions of refugees, numerous war zones and huge areas devastated by natural disaster, aid agencies and militaries have long needed a way to quickly erect shelters on demand.

Soon, there will be such a method. A pair of engineers in London have come up with a "building in a bag" -- a sack of cement-impregnated fabric. To erect the structure, all you have to do is add water to the bag and inflate it with air. Twelve hours later the Nissen-shaped shelter is dried out and ready for use.

The structure is intended to improve upon two current methods of providing emergency shelter: tents, which provide only poor protection, or prefabricated, portable buildings that are expensive and difficult to transport. Dubbed the Concrete Canvas, the shelter incorporates the best aspects of both forms. It is almost as easy to transport as a tent, but is as durable and secure as a portable building. [continue]

From The Telegraph: Taxing on the ears for late payers.

Tax collectors in southern India have come up with an unusual - but highly effective - scheme to encourage slow payers to settle outstanding bills.

Ten-strong teams of wedding drummers are being paid to set up camp outside the homes of defaulting residents, with orders to continue playing until they pay up.

The scheme is being implemented by city officials in Hyderabad which is owed 50 million rupees (£625,000) in unpaid taxes.

"They make a damned big racket," said T S R Anjaneyulu, a municipal tax commissioner, "and even the neighbours approve because they get to see who hasn't paid up their bills. [continue]

A while back I was snooping around on RecipeZaar, and happened across a recipe for Vinegar of the Four Thieves. The recipe's intro blurb says:

A basic version of this antiseptic brew so named because the four thieves used to apply this to themselves to protect themselves from the Bubonic Plague while plundering those who had died from it.

What? Now that's a story I hadn't heard. Here's more from killerplants.com: What was the Vinegar of Four Thieves?

Fear and chaos reigned during these plagues. People performed odd and cruel rituals to spare their town. Paris preferred the danse macabre, frenetic dancing or choreomania. Some places buried all the young children alive as a sacrifice or pubescent virgins were stripped nude and forced to drag a plow counter-clockwise around the village. Flagellants beat themselves so God would have mercy. ("Black Death", Timothy R. Tangherlini, Medieval Folklore, Lindahl, McNamara, and Lindow ed., Oxford University Press, 2002)

Legends also abounded over those who survived, in particular, four thieves who robbed the bodies and houses of the dead. The confused legend places the thieves in Marseilles, or Toulouse, or maybe London, on or around the late 1500s, 1628, 1632, or 1722, caught and brought before the mayor, or councilmen, or judges, and sentenced to death. They would be spared if they told the secret for their survival: the Vinegar of Four Thieves.

Some recipes call for red wine vinegar, others say cider vinegar. Mixed with herbs--lavender blossoms, rue, rosemary, sage--some added wormwood, thyme, mint, and garlic, the vinegar was either steeped in the sun or buried in a crock. One could then get immunity by drinking it, sniffing it, or splashing it on the body. Or setting it on fire?

Oddly, although long proven not to confer any immunity, the Vinegar of Four Thieves was in use as late as 1793 when yellow fever hit Philadelphia. [see full page]

Related:
Vinegar - Wikipedia

This is delightful, and you should go read it: The ontology and epistemology of childhood.

As children, we have so little concrete information about the world, and such a random collection of experience-based learning, that we construct oddly poetic worldviews and beliefs.

Some of these misconstructions of knowledge have their origin in semantic misunderstandings. Having been told repeatedly by our parents that we could be anything when we grew up, I decided at about age 4 that I would be the Pope. (We weren't a Catholic family, and I had not the faintest idea of the Pope's role; I just liked the hat.) Given the same sort of encouragement, my sister N. eagerly looked forward to becoming a circus bear. [continue]

It's from macbebekin.

From csmonitor.com: All the news that's kid friendly.

PARIS – It's early morning in the Paris headquarters of leading French newspaper Mon Quotidien, and the news team is busy discussing a story on the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.

"Do you know where Mecca is?" asks an editor to the news team.

"I've never heard of it," replies Kajetan, the "editor in chief." "Neither have I," add two other editors.

That might sound surprising, but you can't blame Kajetan for his apparent lack of knowledge. He is only 10 years old, and along with two other primary school kids, Juliette and François, he has been invited to be editor in chief for the day at one of the world's only daily newspapers for children. [continue]

I've blogged about the poison garden twice before (see this and this), but it has been a while since we've had an update. Here's the latest, courtesy of the Beeb: Duchess' opium garden is unveiled.

The Duchess of Northumberland's controversial poison garden has been officially opened.

Cannabis, opium poppies, magic mushrooms and coca - the source of cocaine - all feature at the centuries-old Alnwick Garden.

The Home Office granted the Alnwick Garden Trust permission to grow the plants late last year.

Poisonous foxglove, tobacco and wild lettuce, which can be used as a tranquilliser, will also be grown. [continue]

From Gizmodo: Wind-Powered Cell Phones.

Students at the Indian Institute of Technology have developed a pocket-sized turbine that attaches to your cellphone to charge it. Best suited for use in costal areas with near-constant wind flow or long talks with your mother, the device can also be used during travel as long as you set it up against the wind. [continue]

Related:
Using air to charge cellphones? IIT-Delhi does it! - rediff.com

From Reuters: Best-Dressed Homeless in the World....

Some South Korean homeless are dressing in style after the government gave away thousands of fake designer garments confiscated by customs agents.

The Korea Customs Service distributed more than 3,500 fake pieces in the southern city of Pusan this month with the permission of the fashion houses whose designs had been pirated. [continue]

From Scotsman.com: Trial Set to Break the Da Vinci Code.

Art experts and conservative clerics are holding an unusual "trial" in the hometown of Leonardo da Vinci: concerned about the legions of fans of the The Da Vinci Code who take claims in the book as gospel truth, the mock tribunal aims to sort out fact from fiction.

The event in in the Italian town of Vinci, just outside of Florence, began late yesterday with an opening statement by Alessandro Vezzosi, director of a Leonardo museum.

He said he will produce photographs and documents as evidence of the mistakes and historical inaccuracies contained in Dan Brown’s smash hit novel. [continue]

Interesting, but how pathetic that this sort of thing is needed to stop people from taking a work of fiction as fact.

From Reuters: Personality, Not Values, Makes the Marriage -Study.

Shared moral values are less important than compatible personalities as a recipe for a good marriage, according to a study released on Sunday.

Married couples often share the same attitudes about faith and other values, researchers from the University of Iowa found. But those with personalities similar to their spouses were the happiest.

"People may be attracted to those who have similar attitudes, values and beliefs and even marry them," the researchers said, and those qualities are easy to spot in a potential mate. Attitudes toward subjects such as religion or politics "are highly visible," they said.

But how married people behave was shown to have a greater effect on happiness. [continue]

From Ananova: Little green women a success at traffic lights.

Little green women on traffic lights in Germany are a success with motorists and pedestrians.

The trend began in a town in Saxony last year where the female figure in a short skirt and with long hair was introduced at various traffic lights.

The designers claimed the female figure was a safer alternative to the classic male design.

Joachim Rossberg, head of Ildenfelser Signaltechnik, which produces the traffic lights, said: "Pedestrians simply notice her more often." He said that her curvy body allows more light to shine through.

Traffic authorities that gave the project the go-ahead have now approved them across Germany and this year the female traffic lights have started appearing in neighbouring countries. [continue, see photo]

From the Beeb: Left-handers have different view.

Left-handed and right-handed people view the world differently, scientists have shown.

Psychologists found they use opposite sides of their brains when looking at, and making sense of, an image.

It is already known that handedness is associated with differences in the way we make sense of language, and possibly in spatial orientation.

Details of the study, by the University of Birmingham, are published in Nature Neuroscience.

The researchers showed right-handed people use the right hemisphere of their brain to focus on the whole of an image - for example a forest.

But when it comes to focusing on the detail within an image - for instance individual trees in a forest - then they use their left hemisphere.

For left-handers the opposite is true. [continue]

This article comes from the Telegraph:

Baroness Chapman of Leeds is holding court in her House of Lords office. She is bold, assertive, brimming with humour and thoroughly enjoying her newfound status as a peer of the realm.

It is difficult to imagine that when she was born with brittle bone disease, doctors feared that her disability would limit her existence to such a degree that her life would not be worth living.

"When I was born, the medical people said I would be blind, I would be deaf, I would be unable to communicate and I would have no noticeable mental function. Forget it. My life was worth nothing," she said. She cast a look around her red-carpeted office, at the leather chairs emblazoned with the House of Lords portcullis, the piles of embossed stationery and her personal assistant organising her schedule, and added: "That is a little bit different from what I have managed to achieve and where I am today."

Nicky Chapman became the first person with a congenital disability to be appointed to the House of Lords under the People's Peers initiative when she took up her seat in October last year. Her maiden speech was unforgettable, causing a storm in the Upper House as she condemned the Government's Mental Capacity Bill because "if this Bill had been passed 43 years ago, I would not be here". [continue]

From New Scientist: The art of seeing without sight.

It is an odd sight. A middle-aged man, fully reclined, drawing pictures of hammers and mugs and animal figurines on a special clipboard, which is balanced precariously on a pillow atop his ample stomach.

A half-dozen people buzz around him. One adjusts a towel under his neck to make him more comfortable, another wields a stopwatch and chants instructions to start doing this or stop doing that, and yet another translates everything into Turkish. A small group convenes in a corner to assess the proceedings. A few of us just stand around watching, and trying not to get in the way. The elaborate ritual is a practice run for an upcoming brain scan and the researchers want to get everything just right. Meanwhile, the man at the centre of all this attention, a blind painter, cracks jokes that keep everyone tittering.

The painter is Esref Armagan. And he is here in Boston to see if a peek inside his brain can explain how a man who has never seen can paint pictures that the sighted easily recognise - and even admire. He paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but he's never seen any of these things. He depicts colour, shadow and perspective, but it is not clear how he could have witnessed these things either. How does he do it? [continue]

Link found at kottke.org remaindered links.

Sam Schultz doesn't work for an aid agency; he's just a regular guy. When Sam heard about the tsunami, he flew to Sumatra, hired a boat, packed up a whole bunch of supplies and headed off to help. The remarkable story of Sam's work is at csmonitor.com: One man's mission to bring relief to cut-off villages. Well worth a read.

Prague is lovely, and well worth a visit. But if you do visit Prague, watch out for the taxi drivers. The BBC reports:

Prague's mayor has had the chance to see for himself whether the many accounts of city taxi drivers ripping off unsuspecting tourists are true.

Posing as an Italian visitor, in a fake moustache and sunglasses, Pavel Bem hailed a taxi for a short ride - and was promptly overcharged by some 500%. [continue]

Yipes.

Prague-related content on Mirabilis.ca:
The mystery of Prague's missing vav
Archaeological dig throws new light on history of Prague
The Prague Golem
St Wenceslaus
St Vitus, and St Vitus' Cathedral (includes photos)
Prague Astronomical Clock
Prague
Good King Wenceslas

From the paper edition of today's Vancouver Sun: Pianist backs into solution to a Beethoven mystery.

A B.C. music teacher claims to have solved a mystery surrounding Beethoven's last piano sonata, described by some as a flawed masterwork because of a jarring change of metre in the middle of the piece.

Saltspring Island musician Paul Verville, a classically trained pianist who had his "revelation" while teaching himself Beethoven's Opus III this fall, insists the German composer's original instructions for playing the sonato must have been mistakenly altered at some point in history and led generations of performers astray.

It's all quite fascinating.

The online version of this article is only available to subscribers, to which we all say "harrumph!" So for more information, go take a look at the article that appeared in Saltspring's newspaper, the Gulf Islands Driftwood: Local pianist finds Beethoven's rhythm for sonata ‘breakthrough’.

Related:
Paul Verville CDs -SaltspringMusic.com

There have been recent thefts at the Victoria and Albert Museum, but nothing on on the scale of what's been previously stolen, it seems. From the BBC:

A series of thefts by an attendant at the Victoria and Albert museum went unnoticed for around two decades, according to National Archive records.

The thief, a man called Nevin, stole 2,544 items from the museum, prompting a security report in 1954.

A subsequent stock-take revealed about 5,000 objects were missing, although not all were attributable to Nevin.

No stock-taking had taken place for 16 years — not since 1937 — prior to the discovery of the thefts.

Details of the thefts came to light in files now released by the National Archives at Kew, in London.

Objects taken included musical instruments, ceramics, prints, oil paintings, lacquer boxes and 98 Japanese swords. [continue]

Related:
Victoria and Albert Museum -vam.ac.uk

In the midst of all those very sad tsunami stories, there are a couple of astonishing accounts of how people survived. There was the American woman who was scuba diving during the tsunami, and then there was Martin Markwell, the guy from Wales who was surfing off the Sri Lankan coast when when the biggest wave ever came along. He surfed it, of course, and survived. The story is here in the Guardian.

This Norwegian news page has a photo of Martin, his wife, son, and somewhat battered surfboard.

Meanwhile, we can at least be grateful that the web is helping aid agencies gather resources to help cope with the aftermath of the tsunami disaster.

From nature.com: World's smallest baby ‘doing well’.

Her name means "white as milk", but when she was born she weighed no more than a tub of butter. Rumaisa, the world's smallest surviving baby, has been unveiled to the world three months after her birth at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Illinois.

With a birth weight of just over 240 grams, Rumaisa now holds the record for the smallest premature baby to be successfully kept alive. She and her twin sister Hiba, also tiny at just under 570 grams, were born by Caesarian section on 19 September. [continue]

I'm a sucker for stories like this.

Once upon a time I spent ages learning to play the guitar. Chordbook.com would have made it a lot easier! The site explains:

Try virtual guitar and chordbook — our main application. Featuring a fully interactive flash-built guitar, allowing you to strum and hear guitar chords as well as see the finger positions. Once loaded you can access a database of 1,000+ guitar chords, make your own chords and use the ‘name chord’ feature to identify them, save them to your personal chordbank, mute strings, put on a capo and more.

Learn to play scales and improve your lead solos, with the guitar scales generator. Quick tune your guitar using the guitar tuner and try out alternative tunings.

It's very fun.

Link found here at lonita's links log.

From the BBC: Mathematicians crochet chaos.

Mathematicians have made a crochet model of chaos - and are challenging anyone else to repeat the effort.

Dr Hinke Osinga and Professor Bernd Krauskopf, of Bristol University's engineering mathematics department, used 25,511 crochet stitches to represent the Lorenz equations.

The equations describe the nature of chaotic systems - such as the weather or a turbulent river.

The academics are offering a bottle of champagne to anyone who cares to follow the pattern published in the journal Mathematics Intelligencer. [continue].

I bet you're just itching to know what today's date is in the Hebrew calendar, or in the Persian calendar, or in the French revolutionary calendar. And I've got just the page for you! The convert a date page at wundermoosen.com will convert between 18 different calendars, some of which are pretty obscure.

Sidebar links give background information for each calendar, and look - there's other stuff over there, too: links to saints' days, days to go, and so forth.

Do you recognize the stunning clock in the photo at the top of the convert a date page? It's the Prague Orloj.

From Wired: Roads Gone Wild.

Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn't done his job. "The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a road, they always try to add something," Monderman says. "To my mind, it's much better to remove things."

Monderman is one of the leaders of a new breed of traffic engineer - equal parts urban designer, social scientist, civil engineer, and psychologist. The approach is radically counterintuitive: Build roads that seem dangerous, and they'll be safer. [continue]

Link found here at Dappled Things.

What do you want to do before you die? In case you're short on ideas, the Guardian features Turn yourself into a diamond: tips from science on a good life, and death.

A thinktank of British scientists has come up with a new way of quickening the national intellect — a brain-taxing spin on the old formula of 100 things to do before you die.

The group, which includes the evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, astronomer Sir Patrick Moore, neuroscientist Susan Greenfield and the inventor James Dyson, urges us all to take samples of our own DNA, measure the speed of light with chocolate, and solve the mathematical mystery of the number 137.

The list, compiled by New Scientist magazine, suggests booking to see Galileo's middle finger (preserved in Florence) or ordering liquid nitrogen to make the "world's smoothest ice-cream" at home.

More complicated options include joining the 300 Club at the South Pole (they take a sauna to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, then run naked to the pole in minus 100 F) or learning Choctaw, a language with two past tenses — one for giving information which is definitely true, the other for passing on material taken without checking from someone else. [continue]

From Wired: Wikipedia Creators Move Into News.

After doing much in recent years to revolutionize the way an encyclopedia can be built and maintained, the team behind Wikipedia is attempting to apply its collaborative information-gathering model to journalism.

Through a new effort, Wikinews, members of the open-source community who write and edit Wikipedia's encyclopedia entries are encouraged to test their skills as journalists. The news site follows a similar set of rules as the encyclopedia, which allows anyone to edit and post corrections to entries, so long as each change is recorded. [continue]

Related:
Wikipedia

Scott Clark blogs from Kiev, Ukraine. Here's an excerpt from something he posted yesterday: My mother-in-law, revolutionary.

"We were told that she went up to the guards in front of the entrance, guards in full riot gear, masks and shield, in ranks twenty deep. She went up to one and said, "I am a babushka [translated roughly as "grandmother" but used for every older woman grandmother age] from the village. I came here to find out how you are. Are you fine? Are you hungry? Maybe your parents are somewhere worrying about you?

"Babushka has come from the village with some warm socks for you. Maybe your feet are cold and you need some socks?" She talked to this fellow in this way and won him over. He lowered his shield to expose his face and he was grinning at her while she spoke to him."... [continue]

Link found here at Barista.

What do you want to do with your life? 43 Things is a fine place to start making your list.

From Expatica: Homeless in Amsterdam advertise ice cream.

Dozens of homeless people have appeared on the streets of Amsterdam sporting warm jackets emblazoned with an advert for ice cream maker Ben & Jerry's.

The scheme is the brain child of the Augustinian nuns of Warmoesstraat to help pay for the food and shelter they provide for homeless people. Warmoesstraat is near the city's main red light district where many homeless people gather.

The nuns say they are offering businesses the opportunity to advertise in a socially responsible way in exchange for a donation to the convent's coffers. [continue]

Remember reading about the Duchess of Northumberland's poison garden? Here's an update from The Guardian:

The Duchess of Northumberland has been given permission to grow drugs in her world famous public garden.

Cannabis, opium poppies, tobacco and the coca plant — the source of cocaine — are to feature in the Alnwick Garden, in Northumberland after the Home Office approved a licence for the garden's charity to grow the plants for educational purposes.

The drugs will be grown alongside more than 50 dangerous plants in the country's largest public poison garden.

Magic mushrooms will also be grown in the garden, which has been designed by the Belgian Peter Virtz.

Also planned is the poisonous foxglove, the tobacco plant and wild lettuce, which can be used as a tranquilliser. [continue]

Related site:
Alnwick Garden - alnwickgarden.com

Related news articles:
Duchess to grow cannabis, opium and cocaine -Ananova
Duchess grows opium and cannabis - BBC
Duchess's garden of cannabis, cocaine and opium -Times Online
Duchess to grow opium and cannabis in educational public garden - Scotsman
Duchess is allowed to grow illegal pot plants - Telegraph
Drug baroness: Cannabis and poppies will grow at Alnwick - Independent

From the Sydney Morning Herald: Urban design.

Students at a Rome design school have come up with a folding cardboard home for use by street people.

The Quasar Institute's director, Orazio Carpenzano, says the relatively lightweight "living box" has been inspired by origami, is easy to stow when folded and can be made without scissors or glue.

(Password required for the Sydney Morning Herald.)

The Australian site cathnews.com has more information: Rome Catholic charities to receive cardboard shelters for homeless.

Costing around $A20, the structure is a long rectangular box big enough to lie down in and tall enough for a three-year-old child to stand in. The upper surface is inclined and there is a panel at one end that substitutes for a door.

Mr Carpenzano says cardboard was chosen for its flexibility and a capacity for insulation that is "more effective than a blanket". [continue]

From The Independent: Rhapsody in red: how children of China came to lead the world in Western classical music.

On any given day in China, 38 million children are practising the piano, in a country that produces more such instruments than any other.

Chinese pianists regularly win more prestigious international music prizes than British, Italian or French children. Last year 21-year-old Lang Lang, a former child prodigy, was the world's best-selling classical pianist. Three years earlier his rival, Li Yundi, won first prize in the Warsaw International Chopin Competition. There is probably not a conservatory in the West lacking a roster peppered with Chinese names, nor a major American orchestra without Chinese musicians. (...)

Just why these oriental nations have taken to Western classical music with such a passion when other cultures in Africa, South Asia or the Arab world have not, is a mystery. How did Western classical music take such deep root in this alien soil? (...)

The famous Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci presented a clavichord to the Ming emperor Wan Li in 1601 and even taught his eunuchs to play a few pieces. When Lord Macartney led his embassy to the court of the Qing Emperor Qianlong, in an attempt to open China to direct trade, he brought a German band with him, hoping to impress his hosts. The Qing court liked Western music, and several emperors employed a Western-trained orchestra. One or two studied how to play Western musical instruments, but the knowledge imparted by the Jesuits and others never spread beyond the Summer Palace. [continue]

If you've ever wanted to climb Mount Sinai, this article might be enough to change your mind. It's fascinating in an "I'm so glad I don't have to do that" kind of way.

Some set out at 2am to walk the seven-kilometre camel path from St Catherine's Monastery on the valley floor, then leave their camels behind to ascend the 750 stone steps to the summit. Judging by the way the tethered camels stick their tongues out sideways, mocking passersby, they're grateful they don't have to climb any higher.

I left at 4.30am, having walked the camel path the previous day and slept in a camp site surrounded by 1000-year-old cypress trees and huge, ancient boulders.

Named Elijah's Basin, the camp site boasted a shop where the proprietor climbed off his prayer mat to serve customers. There was also a sit-down toilet so filthy that a fellow trekker warned: "Don't even think about it."

This would be good advice to anyone contemplating a third route to the summit — climbing the 3000 steps from the monastery to the camp site and then the further 750 to the top. That journey, aptly named the Stairway of Repentance, would cripple the fittest football team, assuming nobody died first, cartwheeling through the night to the valley floor like the original St Catherine, a virgin who denied a lustful king. [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
At the Monastery of the Burning Bush
Ancient monastery opens library

Elsewhere:
Biblical Mt Sinai - Wikipedia

From Wired: Advent of the Robotic Monkeys.

If a monkey is hungry but has his arms pinned, there's not much he can do about it. Unless that monkey can control a nearby robotic arm with his brain.

And that's exactly what the monkey in Andrew Schwartz's neurobiology lab at the University of Pittsburgh can do, feeding himself using a prosthetic arm controlled solely by his thoughts. [continue]

From The Independent: A stitch in time.

In a small, overheated room in Wandsworth Prison, the inmates are gathering for a needlework lesson. First to arrive is Michael. He puts his bag of sewing on the table for the teachers, Cherie and Jackie, to inspect. "That's beautiful work," says Cherie. Jackie agrees. Michael, who is doing four years for GBH, beams and rewards the ladies with pictures of his grandchildren. The women "ooh" and "aah" at the little tykes.

Katy Emck, chairperson of Fine Cell Work, the charity that organises the needlework classes, saunters over and picks up the bag. "This is a beautiful as anything you'd get from the Royal College of Needlework," she says. Although I'm a needlework novice, I have to agree with her.

Fine Cell Work was founded in 1995 by the philanthropist Lady Anne Tree. Her idea was that if you give inmates something purposeful to do in prison — something that can make them a bit of money — they're less likely to re-offend when released into society at the end of their stint. [continue].

Related:
Prison art comes up from the cells - BBC
Fine Cell Work

From the BBC: Oasis women fashion their own freedom.

Embroidery lies behind a peaceful revolution in the very traditional Egyptian oasis of Siwa.

The small patch of green near the Libyan border currently holds dates as the mainstay of its economy.

But the income of the palm tree is slowly being eclipsed by the efforts of the women of the oasis.

Women — married and unmarried — are able to earn more than twice the average Siwan agricultural wage earned by men by skilfully wielding a needle.

Outside the home they are totally covered, from head to toe, and have no contact with the outside world. But their symbolic stitches are on show on the catwalk in Milan. [continue]

From The BBC: Curry toothpaste ‘a future taste’.

A new report looking at the innovations of the future contains food for thought for many staples of British life.

Curry-flavoured toothpaste, banana mayonnaise and smelling CDs could be the future, according to Mintel.

The research, from its Global New Products Database's Innovations Club, claims every area of day-to-day life is ripe for change - and nothing is safe.

Other promised novelties include an alarm clock which wakes you up with a gentle waft of your chosen scent. [continue].

Looks like the submarine Canada bought from the UK is not such a bargain. From The Guardian:

With due pomp and ceremony the Royal Navy handed over the submarine HMS Upholder to the Canadians at the weekend. The vessel was renamed HMCS Chicoutimi - after the city on the edge of Quebec's vast northern wilds - and the maple leaf flag was hoisted. Then after its final preparations, it began to chug towards Nova Scotia. [continue].

And then it promptly caught fire, due to an electrical problem. Thanks, Britain! What a deal.

I think we should make our own submarines. Considering the two articles I found on homemade submarines (first, second) ... well, how hard can it be?

Related:
Weather hampers rescue of Canadian submarine - CBC
Rescue ship heads for submarine - BBC

Updates:
Stricken sub under tow to Faslane - The Guardian, Oct 8th, 2004
Crew tell of sub terror - The Guardian, Oct 12th, 2004

So we're not in Prague any more. Here it's sunny and hot, and I've been swimming and skin diving in warm water. This is the life! If I show you just three photos, will you know where we are?

This first photo should do it for the linguists. The second photo is a big fat clue, and so is the third. Have you guessed?

Here's a bit about the Prague Golem, from this page of Prague legends.

In the 16th century, during the reign of Rudolf II, an old Jewish man named Rabbi Judah Loew lived in Prague. During that time, the Jewish people of Prague were being attacked and lived their lives in fear. Rabbi Loew decided to protect the Jews against pogroms by creating the Golem, a giant who according to the Cabala could be made of clay from the banks of the Vltava. Following the prescribed rituals, the Rabbi built the Golem and made him come to life by reciting a special incantation in Hebrew. The word "emet", meaning "truth", was placed on the Golem's forehead.

The Golem would obey the Rabbi's every order and would help and protect the people of the Jewish Ghetto. However, as he grew bigger, he also became more violent and started killing people and spreading fear. Rabbi Loew was promised that the violence against the Jews would stop if the Golem was destroyed. The Rabbi agreed. By removing the first letter from the word "emet", thus changing it to "met" (meaning "death"), life was taken out of the Golem. According to legend, the Golem was brought back to life by Rabbi Loew's son, and may still be protecting Prague today.

And here's how to create a golem from the comfort of home.

Related:
Legend of the Golem - appstate.edu. (This version is written for children. It's got more details than the version above.)
The Golem -JewishMag.com

The Prague Astronomical Clock (Prague Orloj) is one of the things we saw this afternoon. Here's an article about it from Wikipedia:

The Prague Astronomical Clock or Prague Orloj (Czech: Pražský orloj) is a medieval astronomical clock located in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. The Orloj is mounted on the southern wall of Old Town City Hall in the Old Town Square and is a popular tourist attraction.

The Orloj is composed of three main components: the astronomical dial, representing the position of the Sun and Moon in the sky and displaying various astronomical details; "The Walk of the Apostles", a clockwork hourly show of figures of the Apostles and other moving sculptures; and a calendar dial with medallions representing the months. [continue]

Well, finally an Internet cafe! We're in Prague, which is full of amazing things. You'd like to see a bit of what it looks like here, wouldn't you? Here are some photos from TrekEarth.

Here's Kathy Evans' article from the Guardian, Me and My Girl. A must-read, if you ask me.

In everyone's life there is a defining event that steers them off the path they were steadily treading. For me it was my daughter Caoimhe's birth. It was not just her diagnosis that knocked me, but the sheer unexpectedness of it. I had limped through a difficult childhood but in my 20s jobs, boyfriends, opportunities had rattled into place like pieces in a child's shape-sorter. While I put it all down to good fortune, a quiet voice inside me believed you made your own luck. If I ate the right food, worked hard, was a nice person, then I would reap the rewards. Then came Caoimhe, a child with a disability, and the tenets of my existence shattered like glass. [continue]

From csmonitor.com: Now you know.

Did your waitress draw a smiley face on your last restaurant check? It may have been simple cheerfulness on her part, but it's also a proven way to get a bigger tip. Michael Lynn, an associate professor of consumer behavior and marketing at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., has done scientific studies on tipping and offers these strategies to servers: [continue].

From abc.net.au: Speak to my right ear, sing to my left.

Our left and right ears process sound differently, according to new research.

When scientists studied babies' hearing they found the left ear was more attuned to music and the right better at picking up speech-like sounds.

Lead researcher Dr Yvonne Sininger of the University of California at Los Angeles and team published their study in the latest issue of the journal Science.

It has long been known that the right and left halves of the brain process sound differently, but those differences were thought to stem from cellular properties unique to each brain hemisphere.

The new research suggested the differences start at the ear. [continue]

Oh! Oh! Remember the thing about capsule hotels? Well, somebody is finally setting some up in England. From the Guardian: Britain's first taste of the Japanese short-stay capsule hotel will pack a lot of luxury into a little space.

It's not exactly a room with a view, but one of the UK's leading entrepreneurs believes Britain is ready for the capsule hotel - a stack of cramped, windowless pods which can be booked for the night, or for a matter of hours.

Simon Woodroffe, the man responsible for the Yo! Sushi chain of restaurants, has brought the concept from Japan and is planning to build the "Yotels" throughout Britain.

A full-scale model of a Yotel room will be shown at a design fair at Earls Court later this month, and sites are currently being looked at.

For £10 an hour, or £75 a night, guests will be able to sleep in rooms measuring 10 square metres and without any proper windows. [continue]

Just the thing for a nap between flights, yes? Please, Simon, put a capsule hotel in Heathrow airport.

The end of the Guardian article is worth a read, too, for those interested in novelty hotels. Tidbits like this are hard to resist:

In Matmata, in the Tunisian Sahara, Berbers have lived as troglodytes since the 4th century. Many of the 50 underground houses of the village are still in use today and have been converted into hotels. The village was used as a location for Luke Skywalker's house in Star Wars. [continue]

Related:
Tycoon to Launch ‘Capsule’ Hotels - Scotsman.com
Simon Woodroffe - Guardian
Capsule hotel - Wikipedia

From Ananova: Priests demand compensation.

Catholic priests in Croatia want more than half a million pounds a year in compensation after a new zero tolerance law for drink driving was introduced in the country.

The new law means they can no longer drive between churches after drinking wine during holy Mass.

The priests used to drive between churches after each service, but after the legal alcohol limit was reduced to zero, they have been forced to find chauffeurs. [continue]

There's more at the BBC.

From newscientist.com: Babies prefer to gaze upon beautiful faces.

Newborn babies prefer to look at attractive faces, says a UK researcher, suggesting that face recognition is hardwired at birth, rather than learned.

Alan Slater and his colleagues at the University of Exeter showed paired images of faces to babies as young a one day old and found that they spent more time fixated on the more attractive face.

"Attractiveness is not in the eye of the beholder, it’s innate to a newborn infant," says Slater.

Developmental psychologists have known for years that babies have preferences for certain objects, such as high contrast images, and curvy, biological shapes. But where these preferences come from remained unknown.

Slater’s research, using extraordinarily young infants, supports the idea that babies are not mere blank slates, but instead come into the world with a fairly well developed perception system. [continue]

From Wired: Paper Pins Space Racer to Earth.

It's got a rocket, an astronaut and a small prairie town anxious to become a spaceport. But a Canadian team competing for the $10 million Ansari X Prize, an international contest promoting a new generation of privately developed spacecraft, still doesn't have a couple of precious pieces of paper it needs to get to space.

The Toronto-based da Vinci Project announced earlier this month that it plans to launch its Wild Fire rocket from Kindersley, Saskatchewan, on Oct. 2. [continue]

Related:
Ansari X Prize

Did I hear you say you're going to go visit somebody at a summer cottage? Or that you might, ever? Ever ever? Then you must go read Ian Brown's Attack of the cottage mooch. The Globe and Mail summarizes it as follows:

Freeloaders. Hangers-on. Cadgers. Sponges. Soaks. Like something out of Jane Austen, they're the bane of Canada's cottage life -- and IAN BROWN is one of them. He defends the noble art of mooching, but there are dos and don'ts. Too many guests don't follow the rules, and they're ruining it for the rest of us.

Ian Brown knows his stuff; the article contains excellent suggestions.

From the BBC: How can it rain fish?.

The latest in a series of bizarre British weather phenomena is a rain of fish. It may sound like the stuff of legend, but such events are increasingly well documented.

On Wednesday, the village of Knighton, in Powys, was reported to have endured such a fishy deluge. Not a story easily believed - an odd site for a Biblical-style plague, one might think, perhaps to be followed by the waters of the nearby River Teme running red with blood?

But in fact, as the Met Office explains, such occurrences are not as uncommon as they may sound. Not only are they not quite the miraculous events that they seem, rains of fish - and other even more surprising objects - are reported with some frequency. [continue]

From the BBC: Butterfly farming proves worth a flutter.

Haji Mshangama charges across the hilly landscape of the East Usamabara mountains brandishing his blue butterfly net.

Suddenly he snaps the net down and has caught what he is after: a pregnant female Salamis Parhassus butterfly.

This is the beginning of a process lasting up to two weeks which will culminate in the export of the live pupa or chrysalis to a butterfly exhibit somewhere in the US or Europe.

Mr Mshangama is a happy and increasingly rich man, at least by local standards.

Working with seven other farmers, he began farming butterflies just ten months ago. In June his group sold pupae worth $500, a staggering amount of money, in an area where many farmers are earning just one or two dollars a day. [continue]

Can you imagine this kind of misadventure? From Aftenposten:

A crowd of beachgoers beating the summer heat in Birkeland in Aust-Agder ran ashore in panic when they noticed the meter-long grass snake sneak into Geir Røstad's swimming trunks, newspaper VG reports. For nearly half a minute Røstad struggled with his unwanted visitor while shocked onlookers ran away. [continue]

No loose swimwear for me when I go swimming in Norway. No, I'll wear skin-tight lycra or neoprene, thanks, with no room for snakes to sneak in. Sheesh.

A bit of colour trivia from the BBC's Magazine Monitor page:

Pink was a boy's colour while blue was thought better for girls - a "generally accepted rule" according to The Ladies Home Journal in 1918, which described pink as "more decided and stronger" while blue was "more delicate and dainty".

Google Answers has more info here.

This Guardian article offers a few interesting tidbits about Malta.

Int lil min thobb? asks the Maltese health service poster, showing a crying baby next to an overflowing ashtray. Malti, a Semitic language that sounds like a gentler, less guttural Turkish, apparently only began to be used for literary purposes in the 17th century, which might explain why it is convoluted and impenetrable to foreigners: it grew wildly, without primers or grammar to confine it.

The assimilated ad-ons from Mediterranean neighbours are easy to spot - bonswa for "good evening", grazzi for "thank you", merhaba for "welcome"; but where does jekk joghgbok (please) come from? Not that this matters to the visitor; most Maltese speak perfect English and often Italian too. But while there isn't a long literary tradition, the culture and civilisation stretch back into prehistory. The Maltese were carving rock chambers and gigantic mother-earth figures when the ancient Britons were probably daubing themselves with woad. The Hypogeum, a World Heritage site, is thought to be about 5,000 years old. [continue]

From The Guardian: A life less ordinary.

Mary and Alan Sage were determined that their third child Paula, who has Downs Syndrome, should be brought up the same as their other children. "We wanted her to develop, as far as possible, like an ordinary child," Mary recollects.

Ordinary is not the word that comes to mind when you see Paula's stellar performance - gloriously funny at times, at others poignant and affecting - as the 21-year-old daughter with Downs to Lindsay Duncan's desperately protective mother in the film Afterlife, opening in London this week. Indeed, this is a lead role, with Kevin McKidd as her other co-star, to make Paula the envy of many ordinary young wannabe actors.

The talents of children with Downs are being recognised increasingly in the arts. But for these children to seize the kind of opportunity offered to Paula, now 34, whose only acting experience was belonging to the One in a Hundred drama group for children with learning difficulties, the style of parenting they get throughout their growing years can be critical. [continue]

From nature.com: Science secret of grand masters revealed.

For all you budding Kasparovs out there, a team of cognitive scientists has worked out how to think like a chess grand master. As those attending this week's Cognitive Science Society meeting in Chicago, Illinois, were told, the secret is to try to knock down your pet theory rather than finding ways to support it - exactly as scientists are supposed to do.

"This is a new result in the psychology of chess, as far as I know," says Mark Orr, a chess enthusiast and Ireland's first international master. The research could help developing chess players to hone their skills, he adds.

In deciding which move to make, chess players mentally map out the future consequences of each possible move, often looking about eight moves ahead. So Michelle Cowley, a cognitive scientist and keen chess player from Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, decided to study how different chess players decide whether their move strategies will be winners or losers.

Along with her colleague Ruth Byrne, she recruited 20 chess players, ranging from regular tournament players to a grand master. She presented each participant with six different chessboard positions from halfway through a game, where black and white had equal chances of winning and there was no immediately obvious next move. [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Birth of the Chess Queen

From The Independent: Pope's altar cloth makers turn to a more profitable line — thongs.

The Polish village of Koniakow is not its former serene self. Is the reason bitter wartime memories or the legacy of 50 years of Communist rule? No. It is underwear. Very skimpy, very tight underwear.

For hundreds of years the local lace-making grannies have been crocheting altar cloths and Roman Catholic vestments, including one altar cloth for the Pope. But some have switched production in rather a dramatic fashion. They have started making thongs — and the Church is not happy about it. So unhappy, in fact, that the local priest has even been naming and shaming the thong-makers in church on Sundays. [continue].

This from the BBC:

South African women have been urged to check regularly at their local registry offices, to see whether they have been married without their knowledge.

A "marriage verification campaign" was launched after 3,387 fake marriages were discovered, an official said. [continue]

From New Scientist: Handedness develops in the womb.

The hand you favour as a 10-week-old fetus is the hand you will favour for the rest of your life, suggests a new study.

The finding comes as a surprise because it had been thought that lifelong hand preferences did not develop until a child was three or four years old.

A team led by Peter Hepper of the Fetal Behaviour Research Centre at Queen's University, Belfast in the UK reached this conclusion after studying ultrasound scans of 1000 fetuses.

In one study, nine out of 10 fetuses at 15 weeks' gestation preferred to suck their right thumbs. Hepper's team followed 75 of those fetuses after birth, and found that at 10 to 12 years old all 60 of the right thumb-suckers were right-handed, while 10 of the 15 left thumb-suckers were left-handed and the rest right-handed. [continue]

Thanks to Melissa for pointing me to this article.

Related:
Preferred hand ‘set in the womb’ - BBC
Scans uncover secrets of the womb - BBC

Did you see that thing in the paper yesterday about soccer teams made up of homeless people? Some of them are competing at the Homeless World Cup, which is in Sweden this year. Here's one article about the event from the Globe and Mail: Canada a player in homeless cup.

Take a look at that, then go see the Streetsoccer.org for more information, like this:

How are the players of the 2003 Homeless World Cup doing now?

• Today 31 of the 141 World Cup players work in regular jobs.


• 12 signed with footballclubs as players or coaches.


• 49 changed their life situation significantly

Related:
Soccer is foothold for homeless - NYDailyNews.com, July 2004
Homeless World Cup team get kitted out - IOL.co.za, July, 2004
Homeless Soccer Team Off to Sweden - AllAfrica.com, July, 2004
Homeless Soccer World Cup held - Taipei Times, July 20003
Homeless To Represent U.S. In Soccer In Austria Puerto Rico Herald - April, 2003
Homeless World Cup - StephenBailey.com, July 2003

From the New York Times: Hail Marys Not Needed: Vatican Mail Will Deliver.

VATICAN CITY — Here where the pope sends religious messages and statues of saints stand against the sky, Dimitri Auerilio comes regularly for a strictly secular reason: to send his mail.

The 109-acre Vatican, walled in against an Italy of labor strife, strikes, long lines, late trains and a maddeningly unreliable postal system, has developed a mail service that is the envy of Italians.

It is both fast and safe, Mr. Auerilio said, describing it as a beacon of bureaucratic success in a landscape of ineffective infrastructures.

"And I can say that because I know the Italian system," Mr. Auerilio, a 48-year-old Sicilian compensation board worker, said on a recent day, echoing the thoughts of many of his countrymen who come here regularly to drop off their mail, with no Hail Marys necessary.

"The Italian state of mind is not to work so hard, and you can really see this in its post office," he added. "Instead, the Vatican post office is really good. They are efficient. They get things done." [continue]

(You'll need a NYT password to read the full article.)

From the BBC: ‘Wireless pebbles’ track glaciers.

Glacier scientists trying to understand more about how the huge bodies of ice behave have made use of innovative wireless "electronic pebbles" to help.

It is the first time such sensors have been put in glaciers to collect information and transmit it instantly over the net to computers elsewhere. [continue]

The women of Tamil Nadu in southeastern India traditionally cover their thresholds every morning with elaborate designs drawn with rice powder. Girls learn the ritual from their mothers and other female relatives, and kolam skills are considered a mark of grace, dexterity, discipline and concentration. Drawing the kolam figures is an important part of the Tamil Nadu culture and landscape. But with their orderly and often highly symmetrical designs, which frequently group into families, kolams are also expressive of mathematical ideas. In the last few decades, kolam figures have attracted the attention of computer scientists interested in describing images with picture languages. Different picture languages have been developed to describe different kolam families.

That extract is from The Kolam Tradition at American Scientist. There's more, but the rest is only available to subscribers. Phooey!

Well, no matter. You'll love the Interactive Kolam website I found, where you can click any design, then see it being drawn before your eyes.

Oh, and the author of the article I quoted above has written a book called Mathematics Elsewhere: An Exploration of Ideas Across Cultures. It sounds plenty interesting, and I'm happy to see that my local library has a copy.

Related:

Kolam (a.k.a. Rangoli) in Tamil Nadu
Kolam- a brief introduction
Symmetry in Threshold Design in South India
Step by step guideline for creating a Kolam
Kolam: The Divine disguised as cosmic pattern
La tradición Kolam (In Spanish)
Las figuras Kolam (In Spanish)

From Reuters: Italy School Foils Cheats by Blocking Phone Signals.

ROME — Mobile phone-savvy teenagers tempted to cheat on exams by sending text messages or scanning pictures of tests could be thwarted by a device that jams signals inside the school walls.

The Enrico Tosi Technical Institute school in northern Italy has found a way to foil the next generation of would-be cheats with the help of military technology.

"Most schools try and confiscate phones before exams, but this way we can be sure nobody slips through," said Benedetto Di Rienzo, the head of the school in Busto Arsizio which is testing the devices for the Education Ministry during exams this week. [continue]

Mongolians seek to make a name for themselves. From the Globe and Mail:

ULAN BATOR — For the first time in his life, Batbold needs a surname. And after some moments of reflection, he thinks he has found the perfect name: the tribal name of Genghis Khan.

"I'm kind of proud of Genghis Khan," the 25-year-old tailor said shyly as he lined up to register his new name. "He was a good leader, a strong warrior. I kind of feel that I'm from the same tribe."

For more than 80 years, everyone in Mongolia was on a first-name basis. After seizing power in the early 1920s, the Mongolian Communists destroyed all family names in a campaign to eliminate the clan system, the hereditary aristocracy and the class structure.

Within a few decades, most Mongolians had forgotten their ancestral names. They used only a single given name — a system that eventually became confusing when 9,000 women ended up with the same name, Altantsetseg, meaning "golden flower."

By the mid-1990s, Mongolia had become a democracy again, and there were growing worries about the lack of surnames. One name might be enough when most people were nomadic herdsman in remote pastures, but now the country was urbanizing. The one-name system was so confusing that some people were marrying without realizing they were relatives. [continue]

Link found at Arts and Letters Daily.

Related:
Rush for surnames produces 500 Genghis Khans - news.com.au
Mongols, Told to Use Surnames Again, Are Trying to Remember - iht.com
Mongolia - Wikipedia

Clothes launder own fabric. From nature.com:

In the classic 1951 film, The Man in the White Suit, Alec Guinness played a scientist who invents a fabric that never gets dirty or wears out. A chemist's pipe dream perhaps, but the prospect of self-cleaning clothes might be getting closer.

Scientists have invented an efficient way to coat cotton cloth with tiny particles of titanium dioxide. These nanoparticles are catalysts that help to break down carbon-based molecules, and require only sunlight to trigger the reaction. The inventors believe that these fabrics could be made into self-cleaning clothes that tackle dirt, environmental pollutants and harmful microorganisms. [continue]

Impressive, hmm? I hope that a team of scientists somewhere is developing a self-cleaning kitchen, too.

From nature.com: Mobiles build interactive cities.

Technophiles could soon use mobile phones to create and access interactive city guides. A four-week trial of the latest technology has just begun in London.

Around 40 volunteers are taking part in Urban Tapestries, a research project that seeks to assess how people will use emerging mobile technologies to create and share knowledge.

Armed only with a specially designed mobile phone and sturdy walking shoes, the participants are traipsing the streets of Britain's capital, recording their location-inspired thoughts and opinions, and accessing those of others.

People can add the locations of their favourite pub or theatre, says organizer Giles Lane of Proboscis, the non-profit making think-tank and research organization behind the project. But they can also insert personal comments, such as whether or not the beer was flat. "We hope that people will use the technology to build up a database of community-based knowledge," says Lane.

Personal entries can be filed as photographs, text messages or voice clips. Information shows up as an icon on a detailed map on the handset, so other users can access it. [continue]

Related:
Urban Tapestries

From the Penrose Tilings page at scienceu.com:

Penrose tilings are a class of beautiful and fascinating nonperiodic tilings. In addition to their intristic beauty they possess an intriguing mathematical structure. This structure is helping scientists studying crystalography understand quasicrystals, a new breed of strange high-tech materials discovered in 1984 by looking at X-ray diffraction patterns. (...)

The Penrose tilings are one of the more enchanting objects to be found in geometry. We are first lured by the tilings' disorienting nonperiodicity and then captured by the regularity lurking within this chaos. [rest of page]

Related:
The Geometry Junkyard - Penrose tiles
Penrose tiling - Wikipedia

From Wired: 16,000 Things to Do With GPS.

When Alex Jarrett packed up his GPS navigator and trekked to a bog near his New Hampshire vacation spot eight years ago, he had no idea he'd be starting a global craze.

Mostly, Jarrett said, he wanted to find something to do with the global positioning satellite mapping device he'd bought a year ago. So he scanned a topographic map he'd picked up for his trip and noticed that a few miles away a longitude line intersected with a latitude line.

He hiked to the point, a bog near a swamp, and snapped a digital photo. Back at home, he created a website and posted the picture online.

"I put up this outlandish goal that I had no intention of anyone taking seriously, which was to take pictures of all the points in the world," said Jarrett, who runs a delivery service near his home in Northampton, Massachusetts, on his bicycle. And at first, true to his expectations, no one but friends and acquaintances paid much attention.

But a couple of years later, as GPS devices and digital cameras became both cheaper and more widely available, the site began to draw attention. Slowly, people who'd never met Jarrett began to add their photos and travel stories.

Today, more than 4,400 GPS-toting travelers have participated in the Degree Confluence Project, covering nearly all the easily accessible points in the United States and Western Europe, and putting a sizeable dent into other populated portions of the globe. [continue]

Matthew Richardson deserves some kind of prize for faking it as a conference speaker, even though he knew next to nothing about the subject. From The Telegraph:

An Oxford engineering student was surprised but undaunted when he was approached to deliver a series of lectures in Beijing on global economics.

Matthew Richardson knew "next to nothing" about the subject but, believing he would be addressing a sixth-form audience, he felt he could "carry it off".

Mr Richardson, 23, borrowed an A-level textbook entitled An Introduction to Global Financial Markets from a library and swotted up on its contents on the flight from London to China.

From it he prepared a two-hour presentation, believing he had to deliver the same lecture several times over to different groups of students over three days.

Mr Richardson, who has the same name as a New York University professor who is a leading authority on international financial markets, was met at the airport and taken straight to a conference centre where, over lunch, "the horrible truth became apparent". [continue]

You've heard of the Enigma cipher machine, yes? The Germans used it during WW2 for encoding and decoding messages.

If you've always wanted to play with an Enigma, the Enigma-E building kit might appeal.

The Enigma-E is a DIY Building Kit that enables you to build your own electronic variant of the famous Enigma coding machine that was used by the German army during WWII. It works just like a real Enigma and is compatible with an M3 and M4 Enigma as well as the standard Service Machines. A message encrypted on, say, a real Enigma M4 can be read on the Enigma-E and vice versa. [continue]

Link found at Slashdot.

Related:
The Enigma coding machine
The Enigma and the Bobme
Code-breaking the German Enigma machine

Arnaud Frich Photographies has some amazing images for you to view. Start with Les Eglises et Cathédrales de France; that's the best bit, at least for me. (Click on the medium-sized images to get to much larger ones.) Also of note: Paris Panoramique and Villes & Paysages.

Teachers offer to ‘lend’ students marks to pass tests. From Ananova:

A school in China is allowing students who don't do well in tests to borrow a few extra marks as long as they pay them back with interest.

The scheme was recently introduced by Penglai Road No 2 Primary School in the Huangpu District of Shanghai, reports Xinhua.

Students who do poorly on a test can ask their teachers to lend them a few points to improve their grade, but twice as many points must be paid back on the next test, assuming they achieve a better mark. [continue]

From the New York Times: Marriages Made Not in Heaven but in a Cleric's Office.

TEHRAN, Nov. 10 — Jaffar Savalanpour Ardabili, 38, a midranking Shiite cleric, sits at his desk, sifting through reams of applications filled with yearning.

His Web site, ardabili.com, is so flooded that it closes several days a month to limit submissions. His office is filled from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday through Thursday with hopeful men and women. His smiling wife, Zahra Tafreshi, welcomes them into a room decorated with holiday lights and the sound of prerevolution love songs in the air.

They are all seeking his help — to get married.

"But I do not like to be called a matchmaker," he said, laughing. "It reminds me of old women."

In business for the last three years — and swamped since newspaper articles publicized the opening of his office three months ago — Mr. Ardabili is doing a unique job in a country where, after the 1979 Islamic revolution, dating was banned and extramarital relationships became subject to severe punishment. Some restrictions eased after the election of President Mohammad Khatami, a moderate, in 1997.

Still, Mr. Ardabili is careful to work within approved Islamic standards. His Web site has links to statements of permission from half a dozen prominent Iranian clerics. [continue]

Related:
Ardabili.com - "In the name of lovely God." Mind-boggling site design.

Downloadable .wav files from the Royal Canadian Legion website:

O Canada (2.58MB)
Last Post (1.48MB)
Lament (3.75MB)
Reveille (439KB)
God Save The Queen (3.63MB)

From the BBC: Let your fingers do the talking.

Throw away your earpiece, soon your finger could be helping you make and take calls via your mobile phone.

Japanese phone firm NTT DoCoMo has created a wristwatch phone that uses its owner's finger as an earpiece.

The gadget, dubbed Finger Whisper, uses a wristband to convert the sounds of conversation to vibrations that can be heard when the finger is placed in the ear. [continue]

From news24.com: Beware of the nun.

Santiago - A 65-year-old Italian mother superior in a convent in Chile captured two burglars even though one of them was armed with a revolver, press reports said on Monday.

The incident occurred on Sunday in Linares, in central Chile, at the Daughters of Saint Camilo Congregation.

Upon hearing noises, Fiorella Malccione, head of nuns at the convent, went to inspect the chicken coop and found several thieves inside it, La Segunda newspaper said.

A worker at the convent accompanied her, but the robbers threw stones and scared him off.

While the worker and other nuns ran for help, Malccione grabbed hold of two of the thieves, 17 and 18 years old, and did not let go of them until police arrived a few minutes later. The other robbers fled.

Take something like lipstick, silly putty, fireworks, or new car smell. What is that stuff, anyway? What's it made of? What's that stuff will tell you. They've got pages on lycra/spandex, aircraft de-icers, lightsticks, and a bunch of other stuff, too.

When you wake up one morning knowing that you must find the lyrics for some ol' Irving Berlin song, rest assured they're over here at the Lyrics Depot. They've got Puttin' on the Ritz, Cheek to Cheek, and others. Whee!

Dating is a three-day event for Moroccan berbers. From SFGate.com:

IMILCHIL, Morocco -- As Rakia Al-Mamouni pushed through the throng, she was on the lookout for just one thing: a potential husband.

She ignored the man who rushed by carrying a sheep across his shoulders. She didn't seem to care for the hawker selling goats' heads. But she did stop when a young, well-dressed fellow ambled over to her and said: "You have captured my liver."

Not the most eloquent pickup line ever. But for the Berbers of the Atlas mountains in Morocco, who consider the liver to be where love resides, it's a lovely sentiment.

It got the attention of the heavily made-up Ms. Mamouni, who chatted briefly with the young man. But the 19-year-old wasn't swept away. "We'll see what happens," she said as she moved on, with eyes peeled for other prospects.

Each year, hundreds of marriageable Berbers gather for this three-day dating ritual, which has been practiced among nomadic tribes in these arid, windy mountains for centuries. Today, the ritual has developed into a major Berber bazaar and a tourist attraction. [continue]

Found at Metafilter.

From the Sunday Herald: Meet France's Mother Teresa.

France has produced some of the world's most memorable icons — writers, actresses, philosophers, cheesemakers — but even Francophiles may have raised an eyebrow at the news this week that a 91-year-old priest has just been voted France's most popular person for the 17th year running.

Abbé Pierre, a frail Capuchin brother, beat football superstar Zinedine Zidane and veteran crooner Johnny Halliday into second and third place in the annual poll carried out by the Journal De Dimanche newspaper. President Jacques Chirac barely registered at Number 22.

Little is known about Abbé Pierre outside his native France, where he is revered for his work with the most marginalised members of society and for founding what has become a worldwide network of communities which find housing and work for homeless people. [continue]

Monks remain a favored icon for advertisers. From a New York Times article, conveniently reprinted at the Contra Costa Times:

The men in hoods and robes are marketers' darlings, having starred lately in campaigns for America Online's broadband service, General Mills' Oatmeal Crisp Fruit 'n Cereal Bars and PepsiCo's Pepsi Blue brand. These came after appearances in commercials for companies like IBM, Nintendo and Sony.

"They're lovable," said Len Short, executive vice president for brand marketing at America Online in Dulles, Va., part of AOL Time Warner. In the pantheon of widely appealing stock figures, "you have dogs, babies and monks." he said. "Who hates monks?"

Monk characters recur in advertisements though real monks generally live sequestered in monasteries and often make vows of silence and poverty -- sharing little with the free-spending, hard-charging consumers that marketers seek. But that disparity, according to advertisers and observers of religion and culture, is what makes monks work for advertisers. [continue]

From Ananova: G-strings save the art of crochet.

Polish women are swapping doilies for G-strings in a bid to save the art of crochet.

No longer able to sell their hand-crafted doilies and table cloths, women in the tiny Polish mountain village of Koniakow are giving the centuries old art a new twist by making sexy G-strings, bras and slips.

Shop owner Tadeusz Rucki told daily paper Gazeta Wyborcza: "Typical crochet lace doesn't sell very well these days. We needed something new to offer women."

And she said it was beneficial not only to those buying it, but to the craft itself.

She added: "We need a way to encourage young girls to keep the tradition of crocheting alive."

Related:
Basic Crochet Instructions

TrekEarth boasts "over 10,425 photos from around the world". It's a fine site to browse through. Here, for example, is a photo of Saint-Germain abbey, captioned as follows.

What to say about the extraordinary Saint-Germain abbey of the city of Auxerre?

The original place was an oratory with relics which was founded in 448 AC. Today, we can see some among the oldest mural paintings discovered in France. This crypt is in the basement of the successive layers of religious buildings (Basilica of Clotild from the 6th century; the Carolingian church from the 9th century, the lower & upper churchs between the 11th and the 14th centuries).

Taken from one bridge across the Yonne river, this shot allows us to see the church and the Saint-Jean tower from the 12th century.

A few other striking photos:
Venice, Italy
Meteora Monastery, Greece
Un Ptit Bizous (What a face!)

Thanks to Frank DiSalle for telling me about TrekEarth.

Jay Currie has an article up at Tech Central Station about Canadian copyright law and the nasty ol' RIAA. Jay writes:

A desperate American recording industry is waging a fierce fight against digital copyright infringement seemingly oblivious to the fact that, for practical purposes, it lost the digital music sharing fight over five years ago. In Canada. [continue]

Now there's a happy thought! The RIAA gives me a pain.

Link found at Jay Currie's blog.

Related links:
RIAA wants to hack your PC - from Wired.com
Fair use is not illegal blurb, tshirt. From ThinkGeek.
RIAA Wrath Hits Teen - from ABC News
Is the RIAA running scared? - from Salon.com
RIAA Methods Under Scrutiny - from Wired.com
RIAA Wants Background Checks on CD-RW Buyers - from bbspot.com (satire)
Senator launches investigation into RIAA piracy crackdown - from kansascity.com
RIAA Plans To Sue Individual Downloaders - from dtheatre.com
Why the RIAA owes us all an apology - from ZDNet.com
Courtney Love does the math See what Courtney has to say about the RIAA on page 2.

From the BBC: Tube heat is snow problem.

Thousands of ideas to cool the Tube have flooded in after London Mayor Ken Livingstone offered a £100,000 reward for the best idea. The latest, from an Israeli firm, says snow is the answer.

An idea imported from the gold mines of South Africa could stop commuters suffering sweltering heat on London's Tube network.

An Israeli firm says giant snow machines should be built above ground.

Avshalom Felber, President of IDE Technologies, said the snow made at street-level would be pumped through pipes into containers placed in train tunnels or at platform entrances.

Then as trains pass through it would create air currents causing cold air from the containers to circulate and cool passengers in stations.

The idea is one of 3,000 entries submitted to London Underground after mayor Ken Livingstone offered £100,000 for the best solution for cooling the Tube in July. [continue]

Related links:
It's perfect barbecue time in London
IDE Technologies
Mayor of London, the London Assembly and the Greater London Authority
London Underground
Cool Down the Tube

If you find that your life is too full of possessions, All That Stuff at Dervala.net is just the thing to read.

The African Ceremonies website has stunning photographs of sacred ritutals in tribal cultures. You can't miss this. Photos include those of an Adioukrou Queen Mother in the Ivory Coast, one of a Surma Father with Children in Ethiopia, and oh, lots more.

Thanks to Frank DiSalle for the link.

The people behind Webexhibits have created lots of cool sites for curious folk like us. Go visit Bellini's Feast of the Gods, Causes of Color, Pigments through the Ages, Calendars Through the Ages, or Daylight Savings Time. They've even got pages on the history and makings of butter!

There are also links to hundreds of interesting exhibits from other places.

I thank Mirabilis.ca reader Frank DiSalle for writing to tell me about Webexhibits. "You'll spend hours in there, I bet," Frank wrote. Yup!

(Oh, and if the rest of you want to email cool links to me, please do. I'd love that.)

What fun! From the BBC: Walkway propels Paris metro into future.

"Keep your feet flat on the ground, keep your feet flat on the ground."

This is the constant refrain at Montparnasse station's main interchange inside the Paris metro.

And there is a good reason for it - failing to comply could land you flat on your face.

The message is directed at people using a new high-speed travelator, an invention that some say could revolutionise the way we get around big cities.

The trottoir roulant rapide (fast rolling pavement) or TRR is on trial until October, when the metro's safety committee will decide whether it has been a success - and whether to roll it out elsewhere.

The prototype carries passengers the length of Montparnasse station at 9km/h - three times as fast as normal travelators, and about the average speed of a Paris bus. [continue]

From The Hindu newspaper: Huge haul of ancient coins in SW China.

Chinese archaeologists have unearthed a seven-tonne column of corroded coins dating back to the southern Song dynasty (1127 AD-1279 AD) in the Suishui town of south-western China's Sichuan province.

The column, two meters high and one-and-a-half meters in diameter, sheltered inside a big stone pit, was found on June 27 by a local farmer working with a bulldozer.

The coins had been divided according to their sizes and dates and strung together with cords, and later rusted into the columnar shape after being buried underground for such a long period of time, according to the archaeologists. [continue]

Patrick Durand has been busy taking photos of Paris, Rome, The French Riviera, and the Val de Loire - all from a low flying plane. Some of the images are incredible. Just imagine Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, flying buttresses and all, viewed from above!

To see these photos, go to Patrick's site and click on the vertical cities link. (Warning: Flash site, better for fast conections.)

Found via Metafilter.

If there are kids in your life, I bet you've seen some of that Royal Doulton Bunnykins china. Well. Turns out that the illustrator who created Bunnykins was Sister Mary Barbara of the Augustinian Canonesses of the Lateran. She died recently at 92. Here's a bit more about Sister Mary Barbara: 'Bunnykins' painter an instant success.

"Bunnykins" china is found in the nursery of the Japanese Royal Family; was used by Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret; and became a popular choice for christening presents in middle-class homes.

The range -- which depicted a family of rabbits gardening, bathing, dancing, cooking, cuddling under a mushroom and netting a cricket -- was the brainchild of Cuthbert Bailey, general manager of Doulton in the 1930s.

Instead of commissioning a professional illustrator, Mr. Bailey turned to his daughter Barbara, who had joined the Augustinian Canonesses of the Lateran, and asked her to produce some pictures for use on cups, plates and other children's tableware.

These proved such a success when they first came out in 1934 that the company soon decided to halt production of its other animal ranges and ask Sister Mary Barbara for more.

The community's formidable prioress was unenthused by this success; however, she agreed that the young nun could do more, while urging her to keep quiet about the venture. As a result, the secret artist sat up late at night, painting by candlelight because the convent had no electric light. [continue]

Just the thing for your fall wardrobe, this:

A new anti-assault device for women wards off potential assailants with an 80,000-volt electric shock.

Dubbed "exo-electric armor," the No-Contact Jacket looks like an ordinary fashionable women's coat. But an inner layer of conductive fiber carries a low-amp charge that delivers a nasty but non-lethal shock to anyone who messes with its wearer.

"It's kind of like sticking your finger in a wall socket," said Adam Whiton, one of its designers. "It hurts. If someone tries to grab you from behind, they get the full, hefty shock out of it. That's really painful."

Designed by Whiton, an industrial designer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Yolita Nugent, head designer at Advanced Research Apparel, the jacket is intended to be an alternative to handguns, pepper sprays and rape whistles. [continue]

(From Wired.com, of course.)

From the Contra Costa Times, Orchid DNA studies reveal ancient roots.

Orchids can be elegant, gaudy, lurid and even downright bizarre. While the unusual flowers of these species have excited plant lovers for centuries, they have made it difficult for evolutionary biologists to place them in the plant family tree and identify their closest relatives.

Now, scientists say, studies of the DNA of orchids are revealing a host of surprises, chief among them, that orchids are actually part of the asparagus group, closer kin to these vegetables than to the other, flashier, flowering plants they had been placed with before.

"They're so weird, so different from everything else," said Dr. Ken Cameron, orchidologist at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx.

At the same time, scientists are finding that orchids, long thought to be the recent product of plant evolution, are actually quite ancient, having emerged more than 90 million years ago. [continue]

From the Register, Mobiles hail London cabs.

Mobile phone users in London should soon be able to hail the capital's black cabs simply by using their mobile phones.

The location-based service comes from an outfit called Zingo, which, incidentally is owned by MBH, the company that makes London's taxis.

Anyhow, Zingo uses mobile technology to put passengers directly in contact with black cab drivers in their area that are free for a fare. [continue]

The Social Studies section of the Globe and Mail includes a world o' syndromes section this week, the best of which is this:

Malignant self-actualization.
“There seems to be a rising tide of mental illnesses,” writes psychiatrist Trevor Turner in the New Internationalist, “a rising demand for ‘lifestyle’ medications and even several new ‘conditions.’ Common ‘shyness’ is now a ‘social phobia,’ screwing around is ‘sexual-addiction syndrome,’ and bad-tempered people now have ‘emotionally unstable personality disorders.’ So why not ‘malignant self-actualization syndrome’ (MSA) defined as a disabling condition which elevates personal choice into the highest arbiter of everything? It’s not yet in the standard psychiatric disease classifications but maybe it should be. . . . In fact, MSA is a bottomless pit of potential demand on the healthcare system. Conditions like ‘air rage,’ ‘road rage’ and dysmorphophobia (the conviction that you don’t quite look right) all reflect the triumph of individual desire over a commitment to the world outside oneself.”

Update, July 6th, 2003:

Aha! Here's Trevor Turner's article in the New Internationalist: I shop, therefore I am. "Has the narcissism of the market destroyed our sense of collective identity? Psychiatrist Trevor Turner argues that a preoccupation with self has spawned a new syndrome: malignant self-actualization."

James Coomarasamy writes about raising kids in France: Au revoir, Parisian parenthood.

My time as a Parisian parent has ended as it began - with our children's paediatrician handing over the Roquefort file.

It was just over three-and-a-half years ago that he first gave us a piece of paper, suggesting we add that venerable blue cheese to our daughter Maya's diet.

How appropriate, then, that during our last visit to his practice, a few weeks ago we were given a similar "prescription" for our 11-month-old son, Finn.

As we scanned the paper with a knowing nod, my wife and I remembered how we'd pondered the medicinal effects of the king of French cheeses - and reached the conclusion that the blue mould must be good for a baby's stomach.

But when we checked with our paediatrician later, we were met with an incredulous stare: "Mais non, it's just to get her used to the taste." [continue]

From the science page in today's Globe and Mail: When the music's too loud.

In a generally noisy world, discothèques, nightclubs, fair grounds and other entertainment sites create special problems. Traditional noise-abatement measures often don't work because DJs or other operators turn music levels up and down at will. At best, they guess at what might be a sound level that violates a local bylaw; at worst, they don't care.

Now, a Spanish company has come up with an automated sound-dampening device that forces DJs to make their music impulses conform to the law. The instrument measures the sound levels as they reach neighbours' property and compares them to what is allowed by the noise-abatement legislation. When the levels exceed permitted limits, the sound system is automatically turned down.

If somehow no amount of muffling gets the sound to the limit, the noise is muted entirely. But equally important from a legal standpoint, the machine keeps track of all noise violations as well as attempts to tamper with its sound-dampening override.

Anybody with an answering machine or voicemail should be forced to read Jennifer Bishop's Nobody Cares Why You Didn't Answer Your Phone over at Buttafly.com.

I'm looking forward to her upcoming rant, too:

Next time we'll move onto the topic of leaving voicemails for others in a little essay I've titled You Should Be Shocked With a Cattle Prod for Every Word Over 20 That You Speak on My Voicemail.

Reuters has an article about a calendar full of priests:

Twelve young priests have raised eyebrows in Italy by joining the ranks of housewives and porn stars in posing for a glossy calendar -- albeit somberly dressed in long, dark robes and broad-rimmed, traditional hats.

The priests featured in "Calendario Romano 2004," which aims to promote tourism in the Italian capital, are photographed standing in front of famous Rome landmarks.

"I usually photograph gondoliers for Venetian calendars, but this time I wanted to do something Roman, and what better than priests?" the photographer Piero Pazzi said of his work, which is not an official Vatican publication.

Here are photos of the calandar pages.

Meanwhile, a priest in Ireland has been told he can't appear in a calendar after all, at least not if all he's wearing is a Bible.

Related link:
Holy nudity "A priest gets in trouble for posing naked in support of charity." - Salon.com

Related Mirabilis.ca entry:
Priest's calendar outsells pinups

So I got distracted by unexpected search results (that always happens to me) and this time I wound up at the Heifer International website. What an excellent charity. Their story:

In the 1930s, a civil war raged in Spain. Dan West, a Midwestern farmer and Church of the Brethren youth worker, ladled out cups of milk to hungry children on both sides of the conflict. It struck him that what these families needed was "not a cup, but a cow." He asked his friends back home to donate heifers, a young cow that has not borne a calf, so hungry families could feed themselves. In return, they could help another family become self-reliant by passing on to them one of their gift animal's female calves.

The idea of giving families a source of food rather than short-term relief caught on and has continued for more than 50 years. As a result, families in 115 countries have enjoyed better health, more income and the joy of helping others.

Heifer International's gift catalog invites you to give one of these animals to help change the world. And chicks only cost $20.00. . . .

The Museum of Unworkable Devices includes a physics gallery, a gallery of artistic impossibilities, Simanek's bouncing ball engine, and oh, so much more. (Found at PeteBevin.com.)

Blogger Christopher Allbritton (former AP and New York Daily News reporter) has decided to take himself off to Iraq to report on what's happening there. He's not working for some big fat news agency; readers have donated to pay for his trip. He writes:

Tickets are purchased, gear is tested (mostly), packing is commencing and everything is coming together. I've not posted much these past few days because of the overwhelming number of loose ends to tie up. Plus, at the moment, I don't really know any more than what's on CNN et al. What's the point of regurgitating? Starting this week however, the real purpose of Back to Iraq comes into view, as this becomes a much more heavily reported site instead of one based on analysis and commentary. (That will still be there, but in much smaller portions.)

I've been doing a fair number of interviews, too, as various media members want to know my story. Often they ask me why I'm doing this, what do I expect or hope to get out of this, am I crazy, etc. Well, I'm probably crazy, yes, but what I'm hoping to get out of this is some respect for the Web (and blogs) as a serious medium for independents. To all the journalism professors who say blogs aren't "real" journalism, I say, "I don't see you getting out of your tenured chair and putting your butt in the middle of Kurdistan to report on what's happening." To those who say, "You've got no editor," I reply, "My readers are my editors." To those who complain, "You're biased, you offer nothing but op-eds," I reply, "I am biased, but at least you know where I'm coming from. And just wait until next week when my butt is in Kurdistan." [continue]

Christopher's site is Back to Iraq 2.0.

From the Lost Pages:

In Japan, they have these statues of the guardian of children and travellers everywhere. And when it's cold, people give them knitted caps to wear. Humanity at its best if you ask me.

What a sad day for the world, and especially for the people of Iraq. This seems like a particularly good time to donate to international aid agencies, like these ones:

The Canadian Red Cross
Médecins Sans Frontières
Oxfam

From Why didn't the Romans invent Photography?

Nowadays, most people take photographs. Remove the modern cameras and film, and many homes still contain the things needed to produce a photograph, things which the Romans could have had access to as well.

This page goes on to give directions for taking and producing photographs, using geranium leaves as your film. Amazing, and they've got photos of the various steps as well. If you do this, please let me know how it turns out.

Look what I found over at Jim Tucker's blog, Dappled Things:

Music from the First Century -- A neat blurb about a new CD in the opening editorial of this week's America.

... I was delighted to receive a few weeks ago a new CD called "Ancient Voices." Recorded by the San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble, the CD is a collection described as "re-creations" of music from the time of Jesus and the Second Temple of Jerusalem.

The ensemble's artistic director, Christopher Moroney, and its founder and general manager, Covita Moroney, have devoted themselves to rediscovering and recreating the sounds and prayers of the period, spending many hours studying the languages of the time, learning to play traditional instruments and tracking down rare musical manuscripts. The texts used — in Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek — include the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes and the Shema prayer ("Hear O Israel..."). The instruments are modern reproductions of those known to have existed at the time of Christ, as well as contemporary Middle Eastern instruments that have evolved over the ages. They include the harp, the kinnor (or lyre), the shabbabah (a sort of flute) and the oud (a kind of lute).

The resulting CD is hauntingly beautiful and a remarkably good companion to prayer. The knowledge that one could be listening to sounds like those Jesus and his disciples may have heard (perhaps not the ipsissima sounds, but close enough) was, to me, deeply moving....

Check out the album's Amazon listing, if you're interested.

So what if it will take several years before you can harvest a few beans? The plant is attractive and you'll be the envy of all. From coffeeresearch.org, here's how to grow your own:

The plant thrives under artificial plant lighting indoors. The outside temperature in countries outside the Tropic belt is too volatile and too cold to allow the tree to develop. I recommend watering the tree twice per week in what I call a full watering and a half watering. In a half watering, I simply add some water to the soil and allow it to drain. In a full watering I add water, allow it to drain, and then add water with fertilizer and allow it to drain. The key is to keep the soil most, but well drained.

After two or three years flowering and possibly cherries can be expected, but do not expect high-quality coffee unless you are at a high altitude and are monitoring the conditions of the artificial microclimate carefully. (...) In theory, it is feasible to grow a high-quality coffee at home under the right conditions.

The Rainforest Seed Company has more details, and they give directions for growing your own banana tree indoors, too.

Related links:
How coffee works

This Atlantic article, Caring for Your Introvert, should be required reading for all bubbly extroverts. An excerpt:

My name is Jonathan, and I am an introvert.

Oh, for years I denied it. After all, I have good social skills. I am not morose or misanthropic. Usually. I am far from shy. I love long conversations that explore intimate thoughts or passionate interests. But at last I have self-identified and come out to my friends and colleagues. In doing so, I have found myself liberated from any number of damaging misconceptions and stereotypes. Now I am here to tell you what you need to know in order to respond sensitively and supportively to your own introverted family members, friends, and colleagues. Remember, someone you know, respect, and interact with every day is an introvert, and you are probably driving this person nuts. It pays to learn the warning signs. [continue]

Which of these 20 dream holidays would you choose? Feast of the east? Pick up a penguin? Thrills with frills?

From Steppe by step in the Guardian.

It's a small world, as the saying goes, when you find out that the Swede sitting next to you on the plane is friends with the only person that you know in Stockholm. Nearly everyone I know has had a "small world" experience. There's even a theory, called six degrees of separation, that says there are just six steps between any two people on earth. In other words, you can get to anyone in the world through a chain of acquaintances. So someone knows someone who knows someone else, and so on - and in six of these steps, you can get to anyone.

. . .

So 35 years on from the original experiment, I decided to test out the urban myth on a world stage: how many steps would it really take to get to someone on the other side of the planet? When I suggested this to Channel 4 commissioning editor Jess Search, it struck us as interesting to see if I could get to someone and somewhere completely random. And what better a place for my mission than Outer Mongolia? After all, it is the proverbial middle of nowhere. What is more, I had never met anyone who had ever been there, let alone anyone from there.

So I placed an ad in national Mongolian newspapers, asking for volunteers to be filmed for a documentary. It seemed like the best way to reach a large cross-section of the population - Mongolia has a very high literacy rate of 94%, and newspapers are distributed widely, even in rural areas. [continue]

From White Russia: Warmth, mysticism await visitors to a country shaped by cold.

People will flat out tell you that you are crazy to go to Russia in the wintertime. But, to me, that is the only time to experience the gray, brooding skies of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Dr. Zhivago.

In the long days of summer, you can't wade knee-deep into the protective snows that stopped every invader from Charles XII of Sweden to Hitler. Only in the bitter cold does vodka perform its intended warming task along with the fur hats and thick wool coats. In winter, Russia is the Russia of literature, legend and history. [continue]

An amazing thing (complete with photos!) from the Iowa City Press-Citizen: Moving a barn, by hand.

Around 150 Amish men from the Kalona area help to carry one of four pieces of a large barn Friday morning along Highway 22 east of Kalona. The men moved the barn by foot to the homestead of Paul T. Miller, who purchased the structure at an auction from Randy Billups of Kalona. It took the group about four hours to finish the task, and they drew the attention of numerous passersby. [continue]

Found on jwz's LiveJournal.

From Pravda, Wonderful Protection Against Thieves Invented in Russia:

A watchman from a society of summer cottages in Russia's Vladimir region, Sergey Sokolov, invented an effective method of struggle with burglars who frequently break into the summer cottages at night.

Although the man himself is neither strong, nor awesome, he turned out to be a wonderful psychologist. He made special veneer bootprints which are extremely large: these devices leave too big prints on the snow around the cottages where the man is working as a watchman.

When burglars attempt to break into the cottages, they first study the enormous bootprints left by the resourceful watchman here and there on the snow. Judging by the shoeprints, burglars think that the watchman is a huge and strong man, and they prefer to retire. The watchman says, the number of burglaries has reduced by almost 50% since the innovation was introduced.

Ananova reports:

A man has prevented a train disaster in India by waving his red underpants in the air.

Nimai Das was relieving himself near the tracks at Kopai in the Birbhum district when he spotted that part of the track was missing. Shortly afterwards, he saw an approaching train.

According to Sify News he stripped and began waving his red underpants frantically to stop the Burdwan-bound Rampurhat-Burdwan train service.

Luckily, he caught the driver's attention and the train stopped on the Sahebgunge loop line near Kopai station, just a few metres ahead of the broken line.

You'd want to be ready, of course, in case of emergency. So red undies it is!

Like most bankers his age, Anuj Chaudhry has a lot to think about each day. Balancing the books. Checking on delinquent loans. Finishing his homework.

Well, okay, so the world doesn't have a lot of 13-year-old bankers. The number of orphaned, street-dwelling, rag-picking youths who run cooperative banks for homeless children must be even smaller.

But Anuj and the 160 members of the Bal Vikas Bank, or Child Development Bank, say children who live on the street should have more opportunities to take charge of their finances and help each other escape the cycle of poverty. If they wait for adults to provide for them, they say, they'll wait forever.

"They are saving their money and proving their worth," says the gangly Anuj in the bank's headquarters, a five- by-seven-foot wood-and-metal cubicle in a corner of the Fatehpuri Night Shelter in Old Delhi. "Now they have hope for the future." [continue]

From an article at csmonitor.com, Delhi street kids bank on each other.

This seems like a good time to mention Rabbi Charles A. Kroloff's 54 Ways You Can Help The Homeless. One of the suggestions:

It's as simple as taking a few extra sandwiches when you go out. When you pass someone who asks for change, offer him or her something to eat. If you take a lunch, pack a little extra.

From an article at SignOnSanDiego.com, Boy opens never-before-seen 'window into autism':

Experts on autism are getting a better view of the condition by studying a 14-year-old boy who has severe autism, but can explain his disorder in great detail.

Tito Mukhopadhyay sits in a darkened laboratory, pointing at flashes of light on a computer screen. On his right is a neuroscientist, one of several who are testing Tito's ability to see, hear and feel touch. At his left, Tito's mother, Soma, watches quietly.

Tito often stops the testing with bursts of activity. His body rocks rhythmically. He stands and spins. He makes loud smacking noises. His arms fly in the air as if yanked by a puppeteer. His fingers flutter.

Everyone waits.

Tito reaches for a yellow pad and writes to explain his behavior: "I am calming myself. My senses are so disconnected, I lose my body. So I flap. If I don't do this, I feel scattered and anxious."

Severe autism occurs when the brain mysteriously fails to develop normally in infancy and early childhood.

Tito, who was born and raised in India, speaks English with a huge vocabulary. His articulation is poor, and he often is hard to understand. But he writes eloquently and independently, on pads or his laptop, about what it feels like to be locked inside an autistic body and mind. [continue]

Related links:
Tito's website(requires flash)
Interview with Tito
Why technologies for autism?

From National Geographic's Confessions of a Backyard Submarine Builder.

Karl Stanley's first submarine, C-BUG (Controlled by Buoyancy Underwater Glider), is easily one of the most innovative personal submarines ever made. The lightweight craft operates primarily without the help of any motor, and even more impressive, it began as a ten-foot-long [three-meter-long] steel pipe, which Stanley began welding in his parents backyard 13 years ago. At the time, Stanley was a high school sophomore with no formal welding experience, let alone an engineering degree.

Sheesh. At 15 I wouldn't have been able to fix a flat bicycle tire, much less build a submarine.

Now Stanley's planning to build an underwater hotel. He says:

I'm going to have an underwater hotel, that's certain. It's going to ride up and down a cable from 800 to 1,000 feet [244 to 305 meters]. The capsule will be as simple to operate as an elevator.

The hotel will have a bed, bathroom, and I was even contemplating a Jacuzzi. I think that would be the ultimate luxury. You're hanging out in the Jacuzzi looking at a 4-foot [1.2-meter] window at 800 feet [244 meters], seeing sharks. The irony is pretty good, too.

Related Links:
Stanley Submersibles
Personal Submersibles Organization

This editor's note introduces an alternet.org interview called Israeli Families Say Peace is Revenge:

In 1994, following the abduction and murder of his 19-year-old son Arik by the terrorist group Hamas, Yitzhak Frankenthal founded the Bereaved Families Forum -- an organization of 190 bereaved Israeli parents, Palestinian and Jews, who lost their children during army service or in an act of terrorism. The organization, also referred to as Parent's Circle, promotes peace and coexistence through educating for tolerance and compromise. The group recently set up a free service to encourage Israelis and Palestinians to talk on the telephone.

Yitzhak's an amazing guy. Here he explains what motivated him to found the Bereaved Families Forum:

After I lost my son, Arik, I came to understand that he was not murdered because the murderers knew him. He was killed because there is no peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. This is why we are ready to make reconciliation and not ready to go for revenge. And if we can do it -- when we have lost members of our families -- everyone can and needs to do it.

Related Links
The Parent's Circle
Why do I fight for Peace? article by Yitzhak Frankental at oneworld.org
I would have done the same - article by Yitzhak Frankenthal in The Guardian
Information about Yitzhak Frankenthal from peacenetwork.org

This is from the Japan rides hard times with tokens of 'love' article at the Christian Science Monitor.

A decade of economic lethargy means more Japanese are working for "peanuts" – and "thank yous" and "love."

Each is a new local monetary unit. As the names suggest, they are the softest of currencies.

In Yamato, near Tokyo, one rabu (love) will buy an hour of babysitting or a massage or a discount on groceries.

The rabu is the most recent and ambitious of 130 community currencies that are springing up in regions across Japan to boost local economies and encourage closer ties between residents.

There are similar programs in about 50 North American towns and cities. But Japan – for reasons of culture and circumstance – is emerging as a global leader in the concept.

The new tokens of exchange are unlikely to challenge the yen any time soon, but they are fostering a new way of thinking about money and barter in Japan that stands in sharp contrast to the rise of megacurrencies like the euro or impersonal electronic transactions carried out over the Internet.

In recent years, local governments have launched their own currencies in the hope of reversing the decline of once-close knit communities. Most have names reflecting their aims. While 90,000 shopkeepers and residents are able to give and receive "love" in Yamato, the residents of Okamura island exchange dan dans (thank yous) in the local dialect.

These currencies sound so much more interesting than the yen! Here's the rest of the article.

From Mike Adams' splendid article on The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome:

It has long been theorized that the week prior to an exam is an extremely dangerous time for the relatives of college students. Ever since I began my teaching career, I heard vague comments, incomplete references and unfinished remarks, all alluding to the "Dead Grandmother Problem." Few colleagues would ever be explicit in their description of what they knew, but I quickly discovered that anyone who was involved in teaching at the college level would react to any mention of the concept. In my travels I found that a similar phenomenon is known in other countries. In England it is called the "Graveyard Grannies'' problem, in France the "Chere Grand'mere," while in Bulgaria it is inexplicably known as "The Toadstool Waxing Plan" (I may have had some problems here with the translation. Since the revolution this may have changed anyway.)

The rest of the article's even better, kids, especially the bit about the proposed solutions.

If you're a discouraged college-level teacher, go read Katherine Meeks' article, Behind bars, the study of theology builds self-respect. Maybe prison would be a good work environment after all, eh?

The Homeless Guy Blog is well worth a read. Take a look at the Get a Job! entry, for example, and maybe read a few other postings while you're there. Here's a how to help suggestion from the Homeless Guy's FAQ:

Get some paper lunch bags and fill them with little goodies. This is just a list of things I can think of, that everyone on the streets would need and appreciate. You might have your own good ideas too. -- "travel size" tooth paste and tooth brush and deodorant. A pair of new or clean socks (it's hard to keep feet healthy on the street) nail clippers, a comb, a bar of soap, gloves when it's cold out, a disposable razor, etc. Then add something special, like little Halloween size candies, a personal note that says "I care". You could even decorate the bags with drawings of happy faces and hearts - yeah, even mean ol' grumpy homeless guys like that kind of stuff - even if they don't admit it.

Once you have your care packages together, take them to where homeless people hang out - wherever it's safe for you too. If you aren't a proper adult, bring along proper adult supervision. And personally hand out the packages. Just try to plan to have enough for each homeless person.

If ever you plan a trip to London and to Rome, go to London first. We've done it the other way around, and it's not an error I'll repeat.

I've enjoyed London on each of several previous trips, but it's a terrible disappointment after Italy. In Rome we had hot sunny days, superlative food, friendly Italians, and, well, Italy. In London it's cold, damp, one must search for good food, and I do get tired of that proper British reserve. *sigh* Oh well.

I'm looking forward to Vancouver's fresh sea air.

Have you heard about those capsule hotels in Japan? Each person gets a container in which to sleep. Imagine rows of people-sized fiberglass boxes, each equipped with a matress, pillow, television, and not much else.

Justin Hall explains:

Tokyo in particular is built to support people working away from home. A number of "Capsule Hotels" around the city, near train stations, absorb men who miss the last train home or just aren't sober enough to stumble home.

Justin's website tells about his experience in a capsule hotel, and he's got lots of photos.

Now, can an somebody please put pay-by-the-hour capsule hotels in all major airports? It would be so handy for those layovers between "connecting flights" which don't connect very well at all.

On the Daily Telegraph site there's an article entitled Wickedness shouldn't be treated as an illness. It's about the way murderers and those who commit other heinous crimes tend to blame their backgrounds. You know - responses like "I didn't have a chance because of a sad childhood, and now I'm insane so it's not my fault I killed everybody."

Palmer writes:

The worse the crime, the less likely it is that the perpetrator was fully responsible for it. He must have been in some way mentally deranged, either by his experiences or by a mental illness, to be capable of it: a reasonable person could not have done it.

and

Underlying the belief that very serious offences are really a medical rather than a moral problem is the optimistic conviction that only the mad are capable of truly dreadful crimes. That optimistic conviction is, however, profoundly mistaken. The depressing truth is that people do not need to be mad to be capable of crimes such as the murder of Holly and Jessica. They can be sane, rational, and totally unreformable by any psychiatric technique - or indeed any technique at all.

Exactly! It's so nice to see somebody say this in print, for once. Psychiatry doesn't have a cure for evil.

If you've got a fast Internet connection (none of this dial-up stuff) and even a slight interest in typography, go see behind the typeface: cooper black.

This is even more bizarre than hovercraft scooters. The Universal Hovercraft website offers four hovercraft kits, one of which is the "exciting 18SPW Hoverwing™ that converts from hovercraft to ground effect craft in minutes, enabling you to fly 4 feet above the ground or water."

Need a summer project?

"What comes as a revelation to those who opt out of the rat race of full-time employment is how much their spending decreases as a result of having more time. In my transition from a workaholic existence to my present lifestyle, I saw my spending drop from about $20,000 annually (after taxes) to almost half that, less than $11,000, while experiencing a huge improvement in the quality of my life. Cutting my living expenses by 50 percent occurred almost effortlessly as I found that with more time, I didn't need to spend money. I didn't have to take the subway every day, no more taxis when I was hurried, no more expensive work wardrobes, no more expensive lunches and after-work socializing with colleagues. For those with children, the immense expense of childcare often eats up the entire second salary in a two-income family. Add to that the big drop in your income taxes when you lower your income, and it becomes painfully apparent that your full-time job is costing you lots of money!"

(From an article by Mary Barknecht on the Simple Living website.)

Psychologists don't want you to know how answers to tests like the Rorschach Inkblot Test are interpreted. If you knew that, you might try to fake your test results, and then how would your psychologist decide how crazy you are?

A Boston Globe article, Study finds web of deceit on mental tests, indicates that psychologists weren't pleased to discover that information about these tests is easy to find on the Internet. For the curious, The Separated Parenting Access & Resource Center has a page which gives interesting details about the Rorschach and other tests.

Today I came across Steven Tannock's blog article about Gordon Campbell's first year in office. (For those of you who don't live in BC, I'll mention that Campbell is BC's premier, the leader of our atrocious provincial government.)

So this reminds me: there's a recall campagn underway. All the details are at the Recall BC website.