Built over the ruins of ancient Pataliputra, the age-old bazaars of modern Patna betray a flavour of yesteryear in its din and bustle, the bellowing of beasts, the salty language of traders and cattlemen and their shocking racy stories.I am very curious as to the nature of the "shocking racy stories" that Indian cattleman tell at the market. Is it about what their cows got up to last night?
The story starts in Walton-on-Thames, a village in the south of England, where she grew up. Her great-grandmother was a servant, her great-grandfather a gardener, and both grandparents on her mother's side died of syphilis, the only response to which is: blimey, they didn't put that in the press release for "Mary Poppins." (The book's tone addresses precisely this kind of joke and seems to implore, with weary finality, Enough already.)
The Hottie & the Nottie, produced by the vacuous, self-adoring socialite Paris Hilton and starring herself as the most beautiful, sought-after girl in Los Angeles. Paris is Cristabel Abbott, 'the hottie', who thinks that 'a life without orgasms would be like a world without flowers'. But would-be suitors can only approach her via her ugly, pustule-encrusted best friend, 'the nottie', who naturally ends up having a spectacular makeover.Nearly every reviewer finds the film's message to be stunningly anti-feminist, and some note that it's a full length ad for the cosmetic surgery industry. As a way of summarising the anti-women aspects, I reckon the wittiest quote on Rottentomatoes goes to Suzanne Condie Lambert of the Arizona Republic:
'This movie hates women' is written over and over in my notebook, but that's not quite fair. This movie hates unattractive women.Congratulations, Suzanne!
Besides this, I find it kind of funny that I occasionally come across this idea that these micro-black holes would 'sink' into the earth and collect at the earth's center. That most definitely wouldn't be the case - they would just go through and leave on the other side, even if 'slowly moving' or 'falling'. Why would they stop in the center of the earth?Interesting point, as I had assumed they would end up there.
Six adult "degus" rodents, a kind of small rat, were trained at a laboratory at the Japanese government-funded RIKEN research institute and all of them were able to use a tiny T-shaped rake to retrieve food, it said.First, I was wondering why Japan was doing this sort of research at all. But now I see. As soon as they can be taught to throw those little star knives, there will an army of hooded killer ninja rats sent out all over the world, hidden in the panels of exported Japanese cars, to do the evil bidding of the Emperor.
In the final stage of the 60-day experiment, they were pulling the tool towards themselves to hold onto it and then moving it to obtain food, the study showed. ...
In one test they were given two tools -- a familiar functional rake and a non-functional tool that lacked a blade or had a raised blade. They chose the functional one without hesitation in most cases.
They chose the correct tool without being tricked by its colour or size, the study said.
Talk about your cases of unintended consequences. I guess in Europe you go to your local brothel or cannabis coffee shop to partake in those habits.Seattle's $5 million experiment with self-cleaning public toilets could soon be over.
Citing drug use and prostitution in the silver pods, Seattle Public Utilities on Monday recommended removing the five restrooms, which were supposed to provide clean, safe facilities for tourists and homeless people....
After the automated restrooms opened in 2004, their floor-cleaning mechanisms became clogged by trash. Prostitutes and drug users sought cover in them. The Downtown Seattle Association reported that human waste on the streets increased, instead of decreasing, after they opened.
Dillard also points to the current fad for "detoxing" the body by regularly getting high colonics as an obsessively unhealthy one. "This is a manifestation that a part of you is dirty," he says. "The colon has been around million of years and the wisdom of the colon predates us.Try working that phrase unobtrusively into your workplace conversation tomorrow, and see if you can get away with it.
The crime branch on Sunday night raided a hotel in Moti Nagar industrial area and arrested 10 scantily-clad girls gyrating to loud vulgar music. Out of job since the ban on dance bars in Mumbai, the girls, all aged between 18 and 25, were allegedly brought to Delhi by the kingpin of the dance racket, Dalbir Singh (25), who was also arrested from the spot.
According to the police, nine customers reportedly in uncompromising position with the girls and the hotel owner, Suresh Kumar (42), were also arrested.
“There are paradoxes in life: apparent loss may be real gain; apparent cruelty may be real mercy; returning good for evil may really be justice and not generosity (18:79-82). Allah’s wisdom transcends all human calculation.”But, the part of the story that is disturbing is that one of Khidr's acts is this:
So they went on until, when they met a boy, he slew him. (Musa) said: Have you slain an innocent person otherwise than for manslaughter? Certainly you have done an evil thing.The explanation Khidr later gives is:
As for the youth, his parents were people of Faith, and we feared that he would grieve them by obstinate rebellion and ingratitude (to Allah and man). So we desired that their Lord would give them in exchange (a son) better in purity (of conduct) and closer in affection.As Robert Spencer notes, it's not hard to see how such a story can be used to support, at least psychologically, the awful practice of honour killings in Muslim society.
A new poll shows that an overwhelming majority of Palestinians support the attack this month on a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem that killed eight young men, most of them teenagers, an indication of the alarming level of Israeli-Palestinian tension in recent weeks.The survey also shows unprecedented support for the firing of rockets on Israeli towns from the Gaza Strip and for the end of the peace negotiations between Palestinian and Israeli leaders.
Indeed, says Fowzan al-Madr, a camel breeder from the Kharj region southeast of Riyadh, there are few pleasures in life greater than a long, late-winter afternoon in the desert in the company of beautiful camels.Make your own jokes.
...."See this one?" he asked, pointing to a white female camel with long eyelashes and a calm gaze.
"She isn't married yet, this one," Shammari said. "She's still a virgin. Look at the black eyes, the soft fur. The fur is trimmed so it's short and clean, just like a girl going to a party."
Suddenly, Shammari grabbed the white camel's chin and kissed her square on the mouth.
A new drug that will soon enter clinical trials for treatment of malaria also appears to be 10 times more effective than the key medicine in the current gold-standard treatment for toxoplasmosis, a disease caused by a related parasite that infects nearly one-third of all humans--more than two billion people worldwide.Readers may recall that toxoplasma affects the behaviour of rats, making them more available for cat attack, and it is suspected that it may also affect the personality of humans:
Reaction time is affected, with possible implications for automobile accidents and other mishaps. Women seem to become more intelligent, outgoing, conscientious, sexually promiscuous, and kind; changes in men seem to cause opposite trends. All humans tend to be more prone to feelings of guilt (Flegr et al, Lindova et al).Hey, wait a minute: from a man's perspective, we should encourage women to get this disease! There would be more sex, but more guilt too. Perfect for Catholics then!
I would also assume that there has not been all that many newspaper office burnings or threats to behead Adams.As you might imagine, I got a lot of e-mail about this strip. Comments were about evenly divided between people who are deeply offended and people who think it was my best work yet. Interestingly, the people most amused often described themselves as religious, and those offended often noted that they were not especially religious.
My favorite rhetorical question, which I received an alarming number of times, was “Why don’t you mock Mohammed next? Huh? Why not?”
Well, aside from the blindingly obvious reason that I prefer life over death, I didn’t realize I was making fun of Christianity this week.
Each tuber contains all the vitamins, minerals, proteins, calories and cellulose necessary for life: a healthy adult could survive indefinitely, though perhaps unenthusiastically, on potatoes alone.But the potato's crowning achievement may yet lie in the future:
A stand of potatoes large enough to provide an astronaut's nourishment for the day will also, Reader reports, supply all the oxygen that the space traveller needs, and mop up all the exhaled carbon dioxide as well. It won't be the only crop in tomorrow's zero-gravity garden, but it could be the most vital.
....scientists from the Swiss biotechnology company Cytos have created a vaccine that lowers blood pressure. They say that it may one day eliminate the need for daily medication.
Unlike in some Western countries that welcome medical professionals from abroad, the gap in Japan cannot be filled by foreigners.
Japan has virtually no foreign doctors due to strict immigration rules, although it took the landmark step in 2006 of allowing in a limited number of nurses from the Philippines.
With as many as 100,000 newcomers from republics such as Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus, the Sacramento region has one of the nation's largest concentrations of Soviet immigrants. Most began arriving in the late 1980s -- about a third of them conservative evangelical Christians seeking religious freedom.Sounds like a place for Foreign Correspondent to do a story.
The influx has created a thriving Russian community with Russian-language newspapers, cable TV and radio shows, as well as 70 Slavic churches -- nearly all adherents of a fundamentalist creed that condemns homosexuality.
And who in their right mind thought it was OK to thinly disguise a blatant male ogling at beaver-as-vagina sunning itself on the beach as a tampon ad?Well, as a general rule, it's near impossible to underestimate men enough when it comes to their visual interest in what's on display at the beach. And couldn't part of the point be that there is (at least metaphorical) genitalia on open display? Ask Paris and Britney if that attracts attention.Make no mistake. There was absolutely no ambiguity here. This ad said loudly — and apparently proudly — that women are nothing more than vaginas on legs. It not only offended and degraded women, it underestimated and degraded men.
The cyanobacteria were taken from hot springs in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, US. When put in a container with water and simulated lunar soil, the cyanobacteria were found to produce acids that are amazingly good at breaking down tough minerals, including ilmenite.
They use the nutrients freed up this way to grow and reproduce. "This is unbelievable," Brown told New Scientist. Breaking down the same minerals artificially would require heating them to very high temperatures, which uses enormous amounts of energy, he says. Cyanobacteria, on the other hand, use only sunlight for energy, though they do their extraction work more slowly than heating the soil artificially.
The exotic nature of the nuggets allows one relatively easy form of distinguishing them from conventional asteroids: since the strange quark matter is expected to have a plasma frequency as high as 20MeV (well in the hard-ray frequencies), the bare quark surface would act as a perfect mirror to the incident solar light. Hence, contrary to the case of even metallic asteroids for which A ∼ 0.1, we expect albedos ≈ 1 and therefore a quotient FV /FI much larger than any reasonable normal surface.Sounds cool; asteroids that are nice shiny mirror balls.
The possibility of a direct impact onto the Earth isJust thought you should know.
extremely small (about one event per Hubble time) for halo PQNs, but grows considerably for a captured population. Specific signatures of such an hypothetic collision (likely giving rise to a huge epilinear earthquake) have never been worked out in full detail.
Fire off a simple text message, wait 15 minutes and presto, 300 euros land in your account; the simplicity of obtaining SMS loans in Sweden is increasingly luring youths into debt.What a silly idea.
The researchers' most conservative forecast predicts that by 2010, there will be an increase of 600 million metric tons of carbon emissions in China over the country's levels in 2000. This growth from China alone would dramatically overshadow the 116 million metric tons of carbon emissions reductions pledged by all the developed countries in the Kyoto Protocol. (The protocol was never ratified in the United States, which was the largest single emitter of carbon dioxide until 2006, when China took over that distinction, according to numerous reports.)The whole article is worth reading, if you like being depressed.
Put another way, the projected annual increase in China alone over the next several years is greater than the current emissions produced by either Great Britain or Germany.
Based upon these findings, the authors say current global warming forecasts are "overly optimistic," and that action is urgently needed to curb greenhouse gas production in China and other rapidly industrializing countries.
British physicist David Deutsch, invoking the "many-universe" interpretation of quantum mechanics, believes that "pastward" time travel would require travel to another, parallel universe--one in which I could kill my grandfather and in which I (therefore) would never be born. Via a time machine, I would have removed myself from this universe to take up residence in that one.
The idea has some interesting implications. Deutsch has suggested that one reason we have detected no extraterrestrial civilizations may be that, using time machines, they have left this universe, preferring to live in another.
I suppose it also means that our universe could see a sudden influx of aliens arriving from another universe; not just from a corner of the one we know.
Middle-aged non-drinkers can quickly reduce their risk of heart disease by introducing a daily tipple to their diet, South Carolina researchers say.
New moderate drinkers were 38% less likely to develop heart disease than those who stayed tee-total, a four-year study involving 7,500 people found.Those who drank only wine showed the most benefit, the researchers reported in the American Medical Journal.
The American Heart Association is still the spoilsport, though:
Despite several studies showing an association with alcohol intake and reduced cardiovascular risk, guidance from the American Heart Association warns people not to start drinking if they do not already drink alcohol.
The ancient Egyptians went to great lengths to be clean, but both sexes anointed their genitals with perfumes designed to deepen and exaggerate their natural aroma.I wonder what scents that involved. (Big potential for poor taste jokes here, I suppose.)
The outsiders usually err on the side of dirtiness. The ancient Egyptians thought that sitting a dusty body in still water, as the Greeks did, was a foul idea. Late 19th-century Americans were scandalised by the dirtiness of Europeans; the Nazis promoted the idea of Jewish uncleanliness. At least since the Middle Ages, European travellers have enjoyed nominating the continent's grubbiest country - the laurels usually went to France or Spain. Sometimes the other is, suspiciously, too clean, which is how the Muslims, who scoured their bodies and washed their genitals, struck Europeans for centuries. The Muslims returned the compliment, regarding Europeans as downright filthy.
LABOR will scrap annual bonuses of $1600 paid to carers as its budget razor gang carves deep into welfare programs to cut spending and curb inflation.Yes, it's important to stop those profligate carers who you always see out at the best restaurants, buying French champagne and using their PDAs.
It will replace the payments with a higher utilities allowance but will leave the sick and disabled and their carers hundreds of dollars a year worse off.
"The sun was dark and its darkness lasted for eighteen months; each day it shone for about four hours; and still this light was only a feeble shadow … the fruits did not ripen and the wine tasted like sour grapes."That's one way to counter global warming.
Bjork is under attack after shouting "Tibet! Tibet!" at the end of her song Declare Independence at a concert in Shanghai.The crowd did not erupt into jeers, however:
...another audience member, Gabriel Monroe, told the Guardian most people did not register the remark at first."One of my friends thought she was saying 'to bed', because she had mentioned it was the last song," he said.
Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps 10 keywords: Dream, Fear, Hope, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together. Fishing exclusively from this tiny and stagnant pool of stock expressions, it ought to be possible to drive all thinking people away from the arena and leave matters in the gnarled but capable hands of the professional wordsmiths and manipulators.Of course, in Australia presently, there are not just slogans, but whole pages of cliché-ridden "vision speak" issuing forth from those who see the very concept of the 2020 summit as some sort of balm for the abraded soul of the nation:
Having survived the Sinister Prime Minister, we need to put down some of our shields, unclench our fists and let down our guard enough to dream again together. The Rudd Government's gesture is grand. Let's rise to the occasion of the Australia 2020 Summit.There's more:
I see it as the start of a restoration of confidence in Australian culture, identity and ingenuity, and a faith that we can think about future challenges, and find what we need to face them.And this:
Regardless of anything else the summit achieves, it has people thinking about where we might go from here, and what we might do instead of what we won't do.Well, it's certainly making me think hard about a non-clichéd way of saying "what twaddle."
A one-day seminar on Monday brought delegates from 12 developing countries, most of them not IWC members, to Tokyo to discuss "sustainable use" of whales.
An official told the BBC that Japan hoped these nations would join the IWC.
The nations concerned include those famously whale interested places Angola and Eritrea. At least they have ocean frontage, I suppose.
This is no way to run a whaling commission, although I also wonder what the outcome would be if all nations had to participate via the UN or some such body. The problem then would probably just be getting enough of the uninterested nations to not abstain from votes.
The International Whaling Commission website is full of information, and the page relating to Japan's "scientific" whaling is here. The number of whales Japan wants to take for its new research program is set out as follows:
Annual sample sizes for the proposed full-scale research (lethal sampling) are 850 (with 10% allowance) Antarctic minke whales (Eastern Indian Ocean and Western South Pacific stocks), 50 humpback whales (D and E stocks) and 50 fin whales (Indian Ocean and the Western South Pacific stocks).They are holding off on the humpbacks for now, as most people would know.
Does the "proportion" apply to the intention of those firing the Kassams -- to wit, indiscriminate terror against civilian populations? In that case, a "proportionate" Israeli response would involve, perhaps, firing 2,500 artillery shells at random against civilian targets in Gaza. Or should proportion apply to the effects of the Kassams -- an exquisitely calibrated, eye-for-eye operation involving the killing of a dozen Palestinians and the deliberate maiming or traumatizing of several hundred more?This is a good point. I would like to know what critics could say if Israel did the literally proportionate thing - an eye for an eye response in the number of unguided rockets. (I don't know that artillery shells really are the same as the Hamas rockets which - I thought - often didn't have much in the way of explosives in them.
But non-reciprocity is not and should not be all-encompassing. First, current IHL does not preclude reprisals during combat against combatants that might violate IHL. Second, even the bans on reprisals in Protocol I have their detractors, such as the United Kingdom, which issued a reservation to that treaty allowing for the possibility of measured reprisals against civilians if the opposing party itself engaged in serious, deliberate attacks on civilians.Interesting.
The Japanese government is so bullish the technology it has earmarked $309 million a year for fuel cell development and plans for 10 million homes - about one-fourth of Japanese households - to be powered by fuel cells by 2020.They work by extracting hydrogen from natural gas, to which lots of houses in Japan are connected. I wonder if they would be better if hydrogen was stored on site, in one of those new storage systems that seem promising.
KERRY OBRIEN: What I'm asking you, you've making these points as you've been making them ad nauseam since you came to power. When is it reasonable for members of the public to start holding you responsible for high interest rates and high inflation? Are you still going to be blaming John Howard two and a half years from now?
So far so weird. But it is not like the student characters are even meant to be really interested in the women customers:At Edelstein boarding school, the schoolboys wear lip-gloss, the headmistress has a weakness for homoerotic comic books, and there is only one subject: how to serve female visitors.
Welcome to Tokyo's first schoolboy cafe, the latest in a flurry of eateries in Japan where customers and waiters role play themes from manga comics.
In keeping with the schoolboy theme, waiters with manicured hands and soft voices pretend to be teenage students, chatting and flirting with well-dressed Japanese women playing the roles of benefactresses visiting the school.
This next line really made me laugh:Its visitors are united by a passion for such "boy-love manga", or comics about boy-boy romance for female readers - a genre that is currently undergoing a huge revival in Japan.
Most boy-love manga feature dreamy, feminine-looking male characters. The same beauty ideal guides Sakamaki when she selects the waiters who talk about their pretend homework and studies at Edelstein.
"I'm in the flower arrangement club," whispers one girlish, long-haired waiter at the cafe, looking up from the book of German poetry he is reading.The Japanese really need something better to occupy their minds.
Two reservations:Most homes will have broadband communication speeds up to 100 times faster than what is currently available, under the Rudd Government's plan to wire Australia for the 21st century.
Federal Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy told The Sunday Age that early discussions on the Government's promised broadband network indicated that it would be much faster than previously thought.
"This is going to revolutionise the way Australians live their lives," Senator Conroy said.
"....All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do." ...Yes, I've heard him express these views before. But what is "Quorn"?
To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.
Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem - the bigger challenge will be food. "Maybe they'll synthesise food. I don't know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco's, in the form of Quorn. It's not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it." But he fears we won't invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects "about 80%" of the world's population to be wiped out by 2100.
