Just like it's not "The Hague". Oh wait...

Nah, I'm kidding. I'm a Canadian of Ukrainian heritage, so I know that "Ukraine" is preferred, but not because of some analogy to other place names. That's just the way they prefer it now.

My dad built us a tunnel of trees like that in our back yard when we little, although it was much smaller. About 30 or 40 meters long and only tall & wide enough for two little kids to walk past each other.

To paraphrase Chris Rock, no one thanks dads for the real work they do. "Boy, those electric lights sure make it easy to read at night. That hot running water sure gets clothes clean more easily than taking a washboard down to the river. That roof sure is good at keeping the rain off my head. All this food sure does prevent starvation."

I'm sure people's hearts are in the right place, but it's almost insulting to thank fathers for grilling some burgers or cleaning out a mousetrap, because it ignores their real contribution. Dads would probably rather be playing with their kids than earning the money to put them through college, but they make that sacrifice for their families. Thank your dad for slaving away in a tiny cubicle where no one respects him. Thank him for spending hundreds of hours stuck in traffic, commuting to a job he hates. Thank him for dealing with idiot co-workers and jerky customers. Thank him for the mortgage payments, the utilities bills, and the food on the table.

It seems like there would be lots of opportunities to get pre-euro bills that are now worthless.

An artifact fabricated to make you chumps think that America went to the moon. Everyone knows, the moon is only about the size of an apple.

Flowchart fail: if you come across a full or half-full coffee pot and drink it all, you don't brew a fresh one. Also, there's no loop back to the top, so if the pot is empty, you brew a fresh pot but don't drink any. There's also no way not to have wasted coffee left over at the end of the day, because you always make a new pot, even if no one wants any more.

I saw this story in several other places, and almost none of them actually show his handwriting. I mean, it's kind of the most important part of the story. I can imagine what a boy with no arms looks like; I have no idea what his writing looks like.

The Daily Mail's version of the story has an actual sample.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1374211/Outstanding-penmanship-award-goes--boy-hands.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

I had no idea that you could buy a statue like that for 900 euros. I imagined it would cost $30-50 thousand, at least. Otherwise, why would statues be so rare? Any boutique at the mall that's trying to class up it's image could afford one.

I used to ride the Toronto subway a lot. Unfortunately an artwork that makes you think, "Huh, it's a pocketwatch" from one angle looks like an awful mess from every other angle.

Nice work on the comma splice, ALA. There should be at least a semicolon after "stupid".

I didn't even notice "Awarness" before Dobalina pointed it out.

"There are still 5-year-old Roma kids attending the first grade, and many who can’t speak or write anything that isn’t in Romani."

How is that discriminatory? 5-year-olds are supposed to be in the first grade. And why would you send your kids to a Bulgarian school if you didn't want them to learn to speak Bulgarian? My father couldn't speak English when he started the first grade - that's why my grandparents sent him to school.

Would you let a barber shave you with a straight razor? After all, he might slit your throat. Would you let someone massage you with their feet (ashiatsu)? They might fall on you, or crush you. Would you let a beautician work on your lashes? She might jab you in the eye.

Ear picking does pose a slight risk, but it is a wonderful experience.

Maybe the iceberg was fully submerged, attached to a larger piece of ice, with the wood floating above it. Then the iceberg calved off and came to the surface, lifting the wood onto itself.

I type two spaces at the end of a sentence. The question is, how much space do you leave at the end of a handwritten sentence? A lot of people leave more space between sentences than they do between words when they use a pen or pencil, so it's consistent to do the same on a keyboard.

I have no intention of changing. If people like looking at ugly text, they can write software to change my double spaces into single spaces, the way HTML does. Likewise, if newspaper editors want to be such pedants, they can change it themselves. To quote Oscar Wilde, "I'll leave you to tidy up the woulds and shoulds, wills and shalls, thats and whiches, etc."

Focus on the substance of the ideas and leave the details of style up to people who care about it.

"Balance" is nonsense. First of all, an option isn't correct just because it's between two extremes. Some people say the Earth is round, others say it's flat, but the best option isn't some "middle ground". It's one of the extremes.

Second, "balance" is subjective. If an extreme amount of time to practice piano is 8 hours a day, then Amy Chua's 3 hours is the "balanced" option.

It's funny how a "balanced" approach is coincidentally the same as what you're already doing.

Good luck trying to support a billion people on the tundra of Siberia or Canada, or 130 million in the deserts of Australia. Not to mention moving the population of Vietnam to Greenland...