They are basically the same (minus the felt linings) as Gillies, used for Irish dancing by my seven-year-old daughter.

http://www.google.com/images?q=gillies+irish+dance+shoes

10/10 here. Helps to know a couple of different alphabets and a little bit of the history of alphabets. I recognized the word for "love" in some of them :-).

Ukrainian is Cyrillic, with slight differences from Russian.

There are several ancient Egyptian scripts, but one is similar to ancient phoenician/hebrew.

Farsi uses arabic script. Only one candidate there.

Yiddish is germanic/slavic in hebrew characters

Japanese Kanji is similar to Chinese

Korean: Used to work in Flushing, Queens, where most of the store signs are in Korean.

Scandanavian Fehe is a variety of Runic. Fehe, like "alphabet", comes from the name of the first two runes.

I'm familiar with the appearance of Sanskit and Thai, so the last was just process of elimination.

How to beat the 37% rule:

http://www-abc.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/users/ptodd/publications/todd97/todd97a.htm

Testing 9 to 12 candidates and then taking the next better one gets you into the top 75 to 90% of the pool, whether the pool is 100 or 1000.

It's really hard to read because of the shallow surface scratches, but it appears to actually use the letters of ancient hebrew/phoenician script, rather than the aramaic letters that replaced them during the first exile.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Hebrew_alphabet#Ancestral_scripts_and_script_variants

The old "aleph-bet" was not commonly known but would have been recognized by the well-educated religious scholars or priests of the time. Use of those letters connoted something similar to the use of gothic script in bibles today ... it's an evocation of the authority of tradition, and would have had the additional advantage of obscuring the meaning somewhat from casual eyes. So I wouldn't call it a code, exactly, but more of a filter.

This sort of layered complexity was typical of sects such as the Essenes. In the Dead Sea scrolls they wrote the tetragrammaton YHVH in the old script.

The Pink Elephant car wash has been a fixture of neon art in Seattle for over half a century:

http://elephantcarwash.com/website/?page=about

@Veracosa: Skunks used to be thought to be in the mustelid family, but it now turns out that they are in a family of their very own, Mephitidae.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk

These skunks are of the "fancy" variety, having been bred in captivity for at least 40 years. You can tell by the odd coloring, similar to what you see in domesticated ferrets. Like ferrets, they still have a bit of wild nature to them, even after generations of domestication.

All predator mammals have anal scent glands -- the skunks have simply developed them as their primary means of defense.

PS: I'm not a carrier of any of the known Ashkenazi Jewish genetic disorders.

I am Jewish. In some fields, I'm considered brighter than 98% portion of the population. In others, I'm completely inept. My children (whose parents are both Ph.D.'s) and most of my cousins fall squarely within the norm of intelligence.

In school, the only difference I ever noticed between my abilities and those of the brighter set of my peers was that I have a slightly better memory. I'm not that much smarter, actually -- it takes me many repetitions to understand things, but I'm stubborn and enjoy the repetition. That's not intelligence, really. More RAM as opposed to a faster CPU. I know plenty of people with faster CPUs :-).

The main difference I've seen that leads to increased intelligence is (1) answering children's questions in a way that keeps them curious, (2) providing an environment that enables that curiosity to grow, and (3) challenging assumptions (in a positive and nurturing way) so the child doesn't settle into the rut of thinking he/she already knows everything. A child raised this way will derive great pleasure from learning, and strong emotion is one of the most reliable ways to retain facts in one's memory.

So maybe I inherited some recessive gene that has a higher probability of occurring in my gene pool. Does that really make a difference? It is still insulting to be regarded as a freak or unfairly advantaged because of something I have no control over. Other than family environment, the pleasure of finding things out is accessible to anyone with sufficient motivation, and can take you just as far.

Paying attention to supposed genetic or cultural "advantages" feels a lot like the dumbing down that happens in grade school, where anyone who works hard to achieve things is resented and picked on for making things harder for everyone else.

"Shouldn't of" is incredibly irritating, and I hear it all the time, from friends with Ph.D.'s, in, yes, rocket science. The reason it should be descried is that it is, as noted above, ungrammatical, and arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of what one is even trying to say. Like saying "eck-setera" or "I'll axe her about it".

People no longer understand the dative form in combinations. As in, "the importance of the event for Michele and I cannot be overstated". Should be "for Michele and me", because if the other person were not mentioned first, you would of course say "for me". This used to be called a Brooklynism, from its attempt to sound more sophisticated, but now everyone does it.

Finally, don't get me started on "you know". For me, it has become a tell whether the person really has confidence in their assertions. My new rule is that when you say "you know" for the third time, you must stop talking. That would have been great in the debates, don't you think?

To those who think caring is wasted on animals: Love is not a zero sum game. There is more than enough to share. It only runs out if you think you need to ration it.