It always struck me as somewhat ironic how parents of adolescent students of mine would promise me their kid would get a hiding when they got home...for fighting at school.

I was told I'd probably change my mind about corporal punishment when I had kids of my own. Now I do, and I'm even more against the concept than ever before. How you're supposed to teach a kid to think responsibly rather than react with aggression while whacking them is beyond me.

And Jessss, if you have a link to that study, that would be super. I've never come across any mention of it before (which is odd).

Most people aren't laughing at him, but rather at the weirdness of the whole thing. Most of us haven't grown up in 1960s Russia and have no experience of such culture, so laugh at it for its peculiarity. If you're one of the few immature douche-bags who thinks it's about laughing at somebody out of a sense of superiority, then I don't see why he'd give two dogs bollocks about such childish opinions.

I say good on him for being a good sport with it. Nothing wrong with laughing at things we find weird - I'm quite sure the Russians do it often as well. ;)

The problem is that there is no way of knowing anything about such 'mysteries'. Time and the chinese whispers effect means facts are slowly dropped, changed or added, making the mere interesting into the absolute mind boggling. A woman with severe hypothermia, frostbite and stiff muscles from hypoxia becomes 'frozen solid', making it seem as if all of the water in her body has become ice. The iron tower 'mystery' is as insulting as thinking structures like the pyramids were beyond stupid ancient cultures. Others aren't even mysteries - a person claiming to do weird stuff that nobody else can see or replicate should simply be ignored.

There are plenty of amazing things in the universe which are truly mind blowing. Why do we need to distract ourselves with hyperbole, hoaxes and make-believe?

@Dax:

So to you, 'drug' carries the qualifier of 'must be synthetic'?

What a positively useless definition. I'm glad the medical field uses a completely different definition to yours.

Medicine is always a case of weighing the risks with the benefits. Blanket statements decrying drugs as bad are as senseless as blanket statements stating everybody should be on some given drug.

In a situation where a patient presents with extreme symptoms, two questions should be asked with regards to a potential treatment; is the potential for negative consequences worth the alleviation of symptoms? And how do alternatives compare?

In this case, it seems as if the benefits far outweigh potential negative consequences.

Nothing terrifies me more than the idea that is only one's belief in a deity that keeps them from harming me or mine.

I'm proud to be an atheist. The values I was raised with and my ultimate belief in our shared responsibility to make life as easy and peaceful for one another as possible means I have no desire to harm another. There is no need to bow to the wishes of another being in this.

For those of faith, if their god were proven absent or they believed it's subjective view of 'good' involved doing harm to another, they would be capable of astonishing atrocities.

No good without a god? I shudder to think if that were true.

Dickhead sharks...

Well, 'grass' certainly might have something to do with the message. ;) Although acid would be my first guess.

So...alien technology that allows it to travel through space results in the squashing of grass to leave its message? Ahh...yeah.

Seriously, how can any serious writer simply swallow this as a given? No 'reportedly' or 'Person X says'. Just the writer accepting that indeed, a crop circle made by aliens responded to the message.

I'm wondering how many people here are true synaesthesiacs, and how many simply associate time with a visual. There is a big difference.

Synaesthesia is a true crossing of senses, where a sound, touch or smell will actually activate a visual response, or vice versa. Seeing a flash might actually produce a sound like a pop or a sizzle. Tasting salt might produce an actual prickly feeling in the fingertips.

Many people can relate concepts with images. I've always seen the number two as red, for example. I also visualise time like a red ribbon, for some reason. But while I can picture it in my mind's eye, it isn't true synaesthesia as it isn't an actual crossing of the senses. Just pattern making, which our brains naturally do quite well.

Whether that is the same with Ms. Branigan or not, I don't know. Need to see some good evidence, though.

How hard has this person tried? Thrown up on the internet, we immediately get half a dozen people recognising that it's a blurred bug...

I think some people simply so want there to be fairies, they'll do their best to ignore reality. If that's the case, why bother with the photo at all?

Leeches were once used to remove blood in order to 'balance the humours' in the body, which in effect was a cure-all (humour imbalance caused nearly every affliction). Today, they have a very specific use that has nothing to do with humours.

Bee stings aren't much different. Any time somebody claims their treatment can cure a wide variety of ailments, you can bet your bottom dollar it'll be pseudomedicine. Bee venom might have some reasonable medical uses, but magic it ain't.

So, none of you have made a mistake before?

I had this happen. A friend grabbed something out of my car. The lock had been broken in the past, and if you didn't close the door properly, the lock would half pop up again.

Somebody broke in and took the only thing they could find - a single cd. They left a similar note, stating I 'should really lock my car properly'.

Smug bastard got his. Working next door to a school, I hazarded a guess it was a student. Sure enough, the handwriting was recognized, the kid got ratted, and I got my cd back.

Chiropractics/fast food. No real difference as far as I can see. Except fast food might be a little better for you.

I seriously doubt it.

The effort required to trek down through many of the cave systems where such art was found would have required quite a bit of preparation. We're not talking about shoving a social outcast down a hole and having them scratch on the walls with a loose stone out of boredom here - it required the mixing and blending of pigments found outside of the cave, creation of a light source of some sort out of animal fat and a wick, not to mention learning how to form such images from observing others at work or practicing it themselves.

It's unlikely a mentally unstable pariah would have foresight to do all of this. Of course, as others have said, that's not to say the artist could not have had other forms of mental disorder. However I don't see any reason to invoke such a hypothesis.

Athon