Honestly, people, there's nothing wrong with what Nona did. The kid's not going to be scarred for life. He'll just be a little disappointed that the "bottles were empty," so to speak. Infants will suck on fingers, noses, anything they can get into their mouths. And grandmas still have strong maternal instincts and love to relive their "new Mommy" days with a new grandchild. Just some harmless fun, good for building a nurturing bond. Too bad some people are so ignorant about breastfeeding and see it as weird or taboo.
Re: the Biddenden Maids - Nobody really knows if the twins existed or exactly how they were configured. However, they would not have resembled their popular image in any event. In conjoined twins and autosite/parasites, the connection is always axial --- that is, they are joined at the torso or head. They might share a limb, but the connection starts at the torso. There would not be a shoulder connection like we see here, with a separation below, followed by a connection at the hip. The gap would be filled with tissue, anything from skin to ribs and internal organs.
The image of the Biddenden Maids might be a stylized representation. Or, more likely, it began as a bit of folk art depicting two sisters or friends walking with their arms on each others' shoulders; the story of the conjoined twins possibly came into being later as a response to the odd-looking folk design.
I've been fed up with gas prices since it went over 10 cents per gallon, actually! This is insane. If anyone has a decent plan to lower the price of, or eliminate the need for, gasoline, let me know. My idea of retrofitting all existing cars to be hybrids (until fuel cells or something else can be implemented) and relying solely on domestic (and preferably recycled, like from a depolymerization plant) oil for the next few years, as far-fetched as it might seem to some people, is more realistic and humane than the alternative. The alternative consists of either letting things continue as they are, or hiring assassins to snap the necks of a few spoiled oil barons. Neither of those really count as solutions to what is a very serious problem.
Of course, if I could just manage to make a living working at home and using the Internet and Postal system to send work in (I'm an illustrator, but have to make a living as a teacher, which costs me over $300 a month in fuel), then I wouldn't have to worry about it so much.
Now that hybrids have become a bit more numerous since the last time I had to buy a car... Can anyone recommend a good USED hybrid? (Keep in mind that I'm practically flat broke despite working 7 days a week. It must be very inexpensive, as cars go. Like a compact two-year-old used Saturn.)
Is anyone else reminded of the Ray Bradbury story (anthologized in "The Martian Chronicles") about the fully-automated "smart" house whose human inhabitants have all been incinerated in a nuclear holocaust? This dog, though, seems to fare better than the one in the story... for now. Is there a machine that will feed it?
Wow! I'm amazed at how many responders also felt that (going solely by looks) #2 was the prettiest. (I also think that #7 and #6 were pretty close seconds, in that order.) But, as some pointed out, beauty is more complex than mere looks. For me, personality is the most important facet of a person's beauty. After that are various other things, and physical attractiveness is at the bottom of the list. In fact, although I'm extremely fussy, the women I have found attractive enough to propose to all look very different from each other. Three key features they all have in common are: a pleasant personality, "nerd-level" intelligence, and appreciation of the fine arts. It's possible that having these features may almost be sufficient for me to find a woman physically attractive as well.
I've heard some people denounce those who find personality more important than looks, saying that such people feel this way because they themselves are unattractive. I've also noticed that these unkind critics are singularly unattractive to me, both physically and otherwise. However, I find most "supermodel" types to be rather "generic" in appearance (to the point where they look alike to me and could vanish in a crowd to my eye), so maybe the unkind critics fit the criteria for "mass-market pretty." Or maybe not... which might explain their need to misinterpret the feelings of those who value personality over looks. In all honesty, I can't tell by looking. But I do feel that the true "ugly that goes to the bone" is a bad personality, and not a physical attribute.
I got Orkin and Chevy switched around; I didn't know what either logo was supposed to look like, so I just guessed. Got the others correct, though, and would have goten those right if I'd seen the logos.
I'm glad to see I'm not alone in recognizing the uselesness and folly of DST. I have the hardest time explaining to people that the increased hours of daylight happen regardless of whether one fools with the clock --- Summer is a comin' in, people! Meanwhile, traffic accidents due to sun glare and tired drivers increase, auto insurance rates continue to climb... and way too many people buy into the party line that "We just saved some daylight!" because the Earth's axial tilt is just too difficult a concept for them to grasp.
There are petitions online for abolishing DST. I urge everyone to seek them out and sign them, or start another one.
Trick to doing a good German accent: keep the teeth together as often as possible, and don't let the tongue show. (Also helps when actually speaking German, especially if you don't want to come off as a tourist.)
Re: #11 (Jitterbuggery) --- Beat me to the punch. While a fair number of people may have no problem with a single-sex school, and some may even do better in such an environment, it's not always preferable to a co-ed school. In my case, since I've been an autodidact from the start, I found the educational value of school to be quite lacking and at least 3 years behind where I was. Hence, I found it boring, time-wasting and often rife with inaccuracies. Couple that with the fact that I quickly discovered that it meant at least 12 years of unpaid labor, and there just wasn't much of an incentive for me to even attend school, let alone apply myself --- except that I would have been punished if I'd failed to comply.
The fact that I'm a straight guy and some of the girls at school were nice was about all that institution had going for it. A same-sex school, for me, would have been even more of a prison.
I also know several people who attended single-sex schools, and even single-religion schools. In such cases, profound ignorance of the opposite sex and other religions is the norm. (In their cultures, marriages are arranged by the parents, and the couples don't communicate very well at all.)
However, it seems some people who attended single-sex schools turned out all right and were even able to compare & contrast them with the co-ed model. If indeed there are definite advantages to single-sex schools, then it would be worthwhile for certain districts to set up a few of them, just to try them out. I imagine there would be an improvement, if only because students attending the school either want to be there, or their parents want them to be there. (This happens in connection with charter schools, regardless of the quality of teaching --- either the student or the parent actually has a stake in it. With public schools, it's just a state requirement, so nobody really cares.)
Nice! I didn't know about Enchodus' elongated front teeth; might be a more recent find...
The format of this site is very much like that of a project my pen-pal Ewa (a palaeontologist; sadly, she died on 1 February during treatment for leukemia) and I had in mind: an interactive virtual globe/timeline. Go to any part of the timeline you wish, and click on any location to learn about the topography, flora & fauna, whatever. Plate tectonics, volcanic activity, meteor strikes, etc. would be included. This would be a rather massive undertaking, and would be best supported online; but it should prove to be a useful teaching and research tool. It would clearly demonstrate, in 4-D, what we know about the Earth's story --- and how much we have yet to learn.
The way I see it, we've been in an economic recession since late December 2000, when the stock market crashed and failed to bounce back. It became a depression probably about three years ago, but it's hard to say exactly when.
In the 1930s, it took the New Deal and heavy government intervention to fix the problem. WWII may have helped, but I doubt that war is a necessity for rebuilding an economy; in fact, it usually has the opposite effect.
Here we are, embroiled in a drawn-out war that has contributed to our economic downfall. It's hard to say what can be done to help us. But I think a good start would be if the government stepped in and put caps on certain poverty-causing expenses, and even rolled them back. Rent --- both business and residential --- is far too high, and landlords do not need that much money to survive. Subsidies for alternative energy sources, such as were granted by the Carter administration, would lower the cost of producing electricity from renewable resources and wean us off of some fossil fuels. There are many more equitable ways to restore the middle class and reduce poverty.
The problem CAN be solved. But it will take a lot of work and leaders who actually recognize that there IS a serious problem, and has been for some time.
#17 (amberae) points out the most likely origin of water (or at least most of it; some could have been in the form of ice from early comet crashes). As anyone who's explored the problem of obtaining straight hydrogen for a fuel source knows, H loves to bond to certain other atoms. Helium doesn't bond too well to anything, but oxygen is always open to some hydrogen action under the right conditions.
This "expanding Earth" thing hardly qualifies as a theory. It begs the obvious questions of what drives this expansion, and what prevents ocean-swallowing cracks from forming. His generalizations and insistent tone do not make his claims any more factual.
Yes, the edges of many land-masses do match up like puzzle-pieces. Plate tectonics explains this very well. However, all the evidence indicates that the Atlantic is slowly expanding while the Pacific narrows. There's a subduction zone beneath the Pacific, hence the more volatile volcanic activity in the "Ring of Fire," more volatile than one gets in an expansion zone like the Atlantic's Mariana Trench. Australia and Antarctica were connected, long ago, and Australia may have been connected to China longer ago than that. Both continents have been migrating south for over 100 million years.
As for the presence of penguins in both S. America and Antarctica, and of closely-related species of conifers and redwoods in Asia and N. America, plate tectonics has little to do with that --- ice ages are responsible. During these cold periods, a good deal of water gets locked up in polar ice, and coastlines expand as sea levels drop. Flightless birds migrated between Antarctica and S. America, while vast forests spread across the Bering Strait and became the dominant flora in both Asia and N. America.
The building and melting of polar ice caps during cold and warm periods causes sea levels to fall and rise. Most of Europe was a shallow sea during much of the Mesozoic era, and so more marine reptiles than dinosaurs are found there --- but it dried out as the climate cooled, so many prehistoric land mammal fossils can be found there.
This guy's animation is fairly accurate regarding the S. America / Africa connection, but he really had to distort the coastlines of the Pacific-facing land-masses to make it all fit. There are good maps showing the continental shelves that make it easy to see how things actually did fit together during the good ol' Pangaea days. (Not THAT good --- most of the inland regions were burning hot, dry desert! But that was before the dinosaurs, even.)
#3 (Melissa) pretty much bopped it on the nose. Marriage in India is still for the most part a business transaction. While this has several up-sides, it has down-sides, too. The same goes for romantic love. Part of me would like to blame the promiscuity of Indian men on this --- except that promiscuity is a problem in the West as well, so apparently promiscuity stems from an unrelated cause.
I have noticed that many Indians and Bangladeshi I know are either profoundly ignorant of pregnancy or in a state of extreme denial, as if babies were somehow something to be ashamed of. My guess is that these violent protests are a case of "the lady doth protest too much." The protesters know that promiscuity happens in India, and rather than accept that it's a common problem that could perhaps be solved by honest, open communication, they treat it as though it's an alien thing and blame it on "the West." In the absence of "western" influences, they'd blame it on someone else.
This seems to hold true anywhere in the world, wherever counterproductive violent opposition occurs.
Where's the Kama, people? (Hindu deity of Love, like Eros or Cupid)
They would do well to remember a couple of romantic lovers from Hindu folklore, whose stories portray them as true & virtuous. The story of Savitri is one: She flees to the forest to escape a prophecy that her husband, should she marry, will die after a single year. She meets a handsome young woodcutter there and falls in love anyway. He dies after a year, but she refuses to stop following Yama (Death) when he takes her husband's soul. Yama takes pity on her and grants her three wishes (provided that "restore my husband to life" is not one of them). Her 3rd wish is to have many children, so Yama promises that this will happen. Having secured that boon, Savitri reminds Yama that a Hindu woman may marry only once. Yama tells her, "In this way do the gods enjoy being defeated," and restores her husband to life, breaking the curse.
The other story I had in mind concerns a "forbidden love" between a man and woman of different castes. As the hapless couple is being dragged off to be immolated for this transgression, the woman compares the burning of bodies to the burning of wood for incense. She points out that although certain woods smell better than others when burnt, the bodies of a Brahmin and an Untouchable smell alike. (Not exactly iron-clad logic, but neither is the basis of the caste system either. In the story, it works.)
The image of the Biddenden Maids might be a stylized representation. Or, more likely, it began as a bit of folk art depicting two sisters or friends walking with their arms on each others' shoulders; the story of the conjoined twins possibly came into being later as a response to the odd-looking folk design.
Of course, if I could just manage to make a living working at home and using the Internet and Postal system to send work in (I'm an illustrator, but have to make a living as a teacher, which costs me over $300 a month in fuel), then I wouldn't have to worry about it so much.
Now that hybrids have become a bit more numerous since the last time I had to buy a car... Can anyone recommend a good USED hybrid? (Keep in mind that I'm practically flat broke despite working 7 days a week. It must be very inexpensive, as cars go. Like a compact two-year-old used Saturn.)
I've heard some people denounce those who find personality more important than looks, saying that such people feel this way because they themselves are unattractive. I've also noticed that these unkind critics are singularly unattractive to me, both physically and otherwise. However, I find most "supermodel" types to be rather "generic" in appearance (to the point where they look alike to me and could vanish in a crowd to my eye), so maybe the unkind critics fit the criteria for "mass-market pretty." Or maybe not... which might explain their need to misinterpret the feelings of those who value personality over looks. In all honesty, I can't tell by looking. But I do feel that the true "ugly that goes to the bone" is a bad personality, and not a physical attribute.
There are petitions online for abolishing DST. I urge everyone to seek them out and sign them, or start another one.
The fact that I'm a straight guy and some of the girls at school were nice was about all that institution had going for it. A same-sex school, for me, would have been even more of a prison.
I also know several people who attended single-sex schools, and even single-religion schools. In such cases, profound ignorance of the opposite sex and other religions is the norm. (In their cultures, marriages are arranged by the parents, and the couples don't communicate very well at all.)
However, it seems some people who attended single-sex schools turned out all right and were even able to compare & contrast them with the co-ed model. If indeed there are definite advantages to single-sex schools, then it would be worthwhile for certain districts to set up a few of them, just to try them out. I imagine there would be an improvement, if only because students attending the school either want to be there, or their parents want them to be there. (This happens in connection with charter schools, regardless of the quality of teaching --- either the student or the parent actually has a stake in it. With public schools, it's just a state requirement, so nobody really cares.)
The format of this site is very much like that of a project my pen-pal Ewa (a palaeontologist; sadly, she died on 1 February during treatment for leukemia) and I had in mind: an interactive virtual globe/timeline. Go to any part of the timeline you wish, and click on any location to learn about the topography, flora & fauna, whatever. Plate tectonics, volcanic activity, meteor strikes, etc. would be included. This would be a rather massive undertaking, and would be best supported online; but it should prove to be a useful teaching and research tool. It would clearly demonstrate, in 4-D, what we know about the Earth's story --- and how much we have yet to learn.
In the 1930s, it took the New Deal and heavy government intervention to fix the problem. WWII may have helped, but I doubt that war is a necessity for rebuilding an economy; in fact, it usually has the opposite effect.
Here we are, embroiled in a drawn-out war that has contributed to our economic downfall. It's hard to say what can be done to help us. But I think a good start would be if the government stepped in and put caps on certain poverty-causing expenses, and even rolled them back. Rent --- both business and residential --- is far too high, and landlords do not need that much money to survive. Subsidies for alternative energy sources, such as were granted by the Carter administration, would lower the cost of producing electricity from renewable resources and wean us off of some fossil fuels. There are many more equitable ways to restore the middle class and reduce poverty.
The problem CAN be solved. But it will take a lot of work and leaders who actually recognize that there IS a serious problem, and has been for some time.
This "expanding Earth" thing hardly qualifies as a theory. It begs the obvious questions of what drives this expansion, and what prevents ocean-swallowing cracks from forming. His generalizations and insistent tone do not make his claims any more factual.
Yes, the edges of many land-masses do match up like puzzle-pieces. Plate tectonics explains this very well. However, all the evidence indicates that the Atlantic is slowly expanding while the Pacific narrows. There's a subduction zone beneath the Pacific, hence the more volatile volcanic activity in the "Ring of Fire," more volatile than one gets in an expansion zone like the Atlantic's Mariana Trench. Australia and Antarctica were connected, long ago, and Australia may have been connected to China longer ago than that. Both continents have been migrating south for over 100 million years.
As for the presence of penguins in both S. America and Antarctica, and of closely-related species of conifers and redwoods in Asia and N. America, plate tectonics has little to do with that --- ice ages are responsible. During these cold periods, a good deal of water gets locked up in polar ice, and coastlines expand as sea levels drop. Flightless birds migrated between Antarctica and S. America, while vast forests spread across the Bering Strait and became the dominant flora in both Asia and N. America.
The building and melting of polar ice caps during cold and warm periods causes sea levels to fall and rise. Most of Europe was a shallow sea during much of the Mesozoic era, and so more marine reptiles than dinosaurs are found there --- but it dried out as the climate cooled, so many prehistoric land mammal fossils can be found there.
This guy's animation is fairly accurate regarding the S. America / Africa connection, but he really had to distort the coastlines of the Pacific-facing land-masses to make it all fit. There are good maps showing the continental shelves that make it easy to see how things actually did fit together during the good ol' Pangaea days. (Not THAT good --- most of the inland regions were burning hot, dry desert! But that was before the dinosaurs, even.)
I have noticed that many Indians and Bangladeshi I know are either profoundly ignorant of pregnancy or in a state of extreme denial, as if babies were somehow something to be ashamed of. My guess is that these violent protests are a case of "the lady doth protest too much." The protesters know that promiscuity happens in India, and rather than accept that it's a common problem that could perhaps be solved by honest, open communication, they treat it as though it's an alien thing and blame it on "the West." In the absence of "western" influences, they'd blame it on someone else.
This seems to hold true anywhere in the world, wherever counterproductive violent opposition occurs.
Where's the Kama, people? (Hindu deity of Love, like Eros or Cupid)
They would do well to remember a couple of romantic lovers from Hindu folklore, whose stories portray them as true & virtuous. The story of Savitri is one: She flees to the forest to escape a prophecy that her husband, should she marry, will die after a single year. She meets a handsome young woodcutter there and falls in love anyway. He dies after a year, but she refuses to stop following Yama (Death) when he takes her husband's soul. Yama takes pity on her and grants her three wishes (provided that "restore my husband to life" is not one of them). Her 3rd wish is to have many children, so Yama promises that this will happen. Having secured that boon, Savitri reminds Yama that a Hindu woman may marry only once. Yama tells her, "In this way do the gods enjoy being defeated," and restores her husband to life, breaking the curse.
The other story I had in mind concerns a "forbidden love" between a man and woman of different castes. As the hapless couple is being dragged off to be immolated for this transgression, the woman compares the burning of bodies to the burning of wood for incense. She points out that although certain woods smell better than others when burnt, the bodies of a Brahmin and an Untouchable smell alike. (Not exactly iron-clad logic, but neither is the basis of the caste system either. In the story, it works.)