Woodie Guthrie the raving communist hater of corporations is advertising Audi cars? Are they going to have this machine kills fascists emblazoned on the side?
And whats with the papercraft? a nice biodegradable car that is put together with loving care? The sort of thing that wont mow down people and leave them clinging to the bloody stumps that used to join to their feet?
At least Woody had the decency to die before they tried to dance around in his skin in some bizarre puppet person desecration. Iggy pop on the other hand has some sort of alien inside him that makes him advertise carinsurance
We have too much food, information, stuff, and the constant quest for more is costing us our physical and mental and even planetary well being.
The good of this book is that it is correct and entertaining. The bad is
1. This bit of the brain lights up which means.... Something like this is said every few paragraphs which as the author himself points out "is like standing outside a football ground, trying to interpret the action in the game by listening to the roars of the crowd". Brain scanning is not that accurate and basing your argument on extremely scant data like this is unwise.
2. In the stone age we did X so now we do X to much in the modern world. Evolutionary just so stories. These pop up in popular culture all the time and become accepted knowledge without any evidence. We don't really know how we lived in the stone age. Looking at Bonobo society early man may have been vastly different to how we imagine it today. So the old cliche (not from the book) Men are better at maths because they had to have spatial abilities to chase antelope. Except when you look at it that's not thereason. People thinking men are better at maths seems to be most of the cause of them being better.
This book is full of these non falsifiable fairy tales which again is not a good foundation for an argument
3. No index
4. We cannot have more stuff unless we consume more. This is taken as an axiom but it is wrong. Ephemeralization is the process where people use technological advances to continuously do more with less.
The book is right that we need to be satisfied with enough and serves as a good motivator as to how to do this personally.
Similar but better books are Collapse by Jared Diamond on what causes societies to fail and Critical Path by Buckminster Fuller on how we can provide the needs of society and move away from over consumption.
How do you improve the vision of poor people? Poor as in uneducated less then a dollar a day third world poor. Joshua Silver has invented adjustable glasses to cheaply do this. There are other ideas donating old glasses for example.
The rand experiment showed that one of the few useful free health care provisions are free glasses. Granted that was of fairly rich people who could buy glasses if they really needed them but it still shows a benefit.
See if you can figure out what the picture is used for?
Bonnie, a 30-year-old female orangutan whistles. Now that is not a weird as a French person showering or an interesting Canadian but it is still important news. From my extensive knowledge of computer games and films I knew simians could kidnap damsels then either throw barrels or climb skyscrapers but whistling?
Bonnie being able to whistle is important because it shows these apes have control over their vocalisations and their sounds can be voluntary. This means that voluntary vocal abilities are not purely a human ability. Bonnie learned to whistle by copying her zoo keeper rather then through being taught explicitly. This means orangutans have far more vocal abilities than previously believed and so humans vocal language skills are shared at least in part with other species.
Which leads to many questions, Should we upgrade the rights we give Orangutans? Or more likely should we downgrade the rights of wolf-whistling builders? Could we have have zoos with exhibits of brick layers who strut and preen occasionally shouting mating calls at passers bye? That does not sound much different to many building sites I have seen.
Now the comparison of human and orangutan may not be fair. I can't whistle and I'm significantly worse at hanging out of trees. On the positive side I'm nearly as house trained so I am not overly worried about getting replaced just yet.
The revelation comes from a paper published in December in Primates, an international journal of primatology. The Christmas edition of Primates is out? And I missed it? That is the one with the free 2009 calender. I hear the miss April Gibbon is a babe.
If they can whistle what else can the do? After whistling a full Christmas carol album can't be far behind. A simian soundtrack to the festive season is imminent. How annoyed is Jane Goodall going to be when she finds out about this? She probably has her chimps working on a a full barbershop album right now.
All the articles on this keep pointing out she is 30? Bonnie is still on the market and pointing out shes a trigenarian and getting on a bit cannot help her in the dating stakes.
Great Ape Trust scientist Dr. Serge Wich said "This is important because it provides a mechanism to explain documented between-population variation in sounds for wild orangutans," Did you know animals had accents? Do Hillbilly mountain monkeys get looked down on by the urbane city slicker zoo ones?
Not only that but the orangutans are teaching each other how to whistle. Indah was a roommate of Bonnie and she learned to whistle from Bonnie. Unfortunately Indah died before they could record a Christmas duet single. They can teach other this stuff? If one ever figures out how to lay bricks builders are in trouble.
Poodles are Satan's Idea of a good pet. But what happens when a proper animal spawns itself with these furballs of hate. All these animals are the unholy union of a poodle and a proper dog. Match the picture of a poodle hybrid to the others side of the crossbreed.
A RECORD haul of cocaine worth more than €500m was dramatically seized off the south-west coast yesterday in a sweeping international 'sting' operation.
2.
TD warns vaccine cut will result in 80 deaths calculating the cost of the programme was half the €14m claimed by the Government — €7m
Does anyone else think 1 could solve 2? Why not let the government sell cocaine to people? You don't hear of pharmacists shooting each other. But we cannot profit from drug dealers? We already do through CAB (criminal assets bureau). But what about the lives that would be lost? Id rather coked up assholes died at their own hand than condemn women to a preventable death.
We are now short of cash. That is the reason prohibition ended.
A bunch of my friends were trying to find a route round this graph at the weekend. Yeah it was a crazy party. A quick search showed the problem was one of finding the Eulerian path. And that the puzzle had no solution
"Eulerian path is a path in a graph which visits each edge exactly once. Similarly, an Eulerian circuit is an Eulerian path which starts and ends on the same vertex"
If there is to be an Eulerian path for a given graph the graph must have lesser than three nodes with odd number of edges."
The code to test this puzzle is print eulerPath({ 1:[2,2,3,3,4], 2:[1,1,3,4,4], 3:[1,1,2,4,4], 4:[1,2,2,3,3]}) print "test run to make sure code works " print eulerPath({ 1:[2,2], 2:[1,1]})
1. Npr va gur Ubyr 2. Vaqvnan Wbarf: Envqref bs gur ybfg nex 3. Gur Ubyr 4. Gur Tbbavrf 5. Gur Qrfprag 6. Gur Pnir 7. Gur Pber 8. Ynolevagu 9. Svtug Pyho 10.PyvssUnatre
Name the film Harrison is looking mildly perturbed in.
1. Nve Sbepr bar 2. Ncbpnylcfr Abj 3. Jung yvrf orarngu 4. Oynqr ehaare 5. Gur shtvgvir 6. Fgne Jnef 7. Vaqvnan Wbarf 8. Fnoevan 9. Jbexvat Tvey 10. Fvk qnlf frira avtugf 11. Cngevbg Tnzrf I accepted any film where the character is played a few times (6,7,11). Use this to unscramble. You can reuse the image for whatever use.
Annoyed at the constant bad weather the government today banned the met office predicting rain. Shares in Irish sun holidays and solar power soared on the new “ostrich” rules designed to stop meteorologists talking us into barometric depressions.
In the past weathermen who predicted the weather accurately were rewarded and those who had all the precognition of Icarus on the devils dandruff were shunned. Now with the fantastic rules that ban any depressing weather forecasts nothing but sunny skies will follow.
In a related story “emperors” clothing has released a new line of minimalist clothing. Anyone disparaging this clothes range or suggesting it may be too minimalist will be thrown to the wolves.
I am going to write a film called “A weekend at Bernankes” where the federal reserve chairman has amazing adventures with the bloated corpses or banking institutions. Of course no one dare anyone suggesting he’s engaging in necrophilia.
When you want to know if someone believes what they claim you ask them to bet. If they won’t bet it’s a very good sign they are spoofing you. Some people want to short stocks, where they are betting the market value of the bank will decrease. They have been banned from predicting the price of banks will decrease. When the government bans predicting the future you have to wonder how bad it must be going to be.
There is a game played in most of the world called Mancala. It is a “count and capture” game that involves moving stones around a board made up of holes. You can see an explanation of various forms of rules of the game here.
Ireland has some of the best preserved ancient tombs and building sin the world. This means we have some of the oldest known versions of games in the world. Boards of a game called “windmill” have been cut into the temple at Kurna, Egypt (~1440 BC). A version of this game called “Nine Man Morris” is still played. Tic Tac Toe can be considered a very basic version of it also. The earliest known depiction of this game is a bronze age cemetery in Ballinderry Ireland.
Boards of nine man morris have also been found in roman age sites.
Irish 5000 years old Mancala boards should look like this. On a flat surface. Two rows of holes, probably six holes (possibly more) long with slightly larger holes at either end. Possibly you would see a few together as mancala is currently a social game and tends to be played in groups.
We tend to view megalithic carvings as having a religious purpose. It is quite possible that megaliths were gathering points and as such social games took place there. So next time your at a megalith have a look for a game board.
1. You can graph a countries poverty versus its populations niceness based on the number of hats people wear when they return.
2. The Chinese are coming. My hotel was full of Chinese business people. They spoke fluent Spanish. Chinese people are investing in Cuba and are serious about the country. All the hotel staff came out to bid goodbye to a visiting Chinese MP. Cuban security were present, hawkish men with identical cream shirts. I saw no Chinese security. This shows how comfortable/safe the Chinese politician felt in Cuba.
3. Cubans are the only people on earth who clap when their plane takes off. Other people clap when the plane lands safely but they are just glad to get out.
Delta have a little linux computer for each seat that shows films and plays games and such. These go tits up often. When they do you get to see the Linux boot process for a few minutes. On my last flight you got to watch it over and over again all flight. Instead of showing the boot process Delta should show a splashscreen with some sort of image/ad.
It is fairly easy to do this . Of course they should actually stop linux from freezing and such but this is a simple change.
The bubonic plague wiped out 1/3 of Europe's population but the depopulated continent meant that peasants had more bargaining power and this hastened the end of the feudal system. So in spite of nearly destroying civilisation and killing millions in crippling pain the black death had some beneficial effects.
I cannot say this about the cocktail of Guinness and red bull.
This is now pretty much the national drink of Jamaica. The barman did not bat an eyelid, or try drive a stake through my pitch black heart, when I ordered it. There are even songs about it
I am not going to even describe what this tastes like. I think if I had gone up and grave robbed an Indian burial ground I would have caused less desecration.
