Russia and the USA have the world’s highest populations of prisoners [PDF from the British Government, 116 KB size]. Russia has 685 per 100,000 people of the national population locked away, followed by the USA, which has 645 prisoners per 100,000. Those figures are around 6 times the rates for most countries in Europe, . . . → Read More: USA / Russia – getting indistinguishable?
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If you have any plans to visit the spectacular Grand Canyon Skywalk, you will probably be interested to read this article first – here’s the salient point: We walked in to get the tickets and met a very long line of people waiting to do the same. After 10 minutes of waiting, a “Question . . . → Read More: The Great Grand Canyon Skywalk Rip-off Richard Branson started thinking about saving fuel for Virgin Atlantic by having their jets towed to the take-off point at Heathrow and Gatwick without using their own engines. Now, from April onwards, Quantas and Air New Zealand are going to try gliding Boeing 747 jumbo jets into Auckland airport to save fuel on . . . → Read More: Aussie and NZ 747s will glide to save fuel Starting in mid-2007, the USA is going to scan in all ten fingerprints of people visiting the USA (at the moment they scan in 2 fingerprints). This allows the prints to be stored in a format compatible with that used by the FBI’s database. The fingerprints will made available to the FBI and international . . . → Read More: One step nearer to 1984 How much information about someone can you find out, starting with a discarded boarding card stub and just surfing the internet for 15 minutes using only data available in publicly available databases? Address? Who you are living with? Passport number and expiry date? Where you studied? Date of birth? Nationality? Well, all of those . . . → Read More: Identity theft 101 Problems that travelers have with the Transportation Security Administration (the agency that is responsible for checking passengers before they board flights to and from US airports) have been well documented (in case you need reminding, here’s a summary of some cases). I wasn’t aware that Canada poses similar problems until Ruth noticed this entry . . . → Read More: Airport controls in Canada William Mitchell, former head of the school of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has developed the City Car, with help on the styling from Frank Gehry in his Smart Cities research group. Mitchell felt the Smart car, developed by DaimlerChrysler in Germany didn’t go far enough either in terms of public . . . → Read More: Concept Car from MIT styled by Frank Gehry Room 407: Forte o Bastante by Speto / Baixo Ribeiro Memo to self – must find a reason to go to Denmark and stay in Hotel Fox in Copenhagen. The rooms are amazing. We greatly enjoyed our two-week break in Salamanca – despite getting taught at least three forms of past tense (including a good number of irregular verbs in each tense), two forms of the imperative and piles of new words in that time. Which says a lot for the staff and the other students, . . . → Read More: Back from Salamanca John Cowan has summarised the top eight languages of the world (by number of speakers). In places 1, 2 and 3 are Chinese, English and Spanish in that order. The commented list is here. I was surprised, that less people speak Russian than Portuguese. |
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