January 2005

"there are no elected representatives to speak for the people and the media have been excluded from large swathes of territory"

"Keeping suspects under house arrest without trial is better than imprisoning them in high-security jails without trial, but it is still unacceptable"

the average wage in Norrath works out at over US$3/hour - and there are Mexican sweatshops where people are paid to play Everquest!

overflights are "are not necessarily an act of war in themselves, unless they are perceived as being so by the country that is being overflown"

"In an election season with few campaign rallies and fewer public appearances by candidates, Mr. Sheikh incongruously displays all of the techniques of a Western politician"

hundreds of Palestinians have had their homes and fields appropriated, without any compensation, under a 1948 law

"Arabic has become particularly popular in colloquial Hebrew and swear words" but English is the real worry

a secular party with a long anti-Baathist tradition and mass support across ethnic and sectarian lines, unlikely to be seen as pawns of the United States...

"with this group that's now in the White House and in the Pentagon, you can't get to the meetings unless you drink the Kool-Aid"

"This is document MIL-C-44072C 30 April 1990 SUPERSEDING MIL-C-44072B 9 December 1987 W/CHANGE 12 February 2003"

they have a nice web site, but I fear not many people overseas will trust a Nigerian retailer with their credit card details!

"For all the nationalistic exuberance of China, there is no sign of a shift away from the fundamentally pragmatic external policy of the last quarter-century"

"you need Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage. Throw your Strunk & White away, and hang the pages on a nail in the guest outhouse for emergency use."

"Somewhere in the world, there's a navy blue suitcase with a small pack of explosives tucked in its side pocket."

"it is becoming difficult to convince our children that we actually did exist there, and that some of us are still there in Iraq, Morocco, Yemen and Iran"

"there are good reasons for believing that todays system of granting patents is stifling innovation, not encouraging it"

"Palestinian nationalism has evolved in a similar fashion to Zionism, with the secular nationalist factions going much further than the religious factions"

the Palestinians really should try getting in first, breaking off relations with Israel whenever the IDF kills another half-dozen civilians

"We've put so much emphasis on diet and exercise that we've failed to recognize the value of good sleep"

I highly recommend Abraham Pais' biography Subtle is the Lord (Amazon), though it's aimed at readers with a reasonable physics background

"at least one error appeared in 38 per cent of the Nature papers and 25 per cent of the BMJ papers looked at"

"just 83 feet across, 65 foot high, 100 foot wide -- a ruddy big lump of rock sticking out the sea about 300 miles from Scotland"

I've never joined any frequent flier scheme - I simply don't want to have to put time into "managing my portfolio"

"Cornish is dead, sadly. Stone dead. No one alive has ever heard a conversation between two native speakers in it, let alone lived with them for long enough to acquire native competence as a child."

"lighter stories about daily life -- the kind of apolitical features that fill Western news channels" and no more quoting from the Guardian or Independent

Okinawa has "one of the world's highest concentrations of centenarians and likely the world's longest life expectancy for any country or state"

"Leupueng has been obliterated. Of this town of 10,000 people, nothing vertical and square-edged is left."

"Iraq is now destroying the professional army the United States recruited to take the place of its citizen army."