Benazir Bhutto was assassinated today and the world is a poorer place for it. I had the opportunity to see her speak at a Simmons Leadership Conference a few years ago. I wish I had my notes to share with you (but they were in my company notebook which I had to leave with the company.) She was inspiring though. She was doing what she thought was right for her country at great personal expense.
I wish the best to her family and her country.
This guy spent a week in the Mall of Americas in Minneapolis - all open hours and one night. It's an interesting read just for the people he met and the things he tried. He met one woman who claimed to be a stay-at-home mom who shopped at the mall six days a week and spent over $100,000 a year!
I got an email called "Quite an Analogy" forwarded on by somebody I respect and it made me so mad. It said we should stop providing housing assistance, emergency medical care and free schools. Because if we did that all the immigrants would go away and life would be better for us. No crowding, no mess. (It was comparing it to the fact that if you put on bird feeders, the birds come and make a mess and pester you for food. Take down the bird feeders, the birds go away and the mess is solved.)
Let me see, if I stopped feeding my kids, they'd probably go away sooner or later and the house would sure be cleaner and quieter. Or to make the analogy more accurate, that if the neighbor kids started coming over for food, I should stop feeding the neighbor kids and my kids, so that the neighbor kids (never mind what would happen to mine) would go away. What kind of reasoning is that?? And it obviously resonates with people - someone forwarded it to me.
If you want the problem to go away, you need to look at why you have the problem. It's not because you put out the bird feeder. If the emergency rooms are crowded, it's not because you offer emergency care to everyone, it's because some people had no where else to go. Figure out why they don't have family doctors and help them get them. It has to be easier and cheaper for them and the emergency rooms to provide care for them some other way. Personally, I like that the courts have constantly up held our right to emergency care regardless of proof of insurance.
I think people that want to get rid of the bird feeder are just plain lazy. They aren't willing to really figure out why we have this problem. This isn't the immigrants' problem. It's our problem. We have to fix it. Getting rid of the bird feeder will just change the problem, not solve it.
I take that back. Getting rid of the bird feeder, if it meant lowering our standard of living to that of Mexico, might solve the problem. If life was as bad here as there, maybe they wouldn't come. If I stop feeding my kids, the neighbor kids will stop coming over for dinner.
The US is wealthy - this map just gives you an idea. For each state, it lists a country with a similar GDP. California produces as much as France and Texas produces as much as Canada! Basically the states produce as much as 50 countries combined!
It would be interesting to somehow include population in the comparison too. How does the population of California (36 million) compare to the population of France (61 million)? So actually, the citizens of California produce twice as much per person as the country of France.
I am not saying that producing more is better! I'm just saying that the US is a wealthy nation. And on second thought, wealth is not the same as income. (You can make $100K/year and be in $200K debt or you can make $50K a year and have a million to your name.) So the US makes a lot of money would probably be a more accurate way of putting it. We spend a lot too.
Some types of coral are now considered threatened under the Endangered Species Act. From the New York Times, Coral is Dying, Can it Be Reborn?
“We have lost 25 percent of the world’s corals in the last 25 years,” David E. Vaughan, director of the Center for Coral Reef Research at Mote, said in an interview, adding that 25 percent more are expected to die in the next decade or two.
In addition to polluted waters, disease, and environmental factors (like fishing and tourists), global warming is also killing coral:
And then there is global warming. So far, scientists say, it has had two main effects on coral, both potentially lethal. First, as oceans absorb more carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, they become more acidic. The acidity makes it more difficult for corals to grow and may even cause them to start to dissolve. And as oceans warm, algae that live in corals, and on which they depend, may be killed.
The change is so drastic that I've been able to notice the difference over the past ten years. And it was already happening when I first started diving and snorkeling - we'd see huge expanses of dead coral and at the time I was told it was because the water was too warm for them. (When you can dive without a wet suit at 100 feet, you know the water is warm!) It's very sad that our children won't get to see what we've had the priviledge of seeing.
When the news came out about the astronaut who wore diapers so she wouldn't have to stop driving my first question was, "yet she took the time to go buy diapers?" After thinking about it, I decided that astronauts must wear diapers, so she was familiar with the idea and maybe even owned some. Turns out that astronauts do wear diapers.
Because astronauts sit on the launch pad, strapped into their seats for over three hours, they all have to wear diapers. Astronauts also wear diapers when they are working in space during spacewalks which normally last 5-8 hours.
We just had an ATV stolen out of our truck sitting in front of our house. Frank is smoking a turkey so he happened to be going outside a lot so we know it was stolen between midnight and 1am. When we called the police the police officer remembered it going north out of town on a Chevy truck. He put out a wire to the the county sheriff and the police departments of the two towns north of us. But all the guy(s) that stole it need to do is pull into a garage and wait a few days until the police forget and move on to bigger things.
I googled "stolen ATV" and found three sites for reporting stolen ATVs - so it must be a common and very frustrating problem. As far as I can tell the sites don't do anything. You just get to register that your ATV was stolen.
Harvard has some Implicit Association Test. You can test how much you associate career with men or science with men or take a test that checks what associations you might have with muslims or arabs or blacks or whites.
It's very interesting and highly recommend everyone go take one. Inspite of being a women in computer science, I showed a slight association between men and career. So did 76% of people that took the test! And then we worry about a glass ceiling ... for good reason it looks like ...
Interestingly enough I show a "slight automatic preference" for gay people over straight people. I think it was because I didn't like putting all the negative words with gay people. I'm used to defending them. Obviously I must not be so used to defending women in career ... I think it's because the people I hang out with (including those I work with) would never dream of putting down women in careers but gay jokes are still ok. So I'm used to defending gays but not women.
As for defending minorities, I once found myself telling a group of drunk guys to quit putting down hispanics. (I debated the wisdom of that afterwards.) I was quite pleasantly surprised when one of them said, "Good for you, Stormy."
In this post Gretchen talks really good or bad versus feeling right. You can feel good about things you do (like giving someone a present or exercising) or you can feel right (like when you've made a tough decision like putting a parent or grandparent in assisted living when it was appropriate.) I think most of us focus on feeling good versus feeling right. Feeling good has more immediate positive feedback whereas feeling right gives us satisfaction in life.
Today I saw a news article, Indian eunuchs help collect taxes. Confused, I googled "eunuchs india." Did eunuchs still exist? And if so why are there a million of them? This article was interesting and disturbing, Eunuchs -- India's Third Gender -- ThingsAsian Article. Eunuchs are alive and well with new ones being created regularly. In India they live in communities and work as dancers, baby blessers and prostitutes. (The baby blessers part sounded more like a threat - pay me or I'll curse your baby.) The article made it sound as if joining the eunuch community and getting an operation to become a eunuch was a personal choice and that most eunuchs were homosexual. I can't believe that a million people would choose that ostarized life style, but I'll reserve judgement until I have more data or get a chance to meet them.
Having just returned to work after maternity leave, I found this article interesting. It's the first study I've seen that added the time spent at work and the time spent working at home for both fathers and mothers and compared the total. Turns out that they are spending relatively equal amounts of time "working." Married and Single Parents Spending More Time With Children, Study Finds - New York Times:
The researchers found that “women still do twice as much housework and child care as men” in two-parent families. But they said that total hours of work by mothers and fathers were roughly equal, when they counted paid and unpaid work.
Using this measure, the researchers found “remarkable gender equality in total workloads,” averaging nearly 65 hours a week.
However, according to the study, working moms have much less free time than stay at home moms and one of the things they cut back on is time with their husbands!
It also said that all parents, single and married, male and female, are spending more time with their kids than parents did 40 years ago.
Check out gas prices around the country broken down by state and county. USA National Gas Temperature Map. Stay away from red areas (California of course.) Those in green areas like Montana and Wyoming have it good.
I was suprised at how state dependent gas pries are. All of Wyoming is green while half of its neighbors are yellow.
It looks like Americans would rather you believe in a god or gods they don't believe in than have you believe in no god at all. Atheists identified as America’s most distrusted minority, according to new U of M study : News Releases: UMNnews: U of M..
From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.
Since we don't do such a good job with religious and racial diversity now, I can't imagine what would happen if the 3% of America that is atheist grows or becomes more publicly visible.
This also seems strange to me since so many Americans do not go to church or actively participate in a religion. I can't imagine that an athesist lives a life that's very different than a non practicing Christian. I doubt they even that they have widely different values.
This post on the FREAKONOMICS BLOG, pointed me to a really cool site, Zillow.com. Type in any address or zip code and it will show you the house on a satellite picture along with the house's estimated value. In addition you can search for recent comparable sales - sales of recent houses with similar specifications in the same neighborhood along with their sale price!
You have got to try this website out - find out your home's value. Realtors are going to have to work hard to show their value!
Two notes:
What do you carry with you ... to work? to the store? to a friend's house? I bet you carry more around now than you did 10 years ago.
On any work day, I carry a briefcase with my laptop, notebook and odds and ends like business cards, vitamins, pens, etc as well as a water bottle and a plastic bag with my lunch in it. (They don't fit in the briefcase - I've been shopping for a bigger one.) If I have class that day, I have a bookbag I also carry that has a change of clothes as well as my books ... oh and don't forget the snacks and the novel.
This Washington Post article, Burdens of the Modern Beast, talks about how we are all carrying a lot more around with us. It doesn't really theorize as to why although through quotes it alludes to the fact that we are all insecure and worried and all of our stuff is our security blanket.
I think we carry lots around with us for two reasons. One, we are too busy. I don't have time to come home for lunch or go out to lunch, so I carry lunch. I certainly don't have time to come home between work and school so the change of clothes and the bookbag have to come with me. Two, we are consumers. Can you imagine going 3-4 hours without a bottle of water, a soda or a Starbucks coffee??
First they tell us not to trade our investments often and then they say we don't trade enough. The tone of this Wharton article implied that it was bad not to actively manage your portfolio. From everything I have studied about investing, I disagree. You should make smart choices, leave them be and check them a couple of times a year, rebalancing if necessary.
Hands-off: Holders of 401(k) Retirement Accounts Are Not Your Typical Investors - Knowledge@Wharton.
This map of the world shows stereotypes found through Google searches. The data was put together by Google Blogoscoped.
Link: The Prejudice Map.
Women have recently been elected to lead the governments of Liberia, Chile and Germany. These new female leaders did not have husbands or fathers who ruled before them, a notable difference from the past.
This public toilet in Houston is made of entirely one way glass. It looks like mirrors from the outside, but from the inside it looks like you are sitting in the middle of the street. Check out the pictures.
Did you always want to be like Genghis Khan? Well, there's a pretty good chance that you might be one of his descendents. If you are male, it's a 1 in 200 chance! The long march of everyman | Economist.com.
there were few males more alpha in their behaviour than Genghis Khan, a man reported to have had about 500 wives and concubines, not to mention the sexual opportunities that come with conquest. It is probably no coincidence, therefore, that one man in every 12 of those who live within the frontiers of what was once the Mongol empire (and, indeed, one in 200 of all men alive today) have a stretch of DNA on their Y-chromosomes that dates back to the time and birthplace of the great Khan.
The article also points out that we tend to elect alpha males to office and then act surprised when they act like alpha males.
Note: This is not what the article is about. It's about the move of early homo sapiens and how they populated the earth. I just found the Genghis Khan stat amazing.
Two men were found in the same Egyptian tomb - a very unusual occurance. What I think is interesting is how we interpret what that means. The three hypothesis:
Each one is supported by it's own interests groups. For example, gay advocates support the gay theory. I'm sure the conjoined twins theory is a result of all the recent news surrounding successful dejoining of twins.
As our society continues to change, I wonder what new theories we will come up with?
I like stories about cultural differences. Here's one from Japan from A Hand in Two Cultures - New York Times.
Or take a simple thing like bathrooms. In Japan, there is no heating system in the toilet, and it is really cold. So we're used to heated toilet seats. Japanese tourists come to American hotels, and the bathroom is warm but the bench is cool. We really don't like that.
Japanese toilets in homes are raised like seats like ours. In public buildings they are in the ground and you squat over them. I broke all my credit cards that I was carrying in my back pocket that way once ...
Everybody learns differently. However, our school system targets visual/audio learners who learn best from sitting in lectures, reading books and taking notes. Lucky for me, that's the way I learn best. However this year I've had a chance to learn how difficult it is to learn in styles that aren't yours. I took Anatomiken classes at the Boulder College of Massage Therapy, BCMT, a very kinesthetic learning class, you actually make muscles out of clay and place them on a plastic skeleton. (For all you visual learners that are interested in Anatomiken, watch the demo carefully! Don't bother trying to follow along.)
BCMT recognizes that there are many different learning styles and they try hard to meet all the learning styles in every class. I wish our elementary and high schools did the same. This Washington Post article, Disappearing Act, talks about how many boys don't do well in our current system.
Boys have a lot of Huck Finn in them -- they don't, on average, learn as well as girls by sitting still, concentrating, multitasking, listening to words.
As the parent of a very bright 5 year old boy who has a lot of trouble sitting still and concentrating on learning how to read, I could relate to the article.
Feel overwhelmed with all your money related tasks? You're not alone. Everything from tracking your cell phone charges to 401K to your checking account seems to take more and more time these days.
Children born via sperm donors are finding their brothers and sisters via web pages. Nobody knows how many children are born to sperm donors each year, but one estimate puts it at 30,000 a year!
Hello, I'm Your Sister. Our Father Is Donor 150. - New York Times.
Want to know what the car seat laws are in each of the 50 states? The only site I found that listed all 50 states and their laws was a UK site. Child Car Seats : Other Countries : United States of America.
According to Warren Farrell in Exploiting the Gender Gap - New York Times women make less than men by choice. According to Farrell, women choose to work fewer hours, travel less and occupy safer occupations. Single, childless women make 177% of their childless male counterparts and "people who work 44 hours a week make, on average, more than twice the pay of someone working 34 hours a week."
More food for thought.
P.S. Take all his statistics with a grain of salt. I don't think he's always comparing apples to apples.
They got the NY subway pervert whose picture was published online.
At least one person is predicting $4/gallon soon:
Consumers can expect retail gas prices to rise to $4 a gallon in the near future, Ben Brockwell, director of pricing at the Oil Price Information Service, said Wednesday. "There's no question gas will hit $4 a gallon," he said. "The question is how high will it go and how long will it last?"
CNN.com - Conditions deteriorate in Katrina's wake - Aug 31, 2005
I know it's an editorial, but what are they trying to imply? That President Bush shouldn't take vacations? Is the middle of an article about the New Orleans disaster the right place to put this type of commentary?
or even to point out that it took what may become the worst natural disaster in American history to pry President Bush out of his vacation.
I read a really interesting article about Gregory Berns's book, Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment
If you do something at which you are highly practiced, then you have little opportunity to encounter something novel or unexpected, so dopamine and satisfaction may be low. But when you do something that takes you beyond what you have done before, you are in unknown territory and novel information will flow into your striatum, pumping out dopamine, which in turn forces you to act on the information. The release of dopamine in response to the novel information is the essence of a satisfying experience.
So what was his advice?
I would say stop pursuing happiness and pursue satisfaction. One should be concentrating on things that give you a sense of commitment and achievement. Seek new experiences.
That might explain why I like traveling, taking classes and trying different volunteer jobs!
Ever wondered about all those taxes on your phone bill that you've never heard of? Turns out they are not taxes at all.
"Property tax allotment" charge, for instance, is nothing more than the property taxes that the carrier pays. The "carrier cost recovery fee" is a catch-all for many kinds of operating expenses; the "single bill fee" charges subscribers who want a single bill for wireless and landline phone service.
This article, Experts Warn Debt May Threaten Economy - Yahoo! News, did a good job of explaining our current debt situation and how our attitude and habits contribute to it. I particularly resonated with this quote:
"I see people younger than me with comparable jobs that drive new vehicles and have a boat and mortgage and things," says Canelon, who responded to the AP/Ipsos poll. "And I just wonder about their debt."
We were camping at the lake a few weeks ago and even with our truck, camper, convertible and boat, we were way outdone by the young couples all around us. They had brand new trucks, 5th wheels that cost as much as houses and boats. We just kept saying, "they are in debt!"
Ever wondered what to tip? I found a good guide at Tipping Etiquette Guide at FindaLink.net.
Asians and Americans see different things in the same picture. When shown a picture of fish swimming, Japanese subjects described the stream, the rocks and then the fish. Americans described the fish first. Americans looked at the fish first and spent more time looking at them. Japanese looked at the whole scene and then the fish.
Interesting applications for all of life and in particular international business.
The Economist.com is my favorite business/news/political magazine. One of the reasons I like it is because it's not afraid to have an opinion and take a stance. Unlike most newspapers that claim to be neutral and aren't, the Economist very openly takes a side. They also report about topics of real interest to me and they somehow make topics I wouldn't normally find interesting very relevant to me.
However, as I was reading last week's edition, I had to laugh out loud at the blatantly biased and gratuitous comments. For example, in an article about how Bush works out a lot, "The jock-in-chief", they write:
For Democrats the main qualification for a top job is "intelligence" - hence their constant complaint that Republican presidents are too dumb for the job. But for Republicans the most important qualification is "character" - by which they mean an ability to hit balls and bang heads.
Or how about this one about the mob, "Gotti go now?"
She and her mother, also called Victoria (they are not an imaginative family, names-wise), were both in court this week and on message.
No doubts about where they stand, I guess!
Women continue to leave the technology fields and it's not just in the US. According to this article, Women 'undervalued' in science, in The Register, it exists in the UK as well:
In June this year, the Scientific Women's Academic Network launched a six-point charter, aimed at changing the academic culture in the UK in a bid to stop so many women leaving the profession. The network said women often felt undervalued by colleagues and unsupported in their career progression.
LifeStraw is an entire purification system in what looks like a fat drinking straw. It was designed by a Danish group to be produced for under $2 a straw in order to be marketable for the developing world where water borne diseases still kill thousands.
LifeStraw purifies water instantly for under $2 a year - Engadget - www.engadget.com.
Why are conversations about sex so hard to have? (That's a rhetorical question, I think.) This article by a doctor about the conversations he has with his adolescent patients is funny, but it just illustrates how hard these conversations are to have. It's Time for the Truth, When Body Clock Strikes 13 - New York Times. It's sad as well as funny when a boy has to ask his doctor whether Mountain Dew kills sperm or not.
What struck me most initially was that this women was speaking up even though she hasn't given up. She is still married to the man who beat her 60 times in eight years and while she thinks the beatings are wrong, she still wants to be married to him. Staying in a situation while publically committing to changing it is a very difficult situation to be in! Most people condemn a situation after they leave it. Sticking around to change it takes guts.
I'm not saying she should stay and be beaten. I'm just saying that not just walking (or running) away while being openly critical of the situation must take a very strong woman.
Entrenched Epidemic: Wife-Beatings in Africa - New York Times.
Steve Jobs gave the commencement speech at Stanford this year and while his advise is hard to follow, it is inspirational. He says:
And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle.
He says every morning you should ask yourself if what you plan to do today is what you'd do if you only had a day left to live. If you answer "no" too many days in a row, you need to find something different to do.
Here's the whole talk: 'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says.
I don't know why, but most of my female friends leave their high tech jobs in their 30s. Most of them do not leave to spend more time with their children, as the predominate urban legend goes. Why do they leave? I don't think women are more fed up then men, I think women are more able to leave a field. Men might change jobs, but women are more likely to feel empowered to quit altogether, quit a job, quit a career, or leave for a lower paying job. Men, I think, have a much harder time quitting.
This article, Where Have All The Women Gone?, says we are spending too much money trying to bring in talent to the country and worrying about women entering into technical fields when they should be worrying about why women leave technical fields.
I think we should focus our efforts on changing IT jobs not on getting women to stay in unpleasant jobs.
I've been thinking a lot lately about why we work (other than the obvious - making money) and how you can figure out what you would be happiest doing. Assuming you have to work because you aren't independently wealthy, what should you do? What would make you happiest? What job would make you want to get out of bed and get to work as soon as possible? So far, theories run from whatever will make you the most money (like the philosophy in Die Broke
Curious, I started thinking about careers and why people do them. Take a career that's not usually imposed on someone, say writing. Writers, especially fiction book writers, usually write because they want to. Nobody forces them to write, nobody asks them to write and nobody hires them to write. And they only get paid if they are successful. So why do they do it? Do they love the result or the process? I'd argue that they love the result because the common urban legend is the writer's suffer a lot of writer's block. This article, 50 Strategies for Making Yourself Work, also implies that writer's force themselves to write. So if people choose a profession that is hard, yet you have to assume they are satisfied, because at any point they could give up writing and go work at the local bookstore for probably more money, why do they do it?
Whatever it is, I think understanding why writers write might give me more insight into how to find the career that is most fulfilling.
The New York Times Magazine has an outstanding article on American kids with HIV. Most of them are teenagers now and confronting all the issues that teenagers usually struggle with. Because the first babies with HIV didn't live long, this is the first generation to make it to adolescence with HIV. And, at least in the US, they will most likely be the last, since we can now prevent HIV mothers from transmitting the virus to their children.
The stories of these children and their families are amazing. Imagine growing up, taking medicine several times a day, and never being told why. Imagine having a disease that you aren't supposed to talk to anybody about because if you did people won't want to hold your hand or invite you to a party or sit next to you in school. But other than getting sick a lot, you are a kid like everybody else. You might grow up fast.
I highly recommend taking the time to read the article. It's worth it.
The city of Chicago is trying to curb prostitution by posting the pictures of men arrested for soliciting prostitutes.
Chicago Police Department - CLEARpath - www.chicagopolice.org.
How well it works is going to depend on what type of man usually visits a prostitute. I would think factors that would make a difference are:
The ice is melting in Alaska and some towns are in danger of being swallowed by the sea. In this article, they talk about relocating Kivalina, a little town that we lived in for a year, Vanishing Alaska.
When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers looked at relocating Kivalina, a nearby village of 380 people, the price tag was $100 million to $400 million — roughly $1 million for each resident.
(If that's really the price, I'm thinking they should just build a new town for a fraction of a $1 million/person and give people a chunk of the money to help them relocate.) The New York Times Travel section had a good article about global warming is affecting Alaska's tourism, The Race to Alaska Before It Melts. Good in the short run as people worry they'll miss the great sights of Alaska - the glaciers are melting.
According to Paul Brown's What's Offline column in the New York Times, people go through three stages in retirement:
So he contends that you should do financial planning with those three phases in mind.
There is an article in the Daily News about how Nerds make better lovers. While the article itself is some what interesting (there's a website where you can find geeks who are looking for mates), the more interesting page was the conversation that nerds themselves had. Check out the conversation on Slashdot | Nerds Make Better Lovers. They accurately point out that Tiger Woods isn't exactly your typical geek, the article doesn't mention female geeks and share their own experiences and sense of humor.
Mat Miller in this New York Times Op-Ed column advocates for restructuring jobs to allow more work/life balance. Jobs should be more flexible in order to allow people room and time to realize their passions both inside and outside of work. I really liked his reference to weekends and minimum wage:
Skeptics should recall that everyone once "knew" that a weekend or a minimum wage would spell economic ruin, too.
We've made big changes in our work life over the past century, hopefully we can continue the trend. Too many jobs require too much travel, too many weekends and too many evenings.
I'd be happy living off half of my salary, but work wouldn't be happy with me doing half of my job. I would no longer be on an upward career path.
The New York Times has a very cool graphic, How Class Works - New York Times, that displays the results of a data they gathered on social class. Their theory is that class is composed of four factors, occupation, education, income and wealth. Your social status is a combination of all four. On this web page, you can select your stats and see how you fit and you can play around and see how changing different factors could change your status.
One of the reasons this was interesting to me is that I currently manage a team of software developers, 65-73rd percentile (depends on whether you think programmers are information technologists or engineers). However, I'm going to massage school (for fun) and everyone keeps telling me not to quit my day job. Now I know why they might be saying that. Massage therapists are in the 16th percentile as far as occupational prestige goes. That's regardless of what they make or how much education they have. Occupation is one of the four cards that affect your class according to this model.
Playing around further in the "How Class Breaks Down" tab, you can see that people in the "Computer, Math" field are almost exclusively in the top two fifths of income and almost all have at least some college. Pick "Health Support" (which is where massage therapy fits in) and you can watch the graph flip. Very few are in the top two fifths of income and very, very few have a college degree. (Although quite a few have some college which is probably massage school.)
The graph also shows data on income mobility and lots of other interesting data. It's worth playing around with.
This dog tried to adopt a baby. The dog brough the baby back to its litter of puppies probably saving its life! Stray Dog in Kenya Saves Abandoned Baby - Yahoo! News.
Wow! Did you know that in seven states it's illegal to live with a person of the opposite gender if you aren't married to them? I think that just goes to show how much our society is changing ... I had a male roommate one summer in college. It was no different to me than having a female roommate and I would have been quite upset if the government interfered in my private business.
I saw a quote in the New York Times today that I like.
Herbert Hoover who said: "You know, the only trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They're too damn greedy."
Polar bears hunt seals on ice. When the ice melts they move back to land and fast, waiting for the ice to come back. In some parts of the world, the water is now frozen over 2.5 weeks less a year, meaning that polar bears have 2.5 weeks less a year to hunt, eat and store up energy for their fast.