:'(

"1258 GMT: Millions of people in greater Tokyo are stranded far away from home as evening falls after Japan's biggest earthquake on record shut down the capital's massive subway system, my colleagues report from Tokyo.

Countless workers, who had earlier fled violently swaying office blocks, found themselves stuck far from their families -- and unable to speak to them because the overloaded mobile phone system could not carry most calls, they tell me."

Live report on the Japan quake.

Immense entertainment value.

A woman's take on the 'smelly green things' we know as NSFs.

http://www.sgforums.com/forums/10/topics/368533

Stupidity knows no bounds.

President Obama swats a fly

"That was pretty impressive, wasn't it? I got the sucker," he said.

Facebook, YouTube at work make better employees: study

Reuters - Friday, April 3

MELBOURNE - Caught Twittering or on Facebook at work? It'll make you a better employee, according to an Australian study that shows surfing the Internet for fun during office hours increases productivity.

The University of Melbourne study showed that people who use the Internet for personal reasons at work are about 9 percent more productive that those who do not.

Study author Brent Coker, from the department of management and marketing, said "workplace Internet leisure browsing," or WILB, helped to sharpened workers' concentration.

"People need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration," Coker said on the university's website.

"Short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the Internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days' work, and as a result, increased productivity," he said.

According to the study of 300 workers, 70 percent of people who use the Internet at work engage in WILB.

Among the most popular WILB activities are searching for information about products, reading online news sites, playing online games and watching videos on YouTube.

"Firms spend millions on software to block their employees from watching videos, using social networking sites or shopping online under the pretence that it costs millions in lost productivity," said Coker. "That's not always the case."

However, Coker said the study looked at people who browsed in moderation, or were on the Internet for less than 20 percent of their total time in the office.

"Those who behave with Internet addiction tendencies will have a lower productivity than those without," he said.

Epic Parent

'We've all got to die sometime. I haven't got cancer from smoking so she'll probably be all right anyway.'

As for drinking, Miss Holt says Sam only drinks a couple of cans of lager a night.

'It wasn't a one-night stand. She had been dating the guy for a couple of weeks.

Miss Holt blames teachers at Sam's former school for being 'too soft'.

http://www.asiaone.com/Just%2BWoman/News/Women%2BIn%2BThe%2BNews/Story/A1Story20081023-95777.html

Senator, thou shalt not sue God

Lincoln (Nebraska): Mr Ernie Chambers. a Nebraska state senator, sought a "permanent injunction" that ordered God to stop causing "widespread death, destruction and terrorisation of millions upon millions of the Earth's inhabitants".

But a judge has thrown out the lawsuit, saying it could not be served because God has an unlisted address.

Mr Chambers filed the suit last year seeking a permanent injunction against God.

The suit listed examples of God's wrath, including "fearsome floods, horrendous hurricanes, earthquakes, plagues, famine, genocidal wars, birth defects, terrifying tornadoes and the like".

It identified the defendant, said to be "also known by various aliases, titles, names, designations" as "present in all places at the same time".

On Tuesday, the court in Lincoln rules that "...as there can never be service effecteuated on the named defendant, this action will be dismissed with prejudice".

Mr Chambers, 71, said he filed the lawsuit to make the point that everyone should have access to courts regardless of whether they are rich or poor.

He has 30 days to decide whether to appeal. He said he has not decided yet.

- The Straits Times, World Page C14. Saturday October 18, 2008.

Math skills are inborn =o

Humans have an inborn, intuitive grasp of numbers that varies sharply from one person to the next and is closely linked to advanced math skills, according to a newly-released study.

In experiments with teenagers in the United States, scientists discovered that children whose "approximate number system" (ANS) was highly developed were also good in school-taught mathematics from an early age.

The ability to roughly estimate quantities in the blink of eye - without any training - has also been found in monkeys, rats and four-month-old infants, and probably has deep evolutionary roots, says the study.

"It is difficult to overstate the importance of the 'number sense' for all kinds of animals," says lead researcher Justin Halberda, a cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

"Maximizing your search for food, finding a seat on the bus, recognizing the difference between a mating call and an alarm call in a particular species of bird by the number of warbles - all of these require the ANS," he explains.

Previous research had shown that an innate sense of numbers is entirely controlled by a non-verbal region of the brain called the intraparietal sulcus.

But to do precise calculations, humans require language, which is governed by another part of the brain.

Halberda and two colleagues tested this hard-wired ability to judge quantities by showing 64 14-year-olds a series of images containing between 10 and 32 dots that were either blue or yellow.

In some images - flashed for only one-fifth of a second - there were twice as many dots of one color.

In other images, however, the ratio was closer to parity with, for example, seven yellow dots and eight blue, and thus much harder to discern.

The results showed a wide variation in the capacity to pick the color with the most dots at least 75 percent of the time, suggesting that some people are simply much better at such lightning-fast "guesstimates".

Even more unexpected, however, was the extent to which the two distinct kinds of number-crunching cognition - ANS and learned mathematics - are linked.

Kids who performed best in the image test were also those who scored the highest in standard math achievement tests, going back almost 10 years to kindergarten.

The same held true at the other end of the spectrum, even after additional factors, such as IQ levels, were taken into account, according to the study, which was published in the London-based science journal Nature.

"What is surprising is that the formal mathematics we work so hard to learn in school ... is related in any way to what a rat is doing when it is out looking for scraps of food, or what you and I are doing when we look for a seat on a bus," says Halberda.

This does not mean that one cannot be good in math without a keen ANS, or that having a strong "number sense" is a guarantee for good grades in school, he adds.

Nor is it clear whether one's ANS can be boosted.

"It remains to be seen if one can improve a student's innate number sense by practice and training, and whether such training will lead to improvements in school math performance," Halberda says.

http://www.asiaone.com/News/Education/Story/A1Story20080911-87118.html