I’m so far behind I have no time for more than a links-dump now.
Brussels is 44th on the list of most expensive cities in the world to live, up from 70 last year, mainly because of a strong Euro and the dismal performance of the US peso dollar. Moscow is at the top, and I was intrigued to see Glasgow far higher than Brussels at 36, so I did something right. The whole list is here.
Women like to be stroked when you’re whispering sweet nothings, but men can make do with only the words, according to a survey from Bizarro World The University of Zurich, reported in the Indie. It’s all a way of reducing stress and making your heart live longer. I should perhaps stress that the woman really ought to give her consent before you start stroking her. As far as the men are concerned, knock yourself out. We don’t like to stand on ceremony.
An interesting history of human economic time in the WSJ starts thus: Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened.
I don’t recall what I was looking for when I landed on this page, but I’ve marked it because it seems to have the answer to anything anyone could possibly need to know, either now or in the future.
The best tourists in the world are the Japanese, the Americans and the Swiss, according to European hoteliers. It doesn’t seem to have occured to anyone that they probably think that because the Japanese and Americans tip like drunken sailors on top of the hefty service charge that’s already been added to your bill, whereas everyone else has got more sense. I don’t know about the Swiss, presumably they go around dropping gold fillings banked by now-forgotten Nazis all over the shop. Or European hoteliers only ever get to meet officials from UEFA, FIFA and the IOC, spraying other people’s money around like tomcats.
The Brits, meanwhile, were judged miserly, noisy and boorish. So no surprises there. They were also the second-worst dressed, just ahead of this guy:
Sum writters chuse bukks too rede. I don’t see the point of it, myself.
Kids can add and subtract before they even know what that is. A little late to be telling us now, SciAm!
Language lessons by podcast from the Peace Corps. Choose between Jordanian Arabic, Mali French and
Kazakh Russian — is very nice, I like!
This is a very eclectic set of reading-lists, I have no idea where this popped up from. It looks like a link clicked by Towse.
This guy has a plan to reform the spelling of English, but rather than bore us to tears with the details, he begins by trashing his opponents (all of whom are notional). It’s your job to pick the structure of the plan out of the wreckage. Very interesting, and utterly pointless.
Grapes 2.0 