Korean Students Learning English by Robot

Learning English by robot? It's happening, in Daegu.

The South Korean city boasts a full 21 elementary schools now featuring egg-shaped robots that teach by reading and dancing to music. (The machines can wheel themselves around the room, after all.)

The meter-high robots, numbering 29 in all, have an avatar for a face, which reflects the facial expressions of the people giving the instructions — teachers in the Philippines! It is indeed a few degrees of separation from one teacher, one classroom.

It's all part of a pilot program, infused by $1.37 million from the national government, to address a shortage of teachers in rural areas. Proponents say that if the trial is successful, then the robots will be rolled out (literally) to classrooms across the country.

Oddly enough, reports are that students too shy to interact with human teachers are responding to the voice and activity of the robots.

The robots also play alphabet games and sing songs. It's all part of the learn-English program.

The teachers, operating remotely, can see what's going on in the classroom, so it's not like they're totally removed from the action. Still, they really are removed from the classroom. If a student misbehaves, will that student mind a robot-teacher? If the student gets physical and tips the robot over, what happens to the rest of the class? Presumably, the remote-teachers would be able to alert the other teachers in the Korean school and/or the principal, who would sort things out. Still, one can't help thinking that this will work only as long as students are not unruly.

Then there's the cost issue. each of these robots costs 10 million won (nearly $9,000). That's a lot less than the cost of maintaining a teacher, even if you factor only salary, sick leave, insurance, and severance into only a one-year calculation. But does it create the same sort of encouraging learning environment that students having human teachers would get? Depends on what you're used to or what you'll tolerate. If learning is the main goal, then maybe these robots are just the ticket, especially since they're a sort of hybrid in that they feature remote interaction with human teachers. Still, it might take more than a bit of getting used to for the students to truly appreciate "I, Robot, am your teacher." Maybe it's a generational thing.

Abbey Road Crossing a Historic Site

It's not just any pedestrian crossing. It is the pedestrian crossing. You know the one. You've seen it so often you can describe in your sleep in what order they're walking, who's wearing what, and who's out of step.

Yes, we're talking about the cover of Abbey Road. That particular pedestrian crossing is now under national protection, thanks to action by the U.K. government. It's a Grade II listed site, to be precise; and that means that anybody wanting to do anything to it needs to make a proposal that gets over the considerably high bar set by the local government's measures of the site's historic significance. Obviously, that bar will be particularly high.

Probably no one would argue if a proposal to upgrade the pavement were approved, since that meets another of the local government's measures (condition of the area), as well as the test of common sense.

And, if a developer wanted to come in and eradicate the white stripes in favor of a stop-free road, that would not pass the third of the local government's measures, that of function.

Suffice it to say that you'd have to work incredibly hard to convince the local government to change anything about that pedestrian crossing.

This is a good thing, right? I mean, we want to preserve in reality as well as in our minds (and repeated glimpses of the album cover) exactly what that street looked like. We want to remember the 28IF license plate. We want to see just how sunny it was that day, when the Beatles went out for just a 10-minute photo shoot but produced an iconic image that has burned itself into the common psyche of millions of fans.

The pedestrian crossing joins the Abbey Road Studios on the Grade 11 listing.

BTW, here's that info from the first paragraph:

• order of walking: John, Ringo, Paul, George
• who's wearing what: John, white suit; Ringo, black suit; Paul, blue suit; George, jeans and jean jacket
• who's out of step: Paul

Reflections on the Eclipse

The celestial trifecta was certainly something to behold, if you could see it. The long white clouds of my nation of residence did not allow me to catch a glimpse of the red moon created by the lunar eclipse on the winter solstice, but I have enjoyed reading about other people's experiences and certainly seeing other people's photos.

The result was quite dramatic and, in certain circles of geographic perfection, lasted long enough for whole families or star parties to remark on the astronomical fascination provided by such a mundane thing as one celestial body moving past another.

Some random thoughts on some of (IMHO) the best photos on the night:

Is that the Moon or Mars? It certainly looks like the latter, even if it is definitely the former. Staring at such a vision would possibly have moved a modern-day H.G. Wells to take pen to paper (or perhaps stylus to Blackberry or fingers to iPhone or iPad) and write about invaders from another world. The more I stare at this one, the more I hear the first movement from Holst's The Planets — "Mars, the Bringer of War." The Moon does look angry, possessed, perhaps demonic. The one thing it isn't is bulging — take away the red tint, massive though it is, and you get our friendly satellite, the one that gives us the tides and keeps us alive in other ways as well.

Dan Brown probably wants this for the cover of the illustrated edition of The Lost Symbol. That is one very powerful image — a reminder that the tallest of buildings, if kept in astrophysical perspective, is but a fraction of the height of the universe. The other element that is striking is that those two little red lights, paired with the two slightly larger lights just below, make the building look like it's possessed, as in the house from The Amityville Horror. In that instance, the mouth would be just out of the bottom of the photo. Not that the Washington Monument is going to take one look at the Moon and then utter a howl that would scare an army of werewolves; but if a building that big has a giant pig running round it, I don't want to know about it.

This one shows the progression of the eclipse and is a wonderful way to teach students, adults, and even professors just how an eclipse works. These obviously didn't happen in the space of a few hundred rapid-fire clicks of a digital camera, but they did follow on one after another relatively quickly in celestial terms. The addition, of course, of the red Moon was icing on the cake, really. These shots are so well framed as well as to look like the Moon was stopping long enough for a statuesque pose.

Speaking of statues, here's our last photo, the Moon shining (or being unshined) next to the Savior of the World Monument in San Salvador, El Salvador. This monument looks like that all the time, as if the guy is about to launch into a lecture or a sermon or a parable or something; but with the Moon right there, it looks like he's saying, "I give you this as an example of the greatness of God" or something like that. And even thought the Moon is red, it doesn't make me feel as bad as I was feeling while contemplating the Amityville Washington Monument.

At any rate, I'd love to hear from you if you did see the eclipse live. If you have posted photos, please send me the links.

She's Afraid of Nothing, This Woman

Got fear? You're not SM, the focus of a decades-long study of a woman who is otherwise normal but has a specific psychological impairment that makes her impervious to fear. She doesn't feel it. She doesn't recognize the need for it. It's just not on her brain's radar.

We know all this because of the recent publication of a study in the medical journal Current Biology. The study lists several instances of tests done on the woman to detect any sort of fear awareness. All were negative.

The woman's amygdala is damaged, and researchers say that the case proves the importance of that part of the brain in telling us to run and hide when confronted with something frightening.

Among the tests done on this woman:

• exposure to snakes and spiders — she loved it
• bombardment with a deafening horn whenever a blue square appeared on a screen — she never learned
• a tour through a haunted house — so not interested in running screaming from the house.

Scientists are a bit divided as to the benefits and/or detriments of such a condition. Obviously, the lack of fear can help in certain situations, where one needs to be especially brave. However, not feeling fear when confronted with a gang of heavily armed thugs intent on doing you bodily harm could be counterproductive. Sometimes, embracing fear can lead to sensible actions.

The woman scores well on other tests, including intelligence, language, and memory. She feels things other than fear. It's just that one part of her DNA that doesn't work in the same way as yours and mine.

Will this discovery lead to legions of amygdala-altering surgeries? 'Fraid not, researchers say.

Cuddle Up with a Stuffed ... E. Coli?

OK, I understand the mother's argument that having her child see some big stuffed heartworm might make the little guy less likely to freak out at every bit of dust found on the kitchen floor, but come on …

The woman in question was mentioned in a story about one of the latest cuddly-toy crazes making the rounds these days — Giant Microbes. Yep, you, too, can have a cuddly E. coli for your home, office, car, or church. Somehow I think they'll make their way into bars as well (but probably not for very long).

Why in the world would you want to have a stuffed germ hanging around the house? Don't we suffer from enough of the real ones? And wouldn't they attract as much dust as every other stuffed animal stuffed into random corners or drawers? If I get the chicken pox, the last thing I'm going to want to do is to cuddle up with a stuffed chicken (right) that represents the very thing that's making me want to scratch until my skin falls away.

I mean really. Can you just imagine the little girl making her bed really nicely and piling all the stuffed toys on the bed so they're all facing the door so you see their smiling faces when you walk in the room — and there, slightly to the left, of the favorite bunny rabbit with the floppy ears or the Mickey Mouse with the frayed arms is … Kevin the Common Cold (left).

Who wants this? Who needs this? It's one thing to remind parents that they house shouldn't be entirely possible because then their children will be even more susceptible to every virus and bacterial infection their classmates bring to school with them. It's quite another thing to climb into bed at night and cuddle up with an E. coli. I just don't even want to go there.

And yet, someone has, to tune of an entirely detailed list of toys (Watch them do tricks here). representing viruses (including HIV and certain others transmitted by more-than-hugging activity), diarrhea, and food poisoning. Surely there's a line that someone has crossed — big time.

An extra $30 million? No thanks, pitcher says

Enough is enough, Cliff Lee has said.

The baseball pitcher known for his pinpoint control was in perfect command of the situation, as he proved by walking away from $30 million. That was an extra $30 million, actually. Lee chose to sign with the Philadelphia Phillies for $120 million rather than sign with the New York Yankees for $150 million.

Why? It wasn't the money. It was much more than that (even if it was, in the end, less).

Lee simply liked Philadelphia better. He liked the city better. He liked the team better. His wife was in agreement on both counts, which probably tells us the rest of what we need to know. Kristen Lee was appalled at Yankees fans' behavior during this year's playoffs. (She probably wasn't the only one so appalled, but that's another story entirely.)

Cliff Lee wasn't at all happy with the Phillies when they dealt him to Seattle after he helped lead them to the World Series in 2009. (He won two games in the World Series, which the Phillies lost to the Yankees in six.) Lee was back in the World Series this year, with Texas, helping lead the Rangers to their first-ever Series appearance. (He didn't have the stellar results that his fans were used to, but that could have been because he ran into the Team of Torturous Destiny that was this year's San Francisco Giants.)

At any rate, Lee has proved that it isn't all about the money — the most money, anyway. Yes, he could have earned more money playing for the Yankees, but that would have meant playing 81 games in Yankee Stadium and living somewhere near New York and all the other things that go with donning the pinstripes — not to mention that Lee and his wife liked the city of Philadelphia more for its opportunities for their two young children.

Instead, he'll be in a rotation that also features Roy Halladay, Cliff Hamels, and Roy Oswalt and he'll be backed up by one of the fiercest-hitting teams in all of baseball.

Maybe Cliff Lee did the right thing after all by making the bucks stop in Philly.

Chernobyl Tour: Not Your Average Reality TV Show

Quick, do you know how to counteract radiation poisoning? No? Well, you'd better not go on a tour of the suddenly open-to-the-public Chernobyl nuclear power plant, then, because that's what you're guaranteed to get.

OK, so guaranteed is rather a strong word. The amount of radiation seeping out of the still-contaminated plant is minimal, which is why the 2,500 employees still working there take it in shifts. Get through your tour in about half an hour and you shouldn't register more than a slightly unhealthy dose on the radiation detector in the doctor's office that's sure to have been set up a few miles away from the plant.

Seriously, why would people take a tour of this place? The 25th anniversary (if we can use such a word for such a travesty-tragedy) is in 2011, so interest in Chernobyl will be high. But do you really need to go in there and have a look round to be able to say something akin to, "Yep, it's still a place to be avoided"?

To this day, people for dozens of miles around are reporting health problems. And that's today. That's nothing compared to what happened shortly April 26, 1986, when the exclusion stretched more than 30 miles in all directions.

Oh, sure, the Emergency Situations Ministry says that plans for building an impressive new shell over the reactor are progressing along nicely. That's one big shell, as well, weighing in at 20,000 tons and measuring 345 feet tall, 853 feet wide, and 490 feet long. (In case you carry such measurements around in your head or you have a guidebook handy, that's big enough to get over the top and all the sides of Notre Dame.

Did we mention the pricetag? It's up to $1.15 billion now, up just a bit from the original estimate of $505 million. Cost overruns are surely nothing new to government and/or construction projects.

The timeline for completion of this fancy new shell, by the way, is 2015. So the budget could blow out again. (Let's hope that's the only thing that blows out.) But if the shell won't be finished until 2015, then I don't like our chances of getting a radiation-free tour before then — in which case I say, "Why bother?" Yes, we are naturally curious. No, we don't want to see Chernobyl that badly.

Tim Burton Scares Up Performance Art via Tweets

Performance art online? Why not, said famed film director Tim Burton.

The result certainly isn't the first collaborative fiction to appear anywhere, but the tools used might be the most in-the-now. Such things might become more of the norm, which would certainly be a good thing.

Burton asked for Tweets — any Tweets — from followers brave enough to submit their short-but-tweet prose to help tell the story of Stainboy. The result is Cadavre Exquis, or "Exquisite Corpse," part of an exhibit organized by the Toronto International Film Festival and New York's Museum of Modern Art. The title and subject matter are perhaps not all surprising, coming as they do from the mind behind The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride.

The online window was open from November 22 to December 6. Users could tweet as often as they liked. One tweet was selected each day to continue the story. Some tweets were sweet; others were odd; still others were unprintable. In the end, 88 tweets made up the story.

Burton started it off thus:

"Stainboy, using his obvious expertise, was called in to investigate mysterious glowing goo on the gallery floor."

The fans took it from there, collaborating on a tale of a robot, the mysterious goo, rusty corpses, and other familiar Burtonesque elements. The fans certainly got into the spirit of things (as it were.) Each day brought a new tweet, contributed usually by a new tweeter (although some writers had more than one tweet chosen for the final story).

How did it end? Click here to find out.

Twitterati Going Strong at 8 Percent

Tweet, do you? You're among the 8% of Americans online who do, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. The center emphasizes the word online there, to differentiate from the mobile Twitter crowd. That's probably a good thing, since the number of Twitter users by mobile phone is probably much larger, although, as with yours truly, that number could include people who do both.

Seems that more women tweet than men and more people under 30 and Latino than other ages and races. The survey also found more Tweets coming from urban areas than from rural or suburban areas. (That's probably to be expected given that the survey asked online users.)

The survey sample was a respectable 2,257 Internet users, whose main vocation in the Twitterverse was posting personal updates. An overwhelming percentage (72, to be precise) of users reported using their Twitter feeds to issue updates on their personal situations. Work status updates weren't far behind. The bar graph starts to level off, however, with categories of activity like sharing links to news stories, retweeting other people's updates, and sharing photos and videos. (Presumably, Stephen Fry would have answered in the affirmative for all categories.)

Nearly a quarter of Twitter users surveyed check for other people's posts more than once a day. That's the fun of it really, isn't it, to see what other people are saying? Otherwise, it's just a dump of information into the world of digital recording.

Still, the overwhelming conclusion from this figure of 8% is that it isn't a huge number. Twitter gets a lot of publicity because a lot of quite public are tweeting quite publicly and often (such as the aforementioned Mr. Fry), but the numbers overall compared to the rest of the American online public are quite small, despite every tweet being archived in the Library of Congress. Perhaps the other 92% haven't figured out yet that they can distill the various bits of their daily lives into 140-character sound bytes.

In the meantime, you can follow this author's tweets here.

After the Flood, There's the Tourist Attraction

Some day soon, we will all be able to see the Ark of Noah on display on Kentucky.

No, this isn't some miracle that has renamed Mount Ararat (or wherever Noah's famed rescue boat ended up). It's actually a theme park, tourist attraction, boondoggle — pick your term being sponsored by none other than Governor of Kentucky. Yes, Steven L. Beshear himself has gotten onboard with this one, talking about how the construction of this whatever-it-is will create jobs and funnel tourist money into the state economy and other such funds-based initiatives. But, apparently, it really is going to happen. They're really going to build a theme park with a mockup of the famed Noah's Ark as the centerpiece. Giraffes will be kept in pens onboard, and presumably visitors can walk around on the ark and get up close and personal with the giraffes. (No word yet on whether they're going to let a dove go periodically from the bow of the boat.)

Also planned are a 100-foot-tall Tower of Babel, a recreation of a Middle Eastern village from the 1st Century CE, and a series of special programs depicting Moses, the plagues that bedeviled Egypt's pharaoh, and the parting of the Red Sea. (No word, either, on whether Yul Brynner's voice will be heard at any point.)

I can see the Tower of Babel being a hot-ticket item, actually, for people wanting to learn several foreign languages at once (although they will have to listen very closely). Then again, it might be just another day in Brussels.

The whole thing is called the Ark Encounter. The governor claims that up to 900 people will employed in the end to build the thing, which is supposed to cost in the neighborhood of $150 million. A site hasn't been picked yet, but the website says that organizers are considering somewhere in some county near Ohio. That narrows it down.

And in the first year alone, organizers say, more than one-and-one-half million visitors will cross the threshold. That's certainly enough to make back the money spent to build all of this wonderfulness.

And just to show that it's not all their-way-or-the-highway, the organizers have enlisted Amish builders to supply the wooden pegs and frames for building the showcase Ark. So that surely puts to rest any ideas of any sort of radical agenda being pushed by these folks, who have also given us the Creation Museum in Petersburg.

Last thing: Don't hold your breath waiting to see all this stuff. The park isn't due to open until 2014. Some things are worth waiting for.

New Life Found Right Here on Earth

Found: something that can absorb arsenic and survive. Where found: here on Earth.

NASA has announced the discovery of strange life right here on the homeward, in the form of a bacterium that can not only swallow one of the world's most deadly poisons — arsenic — but thrive on it to the extent that it absorbs the deadly liquid into its DNA.

The bacterium in question has been termed GFAJ-1, and it was found thriving quite well, thank you very much, in Mono Lake, in California.

Here's the significance: This bacterium has been able to substitute arsenic for phosphorus in its building blocks. Remember that phosphorus is one of the six major elements that scientists consider essential for life — the others being carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur. But GFAJ-1 has proven the ability to jettison phosphorus for the quite-similar-in-structure arsenic and run with arsenic instead.

Not coincidentally, Mono Lake has high levels of arsenic. Scientists probably knew what they were looking for, but they still seemed surprised when they found it.

So what does all this mean? Is E.T. made of arsenic? Possibly. But that's probably not the correct question to ask.

The better question would be this one: How do we need to change the way we are looking for extraterrestrial life? Efforts in this area have long been preoccupied in finding life that closely resembles the familiar — humans or animals or microbes that we can readily identify and understand. But the more exotic lifeforms like GFAJ-1 we find, the more we will be forced to re-examine our prejudices and assumptions in determining the parameters of the search.

Will we recognize life when we bump up against it? Will it recognize us? We should be prepared for outlandish answers to these questions.

Pay Your Way into the Pages of a Book

What's in a name? Depends on who you ask and how much you're willing to pay.

A recent trend in fiction writing, apparently, is to name characters after people who have paid for the privilege. The most recent instance of this is a set of eBay auctions, the proceeds of which go to the nonprofit the First Amendment Project.

Heard of Thomas Perry? He writes the Jane Whitefield mystery novels. He'll use your name for a character in his latest book. He's just started writing, so you can have your pick of victim, villain, or anywhere in between. And, you get your name mentioned at least four times. Surely that's worth a few hundred dollars, right? Remember, the money is going to a nonprofit.

Dave Eggers, the fabulously funny author of You Shall Know Our Velocity and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, is onboard as well. So is Anywhere but Here author Mona Simpson.

Fancy appearing in a graphic novel? Chris Ware's your man. The author of the award-winning Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, Ware will happily write your name above a character in one of this future projects.

It does make me wonder, though, what's to stop authors from doing this all the time. Maybe they already do? Those character names have to come from somewhere.

Some authors spend ages agonizing over names, doing research and sounding out possibilities. (J.K. Rowling comes to mind, with all of her comparative religions and cultures knowledge (not to mention astronomy and astrology) being brought to bear in names like Albus Dumbledore, Minerva McGonagall, and Sirius Black.) Rowling, like Dickens before her, seems to have the knack for choosing names that fit the characters like literary gloves (like Remus Lupin, the werewolf).

But that's not what we're talking about here, at least not according to Andrew Sean Greer. The author of The Story of a Marriage, Greer is offering to include an auction winner's name in his next book but doesn't guarantee anything else. It is, after all, a roll of the dice: You could very well win the auction, get your name in the book, and then find out that you (or at least a character named you) has died in some horrible way midway into Chapter 3.

Maybe that's OK. Maybe it's worth the money. I won't be finding out, since I won't be bidding. If I'm going to see my name in a book, it's going to have to be an autobiography.

Time Now to Grieve

2:37 p.m.

Some family members of the 29 miners lost in the explosion at the Pike River mine will remember that time for the rest of their lives. At random times in the years to come, they will glance at their watches or clocks and see those numbers on the clockface and remember what happened on this day in 2010, what happened to finally seal the fate of their beloved men (one of them just 17 years old and on his first shift at the mine) — their loved ones, their friends and family members, their sources of strength.

Now, the situation has been reversed. Now, the people left behind, as their loved ones carried on into the next journey of their lives, will have to go on and live their lives without the ones they knew and loved most — fathers, sons, cousins, nephews, friends.

The entire Grey District has just short of 14,000 people. Greymouth's population numbers about 10,000. It's a coal area — has been since the British arrived, in the mid-19th Century. It's New Zealand, so every one of those 29 miners was known, friends with, and/or loved by someone in the area. Such close-knit communities forge strong bonds, bonds that are tested by trying times but not broken, even in the midst of shared tragedy.

The men had been trapped in the mine for a few days, as the result of an explosion underground. Two miners managed to make it out, but the 29 others remained. As the number of hours without word mounted, families do what families do best — come together, say a prayer, hope against hope for their darkest fears to be swept away by an ocean of relief and good news.

But this story did not have a happy ending.

This was no Chilean Miracle. This was a reminder that life is precious and that we take it for granted at our peril. At times like this, we think of what we wanted to say but didn't, said but didn't want to, or wish we could say if only because it would mean that the person is there before us, instead of buried deep underground, never to return to be spoken to, listened to, or hugged for all they're worth.

This was a story that just kept getting worse. Rescuers couldn't enter the mine because the gas levels were too high. Rescue robots broke down or found nothing useful. A mixture of gas became toxic and then created a second explosion, this one even bigger than the first.

The Prime Minister has given a speech, calling this disaster a national tragedy and saying that the miners "leave behind them a hollow space, that will not be readily filled."

This is a story that is continuing, even as the ultimate of the missing is now known. Eventually, others will be able to enter the mine and answer some of the questions that linger: when did the men die, and did they suffer horribly, and could they have been saved. Answers to all of those questions, and more, will come in time.

Time can be so cruel sometimes. Time can take our loved ones from us. Time can steal moments from our lives. Time can rob us of our hopes, dreams, and desires. Time can slow to a crawl when we're waiting for good news amid aching despair. Time can fly by when we hear the good news at last.

Sadly for the families of the Pike River miners, the time of 2:37 brought nothing but pain, grief, and sadness.

Up in the Air at Sea

Makes you wonder how the players will fare if they're prone to seasickness ..

Seems Michigan State is planning to play a basketball game — likely against North Carolina — on an aircraft carrier.

Tom Izzo's bunch will undoubtedly be looking for a new challenge on Veteran's Day 2011 — the likely day of the game. (This, according to a well-placed source whose big clue was the red-white-and-blue 11-11-11 painted on the floor at the Breslin Center.) That would be in the middle of preseason games next season. Whether the Spartans win it all at the end of this season remains to be seen.

But back to the aircraft carrier. So it's a mammoth ship, right? And it's anchored and docked and all the rest of it. It's not going anywhere. But it would still be moving, if only slightly. So the crossover dribble would have an extra hitch in its step, the three-point would have a fraction of extra oomph on it, and the long free throws wouldn't get that friendly bounce-back off the back of the rim. And those are only some of the difficulties the players would have to overcome.

Then there's the security issue. An aircraft carrier isn't exactly the same kind of venue as a basketball arena. For starters, the carrier is owned by the U.S. Military. All players, coaches, staff, girlfriends, wives, dogs and cats would have to be searched meticulously for every practice, team meeting and (of course) the game. Then there are the fans. A quick Internet search didn't turn up reliable figures for how many basketball fans could fit on an aircraft carrier, but this made-for-prime-time event probably wouldn't be played in front of only the sailors onboard. So all of the fans would have to be searched meticulously as well. That might be more time and effort than many fans want to spend on cheering on their favorite team. But the possibility of a Tar Heels-Spartans matchup might be enough to pull enough people in to make the experience worthwhile.

Also on the cards is the possible warmup game to be played by the basketball teams of two of the nation's service academies. We could be looking at an all-new variant on Army-Navy.

Emotional Rescue from Tattooed Fate

This horse owner definitely won't get any satisfaction from the court ruling that has just gone against him.

Seems a German man had shaved a good bit of hair off the right hind thigh of one of his horses, in preparation for a tattoo — of the Rolling Stones tongue logo from the earlier days. Seems also that the court didn't like it too much.

The tongue, which existed only in outline, was a good six square inches in size. Had the horse owner had more time and the proper authority, he would no doubt have succeeded in branding his animal in a way that might seem a bit head-scratching to some people.

The court, in its ruling preventing the full tattooing of the poor animal, went on about infringement of animal rights law. That may very well be the case, and such things shouldn't be foisted on animals. However, the court was also on to the horse owner's other, more to-the-point motive, which was to create a template that he could show off and then offer as a service — a tattoo-for-hire business, perhaps.

And where would that end, if it had been allowed to begin? What would be able to stop the man from branching out? Who knows but that we might have seen a horse sporting the genius of Dark Side of the Moon. More frightening might have been the cover for Sticky Fingers.

No matter, though, because the court headed the man off at the pass. No doubt his neighbors will be on the lookout for other, similar sorts of tomfoolery.

Making Another Pass for E.T.

The eyes on the skies are going back for more.

Astronomers in a host of countries are turning their telescopes once again to swathes of the sky first surveyed during the early days of the Cold War, an attempt to find the E.T. in the night sky haystack.

Efforts in Argentina, Australia, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, and the United States to find evidence of extraterrestrial life will go back to the drawing board, looking once again for something they missed on the first pass across nearly impossibly wide sky. Among the targets will be Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti, two of the most famous early stars surveyed, because of their (very) relative proximity to the Northern Hemisphere.

The needle in a haystack metaphor is quite a good one because the very possibility of detecting a noticeable communication from an alien species is complicated exponentially by myriad factors, including:

• that the alien life is transmitting information in a form and/or frequency recognizable to humans


• that the information, even if it was transmitted, lasted long enough to be picked up by our instruments


• that the alien life is transmitting anything at all.

Other factors further complicate our efforts to discover whether we are, in fact, not alone in the universe.

The new project is titled Project Dorothy, an homage to the original project, which was titled Project Ozma, after a character in the popular Oz series of books by L. Frank Baum. Dorothy, the namesake of this latest project, is Dorothy Gale, the main character of The Wizard of Oz. Perhaps a random space cyclone will put us on the yellow brick road to finding E.T. One thing is probably for sure: Any alien life we find will not probably have heard of Facebook or Twitter. Such modern electronic conveniences would certainly be alien to those who launched Project Ozma all those years ago.

15-story Building Built in 6 Days? Not Exactly

Talk about blink and you miss it!

Residents of the Chinese city of Changsha who returned home from a weeklong holiday would have had the shock of their lives, as they noticed that a new 15-story hotel had gone up while they were away.

The travelers had nothing to do with the building, of course. No, that would be the workers who completed the Ark Hotel in record time. They put together the giant pieces that make up the tall, soundproofed, thermal-insulated building in just six days.

But here's where the sound bite ends and the truth begins.

The real story of that building is not how quickly it took workers to build it, for that isn't the real question to ask. What those onsite workers did in those six days was put together a bunch of different pieces into the whole that is now standing, all from bits of prefabricated materials. Granted, that was thousands of different bits and they all were assembled within the timeframe specified.

The bottom line is that we really don't know how long it took to build the hotel, since it wasn't all built onsite. Workers could have taken months or even years to build their parts and then the "building" happened in a week. (Well, six days does not a week make, so it was a bit less than a week.)

So what does that say about truth in reporting? Have we reported the truth if we say only that "it was built in six days"? No, we have not. To be accurate, we need to include the important words construction using prefabricated materials. Any shortening of that or glossing over the key facts can result in something that's already gone viral on the Net now, namely that Chinese workers put in a superhuman effort to build a tall building in less than a week.

Well, yes, they did and no, they didn't. They certainly did the building, but the building consisted in large part of piecing together what was already done. Yes, no one was hurt in the construction of the building (and that fact needs to be communicated as well, since it was basically a day-night-day-night affair). Yes, the building looks fantastic. Yes, the countryside was changed in a very short time.

But to say that the building went from dusk to skyscraper in six days is wildly inaccurate. It misses the biggest detail of all.

The King for a Day: Pena Finishes Marathon

"There's ordinary. And there's extraordinary."

That from the race director of the New York City Marathon. That to describe the performance of Edison Pena, the Chilean miner who went from being on of 33 people trapped deep underground for 69 days to being one of 40,000 people who ran through the famous city's famous five boroughs. That to describe the amazing accomplishment of this man who, while trapped underground ran to stay sane, and who rose to the challenge of completing a marathon having only ever run 10 miles at a stretch.

He did it, with the same blend of determination and faith that inspired him to keep hope alive not only for himself but also for all of the others who were moored helpless deep in the earth until help could arrive, buoyed by one another and, in some cases, by Pena's performances of his beloved Elvis.

He was at first invited to be a spectator or even hold the finish tape as the winner crossed, but Pena wanted to do the race himself. A knee injury didn't stop him. The thousands of people around him didn't stop him. In fact, he took courage and encouragement from the athletes around him and the masses of spectators along the race course.

He made it halfway running on that injured knee (an injury sustained before the mine collapse), then needed ice packs from the medical tent. After a respectable 2:07 over 13.1 miles, he hobbled through the last several miles, cramping up in the last few (a normal occurrence in a marathon, truth be told) and finished in 5:40.51, ramping it up to a run at the end as his body soared with cheers-induced adrenalin.

His reward for finishing — along with the tremendous feeling of accomplishment and the cheers of the throngs of New York — was hearing his favorite artist over the loudspeakers at the finish line. The song of choice was "The Wonder of You."

It wasn't like he was totally unprepared. He did run while in the mine, every day, a couple of times a day. He had competed in a triathlon a couple of weeks before, running on a relay team. But 26.2 miles was a big ask.

And Pena answered.

Chilean Miner to Run NYC Marathon

The New York City marathon gets a ton of people running it every year. Celebrities are commonplace. But one of this year's media darlings was unsung until a date with subterranean destiny forced him to stay deep underground and use his running to help keep his sanity.

Edison Pena, one of the 33 miners rescued after a few months in the depths of the earth after a cave-in underneath Chile, will be toeing the line this coming weekend, determined to run the entire 26.2 miles, even if it takes him 6 hours to do so.

Pena was one of the miners who was the most active while trapped underground. He ran repeatedly, to keep fit and stay sane. He ran as much as 6 or 7 miles a day, in his electrician's boots, which he had cut down to ankle-high. He was determined to outrun a bad fate and make his fitness work for him. When his rescuers finally lifted him and his fellow miners to the surface, he felt fit and ready for anything.

Turns out he was.

The Marathon folks have rolled out the red carpet, including current world-record holder Haile Gebrselassie greeting Pena at the airport. Pena had his own press contingent for awhile, and he didn't disappoint, breaking into song by his beloved Elvis, whose music helped keep the miner focused on staying alive.

Turns out he's a regular runner, this Pena guy. Just last weekend, he ran 6.5 miles as part of a relay team at a triathlon. How he'll go in the longer distance remains to be seen. Still, his wife will be with him, cheering him on, as will 150 Chilean professional and amateur runners who had already signed up for the race. They joined in the cheers for the suddenly famous miner, even forming a parade to escort him off the plane.

You can follow him here.

Despite Ford, City Didn't Drop Dead

Yogi Berra once said, "I never said half the things I said."

As with many of Berra's utterances, this one makes more sense than might first be apparent. What he really meant is that many statements attributed to him never crossed his lips.

Such is the case with Gerald Ford, who, despite being President in 1975, never told New York City to drop dead. Yet you wouldn't know it if you read the New York Daily News on Oct. 30, 1975. The banner headline that day read "Ford to City: Drop Dead."

The subhead reads "Vows He'll Veto Any Bail-Out," but people tend to forget those words and focus on the ones in bigger type (which is only natural).

New York City, at that time, was in trouble. It was nearly bankrupt and had applied to the federal government for a bailout. President Ford denied the request, refusing to pour federal money into a sinking ship. Instead, he proposed a bill that would ease the city on its way into bankruptcy, from which it could claim protection from a host of federal laws.

Shocked New Yorkers were quick to voice their outrage, but Ford and the White House held their ground: New York must solve its own financial problems. History shows that Ford was right to stick to his guns and insist on getting the city to tame its own excessive spending, since New York did just that, the Daily News headline to the contrary.

Yes, in Her Backyard

That's a lot of effort for a backyard treehouse. The mother of three teen girls, however, insists that it was worth it.

The treehouse in question adorns a tree in the backyard of Melinda Hackett, who lives in Greenwich Village, New York City. Hackett and her girls (ages 11, 13, and 16) are recently transplanted from rural upstate New York. They were missing a bit of the more rural elements of the northern part of the state, and so Hackett decided to write a check for $5,000 and have a most distinctive treehouse built, wrapped around a London Plane tree in the backyard of a townhouse built in the mid-19th Century.

Architects were called in, as were carpenters and interior designers. About five months later, the treehouse was complete. That's when the trouble started.

It seems that a neighbor didn't approve of the treehouse and waited until the thing was built before complaining to the Environmental Control Board. Hackett appeared before the board and argued her case, alleging that all she wanted to do by commissioning the circular treehouse was to offer a space that serves as the inner sanctum, clubhouse, and refuge for her daughters. The handwritten No Trespassing sign echoes that wish.

After months of legal wrangling, the Environmental Control Board dismissed the case. Hackett and her daughters got to keep their treehouses.

They might want to move that No Trespassing sign to the front of the house.

Jane Austen Had an Editor? How Sensible

So now we have the story that Jane Austen wasn't the paragon of good grammar and stylish prose that we all think she was. Big deal. Some people probably still think she wasn't poking fun at her subjects or her society in her books.

If, as an esteemed professor claims after an exhaustive study of more than a thousand original handwritten pages from the sainted Ms. Austen, what she wrote and what we read aren't exactly the same thing, then so be it, it doesn't diminish the power of her ideas or the beauty of her characterizations. The fact that the description of Mr. Darcy may have had a few spelling mistakes in the first draft in no way detracts from the indelible impression that the brooding heartthrob has made on millions of readers. (After all, we don't read the first draft; rather, we read the final draft, the one for which a whole department, if necessary, of editors, proofreaders, and printers tidies up the manuscript and presentation so the reader gets the best of all possible words.)

See, Jane Austen had an editor — a good one, in fact. This would be William Gifford, who worked for Austen's publisher, John Murray. Gifford knew how to string sentences together (or, as it sounds like it was in Austen's case, how to distinguish one sentence from the next in a forest of semicolons). The editor knew best, and we need look no further than the finished product to see proof of that assertion. He was able to read Austen's scrawls as well as her intent and meld the two into compelling, universally appreciated prose.

Another point that the esteemed professor makes is quite telling, actually. Kathryn Sutherland, the professor (of Oxford, no less), asserts that Austen, in lumping her sentences together with sparse punctuation, may have been writing in a sort of stream of consciousness, taking chances with the writing style in order to get more compelling characters who would come alive more on the page — more Willoughby than Colonel Brandon, if you will. Those used to thinking of Austen as wearing a sort of literary straitjacket akin to the tight corsets worn my her matronly characters might need to reassess.

So where does that leave us? Jane Austen, one of the English language's most revered novelists, didn't produce the great British novel first time out, every time out. Who does?

2012 the End of the World? Not So Fast!

Wow! I've got my 2013 summer back!

I had stopped planning trips, mortgage payments, haircuts, and other important things for three years from now because, as everyone knows, the world is going to end in 2012. We all know this because the Mayan Long Calendar (not to mention a recent disaster movie) says so. The Maya knew a thing about the "end of days." Look no further than the fact that they're not around anymore.

For years, we've been told that December 21, 2012 would be the last day on Earth because that's the day that the Long Calendar ended. So all this fascination with President Obama's re-election campaign slated to take place in the summer of 2012 would have little meaning in the long run because first of all, he wouldn't be taking office because Inauguration Day would be January 20, 2013, and secondly, there's would be a long run because the Long Calendar would have meant that time had run out.

But wait. Comes a horseman with knows that the prophecy might be, shall we say, out of date. A new book by an expert in the field says that the calculations to bring the Long Calendar in line with our current calendar might be wrong and that the real year in which the world is going to end might be significantly different, like 50 years different, on either side. So, the world could be going to end in 2063. Or it could have already ended. Take your pick. I know what choice I'd make under those circumstances.

See, this Long Calendar has a long of street cred because the Maya were so good at keeping track of things like days, weeks, months, years, and apocalypses. Trouble was, they weren't so good at keeping track of things like disease, enemies, and other ravages of time. They were fascinated by time itself, however, as evidenced by their writings and etchings. They predicted all kinds of bad things happening in the present and in the future.

There's even a word for this end-of-days business: eschatology. The closer we get to 2012, the more people will escalate eschatology in their daily thinking. The more hype this kind of story gets, the more people will hunker down and get ready for the end, whatever and whenever it may be.

There's also the possibility of people bunkering down, perhaps to avoid whatever cataclysm might be referred to by the Mayan prophecy. It might be a war. It might be a nuclear war. We might go to ground —underground, to be more precise, in the precious bunkers that we built lo those many years ago to escape radiation from expected nuclear explosions. (After all, enough bombs exist now to blow up the planet many times over.)

I'd really rather not see that, actually. We'd have all sorts of issues with food, fresh water, living space, and fights in the War Room. Who would want to live through that?

RIP, June Cleaver

Barbara Billingsley, made most famous by her role as the mother in the American TV hit Leave It to Beaver, has died.

Billingsley had been out of the limelight for some time, having played parts of movies and in other shows on television. But it was as June Cleaver that most of America knew her. She was the understanding yet firm mother of Wally and Theodore and the wife of Ward. She was the epitome of the mid-20th Century American wife and mother. (She was so understanding, in fact, that she agreed to call her younger son by his nickname, Beaver.)

Beaver and Wally and their friends routinely got into trouble — not much of it serious — and Ward and June continually explained the need for thinking of consequences of actions before taking those actions. Sometimes the boys listened; other times, we had new episodes of Leave It to Beaver to watch.

To this day, I can remember laughing at Beaver as he walked around town while wearing a full-body rabbit costume.

To this day, I can remember the episode in which Beaver tried to pretend that he had eaten his Brussels sprouts but, in fact, had stuffed them in his shirt pocket.

To this day, I can remember how Wally learned a valuable lesson about workplace seniority by selling hot dogs.

The boys regaled their parents with slang as well. Things were "goofy." Astonishment gave way to "Gosh!" Excitement brought forth "Hot dog!"

The one thing that June especially but Ward as well provided for their boys was a mirror, which they would hold up occasionally, as it to say, "Do you realize just how much you're making of this little thing?" or "Do you realize how much I'm having to do to make amends for what you consider to be a tiny infraction?"

Another thing Wally and Beaver got from their parents was a lifetime supply of real and virtual hugs. Their parents were there for them, whenever and wherever. Oh, misbehavior might result in a lecture or a grounding, but the boys never felt like their parents were going to do more than that.

June Cleaver also was an ideal. Her hair seemed to be continually perfect and her clothes just so. She always looked like she could go to a dinner party at a moment's notice. (There was that ever-present pearl necklace, for one thing.) She was always there for the boys — literally, since even though she was involved in social pursuits, they took a back seat to her family.

Billingsley made June Cleaver believable, down-to-earth, and friendly. The actress will be missed, but her most famous character lives on.

You Want Fries with That Wedding Cake?

"We see this as a business opportunity."

Those words could apply to almost anything, including a wedding at McDonald's.

Yep, it's happening — or it will be happening, as of January 2011, when a Hong Kong outlet of the venerable American fast food restaurant begins accepting requests for what could only be described as a McWedding.

In a situation that is an economics instructor's dream scenario, demand is driving supply. It turns out that the idea came from customer requests. So many regular consumers of Big Macs, fries, shakes, McSalads, Happy Meals (well, OK, maybe not Happy Meals) asked for the thing at the place that the owner of the place decided to provide the thing being requested.

Seems the romantic attraction of meeting, dating, and becoming engaged at McDonald's was enough to drive some customers to want to legally formalize their relationship there.

And it's not just the reception, with a menu filled with normal fare. No, it's the whole nine yards of marriage ceremony, wedding cake (the only unusual item on the menu), and reception for up to 100 people. All the happy couple (or the family of the bride) have to pay is 250 British pounds ($400). One thing that won't be on offer is champagne, since alcohol isn't allowed (not even BYO).

And, in a reminder that business is business, the restaurant manager wishes to inform prospective McWedding participants that the restaurant will remain open during the ceremony and reception and that, because it would be normal business hours, restaurant staff would be obliged to serve customers unassociated with the wedding, even if it meant that the flower girl who got a sudden craving for McDonaldLand cookies would have to stand in line.

No word yet on whether the outlet will offer any sort of honeymoon catering or other … arrangements.

$1 Billion House Towers over Mumbai

Nothing like being ostentatious in an era of nearly global austerity.

Mukesh Ambani, a very rich Indian man, has moved himself and his family into his new house in Mumbai. No ordinary house, this one has 37,000 square meters (nearly 400,000 square feet) of space. Now, the family (two parents, three children) isn't large enough to need all that space, so they all have plenty of room to spread out — and out and out — maybe invite a few neighborhoods full of friends over for a week at a time.

The house is so big that it requires 600 staff to keep the lights on and the floors clean. Those staff probably don't all live onsite, but they could, if they bunked in together on the bottom four floors. The available parking space could accommodate all 600, though, if they carpooled, four to a car. A total of 160 cars can fit in the underground garage. That leaves a comfortable 10 spots for the fleet of cars that the Ambani family no doubt owns.

You don't have to get there by car, though. You can fly your way in, landing at one of three helipads on top of the 173-meter-high (567-feet-high) building. From there, you can make your way down to the living space, pausing long enough to appreciate the small trees growing in the elevated garden (complete with high ceiling so the trees won't have to be cut down to size every few months).

Don't miss the onsite health club. Not just a gym, the health club has all manner of facilities resembling a full-building club, including swimming pools and a dance studio. Speaking of dance, you'll appreciate the large ballroom and 50-seat cinema as well, for dance and/or movie entertainment-filled evenings, after which you can sleep it all off in one of the many guest rooms scattered about the place.

Ambani is certainly the richest person in India, but it's bigger than that: He's the fourth richest person in the world. How did he get that way? He owns much of Reliance Industries, a mammoth conglomerate of oil, commercial, and biotech companies worth 18 billion British pounds (nearly $29 million). He had no problem paying for the new house, which cost a bit more than $1 billion.

By the way, the name of the house is Antilia, which was a legendary Atlantic Ocean island never found by Spanish or Portuguese explorers. Some traditions connect this island with the story of the Seven Cities of Gold.

Google Road-testing a Really Smart Car

I'm not sure what to think about this new self-driven car that Google is trumpeting. The self part of that self-driven doesn't mean you drive and no one else in the car. No, it means that the car is driving itself.

See Google is always on the lookout for new markets. This time round, they're looking to get into the AI road software business. Now, I'm not sure if this is just another opportunity to showcase Google Ads — theoretically, if you're in the car but you're not driving, you could be a captive audience for more Google Ads on your laptop, smartphone, dashboard, rear view mirror, makeup case mire, or whatever other kind of screen you could see from where you sit.

This happens now, with passengers. If Google is driving your car for you, then you're no longer the driver but are instead a passenger, free to make phone calls, surf the Web, answer email, tweet, write a blog post, record a Facebook update, or whatever else you might do in the Web 2.0+ generation.

But back to the car. So the system has a host of cameras, inside the front seat area and strapped onto the roof (in a setup that looks a bit like Darth Vader's fighter ship), and these cameras feed all kinds of information back to a central computer that does the rest.

This isn't exactly a new thing. Automated vehicles have been on the roads for years. This particular project has had seven test cars logging more than 1,000 miles with no human intervention whatever. The number of miles in which a human has to step in occasionally (such as to wait for a pedestrian who was taking an extremely long time to cross the road at a crosswalk or to avoid cyclist who had carelessly run a red light) is well over 100,000. So these folks know what they're doing.

This latest test involved a human-free navigation of Lombard Street, San Francisco's famously windy street. That test went off without a hitch — or a crash or even so much as a dent.

Google also reports having a Prius driving a preprogrammed route up a major highway in the middle of traffic for a distance of 35 miles. A human was behind the wheel but had to do nothing other than monitor traffic. The AI software did the rest, including braking, accelerating, and even changing lanes. (The car, of course, drove the speed limit the entire time.)

Where does this leave us? Probably not as close to the Jetsons as we might think. Still, it's probably closer to that sort of thing than most people realize.

No Gray Area Here: STOP Means Stop

An argument is raging in Southern California over the legality, fairness, you name it of the installation of cameras at remote STOP signs and of the issuance of expensive tickets for people who were caught on camera blowing through the signs. In particular, the people who got citations in the mail are complaining that they didn't realize that they were driving through a speed trap and, further, that they had no warnings to prevent subsequent infractions.

Right issue, wrong focus.

The argument that a physical stop by a patrol officer who handed out a citation would have prevented further infractions doesn't hold up when compared to a list of repeat offenders that nearly every law enforcement department could furnish. Also, the argument that drivers didn't know that they were photographed violating traffic laws and so didn't know that they were breaking the law doesn't hold up, either, since the clear presence of a STOP sign is a black-and-white (and red) indicator that a traffic law is there to be obeyed.

But again, that isn't the point. The point is this: A STOP sign means STOP. The octagonal red signs at intersections don't have shades of gray in the wilderness. A STOP sign is absolutely a restriction on forward progress, full stop. Unlike stop lights, which have yellow lights that can be interpreted as "Proceed with caution" but are more likely to be interpreted as "Get through the intersection before the light turns red," STOP signs go straight to red.

STOP signs are absolute. They say what they mean. Drivers should follow instructions.

To argue that a STOP sign doesn't need to be followed because it is at an intersection in a remote area assigns a qualifier to a situation that has no room for qualification. Down that slippery slope lies vast potential for confusion and injury, not to mention future arguments about when and whether the law applies in certain situations. We just don't want to go down that road as a society in any meaningful way. Traffic laws are on the books to protect drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, and anyone else who might be using roads. Traffic laws are not intended to be followed discriminately, nor should they be so enforced.

STOP does not mean SLOW AND PROCEED IF NO ONE IS COMING. STOP means STOP. If issuing citations to drivers who break the law in this regard is what it takes to get people to focus on road safety, then that is a price worth paying (and yes, I would be willing to pay a steep fine if I so broke the law).

Double-lottery Winner Counting His Millions

Third time lucky? You have to like his chances.

A Missouri man has won a million dollars in the lottery twice — three times, actually, since his second win was $2 million.

Ernest Pullen, a 57-year-old retired telecom employee and military man from Bonne Terre, Mo., won big in two different lottery events in his home state. In June, he won just a $1 million prize as part of a "100 Million Dollar Blockbuster" promotion run on the Scratchers lottery system. In September, he won another Scratchers event, "Mega MONOPOLY," to the tune of $2 million. (Now that's a lot of hotels on Boardwalk!)

It's not surprising that Missouri Lottery officials can conclusively state that this occurrence is the first of its kind. A lottery official put the odds at winning merely $1 million at 1 in 2.28 million. Winning $2 million after winning $1 million? Infinity is not enough.

But what about the money? Surely the state government gets part of that $3 million in tax. Well, yes. In fact, the payout was reduced further because Pullen chose to receive his winnings as lump sums, rather than as annuities. The $1 million payment was chopped to $700,00 right away, and the $2 million prize was a mere $1.3 million. And that's taxed income, remember.

Still, a man's house is his castle, and Pullen plans to spend some of his winnings on fixing up his castle. He probably has enough to install a top-notch security system.

Now We're Ready for the Aliens

Some things make me sleep better at night. This just might be one of those things: As far as aliens are concerned, we (Planet Earth) may yet have a leader.

The cliche of alien beings landing on Earth and uttering words to the effect of "Take us to your leader" is a cliche for a reason: It's entirely possible. Yes, it is entirely plausible, possible, predictable, and lots of other words ending in -able or -ible that intelligent members of a non-Earth species who arrive on our home world and can somehow approximate language that we humans can understand will assume that we have a leader and, more to the point, ask to be ushered into the presence of that leader.

If that happens, we need to be ready. And now, it seems, we are.

The United Nations (did you know this?) has an Office for Outer Space Affairs. It even has a catchy acronym — UNOOSA. UNOOSA has a leader, Mazlan Othman of Malaysia. She's an astrophysicist, a fact that will no doubt come in handy during the first discussions with alien beings who land on Earth and want to do something other than liquefy our defense systems.

Look at her picture: Othman is a kindly sort. At 58, she's been around the block a time or two in terms of astronomical research. She knows the chances of meeting a representative of an alien species (and she knows the chances are slim). However, she also knows that with the advent of the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Telescope, the International Space Station, and all manner of other hunks of scientifically enhanced metal orbiting Earth, humans' chances of detecting intelligent life anywhere other than most places on Earth are growing by leaps and bounds.

This is undoubtedly not news to the U.N. scientific advisory committees, which will hear Othman's case very soon. If they agree that she and her office are the ones who should be put forward for a First Contact tete-a-tete, then (barring a no vote by the General Assembly), that is exactly what will happen.

Nightmares of alien overlords ruling the world? What nightmares of alien overlords ruling the world? We have a leader (or at least we will soon).

Love Killed the Social Media Star

Proving once again that too much of a good thing can be bad, workers at a library in Australia are reporting a horticultural case of death by Facebook.

Seems the Queensland state library hooked up a plant to a watering device, added in some electrical designs, threw in a bit of social media, and there they were.

Meet Eater, as the plant has come to be known, issued a call for fans and Wall posts on Facebook. Anytime someone went to the page and wrote something on the Meet Eater's Wall, the plant got a squirt of water.

Better yet (or worse yet, depending on how much you know the rest of the story), each time a person Liked the plant, the water rations went up.

Well, the plant proved pretty popular and so many Likes made so much more water trickle into the plant's container and before you could say "Man the lifeboats," the plant was waterlogged. Library officials report that the plant has "died" twice.

Turns out you can get a lot of water if you get 5,000 Likes. Surely these people were thinking they were doing the right thing, giving water to what was surely a plant that needed some attention, other than the kind brought on by the apparatus invading the plant's container in the name of a social media experiment.

But the writing should have been on the Wall when the number of Likes started to skyrocket. Still, the people looking after the poor plant say it's all part of their experiment.

Also part of their experiment is the opportunity to get up close and personal with the plant. See, the plant is the real thing, not just some virtual center of attention. If you happen to be in the neighborhood of the Queensland state library (and you'd be in Australia, of course), you can stop in and give the plant some real-world TLC. Organizers of the project have set up certain sound effects to reflect activity, including a sort of crooning sound that results from contact between the plant and green thumbs and a full-on crying suite triggered by the plant's being abandoned for more than a certain amount of time.

Somewhere, Akihiro Yokoi is smiling.