I'm still struggling with explaining to my (older) children *why* people get so upset by fuck. Having laughed until I cried at an Eddie Izzard recording in which he must have said fuck about a thousand times, it has no shock value for me or for them... and led to a conversation in which I struggled to understand *myself* why certain words are forbidden.

My 15 year old thought that if you were an adult and knew the word fuck, and knew what it means, and knew the words sexual intercourse and knew what *that* meant, it was plain stupid to be offended by one and not by the other, as the meaning is the same.

I'm stuck for answers. I don't know why shit is offensive and excrement is not when both words denote the same thing. I know I am meant to be offended by them, but can't logically see why.

As for the word count... it is amazing how many new words a day a child learns. They can be very creative when developing ways around filters. Not sure that parents will be entirely positive about the possibility that they will learn hat for hate and a whole range of other creative spellings that will foul up their spelling tests.

Used correctly, online and virtual environments can be wonderful, safe, places to learn, create and interact. It think it is a shame if all the energy is going into protecting the little darlings from each other, and preventing interaction.

Judging by the reviews on Amazon, it doesn't steer and only has a forwards and backwards motion, meaning that you have to rescue the hamster everytime it runs up against something. It seems to be a cool idea but a poorly executed hamster toy. The balls enable a hamster to reverse or walk away from a corner or obstacle, so they can rescue themselves... although you have the danger of a Stephen Fry coming along and mistaking the ball for a football and booting it out of the window, as he claims to have done with a friend's (inhabited) hamsterball. He claims the animal suffered no ill effects, but it must have been a particularly soft landing for that to have been the case: they're pretty brittle.

I've always been in favour of child-sized hamster wheel pods being installed on the side of houses, so that children can put their excess energy to good use....

I have a pay as you go oyster card my aunt picked up when she was in town. As far as I know it wasn't registered with anyone.

it is possible to use an unregistered oyster and get most benefits; it may not be possible to buy longer term tickets with an unregistered one.

#3 the coffee is generally weak and cold in our local Starbucks *anyway*.

I don't know whether to applaud the ingenuity of man, who can decorate anything... or to weep over a world so decadent that people can be planning artworks on latte froth while people eat mud in Haiti.

Before my husband turned to crime... he's a lawyer, poor, as he does legal aid... he did a stint in divorce law. He said that there was nothing so trivial it couldn't be argued over by divorcing couples. Often it comes down to spending good money arguing over the ali baba linen basket. There nearly always is one and only one, and couples will waste the equivalent of ten or twenty in arguing over the only one.

I can only think of two things that this woman might get out of posting the video: publicity and hurting her soon-to-be-ex husband.

Either she hopes that in these sad times, notoriety gained on youtube will gain her some value in chat shows or maybe pantomime, or she hopes to hurt her husband significantly.

If she's hoping for anything else... I think the video probably does more harm than good. The husband only has to show it to ensure that everyone understands his grounds for divorce.

I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned the main danger for children of this age, which is the traffic on the streets. My father, who was born in the 1930s maintains that the reason parents of his generation were able to allow their children more freedom, was the relative rarity of cars in small towns and villages. He points out that there are more cars in our London borough now than there were in the whole country in the 1950s.

The ability of a child to judge traffic and be sensible increases with age, and depends on the individual child. One chil *might* be ready to take life or death decisions on crossing the road at 7/8 but many won't. Nearly all can by 12.

There is a general superstition in our culture about stranger abductors, I can agree. That worries about sexual predators are unfounded I do not agree. When I joined a women's group to discuss an organisation's policy on safeguarding children from harm, every woman in the group had experienced some form of sexual assault as a child. The increasing experience of non-fatal but life-altering experiences of sexual predation on children, which is something we should be examining very closely, is something that keeps parents from trusting their children to the street. These experiences go deep, and sometimes affect people for the rest of their lives... if you have been assaulted by a trusted adult in your own childhood, it is unlikely that you are going to be able to trust your children to strangers.

Looking at how big a cube is made with your $60 set of 20, that (pretty ugly) divider wall is a cool $1000-worth! I don't know how much wood costs in your neck of the woods, but you could achieve the same effect in a lot of much more durable materials for the same or less.

This is an interesting product. What will make it a great product will be if someone produces it with all recycled materials, cheaply, and in a way which addresses the safety concerns. What would make it brilliant would be if someone where to produce a stamper that enabled you to make your own.

I can't believe some of the opinions in this thread. My son doesn't have a feeding tube... he does have a colostomy, and has been in hospital with a lot of children who do have feeding tubes. According to some posters here that makes him "special needs" and in need of a carer. Forget that the parents of children needing such interventions work hard to ensure that it doesn't turn them into needy people, that they work hard to make life seem "normal" to teenagers who require such things. If you have a feeding tube, or any other assistance with your life, you have special needs and should have a babysitter.

Fourteen, for some children, is old enough to take responsibility for yourself... but even adults have a hard time standing up to the sort of jobsworth than the TSA appears to recruit and employ. Many people, and not only a 14 year old would have trouble balancing up the choice between allowing someone to mess with their required medical equipment and getting on the place. You do not know if he had a hospital appointment or some important event to reach.

It's hard from outside the USA to understand how these things happen. Then people post to the comments and you start to understand.

Beating the bounds is earlier and later than the 5th century. In many places in England there is still a beating the bounds ceremony performed every year. Some of these parishes have always performed the ceremony and in others it is a modern revival of the ancient practice. See here:
http://www.cholesbury.com/beatbounds.htm

and here:
http://www.strangebritain.co.uk/traditions/bounds.html

It is one thing hijacking religious ceremonies from long-dead ancestors... I think you're on tricky ground as an artist when you exploit a current ritual for art, although fortunately both the Church of England and the Pagans who could both lay claim to it, have a history of good humoured tolerance... when they aren't persecuting and burning each other at the stake etc.

The discussion on this issue highlights the basic idiocy of asking employees to sign a loyalty oath. Those who think about it and consider what they are able to sign up to are MORE likely to live by what they signed, than those who simply sign it as a formality and go through one of those rituals, like crossing their fingers, spelling their name wrong, or simply not feeling that putting your name or your oath means anything at all.

It has always seemed to be a nonsensical idea that someone who is able to square their conscience with murdering or raping another human being, might then show some fastidiousness about signing a loyalty oath or lying to a court. Obviously, if you don't have a conscience about killing, you're unlikely to have a conscience about anything else.

I'd like to know what is this loyalty oath ~*for*? Is it meaningful? Why is it required? Would University employees actually be made to make good their oaths? If not, what is the purpose to making them sign up to it? Why can't the law which requires this be revoked as meaningless?

Allowing your employees to sign oaths which are meaningless and which they do not intend to fulfil, damages the morality of the organisation and the people. And yes, I am a Quaker too.

In the UK it is the magpie which seems to be the ubiquitous bird in town and country. They seem to aggressively protect their territory and they deliberately trash other bird's nests and eat their eggs. We have had a pair of collar doves in our garden for some time and the magpies got both the nests they made last year.

My son thinks that crows being very intelligent will take the easy way to collecting trash and/or coins and start raiding likely places or indeed mugging people for their papers and crisp packets. There are already places where they are a nuisance. It may be necessary to send them for re-education from time to time.

Wrote a long comment. Submitted it. The system tells me the text entered was wrong. LOL!

In essence I wanted to say that most home educators in the UK are not home educating for religious reasons, but I have come across a few who are. Frankly I think those children who live in homes where their parents have very strong religious beliefs that discount the idea of evolution, are going to be healthier and happier out of school, rather than somewhere where they are brought into conflict with the ideas they have been taught are right.

Because we live in an adversarial system, we think that people should be challenged by the alternatives to their ideas... but in fact the people I have met who were most vociferously anti-evolution and pro-creationism in the UK were brought up in ordinary schools with the routine scientific ideas and then rejected all that when they got religion. Being exposed to the alternatives did not make a difference.

In any case, what neither scientists nor priests realise, is that for most ordinary people, things are not "proven", at least not to the individual, they are simply learned about. Thus nano technology seems no less fantastical than the creation story, and moon landings no more likely than the parting of the waters.

In the end, you can't tell the other guy what to believe, or else how are you different from the fundamentalists?

"...Since I had plenty of other things to do, and didn't particularly want to do them, I spent a relaxing half-hour knotting a plant hanger with the cable."

That's two things that have resonated with me on the page - the someone-is wrong-on-the-internet cartoon and this statement.

I am the world's worst housewife, and I am a sufferer from serial distraction disorder. Someone is coming to see me, and so my eye strays from the screen and realises that I am living in a room scattered with books, photographs, half-finished family trees, crates with miscellaneous objects, shoes and jumpers that have migrated from the children's rooms, dog hair in wafting dunes under the furniture and a thin scattering of dust overall.

*Of course* I start with the photographs, realise that I have previously sorted out some pictures for my album which are still waiting for me to stick them in, and I while away a happy hour sticking the pictures in the album until I realise that this is the picture of Aunt Nellie that I intended to keep in the family history folder (because I am trying to keep an archive picture of each person) and so it is natural to collect up the photographs and stuff them in a box file and move onto the family trees which I got halfway through and then abandoned, but which really ought to be finished off, except that I go to find a pencil sharpener and realise the sink is full of dirty cups and stop to do that. There's no hot water so I go upstairs, taking with me the assortment of things which have been put in a crate (or really, the too-hard basket, because I don't know what that black piece of moulded plastic is, I only know that as soon as I discard it I will find out...and didn't we throw away the board game which used those bright little bobbles?) and so it is that I can have worked really intensively and still have made more mess than I have cleared up in the course of a morning.

And of course now I have a new hobby, surplus wire macrame. It's green, very green....

Reminds me of those old pictures of mediums with muslin ectoplasm spewing out of their heads....

Hi Arkizzle,
I suppose what I meant was that while some women loved them and some women agreed with the men, ALL the men thought they were creepy.

Among women of my acquaintance it's roughly half and half "aren't they gorgeous, where do I get one?" (answer: ebay) and "yeuch!"

Men are all in the yeuch department, haven't found one yet who thinks they're cute. Don't know whether that's a gender bias due to environmental conditioning or a real gender bias due to an innate female/male difference.

I think there are new ways of doing things involving crodsourcing etc, but I think that you need a vision and generally that needs to be a person who can direct the effort.

My experience in Second Life, working on group projects is that you can work a sort of magic, and make a group produce things that are more than the sum of the parts, but without someone to direct operations, it falls to pieces. You can have the same people, same enthusiasm, same talents without a directing force, and the thing just collapses in on itself.

I think SL is a good experimental laboratory for theories of how things work (or don't work) and how people create together.

What I see as new is the destruction of hierarchy, and it's something which companies and institutions are going to struggle with in the UK particularly. People need authentic communication to make it work; if you start to demand a different sort of communication because you are the MD/CEO/Duke of Cornwall, then it doesn't work... everyone has to leave behind their feelings of superiority/inferiority.

Hi Mark, you're welcome, I'm only sorry that I type as though wearing boxing gloves at this time of the morning. And that I accidentally reported my own post in trying to find the edit button, lol.

Can I be the only person wondering if your friend's weird elbow rash might have been a ferret allergy?

I watched this documentary and unfortunately didn't realise it was perfect Boingboing material. There were a few women featured in the documentary. One was very sad, someone who had looked after her grandchild as a baby due to his mother's illness, and then had lost him because her daughter recovered and went off to New Zealand with the baby. I could understand why she wanted a grandson subsstitute, but it made me sad that there are so many families around who could do with an adopted granny with real children that she could hug, and instead of finding them she found a rubber baby.

One of the women was as mad as a box of fish, and had multiple fake babies because the real thing might make a noise or ruin its clothes. She made me very glad that she could have rubber babies and not the real thing. While most real parents hate that whole lugging around the pram and bottle and nappy bags thing, she loved all that - for a pretend baby. I think the truth is she is still a little girl at heart, and couldn't bear not to be the focus of everyone attention. If she takes her fantasy too much further she may find herself the centre of everyone attention - down at the local psychiatric ward.

Another woman who briefly appeared seemed to have a toy show in her house, hundreds of babies in cots crammed into a room. That seemed a bit obsessive compulsive really.

I think some of them are fantastics works of art in the realism, but I agree with others that the more real they are, the more creepy. In general, although I am a woman, I found the men's reactions to them most normal... nearly all regarded them as disturbing and macabre.

Congratulations... but hang on, *how many* babies is that name attached to?

It's a pretty long set of initials to saddle her with - no form will ever be long enough!

I revert to my argument that despite good clinical trials, a lot of conventional medicine does a lot of harm - something that cannot be claimed about homeopathy. Anyone who thinks medicine in any form is scientific is deluded... it is much more close to an art because our genetic inheritance, lifestyle choices and the perception of our symptoms varies infinitely.

Those who believe in the current scientific paradigm point out that none of us would like to take untested drugs which are not safe. Those of us who feel that science has a long way to go before it can explain the palpable effects of acupuncture, for example, and the fact that many drugs affect women and men in different ways (as reported in New Scientist), are also free to think that a placebo effect from a harmless and possibily ineffective homeopathic preparation is preferable to an unknown drug interaction from well tested allopathic drugs.

Captain Kibble: With around 100,000 Americans dying each year from the effects of the drugs they are prescribed, I think that even if homeopathy is only triggering a placebo effect in the people who use it, it is achieving something. First do no harm....

I have read Derren Brown's book (last year... taking you a while to catch up with your reading, Cory?) and have watched his programs. He is, without a doubt, a very talented and unusual performer, although I felt that his most recent TV series verged on the abusive, where for example, he hypnotised a woman to believe she was having an out-of-the-body experience following a car crash, apparently in order to demonstrate the dangers of her driving style.

There were assurances that the young woman in question suffered no lasting after effects, but I am not convinced that Derren Brown is qualified to say this... how the mind might react in future to past experiences is something that I do not think even he can control. It seemed that he was doing rather extreme things to her mind in the name of entertainment, and I found it distasteful.

That he is completely opposed to any hocus pocus, seems to lead him in the book to argue that hypnotism is not a real thing... unless I misread it. For someone who seems to have made his name by the use and misuse of what anyone else would call hypnotism, to deny that it exists, seems a tad strange. But then if you were asked to sum Derren Brown up in a pithy phrase, a tad strange would do it for me!

There have been fashions for pregnancy-style shapes at several earlier periods in history, and one theory that I have heard was that women emulated royalty, adopting the "fashion" of an enlarged stomach during times when the current royal was also pregnant.

One guide at a French chateau I visited postulated that there were times when the French court adopted the fashion in order to conceal a real and illegitimate pregnancy on the part of a royal. If every woman looks pregnant, then those who are pregnant can better conceal it.

Aside from the moral repugnance that everyone (except the people in the US who take decisions) feels about this technique, I always assumed that the major reason for not using torture on prisoners was that it is ineffective. If your prisoner has no useful information and will tell you anything in order to have the torture stop, the information thus obtained is likely to be dodgy to say the least.

Maybe people who don't feel that this technique is wrong, who can square their consciences with detaining people without the right of a trial or even to know why they have been detained, who endorse kidnapping rather than the due process in order to extradite people accused of crimes... maybe there is no humanity or better nature to appeal to there... maybe there is a chance that the ineffectiveness of torture as a way of obtaining information, might sway them instead?

I don't think there are many people who could endure this torture without trying to give their interrogators something to stop them... the idea that innocent people may be implicated by other innocent people because the US allows the use of torture is terrible.

In the week when Adel Hamad has been released, an innocent man incarcerated for no good reason for years in Guantanamo Bay, I think the US population needs to start standing up for the Christian ideals it putports to represent to the rest of the world.

OK, OK I apologise for explaining pavement. I've just got used to people saying "Wellingtons? What's that?" or laughing at the (seemingly) inappropriate use of bum/fag/knocked me up/whatever. If it takes me more than a couple of seconds to think of the US equivalent, I usually assume it is worth adding. I was WRONG, sorry.