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Comment Re:What is "Kowtowing" ? (Score 1) 335

Kowtow is a Chinese word actually. Formally it's kneeling and bowing your head to touch the floor three times.

I think you'll find the word currently used in English comes from Japanese (kohtoh - where the "o" is long as in "or" and the "h" is not pronounced). In Japanese it means to lower one's head (in reverence to a superior or higher ranked person) and from what I can recall, came into the English language during WW2, when POWs were forced to lower their heads to Japanese POW guards and commanders. In the same way, the word "hocho" comes from Japanese as well (hancho - where the "o" is again made long), and means the head of a unit or group (han). Unit leaders or guard leaders among both Japanese army and POWs where given this designation. Identically, the word "tenko" (the "o" is short) means "roll call" or "line call" and POWs were expected to line up and number off in the morning, before meals or whenever they were told to, in order to ensure that they were all there. It was also the name of a popular Australian soap about female POWs in WW2.

Comment Re:Erm... (Score 5, Informative) 284

Toyota? Or Toshiba?

Toshiba, as in TFA. The title is just wishful thinking to get this in the Prius.
Seriously, one of the main issues (other than price) keeping people from buying electric or hybrid vehicles is the time it takes to recharge, which doesn't make them a viable option for long (read: hundreds of kilometres in one go) trips.

Comment Re:you dunnnowhattyertalkin (Score 3, Funny) 256

" Ozzy Osbourne To Be Genetically Decoded" So that's why we can't understand what he's saying .... it's all encoded. Doesn't seem that complicated a code though; I'm pretty sure one of the boffins at Bletchley Park could figure it out in a few days ... (former) President G.W. Bush on the other hand - there's a challenge that would stump even the geniuses over at the NSA.

Comment Re:Am i missing something? (Score 1) 309

I thought that everyone started out with pretty much zero gut bacteria and acquire them based on what they eat. (And sometimes people lose all their gut bacteria from various medical treatments and have to work to restore them.) So the japanese end up with the bacteria/enzymes do digest sushi because... they eat a lot of sushi. Presumably anyone else could develop a colony of such bacteria/enzymes by also eating a lot of sushi? That would mean the division isn't whether you're Japanese or American or something else. It's just whether or not you eat a lot of sushi.

I doubt it really has that much to do with eating sushi per se. I have been living in Japan for over 12 years, and I have no problem digesting any form of seaweed. It's not just used in sushi, but also on 'onigiri' rice balls, in miso soup, in side dishes etc. It is true that most people don't each sushi all the time; maybe we go to a cheap sushi place once in a while, but that's about it for most people. But Japanese people love eating seaweed, and there are many other ways to ingest it. I think the original researchers should have also tested foreigners living in Japan for long periods of time, and Japanese people brought up in the US or else living there for a long time, to see just how the enzymes in the gut change with diet. I think they'd find that people like me have more enzymes than they expected.

Canada

MetaLab Accuses Mozilla of Ripping Off UI Elements In Mockups 159

CWmike writes "Canadian interface design firm MetaLab has accused Mozilla of stealing user interface elements for a development tool in the browser maker's Jetpack project, which aims to simplify add-on making. MetaLab leveled the charges on Tuesday when the 11-person firm's founder, Andrew Wilkinson, blogged about the similarities between his company's designs and those posted by Mozilla for FlightDeck, a Jetpack editor. 'What they did was pretty ridiculous,' Wilkinson said on Thursday. 'There's a difference between inspiration versus ripping something off,' he said. 'The measurements of the graphic elements [Mozilla took from us] were the exact same, the very same pixels. When someone takes your images from the server hosting them, that's crossing the line.' Mozilla apologized to MetaLab on Wednesday, saying in a blog post, 'While the design direction being implemented does not utilize these design elements, we inadvertently included the early mockups in our blog post and video announcing the next phase of development for the Jetpack SDK ... We sincerely apologize to MetaLab for incorporating design elements from their web site in our early mockups and for posting them publicly without proper attribution.'" Alexander Limi of the Firefox User Experience Team points out that MetaLab has accepted the apology, too — worth bearing in mind.

Comment Re:I can recall (Score 2, Interesting) 168

pilots in the 60 who spoke quietly about these. Of course, scientists said that no such thing exists and as such, most pilots kept real quiet about it. Only at wild 60's parties would I hear some of these guys talking about it.

Maybe an even larger, as yet undiscovered type of these ""gigantic jets" can be used to explain the images taken from the shuttle, Mir space station etc. orbiting earth that clearly show something (an object) leaving the earth's atmosphere, and which have for a long time - at least in particular circles - been used to 'prove' the existence of UFOs on earth. If the jets in the article can reach 80km, could it not be possible that some as yet undiscovered phenomena could reach even higher, with enough power to break through the ionosphere into outer space?

Power

Submission + - Big Bang Could Be Recreated Inside A Metamaterial (technologyreview.com)

KentuckyFC writes: "Metamaterials are substances with a permittivity and permeability that has been manipulated in a way that allows fine control over the behaviour of light. They have famously been used to create an invisibility cloak that hide objects from view (see, for example, here or here). Now one physicist in the US has calculated how they could be used for a much more profound demonstration: to reproduce the behaviour of light in various kinds of spacetimes, in particular a (2+2) spacetime (which means having two dimensions of space and two of time). His method is to show that there is formal mathematical analogy between the way metamaterials and spacetimes effect light. He goes on to show how a phase transition in a (2+2) spacetime leads to the creation of a (2+1) spacetime filled with photons, an event that is analogous to the Big Bang."
Education

Go For a Masters, Or Not? 834

mx12 writes "I'm currently an undergrad in computer engineering and have been thinking about getting my masters. I have a year left in school. Most of my professors seem to think that getting a masters is a great idea, but I wanted to hear from people out in the working world. Is a masters in computer engineering better than two years of experience at a company?"
Biotech

Submission + - The 300 Million Year Old Brain

Pickens writes: "Paleontologists recently discovered the world's oldest brain nestled within a 300-million-year-old fish fossil of one of the extinct relatives of modern ratfishes, also known as "ghost sharks" or chimaeras. These chimaera relatives, called iniopterygians, represented bizarre beasts that sported massive skulls with huge eye sockets, shark-like teeth in rows, tails with clubs, huge pectoral fins that were almost placed on their backs, and bone-like spikes or hooks tipping the fins. The brain shows details such as a large vision lobe and optic nerve stretching to the proper place on the braincase, which fits with the fish's large eye sockets. The ear canals of the extinct fish only exist on a horizontal plane so the fish could only detect side to side movements, and not up or down. "There is nothing like this known today; it is really bizarre," said John Maisey, paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. "But now that we know that brains might be preserved in such ancient fossils, we can start looking for others. We are limited in information about early vertebrate brains, and the evolution of the brain lies at the core of vertebrate history.""

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