Monkey Ch*&^^a

These are possibly the 5 best sentences you'll ever read!

"You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity."

"What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving."

"The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else."

"When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation.."

"You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

-David Vincent Gilbert

Braille

Mind-boggling Ad

The History of the Middle Finger

Well, now......here's something I never knew before, and now that I
know it, I feel compelled to send it on to my more intelligent
friends in the hope that they, too, will feel edified. Isn't
history more fun when you know something about it?
Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating
victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of
all captured English soldiers. Without the middle finger it would be
impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore they
would be incapable of fighting in the future. This famous English
longbow was made of the native English Yew tree, and the act of
drawing the longbow was known as "plucking the yew" (or "pluck yew").
Much to the bewilderment of the French, the English won a major upset
and began mocking the French by waving their middle fingers at the
defeated French, saying, See, we can still pluck yew! Since 'pluck
yew' is rather difficult to say, the difficult consonant cluster at
the beginning has gradually changed to a labiodentals fricative F',
and thus the words often used in conjunction with the
one-finger-salute! It is also because of the pheasant feathers on
the arrows used with the longbow that the symbolic gesture is known
as "giving the bird."
IT IS STILL AN APPROPRIATE SALUTE TO THE FRENCH TODAY!....And yew thought yew knew every plucking thing!

A whole new world: The amazing map based on population that shows Britain is still a big player

A new world atlas which concentrates on population rather than land mass has been published today - and it shows that Britain is still a big player.

The atlas has been redrawn to show which cities are the largest, how all urban areas compare, and whether many of few live in the countryside.

Researchers from the University of Sheffield created the online atlas of 200 maps using population distribution data so viewers can understand how many people make up each nation.

The new world guides break with the 500-year tradition of conventional cartography, which shows compass directions as straight lines.

Benjamin Hennig, a postgraduate researcher at the University's Department of Geography, was part of the team that created the maps by using the gridded population of the world database of the Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project.

Mr Hennig said the new projections give an 'interesting insight into different countries'.

He added: 'The map of Afghanistan, for example, shows a country dominated by Kabul and a few other urban centres.

'The UK on this new global projection is a tale of London and the other cities.

'The United States, on the other hand, has much more variety to its human geography, while the new projection of China shows a sea of humanity bubbled up into a thousand cities in the Eastern part of the country.

IVF websites often mum on embryo gene test risks

Fertility clinic websites aren't doing a great job of explaining the risks of testing an embryo for genetic disorders before it's implanted in the womb, researchers found.

The procedure, known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), can be used to test for 5,000 different genetic disorders and, more controversially, choose the sex of an infant. But it's not 100-percent reliable, and could, in rare cases, cause harm to the embryo or even destroy it.

Dr. Robert Klitzman of Columbia University and his colleagues took a look at the websites of 83 clinics offering PGD to investigate how fully they explained these risks. Twenty-two of the clinics were based at hospitals or universities, and the rest were private, freestanding clinics.

Just 35 percent of the websites Klitzman and his team surveyed mentioned the possibility that the test could miss the target diagnosis, while only 18 percent mentioned the risk that the procedure could destroy the embryo. Fourteen percent described PGD as "new" or "controversial."

There were also differences in the sorts of information provided by hospital- or university-affiliated clinics and that offered by private clinics. For example, 18 percent of private clinics were more likely to mention the controversial practice of selecting gender without a medical reason for doing so, while none of the university- or hospital-based clinics did.

However, the private clinics did provide more extensive information about the risks and benefits of PGD; this is possibly because university- or hospital-based clinics can rely on the prestige of their affiliated institution, Klitzman suggested.

And while private clinics may have been more forthcoming with this information, he added, their websites still left a lot to be desired; for example, just 43 percent mentioned the risk of missing a target diagnosis, and 21 percent noted that PGD posed risks to the embryo.

The information that clinics offer on their websites is, in essence, advertising, and should be seen as such by consumers, said Klitzman, who directs a new master's program in bioethics at Columbia. He recommended looking for citations -- for example, in a respected medical journal -- for any claims made on a site.

"This also speaks to the need for physicians to have time to go over material with patients," he added.