Shaun's Doodles

[Shaun's List #642] Take that, Dubai!

2012-02-15T19:50:00.001Z

INNOVATIONS

London to Host World's First Rotating Tower

Dynamic Architecture's unprecedented UK project will consist of 80 independently-rotating floors

The tower's 80 floors will rotate independently

13 FEB 2012 Jon Walton

Looking to grab the global spotlight ahead of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, London is putting a spin on modern architecture with the world's first rotating tower.

The 80-story skyscraper will boast independently-rotating floors that can be orchestrated to give the building a fluid, changing look architect David Fisher hopes will usher in a new era of architectural design.

South Korea's Eco Prism Tower to be 'Invisible'

Travel+Leisure Releases World's Top New Landmarks

Check out the January issue of Construction Digital

Dynamic Architecture, the firm behind the unique design, was initially planning for the first project to take place in Dubai, but because of financial concerns and other factors the team decided to focus instead on the London project.

While the status of the Dubai project remains ambiguous, the firm is optimistic that work will begin when the regional economy has recovered.

Construction of the London tower should begin sometime this year, according to a representative of the architecture group, as the firm hopes the project will 'serve as a landmark' during the media frenzy of the Olympic Games this summer.

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[Shaun's List #641] Hub caps

2012-02-14T19:36:00.000Z

Locating airports

Hub caps

Increasing capacity at London's airports is a long haul

Feb 4th 2012 | from the print edition

I wonder what it's like in cabin class

IN 1943 Frederick Miles, an aircraft designer, had the intriguing idea to build an airport near Gravesend, along the Kent coast, to serve London. The plan never took off—but Miles's vision lives on.

Though London now has five international airports, pitches for new ones in the Thames Estuary keep coming. In March the government will consider yet another when it consults on a "sustainable framework for UK aviation". The latest plan to build a hub in east London, dreamed up by Boris Johnson, London's mayor, was until recently pooh-poohed. Now it is being seriously considered. So are plans to expand existing airports in the south-east.

Ministers certainly need to solve the problem of London's airport capacity crunch, which threatens to throttle the economy. Heathrow, the world's busiest international airport, is already full. Its two runways operate at 99% capacity. Though passengers loathe the congestion, delays and often shabby facilities there, last year 68.7m of them passed through the airport, more than London's four other big airports combined. Yet Heathrow cannot grow to meet demand. If they wish to add a flight, airlines must first cancel another. BAA, its owner, says Heathrow is losing out to four European hubs, each of which has four or five runways. Frankfurt serves 245 destinations, Heathrow only 160, according to OAG, an aviation consultancy.

Demand is unlikely to ease. Business travel has grown despite the rise of e-mail and videoconferencing. Stretching existing resources would help only a little. Current limits on night flying are to be revisited. Using Heathrow's runways more flexibly would allow another 60,000 flights a year, says Colin Matthews of BAA. The schedule is currently designed to give local residents some respite.

Other airports may pick up trade from Heathrow, particularly if competition between them intensifies. The Competition Commission forced BAA to sell off Gatwick in 2009; on February 1st the firm lost an appeal against having to offload Stansted too. But without new runways, the Department for Transport predicts that Gatwick, Heathrow and Stansted will all be full by 2030.

The key problem is whether and how to provide the capacity for a larger hub, with connections across the world. BAA says Heathrow's status as London's prime airport relies on flights proceeding to and from the same point. British Airways' experiment in the 1990s with dividing its business between Heathrow and Gatwick—"the hub without the hubbub"—failed. Still, if more runways were available at another London airport, additional airlines might set up shop there. Gatwick is already the 11th-busiest international airport and serves almost as many destinations as Heathrow, though its flights are less frequent and typically shorter haul.

Governments have done surprisingly little research into the benefits of hubs, according to Tom Worsley, former economist at the Department for Transport. BAA does well out of the present one. Airlines, too, can charge premium fares for Heathrow flights because landing slots are scarce. The host country benefits little directly from air travellers who are in transit at Heathrow, but those transfer passengers help support direct access for airlines to a larger number of cities. London is also a major destination in its own right: two-thirds of passengers end their trip at Heathrow.

The last Labour government's proposal for a third Heathrow runway was fought off by west Londoners irked by noisy aeroplanes and by green campaigners who fretted about noxious emissions. Action groups near other airports are geared up to resist any fresh expansion plans with similar zeal. In 2010 the coalition ruled out building new runways at London's airports. Ministers are now thinking again. Deciding where the expansion should happen is a battle in the making.

from the print edition | Britain

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[Shaun's List #640] Atomic hunour

2011-10-13T23:20:00.001+01:00

[Shaun's List #639] Oxford comma

2011-09-20T20:30:00.001+01:00

A brilliant rare example of its appropriate use.

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[Shaun's List #638] For Many Older Gays, a Toll of Time and Isolation

2011-09-20T20:11:00.000+01:00

September 12, 2011

For Many Older Gays, a Toll of Time and Isolation

By MANUEL A. ESKILDSEN, M.D.

Long after I had asked the paramedics to stop chest compressions, I was more dejected and frustrated by this patient's death than by almost any I had experienced as a physician.

Sure, performing CPR after cardiopulmonary arrest on a frail man in his late 90s was likely to be an exercise in futility. And, in retrospect, we should have been more aggressive at the nursing home about suggesting he change his status from "full code" to "do not resuscitate." But that wasn't the main reason this man's death continued to gnaw at me.

My patient was gay, and as a gay geriatrician I had felt a connection with him unlike any I'd had with my other patients. We never directly discussed his sexuality; initially, I only knew that he was a lifelong bachelor and a retired history professor who had taught for many years at Emory University in Atlanta.

In time, as he let his guard down, I learned that what he considered his life's work and true love was the restoration of the historic farmhouse he owned in rural Georgia, where he had an enormous garden that was his pride and joy. Eventually, this World War II veteran told me about his postwar years as a graduate student in Chicago, where he formed close relationships with a few other men.

He never had a long-term relationship, though, and lived alone for years. In the few months that he lived at our facility, the only family member I talked with was a niece who lived out of state.

What bothered me most was that this kind, erudite and generous man had died alone.

As a geriatrician, I've come to learn a bit about people's fears about growing old and dying. I most often see it in my patients' family members, but I think that it exists in all of us to an extent. Physicians feel it, too. This unease may be one of the reasons the number of geriatricians is decreasing even as there is an acknowledged need for more providers who are proficient in the care of older adults.

Growing up suspecting I was gay, one of my greatest fears was to end up alone. When I came out to my parents, the one aspect about being gay that most worried my mother was the punishing solitude that she thought I would face as a gay man in the world. Life had other plans for me, however. I now have a husband and two beautiful young children, and in a bustling household like mine, finding some time alone is more often a blessing rather than a curse.

Maybe my strong connection to this patient was related to the guilt that I felt about my generation's relative good fortune in having the freedom to come out and be honest about our lives, and the ability to lead them to their maximum potential. Gay men in my patient's age group largely did not have this luxury.

We know now that older gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are more likely to be isolated socially than their heterosexual peers. They tend to be childless and may be estranged from family members, and often live with the enduring stigma that came with being anything but heterosexual in generations past.

Connectedness and a sense of community are vital human needs that, if anything, become more important as we get older. But by virtue of their frequent social isolation, many older gay people may be more likely in their later years to have little access to the very social networks that are important factors in successful aging. So, in a way, being old and gay can concentrate the biggest fears that many of us have about aging: that no one will care for us, and that we will die alone.

What can health care providers do to help? The task is complicated by the fact that these men and women may be all but invisible to us. Even people who were able to come out may find themselves retreating into the closet when they are forced to move into assisted living facilities or nursing homes. Health care providers must remember that just because a patient is old, he or she is not necessarily heterosexual.

With that knowledge in mind, we can be more respectful of the diversity of relationships that all our patients, gay and straight, hold dear.

I know my patient lived a rich and rewarding life, and it did not seem to me that he was anguished or regretful in his last days. But the story of how he lived his sexuality is not an unusual one for men of his generation. As my practice evolves, my hope is to meet more gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender patients who are able to choose the relationships they want and who feel comfortable sharing their lives with me as their doctor.

Dr. Manuel A. Eskildsen is a geriatrician and an assistant professor of medicine at Emory University.

Cases: Caregivers Don't Always See the Spirit Diminishing

[Shaun's List #637] Oxford comma

2011-09-20T07:30:00.000+01:00

A brilliant rare example of its appropriate use.

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[Shaun's List #636] Melbourne edges out Vancouver to top liveable city list

2011-08-30T17:53:00.000+01:00

30 August 2011 Last updated at 11:48

Melbourne edges out Vancouver to top liveable city list

The Australian city of Melbourne has beaten Canada's Vancouver to the title of world's most liveable city for the first time in almost a decade.

Vancouver has topped the annual Global Liveability Survey since 2002, but this year fell to third behind Vienna.

Overall, Australian and Canadian cities did well, capturing seven of the top ten spots.

Harare, Port Moresby and Dhaka occupied the bottom of the table.

The cities were assessed in five categories - stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure.

Vancouver missed out on the top spot because its infrastructure score had fallen due to periodic closures of a key motorway.

London was ranked 53, out of 140 cities surveyed. Honolulu, at 26, was the top US city.

The Economist Intelligence Unit, which carried out the survey, said scores in Europe had been pushed slightly down by the eurozone crisis, while the Arab Spring had affected ratings across the Middle East and North Africa.

"Australia, with a low population density and relatively low crime rates, continues to supply some of the world's most liveable cities," report editor Jon Copestake said in a statement.

"Despite the rising cost of living driven by the strong Australian dollar, these cities offer a range of factors to make them highly attractive."

Melbourne was a joint winner with Vancouver in 2002.

Mayor Robert Doyle said he was "absolutely delighted" with the news.

''For the first time in a decade we are now officially ranked number one,'' he said. ''When you think the strong Aussie dollar militates against this, this is even more impressive."

Cities were scored out of 100 and the report noted that the top 10 cities were only separated by 1.8 percentage points.

[Shaun's List #635] Connubial bliss in America

2011-08-12T23:57:00.000+01:00

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Lexington

Connubial bliss in America

Behind the politics of gay marriage, a widening social acceptance

Jul 30th 2011 | from the print edition

AMERICA is the country, said Alexis de Tocqueville, where the bonds of marriage are most respected and the concept of connubial bliss "has its highest and truest expression." If the French aristocrat were to revisit America's capital today, he might at first glance think his observation had withstood the test of time remarkably well. Not content with having in 1996 put a Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA) on the statute book, Congress has now begun to hold hearings on a Respect for Marriage Act. Defended, respected: what could possibly ail marriage in America?

Plenty. As the revisiting Norman would swiftly discover, Americans today are better at quarrelling about what marriage is and who should be allowed to enjoy its benefits than they are at the more demanding work of getting and staying married themselves. The National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia points to a widening "marriage gap". Traditional family values are enjoying a revival among better-educated Americans, but are fraying in the lower middle class and have collapsed among the poor. As for laws "defending" and "respecting" marriage, these are merely weapons in a battle that has rolled back and forth for more than a decade between those who say that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry and those who abhor the idea.

So far neither side has scored a decisive victory, though each will occasionally claim one. When it was passed, DOMA looked like a solid victory for enemies of gay marriage. Its aim was to nip moves towards same-sex marriage in the bud by defining marriage as a legal union "between one man and one woman as husband and wife". It also stipulated that in the event of an individual state making same-sex marriage lawful, no other state needed to respect the rights or claims arising from such a marriage. To buttress this apparently formidable firewall, three dozen states have imposed constitutional or other legal bans.

And yet gay marriage marches on, scoring its own victories along the way. Among the greatest and most recent was New York's decision last month to become the sixth and most-populous state to allow same-sex marriage. If the Respect for Marriage Act were to become law (though this will need to await a more sympathetic Congress), this would defang DOMA and mark another victory for gay marriage. But DOMA is anyway not the deterrent it once seemed. The ever-cautious Barack Obama, who favours civil unions but says his views on gay marriage are still "evolving", has ordered the Justice Department to stop defending the law, which is under challenge in the courts.

The relentless back-and-forth in Congress, the courts and state legislatures transfixes the minority of Americans who feel strongly about this issue. And yet the cycle of victories and defeats may in the end matter less than one startling underlying fact, which is that America's attitudes to homosexuality appear in recent years to have undergone a dramatic change.

Gallup reported in May that for the first time ever a majority (53% to 45%) of Americans said that same-sex couples should have the same marriage rights as straight couples. In 1996, the time of DOMA, the majority leant 68% to 27% the other way. The controversial policy of "don't ask, don't tell", which banned gays from serving openly in the armed forces, is meanwhile due to expire in September with surprisingly little hue and cry. And when National Journal polled political "insiders" this month, it found a majority of Democratic politicos, lobbyists and strategists in favour of making gay marriage legal. No less telling, a majority of their Republican counterparts, while continuing to oppose gay marriage, thought their party should just ignore the issue.

That might make electoral sense. Since it is the young who are most relaxed about gay marriage, standing in its path might cost the Republicans dear in the future. The notion of denying gays the spousal rights available to others makes little sense to a generation that sees marriage at least as much as a union of soul-mates as a formal structure for child-rearing.

To crusaders against gay marriage, however, the issue transcends electoral calculation. They say they are defending both God's will and a vital child-centred institution that is already beleaguered enough. In this election cycle, Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota congresswoman pursuing the Republican presidential nomination, has become a lightning-conductor on gay issues. In spite of having a gay stepsister, she has long put opposition to same-sex marriage at the centre of her politics. In 2004 she likened the gay lifestyle to "personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement". The fact that her husband runs a clinic offering to cure gays of their supposed affliction has caused both indignation and merriment among metropolitan types.

Attitudes like Mrs Bachmann's may do her little harm with the Republican base, but strike parts of the wider electorate as antiquated or downright bigoted. That may be why Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York who ran for the presidency in 2008 and may yet do so again, has warned fellow Republicans to "get the heck out of people's bedrooms". It could also explain why Rick Perry, the governor of Texas now pondering a presidential run of his own, says that he has no quarrel with New York's new law. Pleading the tenth (states' rights) amendment, he argues that New York's stand on gay marriage is its own business.

In point of fact, neither Mr Giuliani nor Mr Perry favours gay marriage. Mr Giuliani says civil unions are good enough for gays. Mr Perry has not only been a vehement opponent of gay marriage but also gone so far as to defend Texas's anti-sodomy law, which the Supreme Court has ruled to be unconstitutional. Such men have their beliefs, but they are also seasoned politicians. They can see which way the national mood is blowing.

Economist.com/blogs/lexington

from the print edition | United States

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[Shaun's List #634] The Truth About Taxes

2011-08-07T11:57:00.000+01:00

August 6, 2011

The Truth About Taxes

A week later and we are still amazed at how the Republicans in Congress pulled it off. They held the economy hostage, won some cheap political points, and all of us will spend the next decade paying the ransom as government programs — $900 billion over 10 years in the first round — are slashed and the recovery is put at risk.

The only glimmer of hope is that the battle is not completely over — if President Obama is finally willing to fight.

Under the terms of the ill-conceived debt agreement, Congress has to propose another $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction measures by December. Just to ensure that rationality does not have a chance, Republican leaders said they would not put anyone on the deficit-cutting "super-committee" who might entertain the idea of raising taxes.

A week later and we are even more amazed by the failure of Mr. Obama and the Democratic leadership to stand up to this intransigence. If they do not start pushing back, with the same ferocity, the results will be disastrous.

Standard & Poor's made its judgment about both the political standoff and the all-cuts, no-new-revenues deal on Friday when it lowered the country's long-term debt rating one notch, down from AAA. And while "no new taxes" pledges are almost always big political winners, Americans are also figuring out that the country cannot keep on this way. According to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll, 63 percent support raising taxes on households that earn more than $250,000 a year to help address the deficit.

If that is not enough to energize the White House, here are a few more facts. To avoid across-the-board cuts, Congress must enact at least another $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction measures over the 10 years. For all of the talk of "big government," there is no way to cut that much in discretionary programs without crippling basic functions. Lawmakers could eliminate the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Pell Grants, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and Head Start and still not cut $110 billion annually.

Entitlement reform is essential. But it is unlikely that lawmakers will agree on deep cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Finally, asserting that deficits can be tamed with spending cuts alone ignores that the Bush tax cuts — costing $1.8 trillion from 2002 to 2009 — are a big reason we got into this deep hole.

Here is the bottom line. There is no economically sensible or politically honest way to address the deficit without also increasing revenues and reforming the tax code. The major challenges are these:

LET THE BUSH CUTS EXPIRE Mr. Obama vowed to let the high-end tax cuts (for people making more than $250,00) expire in 2010. But in a preview of the debt fight, he agreed to extend the cuts for two more years when Republicans held unemployment benefits and other measures hostage.

Letting all of the cuts expire at the end of 2012 would save $3.8 trillion over the next decade. Letting the tax cuts expire for those making more than $250,000 would save $700 billion. That would make a real dent in the $2.4 trillion in total deficit reduction envisioned in the debt limit deal.

A sensible and fair approach would be to let the high-end tax cuts expire as scheduled, but keep the other tax cuts for another year. That would keep more cash in the hands of people most likely to spend it and prop up consumer demand while the economy is weak. It would give Congress and the administration time to undertake tax reform.

MAKE REAL REFORMS Most Congressional Republicans are willing to embrace reform, but only if it is "revenue neutral." There is no question that the system is overly complicated; it is also riddled with hugely costly special deals for special interests. Any reform must streamline the code, make it fairer and — most important — raise more revenue.

TARGET TAX BREAKS AND LOWER RATES Each year, the government provides $1 trillion in tax breaks. Some of the largest breaks — for itemized deductions and retirement savings — should be retained because they subsidize important goals, like home ownership and old-age security. Right now, wealthier taxpayers get the greatest benefit. The process needs to be reformed so that most of the help flows to those who most need it: low- and middle-income taxpayers.

At the same time, super-low tax rates for investment income should be ended. Capital gains are taxed at a top rate of 15 percent, compared with a top rate for wages and salary of 35 percent. Proponents argue that the lower rate is an incentive to invest, but research shows that it also encourages gaming of the system. Tax breaks that have outlived their purpose must be ended, starting with subsidies for the oil industry, which is making billions in profits.

The revenue from such reforms could be used to pay down the deficit and allow all tax rates to be lowered, improving incentives to work. The amount of revenue raised and the drop in tax rates will depend on how much tax breaks are curbed.

OTHER TAXES Congress should consider raising revenues in other ways, like a value-added tax, or carbon taxes. That way all of the needed revenue for deficit reduction, and for what government provides, does not need to be squeezed from the income tax. A value-added tax is conducive to saving, and a carbon tax helps protect the environment.

The public is open to new taxes, and the economic facts are clear. Until tax increases are considered in equal measure to spending cuts, there will be no budget fix.

Opinion: What Happened to Obama?

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[Shaun's List #633] Americanisms: 50 of your most noted examples

2011-07-20T19:29:00.000+01:00

Magazine

20 July 2011 Last updated at 02:30

Americanisms: 50 of your most noted examples

Comments (799)

Our recent piece on Americanisms entering the language in the UK prompted thousands of you to e-mail examples.

Some are useful, while some seem truly unnecessary, argued Matthew Engel in the article. Here are 50 of the most e-mailed.

1. When people ask for something, I often hear: "Can I get a..." It infuriates me. It's not New York. It's not the 90s. You're not in Central Perk with the rest of the Friends. Really." Steve, Rossendale, Lancashire

2. The next time someone tells you something is the "least worst option", tell them that their most best option is learning grammar. Mike Ayres, Bodmin, Cornwall

3. The phrase I've watched seep into the language (especially with broadcasters) is "two-time" and "three-time". Have the words double, triple etc, been totally lost? Grammatically it makes no sense, and is even worse when spoken. My pulse rises every time I hear or see it. Which is not healthy as it's almost every day now. Argh! D Rochelle, Bath

4. Using 24/7 rather than "24 hours, 7 days a week" or even just plain "all day, every day". Simon Ball, Worcester

5. The one I can't stand is "deplane", meaning to disembark an aircraft, used in the phrase "you will be able to deplane momentarily". TykeIntheHague, Den Haag, Holland

6. To "wait on" instead of "wait for" when you're not a waiter - once read a friend's comment about being in a station waiting on a train. For him, the train had yet to arrive - I would have thought rather that it had got stuck at the station with the friend on board. T Balinski, Raglan, New Zealand

7. "It is what it is". Pity us. Michael Knapp, Chicago, US

8. Dare I even mention the fanny pack? Lisa, Red Deer, Canada

9. "Touch base" - it makes me cringe no end. Chris, UK

10. Is "physicality" a real word? Curtis, US

11. Transportation. What's wrong with transport? Greg Porter, Hercules, CA, US

12. The word I hate to hear is "leverage". Pronounced lev-er-ig rather than lee-ver -ig. It seems to pop up in all aspects of work. And its meaning seems to have changed to "value added". Gareth Wilkins, Leicester

13. Does nobody celebrate a birthday anymore, must we all "turn" 12 or 21 or 40? Even the Duke of Edinburgh was universally described as "turning" 90 last month. When did this begin? I quite like the phrase in itself, but it seems to have obliterated all other ways of speaking about birthdays. Michael McAndrew, Swindon

14. I caught myself saying "shopping cart" instead of shopping trolley today and was thoroughly disgusted with myself. I've never lived nor been to the US either. Graham Nicholson, Glasgow

15. What kind of word is "gotten"? It makes me shudder. Julie Marrs, Warrington

16. "I'm good" for "I'm well". That'll do for a start. Mike, Bridgend, Wales

17. "Bangs" for a fringe of the hair. Philip Hall, Nottingham

18. When my manager informs me we're "touching base" over lunch. Aaron Skidmore, Birmingham

19. I enjoy Americanisms. I suspect even some Americans use them in a tongue-in-cheek manner? "That statement was the height of ridiculosity". Bob, Edinburgh

20. "A half hour" instead of "half an hour". EJB, Devon

21. A "heads up". For example, as in a business meeting. Lets do a "heads up" on this issue. I have never been sure of the meaning. R Haworth, Marlborough

22. Train station. My teeth are on edge every time I hear it. Who started it? Have they been punished? Chris Capewell, Queens Park, London

23. To put a list into alphabetical order is to "alphabetize it" - horrid! Chris Fackrell, York

24. People that say "my bad" after a mistake. I don't know how anything could be as annoying or lazy as that. Simon Williamson, Lymington, Hampshire

25. "Normalcy" instead of "normality" really irritates me. Tom Gabbutt, Huddersfield

26. As an expat living in New Orleans, it is a very long list but "burglarize" is currently the word that I most dislike. Simon, New Orleans

27. "Oftentimes" just makes me shiver with annoyance. Fortunately I've not noticed it over here yet. John, London

28. Eaterie. To use a prevalent phrase, oh my gaad! Alastair, Maidstone (now in Athens, Ohio)

29. I'm a Brit living in New York. The one that always gets me is the American need to use the word bi-weekly when fortnightly would suffice just fine. Ami Grewal, New York

30. I hate "alternate" for "alternative". I don't like this as they are two distinct words, both have distinct meanings and it's useful to have both. Using alternate for alternative deprives us of a word. Catherine, London

31. "Hike" a price. Does that mean people who do that are hikers? No, hikers are ramblers! M Holloway, Accrington

32. Going forward? If I do I shall collide with my keyboard. Ric Allen, Matlock

33. I hate the word "deliverable". Used by management consultants for something that they will "deliver" instead of a report. Joseph Wall, Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire

34. The most annoying Americanism is "a million and a half" when it is clearly one and a half million! A million and a half is 1,000,000.5 where one and a half million is 1,500,000. Gordon Brown, Coventry

35. "Reach out to" when the correct word is "ask". For example: "I will reach out to Kevin and let you know if that timing is convenient". Reach out? Is Kevin stuck in quicksand? Is he teetering on the edge of a cliff? Can't we just ask him? Nerina, London

36. Surely the most irritating is: "You do the Math." Math? It's MATHS. Michael Zealey, London

37. I hate the fact I now have to order a "regular Americano." What ever happened to a medium sized coffee? Marcus Edwards, Hurst Green

38. My worst horror is expiration, as in "expiration date". Whatever happened to expiry? Christina Vakomies, London

39. My favourite one was where Americans claimed their family were "Scotch-Irish". This of course it totally inaccurate, as even if it were possible, it would be "Scots" not "Scotch", which as I pointed out is a drink. James, Somerset

40.I am increasingly hearing the phrase "that'll learn you" - when the English (and more correct) version was always "that'll teach you". What a ridiculous phrase! Tabitha, London

41. I really hate the phrase: "Where's it at?" This is not more efficient or informative than "where is it?" It just sounds grotesque and is immensely irritating. Adam, London

42. Period instead of full stop. Stuart Oliver, Sunderland

43. My pet hate is "winningest", used in the context "Michael Schumacher is the winningest driver of all time". I can feel the rage rising even using it here. Gayle, Nottingham

44. My brother now uses the term "season" for a TV series. Hideous. D Henderson, Edinburgh

45. Having an "issue" instead of a "problem". John, Leicester

46. I hear more and more people pronouncing the letter Z as "zee". Not happy about it! Ross, London

47. To "medal" instead of to win a medal. Sets my teeth on edge with a vengeance. Helen, Martock, Somerset

48. "I got it for free" is a pet hate. You got it "free" not "for free". You don't get something cheap and say you got it "for cheap" do you? Mark Jones, Plymouth

49. "Turn that off already". Oh dear. Darren, Munich

50. "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less" has to be the worst. Opposite meaning of what they're trying to say. Jonathan, Birmingham

[Shaun's List #632] Aldi ad

2011-07-03T21:06:00.000+01:00

LOVE it. :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCKgCkubGc0

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[Shaun's List #631] Across Europe, Irking Drivers Is Urban Policy

2011-06-27T20:58:00.001+01:00

Brilliant! America should emulate!

June 26, 2011

Across Europe, Irking Drivers Is Urban Policy

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

ZURICH — While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation.

Cities including Vienna to Munich and Copenhagen have closed vast swaths of streets to car traffic. Barcelona and Paris have had car lanes eroded by popular bike-sharing programs. Drivers in London and Stockholm pay hefty congestion charges just for entering the heart of the city. And over the past two years, dozens of German cities have joined a national network of "environmental zones" where only cars with low carbon dioxide emissions may enter.

Likeminded cities welcome new shopping malls and apartment buildings but severely restrict the allowable number of parking spaces. On-street parking is vanishing. In recent years, even former car capitals like Munich have evolved into "walkers' paradises," said Lee Schipper, a senior research engineer at Stanford University who specializes in sustainable transportation.

"In the United States, there has been much more of a tendency to adapt cities to accommodate driving," said Peder Jensen, head of the Energy and Transport Group at the European Environment Agency. "Here there has been more movement to make cities more livable for people, to get cities relatively free of cars."

To that end, the municipal Traffic Planning Department here in Zurich has been working overtime in recent years to torment drivers. Closely spaced red lights have been added on roads into town, causing delays and angst for commuters. Pedestrian underpasses that once allowed traffic to flow freely across major intersections have been removed. Operators in the city's ever expanding tram system can turn traffic lights in their favor as they approach, forcing cars to halt.

Around Löwenplatz, one of Zurich's busiest squares, cars are now banned on many blocks. Where permitted, their speed is limited to a snail's pace so that crosswalks and crossing signs can be removed entirely, giving people on foot the right to cross anywhere they like at any time.

As he stood watching a few cars inch through a mass of bicycles and pedestrians, the city's chief traffic planner, Andy Fellmann, smiled. "Driving is a stop-and-go experience," he said. "That's what we like! Our goal is to reconquer public space for pedestrians, not to make it easy for drivers."

While some American cities — notably San Francisco, which has "pedestrianized" parts of Market Street — have made similar efforts, they are still the exception in the United States, where it has been difficult to get people to imagine a life where cars are not entrenched, Dr. Schipper said.

Europe's cities generally have stronger incentives to act. Built for the most part before the advent of cars, their narrow roads are poor at handling heavy traffic. Public transportation is generally better in Europe than in the United States, and gas often costs over $8 a gallon, contributing to driving costs that are two to three times greater per mile than in the United States, Dr. Schipper said.

What is more, European Union countries probably cannot meet a commitment under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions unless they curb driving. The United States never ratified that pact.

Globally, emissions from transportation continue a relentless rise, with half of them coming from personal cars. Yet an important impulse behind Europe's traffic reforms will be familiar to mayors in Los Angeles and Vienna alike: to make cities more inviting, with cleaner air and less traffic.

Michael Kodransky, global research manager at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy in New York, which works with cities to reduce transport emissions, said that Europe was previously "on the same trajectory as the United States, with more people wanting to own more cars." But in the past decade, there had been "a conscious shift in thinking, and firm policy," he said. And it is having an effect.

After two decades of car ownership, Hans Von Matt, 52, who works in the insurance industry, sold his vehicle and now gets around Zurich by tram or bicycle, using a car-sharing service for trips out of the city. Carless households have increased from 40 to 45 percent in the last decade, and car owners use their vehicles less, city statistics show.

"There were big fights over whether to close this road or not — but now it is closed, and people got used to it," he said, alighting from his bicycle on Limmatquai, a riverside pedestrian zone lined with cafes that used to be two lanes of gridlock. Each major road closing has to be approved in a referendum.

Today 91 percent of the delegates to the Swiss Parliament take the tram to work.

Still, there is grumbling. "There are all these zones where you can only drive 20 or 30 kilometers per hour [about 12 to 18 miles an hour], which is rather stressful," Thomas Rickli, a consultant, said as he parked his Jaguar in a lot at the edge of town. "It's useless."

Urban planners generally agree that a rise in car commuting is not desirable for cities anywhere.

Mr. Fellmann calculated that a person using a car took up 115 cubic meters (roughly 4,000 cubic feet) of urban space in Zurich while a pedestrian took three. "So it's not really fair to everyone else if you take the car," he said.

European cities also realized they could not meet increasingly strict World Health Organization guidelines for fine-particulate air pollution if cars continued to reign. Many American cities are likewise in "nonattainment" of their Clean Air Act requirements, but that fact "is just accepted here," said Mr. Kodransky of the New York-based transportation institute.

It often takes extreme measures to get people out of their cars, and providing good public transportation is a crucial first step. One novel strategy in Europe is intentionally making it harder and more costly to park. "Parking is everywhere in the United States, but it's disappearing from the urban space in Europe," said Mr. Kodransky, whose recent report"Europe's Parking U-Turn" surveys the shift.

Sihl City, a new Zurich mall, is three times the size of Brooklyn's Atlantic Mall but has only half the number of parking spaces, and as a result, 70 percent of visitors get there by public transport, Mr. Kodransky said.

In Copenhagen, Mr. Jensen, at the European Environment Agency, said that his office building had more than 150 spaces for bicycles and only one for a car, to accommodate a disabled person.

While many building codes in Europe cap the number of parking spaces in new buildings to discourage car ownership, American codes conversely tend to stipulate a minimum number. New apartment complexes built along the light rail line in Denver devote their bottom eight floors to parking, making it "too easy" to get in the car rather than take advantage of rail transit, Mr. Kodransky said.

While Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has generated controversy in New York by "pedestrianizing" a few areas like Times Square, many European cities have already closed vast areas to car traffic. Store owners in Zurich had worried that the closings would mean a drop in business, but that fear has proved unfounded, Mr. Fellmann said, because pedestrian traffic increased 30 to 40 percent where cars were banned.

With politicians and most citizens still largely behind them, Zurich's planners continue their traffic-taming quest, shortening the green-light periods and lengthening the red with the goal that pedestrians wait no more than 20 seconds to cross.

"We would never synchronize green lights for cars with our philosophy," said Pio Marzolini, a city official. "When I'm in other cities, I feel like I'm always waiting to cross a street. I can't get used to the idea that I am worth less than a car."

Drilling Down: Behind Veneer, Doubt on Future of Natural Gas

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[Shaun's List #630] Bitcoins: What are they, and how do they work?

2011-06-26T13:27:00.001+01:00

I've always found currencies fascinating; why is a piece of paper with the number five on it that was printed on it in the UK more valuable than one with a five on it that was printed in the US? Of course, there are a million (valid and invalid) reasons why, but this article underscores the fact that currency only has value because we believe it has.

Don't worry - I'm not turning revolutionary and predicting the fall of the cash economy, but I found this a a very good read.

Cheers,

Shaun

Bitcoins: What are they, and how do they work?

Bitcoin is one of the first attempts to create a real-world currency with no governments, no central banks, and no rules

James Ball
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 22 June 2011 14.07 BST
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Bitcoin ... can it become a real-world currency? Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty

It started, and ended, with a click. With one touch of a mouse, a hacker managed to transfer 25,000 credits of online currency – then worth almost $500,000 dollars – to his own account. The transfer is visible on a public register; the original owner has publicised his plight online, but to no avail – the money is gone.

This hack, which happened in June 2011, was the first major online heist for Bitcoins, one of the world's newest currencies, and the subsequent panic left many casual users reeling.

Days later, it was dwarfed by hack number two: an attack on the currency's biggest online exchange, involving more than 400,000 Bitcoins – worth almost $9m (£5.5m). The attempt to sell off the coins was a sale so huge it plunged the value of each coin from more than $17 to $0.01.

The exchange, MtGox, was promptly taken offline, and is planning to reverse the transactions. No-one knows what the currency will be worth – if anything – when it reopens.

Such is the strange world of the online frontier. Bitcoin isn't the currency of an online game or Facebook fad – it's one of the first attempts to create a real-world currency with no governments, no central banks, and no rules. More than 6,500,000 Bitcoins are in circulation, in an online economy, which was worth over $180m shortly before June's hack.

No bank or government issues new Bitcoins. Instead, they are "mined" in batches of 50 as a result of intensive calculations carried out on PCs across the world. Anyone wanting to mine the coins installs mining software, which carries out intensive calculations on a certain unit of "work".

Whichever computer around the world solves the problem receives 50 Bitcoins. Six months ago, this reward was worth less than $1. At the start of June 2011, it was worth $1,000. The work generally needs powerful computers to pay off: some developers involved with the project estimate a typical laptop could work for two years without ever generating any coins.

Given the rocketing value of the coins – and the increasing difficulty of mining them – it's no surprise people have started going to extraordinary lengths to generate them.

Users on mining forums discuss cooling their computers in dry ice to allow the processors to run faster, customising specialist chips, or borrowing networkedcomputing power to generate more coins. One even reported the upturn in his electricity use was so significant his house was raided by police, who were concerned that he might be farming cannabis.

Members of the hacking collectives LulzSec and Anonymous, behind many of the high-profile hacks of recent weeks, may have found a more innovative solution: using other people's computers.

The groups' famed distributed denial-of-service attacks rely on botnets – networks of computers to which hackers have gained access, usually without the owners' knowledge – to provide the weight of numbers to take down high profile targets.

Several purported members of Anonymous, plus intermediaries linked to Anon and to Lulzsec, have confirmed some individuals connected to the organisations have used their botnets to "mine" Bitcoins.

Credible reports suggest some individuals connected to Anonymous have botnets with more than 100,000 active computers. A network of this size, even mining Bitcoins inefficiently, has the potential to generate 400 to 500 coins a day – worth in excess of $7,500 before the crash.

Coders in the Bitcoins community are divided by the involvement of the hacking collectives in their community. While some deny any botnet mining occurs, others concede it's a factor, and admit a slump in processing power data in April signified a botnet being turned off. One, who preferred not to be named, acknowledged it was "neat that those guys decided they could get a better return from participating in Bitcoins than by attacking it".

The attractions of Bitcoins to such communities are manifold. It's an online-only experiment with no government or corporate involvement. It's accepted as currency on hundreds of sites worldwide, including one claiming to sell illegal drugs and several selling pornography.

It is also, despite having a public register of all transactions, capable of being totally anonymous. Users taking other precautions will find the only occasion at which they might link their Bitcoins wallet to their real identity is when transferring their coins into real cash at privately owned exchanges.

Given these can base themselves anywhere in the world, and often reject regulation, law enforcement agencies have a problem – if the Bitcoins experiment survives, criminals and money-launderers may soon have a near-untraceable channel through which to funnel their proceeds.

Perhaps as troubling to some agencies is WikiLeaks' recent decision to embrace the new currency, giving its donors the prospect of anonymity as secure as the site claims its whistleblowers enjoy.

Such prospects trouble those driving the development of the currency far less; instead, the majority see the benefits of an unfettered currency as outweighing the costs.

"The freedom to easily, instantly, and at very low cost pay anybody in the world is the fundamental idea," says Gavin Andresen, described as Bitcoin technical lead. "Theinternet gives us the ability to communicate with anybody in the world easily, instantly, and at very low cost; I think it should be as easy to pay somebody across the world as it is to send them an email."

Another, Nils Schneider, puts it more succinctly: "Bitcoin is an experiment to make a 'raw' digital currency. Such a currency does not need supervision."

Schneider also lacked sympathy for the victim of the 25,000 Bitcoin theft which first brought security jitters to the fledgling community. Bitcoin wallets at present are stored with no encryption whatsoever by default, and transfers of stolen material are irreversible unless half of all Bitcoin users agree to it.

The change in price when the Bitcoins hit the market after the hack. Source: MtGox

Asked – before the MtGox hack – about the situation, Schneider said: "We're working on adding encryption to the wallet so it can't be stolen that easily again. But other than that, Bitcoin is like cash. You have to secure it yourself and shouldn't keep too many Bitcoins on an easily hackable computer."

He added that should the currency take off, he hoped banks would emerge to aid people in securing their wallets.

Perhaps the simplest explanation for what brought thousands of users – many non-technical – to an unprotected currency is the sheer increase in value it attained in recent months. On 1 January 2011, Bitcoins were worth 30 cents each. By 9 June 2011, they were worth $29.55.

The total volume of US dollar to Bitcoins traded on MtGox was $146,000 in January. In the first two weeks of June alone, this was 143 times bigger, at $21m worth of trades.

Bitcoins have been generating value from nothing, and breaking the economic rules of virtually every currency. By design, Bitcoins at present have an inflation rate estimated by one developer at 7,200% (this will automatically drop to 0% over the next 30 years).

Such hyperinflation usually causes the exchange rate of a currency to plummet – as happened to Germany in the early 1930s, or Zimbabwe over the past decade. Bitcoins' value instead increased almost a hundredfold in six months.

Even those most centrally involved in Bitcoins agree that prior to the MtGox hack Bitcoin was in a bubble – and that a loss of trust could be fatal: "The growth rate is certainly not sustainable. I don't know if the current value with respect to established currencies is sustainable or not; certainly if people lost trust in the Bitcoin system its value would crash," says Andresen.

"Bitcoin is an experiment that has never been tried before. People should think of it as an internet startup – it might be wildly successful, or it might fail. In any case, I do not expect that the road ahead will be smooth: even if Bitcoin is ultimately successful, I expect more price bubbles, scams, software bugs, failures of Bitcoin-related businesses and other problems that I can't even imagine right now."

Given Bitcoin's travails, the more idealistic developers are keen to point out the wider benefits an open currency could have, if it became established. Controversially – within the community at least – some also acknowledge legal oversight may be necessary for these to be realised.

"People in the third world are at the mercy of corrupt governments and banks," says Amir Taaki, co-founder of Bitcoin Consultancy. "Bitcoin can drastically reduce overheads and fight corruption. At present, it's possible to pay up to 23% commission on an international funds transfer. That's not capitalism, that's a corruption of capitalism."

Just days after the massive hack of MtGox brought the fledgling currency to its knees, its idealists awaited its reopening to see if a currency without rules, government, or corporate control could withstand its first crash to survive long enough to deliver any of its potential benefits.

The wealthiest Bitcoin users have more pressing concerns. It's only when the exchange reopens that they'll learn if their electronic wallets are worth millions of dollars, or less than the $10 USB stick on which they're stored. It's a tense wait.

[Shaun's List #629] Rise of the Asian megacity

2011-06-21T23:42:00.000+01:00

21 June 2011 Last updated at 00:18

Rise of the Asian megacity

By Thomas J CampanellaAuthor of The Concrete Dragon

To write about urbanisation in China is to traffic in superlatives.

Three decades of sustained economic growth, concentrated along the booming coast, has lured millions from the impoverished Chinese countryside. This great migration - unprecedented in human history - has put 46 Chinese cities over the one million mark since 1992, out of a national total of 102.

And this is just the start.

Currently only about 40% of China's population lives in cities, roughly that of America in 1885.

It is estimated that another 350 million Chinese will become urban by 2025, raising China's urban numbers to a cool billion.

Accommodating all these people has meant building on a scale the world has never seen before.

In the first 20 years of China's economic revolution, begun under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, China built some 6.5bn sq m (70bn sq ft) of new housing - the equivalent of more than 150 million average-sized apartments.

In Shanghai there were no skyscrapers in 1980; today it has twice as many as New York. Between 1990 and 2004 developers erected 85m sq m of commercial space in the city - equivalent to 334 Empire State buildings.

Nationwide, China's construction industry employs a workforce of about 37 million.

Nearly half the world's steel and cement is devoured there, and much of the world's heavy construction equipment has relocated to the People's Republic. Tower cranes, for example, have become the ubiquitous symbol of urban China.

'Spreading pancake'

But China's urban revolution has also destroyed as much as it has built.

In its head-long rush to be rich and modern, China has deprived itself - and the world - of a priceless heritage.

Beijing, once among the world's great urban treasures, is fast becoming just another node of globalised consumerism; full of absurdly sanitised reconstitutions of its lost past, unaffordable to working people, lacerated by eight-lane highways.

Urban development in China has also displaced more people than any nation in peacetime.

In Shanghai alone, redevelopment projects in the 1990s displaced more residents than did 30 years of urban renewal in the United States.

Because China's cities are growing outward as well as upward, urbanisation has also consumed a staggering amount of rural countryside.

Between 1985 and 1995, Shanghai's footprint grew from 90 sq miles to 790.

The "spreading pancake" of urban growth in China - "tan da bing", the popular Chinese expression for sprawl - has devoured some 45,000 sq miles of productive farmland over the last 30 years, nearly half the land area of the United Kingdom.

Chinese suburban development is much more concentrated than in the US. Large detached homes owned by single-families - the American standard - are relatively rare.

The basic unit of Chinese suburbia - with its mid-rise apartment towers, community centre and shared public spaces - is half way between a Maoist "dan wei" (work unit) and a Californian gated community.

Nonetheless, such development on the urban periphery is fast making China a nation of motorists.

China's domestic car market now exceeds America's, and the largest car showrooms in the world today are not in Los Angeles or Houston but the People's Republic.

Accommodating the steady flow of new cars - Beijing and Shanghai average 1,000 new vehicle registrations a day - is a national road network on the verge of eclipsing the American interstate system as Earth's most extensive human artefact.

And with cars and highways have come all the standard spaces of suburban consumerism - drive-through restaurants and big-box shopping malls, budget chain motels, and even that vanished icon of middle America, the drive-in cinema.

Saving the world

None of this bodes well for planet Earth. How ironic that, just as the West has begun to get its environmental house in order - finally taking serious action to reduce its carbon footprint, combat global warming, and end its oil addiction - here come the millions of China, wanting the very lifestyle and material amenities that have put us on the verge of environmental collapse.

If China were to match, per capita, car ownership in the US (which is falling, incidentally), it would mean more than one billion cars.

The planet, in a word, would be fried.

And this takes no account of India, which will soon overtake China as the world's most populous nation.

Experts such as Paul Gilding have come up with a measure for our total global footprint in terms of our impact on the environment and resources. In his book The Great Disruption he concludes that our economy is operating at about 150% of capacity - in other words, the way we live will take between one-and-a-half planets to sustain.

That is not just unsustainable, it is a catastrophe.

And yet, who are we to say to China: "We've had our playful, wasteful day in the sun but you must now conserve."

Happily, we don't need to; the Chinese are saying it themselves.

Even as it sprawls, China is building more public transit than all other nations combined, and is well ahead of the US in developing sustainable building technologies and clean-energy alternatives such as solar, wind, and biomass.

According to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, China invested $34.6bn (£21bn) in the clean energy industry between 2005 and 2009 - nearly twice that of the US.

We may have taught China to drive, eat, and buy its way to ruin; China may yet show us how to save the world.

Thomas J Campanella is author of The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World. He is currently a Fellow in residence at the American Academy in Rome.

[Shaun's List #628] Addicted Kitty

2011-05-21T22:53:00.001+01:00

It reminds me of Mom!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm31xBjfMNY&feature=player_embedded

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[Shaun's List #627] Liveable v lovable

2011-05-15T13:29:00.001+01:00

Financial Times FT.com

Liveable v lovable

By Edwin Heathcote

Published: May 6 2011 17:52 | Last updated: May 6 2011 17:52

Vancouver is Hollywood's urban body double. It is famously the stand-in for New York, LA, Seattle and Chicago, employed when those cities just get too tough, too traffic-clogged, too murderous or too bureaucratic to film in. It is almost never filmed as itself. That is because, lovely as it is, it is also, well ... a little dull. Who would want to watch a film set in Vancouver? To see its skyscrapers destroyed by aliens or tidal waves, its streets populated by cops and junkies, its public buildings hosting romantic reunions? Yet Vancouver (original name, Gastown) has also spent more than a decade at the very top of the charts of the best city to live in the world. Can that really be right?

No. Not at all. In fact, Vancouver's boringly consistent topping of the polls underlines the fundamental fault that lies at the heart of the idea of measuring cities by their "liveability". The most recent surveys, from Monocle magazine, Forbes, Mercer and The Economist, concur: Vancouver, Vienna, Zurich, Geneva, Copenhagen and Munich dominate the top. What, you might ask, no New York? No London? No LA or HK? None of the cities that people seem to actually want to emigrate to, to set up businesses in? To be in? None of the wealthiest, flashiest, fastest or most beautiful cities? Nope. Americans in particular seem to get wound up by the lack of US cities in the top tier. The one that does make it is Pittsburgh. Which winds them up even more.

The big cities it seems, the established megacities of the US, Europe and Asia are just too big, too dangerous, too inefficient. So what do these top cities have in common? How exactly do you measure "liveability"?

Which is your favourite city?

Vote and have your say

All the surveys use an index. But what is on it? "There's always proximity to nature," says Tyler Brûlé (editor of Monocle and patron saint of liveable cities and airport lounges, whose column appears weekly in the FT's Life & Arts section). "Global connectivity is important, education and we've recently added chain store metrics – is there a Starbucks or a Zara?" he says.

So that's the mountains, lakes and huge cups of generic coffee accounted for. Then there's efficient public transport (that faint whoosh is the sound of London, NY and LA disappearing). There are also cultural institutions, global connectivity, green urban policies, well-designed housing within an easy commute, and so on. Each determinant on its own seems an indisputably good thing. But what do they mean together? Can Munich (Monocle's Number 1) really be one of the best places in the world to live? On a Sunday afternoon?

To even begin to understand how these slightly unsettling results are arrived at, we need to understand who compiles them and who they are for. The lists are made by well-travelled academics, researchers and journalists for corporate, media and creative executives on generous expense accounts as well as other academics enjoying grants and stipends. And, of course, by Tyler Brûlé.

Most of these people are profoundly concerned with things like well-designed street furniture, a proliferation of eye-wateringly expensive artisanal retail, boutique hotels with good (English-speaking) service and environmentally friendly mayoral policies. Certainly these are all things which help but they skew the polls to a particular type of European or marginal Pacific city. What they also do is to strip out all the complexity, all the friction and buzz that make big cities what they are.

I spoke to Joel Kotkin, a professor of urban development, and asked him about these surveys. "I've been to Copenhagen," (Monocle's Number 2) he tells me "and it's cute. But frankly, on the second day, I was wondering what to do." So, if the results aren't to his liking, what does he suggest? "We need to ask, what makes a city great? If your idea of a great city is restful, orderly, clean, then that's fine. You can go live in a gated community. These kinds of cities are what is called 'productive resorts'. Descartes, writing about 17th-century Amsterdam, said that a great city should be 'an inventory of the possible'. I like that description."

Joel Garreau, the US urban academic and author, agrees. "These lists are journalistic catnip. Fun to read and look at the pictures but I find the liveable cities lists intellectually on a par with People magazine's 'sexiest people' lists."

Ricky Burdett, who founded the London School of Economics' Cities Programme, says: "These surveys always come up with a list where no one would want to live. One wants to live in places which are large and complex, where you don't know everyone and you don't always know what's going to happen next. Cities are places of opportunity but also of conflict, but where you can find safety in a crowd.

"We also have to acknowledge that these cities that come top of the polls also don't have any poor people," he adds. And that, it seems to me, touches on the big issue. Richard G Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's hugely influential book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (2009) seems to present an obvious truth – that places where the differential in income between the wealthiest and the poorest is smallest tend to engender a sense of satisfaction and well-being. But while it may be socially desirable, that kind of comfort doesn't necessarily make for vibrancy or dynamism. If everybody is where they want to be, no one is going anywhere.

"Sure, Vancouver is beautiful," says Kotkin, "but it's also unaffordable unless you're on an expense account and your company is paying your rent." Burdett agrees: "Economically all these cities at the top of the polls are also in the top league." In fact, it can often be exactly the juxtaposition of wealth and relative poverty that makes a city vibrant, the collision between the two worlds. Where parts of big cities have declined, through the collapse of industries or the fears about immigration that led to what urbanists have termed the "donut effect" (in which white populations flee to the suburbs, leaving minorities in the centres), there is space to be filled by artists and architects, by poorer immigrants arriving with a drive to make money and by the proliferation of food outlets, studios and galleries. These, in turn, attract the wealthy back to the centre, at first to consume, and then to gentrify. Whether in New York's SoHo, Chelsea or Brooklyn, in Berlin's Mitte or London's Shoreditch, Hoxton and now Peckham, it is at these moments of radical change that cities begin to show potential for real transformation of lives, or for the creation of new ideas, culture, cuisine and wealth. Once gentrification has occurred, bohemians may whinge about being priced out, as they always have done but, in a big enough city they are able to move on and find the next spot.

What makes a city great

● Blend of beauty and ugliness – beauty to lift the soul, ugliness to ensure there are parts of the fabric of the city that can accommodate change.

● Diversity – if lots of people are wanting to come to a city, there must be something there.

● Tolerance – the only way diversity works but also an accommodating attitude to sexuality (gay communities are famously successful inner-city regenerators) and religion (there are signs of increasing intolerance towards religious minorities all over the world).

● Density – density of habitation is crucial in ensuring density of activity, a vibrancy of commerce, residential and cultural activity.

● Social mix – the close proximity of social and economic classes keeps a city lively.

● Civility – impossible to measure and slightly against my stated notions about the benefits of friction but critical nevertheless. I once criticised the ingratiating politeness in the US and was told by an American who used to live in Paris that "it's better to be told to have a nice day by someone who doesn't mean it than to be told to go f*** yourself by someone who does". Discounts any Israeli or Russian city from ever getting on the list. EH

In a strange way the everyday conflict with the (unliveable) city can also become part of the attraction. Professor Tony Travers of the LSE says, "At one level the kind of urban sophisticates who live in these areas, in Hoxton or Brooklyn, want to fight the city. The urban struggle is part of the self-image of living on the edge."

If the relative poverty of newcomers to the city distorts income equality in one direction, then the arrival of the super-wealthy does the same from the other end. The recent turmoil in the Middle East has led to a huge wave of investment in London property, one of the traditional safe havens for foreign money. London, unlike many cities that appear high on liveability lists, has few controls on property ownership. "If cities are any good," says Travers, "they'll attract a footloose international crowd who bring wealth." And so the gap gets bigger.

He adds: "But they also come because of stability. If they buy something, they'll be able to get their money back." Which explains why New York and London remain popular, desirable and hugely expensive, despite never appearing on the lists.

The big cities also suffer from size. It's true that Tokyo (Monocle's Number 4) occasionally makes it on to these lists but metropolises like London, New York, Paris and Istanbul struggle with aged infrastructure and vast, sprawling transport systems. They are penalised in surveys for their inefficiency compared to, say, a small Scandinavian city. But it's easy to be efficient when you're small and when you have a highly taxed, wealthy population. It is also easy to initiate green measures, from recycling to cycling, which prove far more challenging in a proper metropolis with its problems of crumbling infrastructure and mobile population.

Yet it is proven again and again that the biggest cities are in fact the greenest. Their density, the close proximity in which people live and the minimal amount of land they occupy – compared with largely suburban Vancouver, for example, makes for a far smaller carbon footprint. Mumbai is probably the greenest big city there is – slums like the million-strong Dharavi use minimal land, energy and water. And, of course, without wishing to patronise, it is undeniable that there are happy people living surrounded by their families in Brazil's favelas and millions living lives of drudgery and lonely despair beneath northern Europe's leaden skies. The world's most liveable informal cities lists have yet to be pioneered.

There is one criterion which throws up shockingly counter-intuitive results – beauty. On this criterion alone, almost any Tuscan hill town, perhaps Venice, perhaps Paris, would come out on top, yet none of these are there. Most of the beauty in the cities which occupy the tops of the leagues seem to ghettoise their beauty outside the city. They have convenient escapes, though the most beautiful and enjoyable – Rio, San Francisco and others – are curiously absent from the lists. The problem is that beauty doesn't do you any good at all. It's not a factor for the efficient, mid-sized chart toppers – though places such as Zurich certainly have their lovely bits. But it also damages your chances of making it into the disaffected megacities mentioned at the start of this article. The most beautiful cities become monuments to their own elegance, immobile and unchangeable. They cannot accommodate the kind of dynamic change and churn that keeps cities alive. In London, New York and Berlin, it is their very ugliness which keeps them flexible.

"The other big question," says Kotkin, "is can someone coming from somewhere else improve themselves, reinvent themselves? Is there upward mobility?" The top cities score badly again. London and New York are magnets for immigrants precisely because they allow those kinds of new beginnings. They do have class structures but they are increasingly malleable.

There is one problem, though, that remains hard to ignore – violence. Johannesburg may be beautiful but its per capita homicide rates are astronomical; Los Angeles and New York are held back for the same reason. Washington DC's per capita homicide rate, for example, is more than 30 times that of London and this continues to hold US cities down in the rankings. Urban guru Richard Florida remarks that the key to liveability is to "ensure that a city can guarantee the safety of all its residents".

Of course, the ultimate difficulty with these surveys is that tastes are individual. I find London infuriating but –with the possible exception of New York – couldn't think of anywhere else I'd rather live. "The city is a unique and private reality," wrote Jonathan Raban, author of Soft City. He proposed that his London was a "soft city", a place that everyone remakes in their own manner, in which every place evokes a personal memory or connection and which we navigate through our own unique mental maps. Our cities are our own – we make them inside us. No city means the same to two people so how on earth can we measure them?

Edwin Heathcote is the FT's architecture critic

..................................................

Rankings: the best and the worst

New York

The only city that gives me a thrill every single time I walk through it. Fast, furious, brash, cosmopolitan yet completely self-absorbed, it is the perfect big city.

Rio de Janeiro

An extraordinary cocktail of pleasure and pain, beaches and favelas, condos and shacks, Rio is one of the most beautiful, most tolerant and most varied cities on earth. Unfortunately, its high murder rate discounts it from traditional best cities lists. But what a cityscape.

Istanbul

The fulcrum of the delicate balance between Europe and Asia, Christianity, secularism and Islam, Istanbul manages to be both one of the most beautiful cities on earth and yet accommodating to huge and constant change. It is a young, international, wildly commercial city with an extraordinarily vibrant street scene, open 24 hours and genuinely alive.

London

London seems to have the ability to reinvent itself. It has been a magnet for immigrants for centuries and remains a place where the poor can make something of themselves and the wealthy can enjoy their money. Its infrastructure is crumbling, its property overpriced and its weather dull but London's cultural life is astonishing and most of its museums are free.

Rome

It might be more than 1,500 years since Rome was a proper world city but its allure lies in a blend of history, chaos, beauty and infinite layers of culture.

A few that don't make the grade

Moscow

Impossible to traverse on foot, infinitely rude, corrupt, understandably alcoholic and seriously traffic-clogged, Moscow needs work. It does have some beautiful bits, from the Kremlin through to the masterworks of revolutionary modernism but the legacy of the communist police state hangs heavy.

Dubai

Everything that could go wrong with a city does here. It is, in fact, a place with no "here". A succession of malls, highways, hotels and hideous towers, it has spent its history announcing its arrival but hasn't a clue what to do when it gets there.

Birmingham

Once it was the workshop of the world, an astonishing morass of industry that somehow threw up a powerful, elegant Victorian city, which has been completely destroyed. Its decline has been less complete than that of, say, Detroit or Flint but it manages to be uglier nevertheless.

Jerusalem

I know, I know – beautiful, holy, history lingers in its every shady corner. Yet the treatment of Arabs as second-class citizens, the ghastly security wall smashing through its edges and the omnipresent guns have spoilt it. Jerusalem is the perfect example of why tolerance is so critical to a city.

_________________________________________________________________________________

[Shaun's List #626] Why Are British English and American English Different?

2011-04-24T11:19:00.000+01:00

Why Are British English and American English Different?

Episode 177: July 3, 2009
General Grammar

Saturday is the Fourth of July, also known as the American holiday Independence Day. I'm American and I think it's fair to say we love the British now--we give British royalty a royal welcome when they visit America--but Saturday is the day we celebrate our independence from Britain, and people often ask me why there are differences between American and British English, so this seems like a good time to answer that question.

Why Do Britons and Americans Spell Words Differently?

The first question is why are British and American spellings different for certain words?

Noah Webster

The first answer is to blame Noah Webster, ofWebster's Dictionary fame. He believed it was important for America, a new and revolutionary nation, to assert its cultural independence from Britain through language. He wrote the first American spelling, grammar, and reading schoolbooks and the first American dictionary. He was also an ardent advocate of spelling reform and thought words should be spelled more like they sound.

Many years before he published his well-known American Dictionary of the English Language, he published a much smaller, more radical dictionary he called a Compendious Dictionary that included spellings such as w-i-m-m-e-n for "women" and t-u-n-g for "tongue." That dictionary was skewered and he dialed down the spelling reform in his final masterpiece. Yet still, Noah Webster, his affection for spelling reform, and the success of his final dictionary in 1828 are the reasons Americans spell words such as "favor" without a "u" (1), "theater" with an "-er" instead of an "-re" at the end, "sulfur" with an "f" and not a "ph" in the middle, and "aluminium" as "aluminum (2)."

A Separated Population

There are some word differences we can't lay at Webster's feet. For example, "while" and "whilst" mean the same thing, but as far as I can tell, nobody really knows why "whilst" survived in Britain but withered in America. According to World Wide Words (3), "whilst" is considered more formal than "while," even in Britain. So if I had to guess, I'd say "whilst" probably fell out of favor in America because we are a less formal nation, and geographic separation of the two populations also let the language change differently in the two countries, but really, I'm just making things up at this point. If anyone has a better answer, please post it in the comments.

Why Do Britons and Americans Use Single and Double Quotation Marks Differently?

On to a difference where I at least have a hint of an answer.

In America we use double quotation marks to enclose a quotation, and single quotation marks if we need to enclose another quotation inside the first quotation. In British English, it's the opposite. Single quotation marks are used for everyday purposes such as enclosing a stand-alone quotation (4, 5).

In 1908, an influential British style guide called The King's English, stated that "The prevailing [method] is to use double marks for most purposes, and single ones for quotations within quotations." So to spell it out for you, the author, Fowler, was saying that at the time the British did it the same way we do it now in America. But Fowler went on to advocate for single quotations marks, saying it is more logical to use them for regular quotations, and to reserve double quotation marks for quotations within quotations (6). He didn't explain why he thought it was more logical; he just said it was. Given that the British method now follows Fowler's stated preference, I presume that Fowler is the reason the British now use single quotation marks where Americans primarily use double quotation marks--that he was influential enough to make that change happen. But that one little paragraph from The King's English is the only proof I have, so if you know of some other reason Britons made the change, please leave a comment below.

Typesetters Quotations Versus Logical Quotations

There's another difference in how Americans and Britons treat quotation marks. In the U.S. we put periods and commas inside quotation marks, and in Britain they usually put periods and commas outside quotation marks. My admittedly U.S.-centric memory trick is to remember "Inside the U.S., inside quotation marks. Outside the U.S., outside quotation marks."

The reason for this difference begins with the introduction of movable type. Before typesetting, nobody paid too much attention to where they put periods and commas relative to quotation marks, but periods and commas became a problem with the advent of typesetting because they were so tiny. Printers found that the periods and commas were more stable when they were placed inside closing quotation marks, so that's the way they started doing it (7, 8).

Again, our British friend Fowler seems to have made the difference in his bookThe King's English. (9) Typesetting technology had advanced to the point where it wasn't necessary to shield periods and commas anymore, and he argued for what he considered a more logical system of letting the context of the sentence determine where the period and comma should go. The British seem to have taken his suggestion to heart and Americans seem to have ignored it.

Because of these origins, it is sometimes said the British use logical quotations and Americans use typesetters quotations.

Pronunciation Differences

Finally, you may be wondering why there are pronunciation differences between British and American speakers of English (not to mention Canadians, Australians, and others). The general idea is that regional and national pride and changing ideas about what sounded like "proper" speech, at least to some degree, played a role in changing the British sounding speech of the American colonists to what we hear today in America. It's far too complex to cover here, so I'll refer you to a PBS show called "Do You Speak American?" which talks about regional dialects too (10).

Summary

In summary, American English is different from British English because of the revolutionary leanings of a dictionary writer (Noah Webster), typesetting conventions, geographical separation, and the opinion of one influential style guide author (H.W. Fowler).

This article was written by Mignon Fogarty, author of Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.

More

The Economist, a British publication, has an interesting page about Americanisms in their online style guide.

References

1. Lepore, J. "Noah's Mark," The New Yorker, November 6, 2006, p. 78-87.
2. Quinion, M. "Aluminium Versus Aluminum" World Wide Words,http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/aluminium.htm (accessed July 2, 2009).
3. Quinion, M. "While Versus Whilst" World Wide Words, 18 May 2002.http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-whi2.htm (accessed July 2, 2009).
4. Woods, G. Webster's New World Punctuation, 2005, Wiley Publishing, Inc. p. 7.
5. Merriam-Webster, Inc. Merriam-Webster's Manual for Writers and Editors, 1998, Merriam-Webster, Inc. Springfield, Mass. p. 31.
6. Fowler, H. W. The King's English. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1908; Bartleby.com, 1999. http://www.bartleby.com/116/406.html#2. (accessed July 2, 2009).
7. pthompsen "Typesetters' Quotes vs. Logical Quotes" MacHeist Forum. http://cli.gs/pRSE2g (accessed July 2, 2009).
8. Wikipedia contributors, "Quotation mark," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia,http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Quotation_mark&oldid=299541669(accessed June 30, 2009).
9. Fowler, H. W. The King's English. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1908; Bartleby.com, 1999. http://www.bartleby.com/116/406.html#1
10. Do You Speak American? PBS. MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, 2005.http://www.pbs.org/speak/transcripts/1.html (accessed July 2, 2009).

_________________________________________________________________________________

[Shaun's List #625] A FULL LIFE WELL LIVED!!

2011-04-04T20:19:00.000+01:00

A FULL LIFE WELL LIVED!!

A doctor on his morning walk, noticed the older lady, pictured above,

sitting on her front step smoking a cigar, so he walked up to her and said,

"I couldn't help but notice how happy you look! What is your secret?"

"I smoke ten cigars a day," she said. "Before I go to bed, I smoke a nice

big joint. Apart from that, I drink a whole bottle of Jack Daniels every

week, and eat only junk food. On weekends, I pop pills, get laid, and I

don't exercise at all!"

"That is absolutely amazing! How old are you?"

"Thirty-four," she replied.

_________________________________________________________________________________

[Shaun's List #624] The awkward moment...

2011-03-23T18:26:00.000Z

...when your friend's fat arm makes you look naked!!

[Shaun's List #623] Who'd'a thunk it? London's cheap!

2011-01-28T18:40:00.000Z

And New York's a darn right bargain!

Hong Kong Is World's Costliest Place to Buy Homes

Jan. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Hong Kong is the world's most expensive place to buy a home because of a shortage of properties on the market, according to a study of the top four cities by Savills Plc.

Hong Kong is 55 percent more expensive than London, based on an index published today by the property broker that compares the U.K. capital with the other cities. Moscow is 7.4 percent more expensive than London and New York is 15 percent cheaper.

Home prices in Hong Kong have been driven higher by record- low borrowing costs, a lack of new supply and an influx of Chinese buyers, Savills said. They have jumped more than 55 percent since the beginning of 2009, according to an index compiled by Centaline Property Agency Ltd., Hong Kong's biggest closely held broker.

"Prices will continue to rise over the next year to 18 months," said Simon Smith, the Hong Kong-based head of Asian real estate research, at a presentation in London yesterday.

In November, Hong Kong's government stepped up a yearlong battle to curb inflation with additional taxes and policies. Chief Executive Donald Tsang pledged to make more land available to build 20,000 housing units each year and raised property taxes to deter speculators.

Hong Kong's "government is trying to cool the market and isn't doing a very good job of it," Smith said.

The Hang Seng Property Index, which tracks the performance of the city's seven-biggest developers, gained 76 percent from the beginning of 2009, after falling to a more than four-year low during the global credit crisis.

World's Biggest Developer

Sun Hung Kai Properties Ltd., the world's biggest developer by value and owner of Hong Kong's two tallest skyscrapers, has gained 31 percent over the past year. Cheung Kong (Holdings) Ltd., controlled by Hong Kong's richest man, Li Ka-shing, and the builder of luxury housing projects including The Legend, has risen 45 percent during the same period.

Savills compiled the data using estimates of what employees of a company would pay to relocate to each of the four cities. The index reflects home values for one chief executive officer, two directors and four administrative workers. It based its calculations on the price per square foot for each type of property the seven buyers would purchase.

An office worker would have to pay the equivalent of about 659 pounds ($1,050) a square foot for a home in Hong Kong, 76 percent more than their counterpart in London, the company estimates.

Land Release

Seventy percent of the Hong Kong land releases are in the New Territories, aggravating the shortage in desirable districts like Hong Kong Island, where there are only 2,400 houses, Smith said.

Hong Kong also leads at the top end of the market, London- based Savills said. A home in The Peak, an exclusive neighborhood with only 500 houses, might sell for as much as 6,353 pounds a square foot. That's more than double the price for a comparable property in Mayfair or Knightsbridge in London, the second-most expensive city for high-end homes, the Savills survey showed.

To contact the reporter on this story: Simon Packard in London at packard@bloomberg.net .

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew Blackman at ablackman@bloomberg.net .

Find out more about Bloomberg for iPhone: http://m.bloomberg.com/iphone/

[Shaun's List #621] 8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City A Horrible Place To Live

2010-09-03T07:39:00.001+01:00

I thought some of you would appreciate this...

http://www.theonion.com/articles/84-million-new-yorkers-suddenly-realize-new-york-c,18003/

Cheers,
Shaun

Shaun H. Coley
Shadwell, Tower Hamlets
London, UK

http://www.nocirc.org

[Shaun's List #0] 'Til death do us part? Ballot measure banning divorce clears hurdle

2010-07-19T19:56:00.001+01:00

'Til death do us part? Ballot measure banning divorce clears hurdle

By Denis C. Theriault

dtheriault@mercurynews.com

Posted: 07/18/2010 10:36:49 PM PDT

Updated: 07/18/2010 10:36:51 PM PDT

SACRAMENTO — John Marcotte had a revelation after he voted against Proposition 8, the 2008 California initiative that banned same-sex marriage — in part, its backers said, to preserve traditional marriage.

If saving traditional marriage was the aim, then there has to be a better way, thought the Sacramento father of two. "Don't stop gay people from getting married; stop straight people from getting divorced!

"It's a much more direct way of achieving the goal of Prop. 8."

So Marcotte went and drafted a ballot measure of his own, one that would ban divorce but still allow for religious annulments. And now, the 2012 California Marriage Protection Act has cleared a major legal milestone: Last week, the secretary of state's office gave Marcotte permission to start gathering signatures. To make the June 2012 ballot, he'll need nearly 700,000 approved signatures by the spring of that year.

Is Marcotte serious? When asked by a reporter, he claimed he is, at least "as far as you know." In any case, he said he's seriously tired of the question: "It's a slap in the face of the California voter when people ask me that."

Serious or not, he's devoted: He's talked on TV news, been written up in the papers and had his cause splashed all over the blogosphere. His Facebook group has nearly 26,000 fans, and his website (rescuemarriage.org) has attracted hundreds of comments. Some of them seem like they're in on the joke. Not that Marcotte's joking, mind you.

The 38-year-old certainly talks a good game, complaining among other things that divorced teachers shouldn't be allowed to teach his kids. He said there's a reason people like his anti-divorce arguments so much: "I stole them from the Yes on 8 site." And he's counting on support from groups who bankrolled the anti-gay-marriage initiative.

Will they line up? Ron Prentice, president of the California Family Coalition, did not return a message seeking comment Friday. But in previous media interviews, he has called Marcotte's measure "impractical."

Marcotte, however, is undeterred. In fact, he's counting on a landslide — noting, "for some reason, I'm getting a huge outpouring of support from the gay and lesbian community."

There are other questions, though. Chiefly, if Marcotte's real aim is to make a statement about gay marriage, is the ballot process really the best forum?

Political experts say that's not the point: The initiative process was designed not to have any boundaries, save for questions of constitutionality. Bold, almost theatrical, statements have long been part of the state's history.

Corey Cook, a political scientist at the University of San Francisco, recalled a 2000 state proposition that would have let voters, in future ballots, choose "none of the above." (It failed.) And he also mentioned the unsuccessful San Francisco measure that sought to rename the city's sewage treatment plant after George W. Bush.

"He's trying to point out the comedy, as he sees it, of the state's policies on marriage," Cook said. Moreover, "it's a pretty interesting critique of the initiative process in California."

But even to crack the ballot, Marcotte first must line up hundreds of thousands of signatures. That's tough work, even for a much bigger operation that has millions of dollars to make the ballot.

Marcotte also is serious about what it means if he falls short.

"There's value," he said, "in just thinking about this subject."

Shaun H. Coley
Shadwell, Tower Hamlets
London, UK

http://www.nocirc.org
http://shaunism.blogspot.com

[Shaun's List #620] Old ads

2010-06-22T07:28:00.001+01:00

Ah, the golden age of America!

[Shaun's List #619] Free TV

2010-06-05T13:52:00.001+01:00

Even as an American, I don't need four TVs, so giving away the surplus boob tube if anyone wants it.

Cheers,
Shaun

Shaun H. Coley
Shadwell, Tower Hamlets
London, UK

http://www.nocirc.org
http://shaunism.blogspot.com

[Shaun's List #619] Model play

2010-02-07T15:18:00.001Z

OK, this is pretty cool -- and he is my new husband, you are invited to the wedding.

http://eu.wrangler.com/bluebell/#/collection/0

Shaun H. Coley
Shadwell, Tower Hamlets
London, UK

http://www.nocirc.org
http://shaunism.blogspot.com

[Shaun's List #617] What goes through your mind when someone says "Let's go for a drink"?

2009-11-01T15:12:00.001Z

Old, but good... :-)

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[Shaun's List #616] I'm burning my passport as I send this...

2009-09-17T22:38:00.001+01:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUPMjC9mq5Y&feature=related

Shaun H. Coley
Shadwell, Tower Hamlets
London, UK

http://www.nocirc.org
http://shaunism.blogspot.com

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[Shaun's List #615] Anti-gay attacks on rise in Iraq

2009-08-17T20:26:00.001+01:00

Anti-gay attacks on rise in Iraq

Gay Iraqi men are being murdered in what appears to be a brutal coordinated campaign involving militia forces, the group Human Rights Watch says.

It says hundreds of gay men have been targeted and killed in Iraq since 2004.

So-called honour killings also account for deaths where families punish their own kin in order to avoid public shame.

The report says members of the Mehdi Army militia group is spearheading the campaign, but police are also accused even though homosexuality is legal.

Witnesses say vigilante groups break into homes and pick people up in the street, interrogating them to extract the names of other potential victims, before murdering them.

HRW says it was told Iraqi security forces had sometimes "colluded and joined in the killing".

Witch hunt

Recently, posters appeared in Sadr City - a conservative, Shia area of Baghdad - calling on people to watch out for gay men and listing not only their names but also their addresses.

One gay man in Baghdad described the killing campaign as a witch hunt.

" These killings will continue, because it has simply become normal in Iraq to kill gay men "
Hossam [name changed]

Nearly 90 gay men have been killed in Iraq since the beginning of January, many more are missing, local gay rights campaigners say.

The report, called They want us exterminated: Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq, says horrifically mutilated bodies of gay men have been left on rubbish tips.

Sometimes their bodies are daubed with offensive terms such as "pervert", or "puppy" which is a hate word for gay men in Iraq.

"We've heard stories confirmed by doctors of men having their anuses glued and then being force-fed laxatives which leads to a very painful death," says Rasha Mumneh, one of the authors of the Human Rights Watch report.

'Feminised men'

When questioned in the past, officials in Iraq have condemned the killings, but the BBC's Natalia Antelava in Baghdad reports that gay men there say nothing has been done to protect them.

"These killings will continue, because it has simply become normal in Iraq to kill gay men," said Hossam, not his real name.

Mehdi army spokesmen and clerics have condemned what they call the "feminisation" of Iraqi men and have urged the military to take action against them.

The report said many gay men have fled to other countries in the region, despite consensual homosexual activity being illegal there, because the risk of victimisation is reduced.

HRW says the threats and abuses have spread from Baghdad to Kirkuk, Najaf and Basra, although persecution remains concentrated in the capital.

Officials say the part of the problem in dealing with the attacks is that victims' relatives seldom if ever provide information for the police.

"They consider talking about the subject worse than the crime itself, this is the nature of our society," ministry spokesman Major General Abdul-Karim Khalaf said.

Have you been affected by the issues raised in this story? Do you live in Iraq?

Send your comments using the post form below.

A selection of your comments may be published, displaying your name and location unless you state otherwise in the box below.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/8204853.stm

Published: 2009/08/17 08:57:01 GMT

© BBC MMIX

Shaun H. Coley
Morgan Stanley | ISG Operations
25 Cabot Square | Canary Wharf | Floor 05
London, E14 4QA
Phone: +44 20 7677-4044
Fax: +44 20 7056-8334
Shaun.Coley@MorganStanley.com
www.morganstanley.com

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Which is your favourite city?

[Shaun's List #626] Why Are British English and American English Different?

Why Do Britons and Americans Spell Words Differently?

The first question is why are British and American spellings different for certain words?

Noah Webster

A Separated Population

Why Do Britons and Americans Use Single and Double Quotation Marks Differently?

On to a difference where I at least have a hint of an answer.

Typesetters Quotations Versus Logical Quotations

Because of these origins, it is sometimes said the British use logical quotations and Americans use typesetters quotations.

Pronunciation Differences

Summary

In summary, American English is different from British English because of the revolutionary leanings of a dictionary writer (Noah Webster), typesetting conventions, geographical separation, and the opinion of one influential style guide author (H.W. Fowler).

[Shaun's List #625] A FULL LIFE WELL LIVED!!

[Shaun's List #624] The awkward moment...

[Shaun's List #623] Who'd'a thunk it? London's cheap!

[Shaun's List #621] 8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City A Horrible Place To Live

[Shaun's List #0] 'Til death do us part? Ballot measure banning divorce clears hurdle

'Til death do us part? Ballot measure banning divorce clears hurdle

[Shaun's List #620] Old ads

[Shaun's List #619] Free TV

[Shaun's List #619] Model play

[Shaun's List #617] What goes through your mind when someone says "Let's go for a drink"?

[Shaun's List #616] I'm burning my passport as I send this...

[Shaun's List #615] Anti-gay attacks on rise in Iraq