http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/magazinemonitor/2006/12/100_things_we_didnt_know_last_2.shtml

The frequency of words appearing tails off really rapidly. What the BBC really wanted to look at was the size of their "use" vocabularies.

See Language Log for more on this than you can imagine.

Following the money: "Tesco, which commissioned the report, said it was responding by launching a scheme which allows all UK comprehensive schools to interact and communicate with other schools around the country using its internet phone technology."

Handsome, yes; vain, most definitely; but really quite disturbed.

After today, this doesn't surprise me -- one of my cats went to the vet for a quick visit, no needles, no thermometers, nothing invasive, just a once-over and a prescription. Easy, until some odor in the examining room (no doubt from a previous patient) got him agitated.

A hissing, yowling, 15-pound cat with all his claws and teeth is a fearsome thing (and not at all kind to eardrums in a confined space).

A tree to climb would have been a blessing. Maybe I'll suggest it the next time I'm there ...

In the spirit of Xopher's noble effort in another thread to hold in the "But I have a boyfriend for that!" comment, I have--until now--refrained from mentioning what that could do for Kitten Poker.

You didn't already?

The chicken and the egg are in bed, and the egg rolls over and lights a cigarette. The chicken says, "Well, I guess that answers that question."

Then Millicent (?!) meets the cat who can tree a bear and I find myself thinking of Quentin Tarantino making a movie out of that.

They're saying it's safer than it used to be? In the early 90's I read that you only had a one in eight chance of getting through the Khumbu ice falls. I actually had an Everest video game back in the day and my son's character got squashed by a serac 20 times in a row, at which point he gave up in disgust...

Georgianna: are the Khumbu ice falls on all of the multiple approaches to the summit? Note also that a video game is hardly a good metric; if they were easy, they'd be used up too quickly. Cf the Steve Jackson (text) version of MCFI's con-running game, in which your chance of winning a worldcon bid is \much/ less than in real life.

Did Rupert Murdoch buy it, too?

Which makes things so much more convenient for the government ...

Oh, I forgot that one. Yep. that's a good one too.

Accounting for land versus total surface only makes a difference of a factor of ~3. They're out by a factor of ~100. Has anyone seen the bbc nature show from which they supposedly extracted their factoid?

I've just recently read Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, and he has a harrowing description of passing through them...but not that harrowing. (The Discovery Channel miniseries Everest: Beyond the Limit, by contrast, pretty much glosses right over them.)

(I also watched the movie based on Krakauer's book. After experiencing all this stuff about climbing Everest, I've made a resolution: I'm never doing that.)

Thanks for bringing this to my attention.