I'm rarely a patriotic person but I do feel a little twinge of it every time I remember that Flash Gordon was a massive flop everywhere but the UK. Win.

...Do these people even know what's in the Constitution? For all their blathering on about it, they seem quite happy to ignore it as and when they please.

Nobody's disputing that. The article actually says that 36% of Americans believe in UFOs, not aliens.

Suddenly the Nazis don't seem so distant and uimaginable. That's some impressive level of sadism and callousness right there.

This reminds me of Santorum claiming that 10% of all Dutch people are euthanised, and that doctors and paramedics are so murder-happy that you have to permanently wear a tag saying "DON'T KILL ME" in order to survive an encounter with one.

I saw this embodied cognition thing mentioned (although not by name) on a BBC Horizon programme on AI by Marcus du Sautoy. Seems pretty neat.

I still can't believe that supposedly smart business types are willing to throw hundreds of million of dollars at a project that genuinely doesn't have a script.

I agree. Whatever happened to the internet? That seemed really promising back in the day. It's bound to show up sooner or later I guess.

I think the Opera team (of the neutrino fiasco) was an Italian endeavour.

Are you familiar with Giordano Bruno? He suggested in the 16th (I think) century that all stars have planets, and that those planets may well have aliens on, which would have been visited by Jesus (or some equivalent). Oddly enough, this didn't go down too well at the time, but I don't see why it couldn't "rescue"…

This is what I thought. Which does make me question the headline and purpose of this article.

Statistically I'm pretty sure that marriages preceded by cohabitation actually have higher divorce rates than ones that aren't. But I'm not sure that accounts for cultural backgrounds (i.e. people who don't live together before they get married are more likely to be from social groups where divorce is less common) so…

This is another reason the US Olympic selection policy is a bit dodgy. It's overly rigid (the top 3 at the trials get the places). In the UK there's more flexibility and so the selection committee could just pick whoever had run the best times at other meets so far this year.

I suspect better than in the US because of the nature of the Swedish judicial system (which has a focus on rehabilitation), and being able to live a normal life with a job and a house is a pretty key component of not reoffending. The US system instead seems to take the view that since the person has already been…

Reoffense rate in the US for drug offences was 66%, 74% for property offences and 62% for violent crime. So it would actually, near enough.

It is an option, yeah. But it is rare for someone to spend the rest of their life in prison. But that's the case in most Western nations. The Swedish one is more strict than the Norwegian one, which barely has the option for life in prison.

Swedish recidivism rate: 35%

The vast majority of sex offences against children are committed by family members. I don't think offences by strangers have gone up in the times since times when kids used to routinely play outside the house in the neighbourhood.

I think it's a 20 minute break in the morning and an hour for lunch. And pretty much all schools have playgrounds/playing fields. That was the case at my school(s).

Oh yeah, my bad. I missed that bit.