NFL-saesonen er i gang!

Nu er den i hvert fald i gang på tv2-sport – ved godt der var lidt med mit yndlingshold (…long time Colts fan, det har INTET med deres Super Bowl sejr at gøre) i torsdags.

I love it!

Pictures from North Korea

“Today’s pictures” in slate are from North Korea.

Three pictures that didn’t make the cut:

…

Update:

If you haven’t already watched The Vice Guide to North Korea, please do. It’s by far the best piece on NK I have seen.

Update ii:

Here’s The Economist on the next food crisis that is about to come. Here’s another article on the same subject from earlier this year. A quote from the latter: People are forced on to the black market, where rice has shot up from 860 won (about $6) a kilo a year ago to 3,100 today. Income per head is perhaps $500 a year.

It looks to me as if the story from the 90′es is about to repeat itself. People don’t have enough to eat as it is, so they don’t have the surplus (or the incentives) necessary to sow new crops. Which means that next years harvest will fail badly, no matter what the weather will be like, even if of course the weather will be blamed by the apologists of the regime. Meanwhile, as the situation unfolds, the government will do everything it can to disrupt the market from functioning properly, making it even harder for the starved North Koreans to get food. You must remember here that it isn’t the high food prices that’s the problem: It’s what’s causing them. High prices are simply the market’s way of signalling scarcity, nothing else. The regime is to blame for the scarcity. This year’s scarcity, and next year’s, the weather has very little to do with this. The regime has driven up the price of rice by dismantling the free market, and at the same time it has kicked out all releaf agencies in the country. It has deliberately been killing people. It will continue to do so next year. Don’t apologize for what these people do to their countrymen.

The speed of evolution

Evolutionary pressures might work a lot faster than I’d have thought:

Researchers have found that the shape of the human skull has changed significantly over the past 650 years.

[...]

The two principal differences discovered were that our ancestors had more prominent features, but their cranial vault — the distance measured from the eyes to the top of the skull — was smaller.

Dr Peter Rock, lead author of the study and director of orthodontistry at Birmingham University, told the BBC News website: “The astonishing finding is the increased cranial vault heights.

“The increase is very considerable. For example, the vault height of the plague skulls were 80mm, and the modern ones were 95mm — that’s in the order of 20% bigger, which is really rather a lot.”

HT: Glenn Reynolds