We decided the best deal was from 3. We ordered the phone for Sandra at around 2pm Friday and it arrived by courier at 9am the following morning. 
Yay! Picspam again! Another example of how much two shows that have nothing to do with each other can still feel and look the same. So, you ask how can you compare an animated show like Futurama with something like Doctor Who? Well, as I'll show you, there are some striking similarities. I sometimes wonder if the writers of both shows are smoking the same thing. It's time for the ultimate comparison!
Zoidberg vs. the Ood, or: "I took the liberty of fertilizing your caviar." vs. "Would you like sauce with that?" Futurama wins. Woopwoopwoop!
Following on from yesterday's story of the hip, reusable, Anya Hindmarch shopping bag, (marked with the slogan "I'm not a plastic bag" and made from resuable cotton as part of a campaign to make us all aware of the perils of plastic bags) that had daft** women lining up from 3 in the morning to buy one, according to the editor of this morning's Today programme when the customers paid for the aforementioned eco-friendly, non-plastic bag many of them walked out of the stores with it in a...plastic bag. The solitary fingerprint was found halfway up a bathroom door frame in the bungalow where a reclusive spinster named Marion Ross had been brutally stabbed to death. At first, detectives attached no importance to the slightly smudged print, for, over the years, dozens of people had been in the house. Indeed, the print was among 400 discovered when fingerprint officers dusted down the murder scene. Besides, the police had already arrested David Asbury, a young builder from the same town where 51-year-old Miss Ross lived, and were convinced he had killed her - with such savagery that she was found pinned to the blood-soaked carpet by a pair of scissors which had been driven through her throat and spinal column.
It was only when the supposedly 'insignificant' print on the door frame was examined by criminal records experts that events took a different turn. This was in the winter of 1997 and over the next decade the result of that one routine test would drive a dedicated young Scottish policewoman to the brink of suicide and destroy her promising career. It would also undermine the previously unassailable, century-old practice of fingerprinting - and spark one of the most damaging scandals in British judicial history.
I posted, briefly on this case here. Synopsis: Her crime - to speak the truth and refuse to accept the mis-identification of her fingerprint, allegedly found at a murder scene she should not have entered. During those nine years, her case became an international cause celebre during which she gained the support of the world fingerprint experts community and much of the world's press whilst at home being persecuted by government ministers, smeared by senior police officers and having her integrity traduced by Scottish forensic experts and Scottish politicians. Now, for the first time the true and authorized story of the Shirley McKie case is told by her father Iain - her strongest champion - and former MSP Michael Russell who has worked alongside the McKie family for over seven years.
We are to be overwhelmed. A tidal wave of epitaphs, eulogies and obsequies of Tony Blair is upon us. His era will crave definition. The flesh must be made word, and the word is Blairism. Already it is creeping into the columns of this paper. It hangs on the lips of friend and foe alike.
Let us get one thing straight. Blairism does not exist and never has. It is all froth and miasma. It consists of throwing a packet of words such as change, community, renewal, partnership, social and reform into the air and watching them twinkle to the ground like blossom until the body politic is carpeted with sweet-smelling bloom. An -ism implies a coherent set of ideas, an ideology capable of driving a programme in a particular direction. In plumbing the shallows of Blair's ideas, even his guru, Raymond Plant, was reduced to taking refuge in Daniel Bell's End of Ideology.
Like most British prime ministers - whatever they proclaim - Blair in office has taken things as he found them, tootling along until the dying fall of his departure.
Both (Blair and Cameron) agree on one thing: all trouble starts with the family. The more children grow up in a stable environment, the more they are likely to turn into model citizens. Restore family life and you restore the well-adjusted child. But what if that theory is wrong? What if the family has nothing to do with the way the young turn out, and the influences, for bad or good, lie elsewhere? What, in short, if the nurture part of the nature/nurture debate has been looking in the wrong place all this time?That is the subversive argument that Judith Rich Harris, the American psychologist, has been pursuing for the past ten years or so, and which she has built into two books, The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike. The theory she advances is that what influences behaviour is not so much the home or the family, or even the genetic make-up of a child, but the peer group in which they grow up. The survival instinct, which teaches the young either to conform with their contemporaries or to become their leader, kicks in early on and can result in huge variations in behaviour. One child may turn into a model conformist, while another, brought up in the same household, becomes a tearaway. To explain why, you have to look outside the family not inside it.Harris has an article in the latest Prospect:
JRH: The surprising result had to do with the environment. Since genetic effects account for only about half of the differences among us, the other half has to be the result of environmental effects, right? Well, that was the assumption. But researchers still haven't been able to pin down which aspects of the environment are important. All they've been able to determine is which aspects of the environment are not important. The aspects of the environment that don't seem to matter are all those that are shared by all the children who grow up in a given family—which includes most of the things the word "home" makes you think of. Whether the home is headed by one parent or two, whether the parents are happily married or constantly rowing, whether they believe in pushing their children to succeed or leaving them to find their own way in life, whether the home is filled with books or sports equipment, whether it is orderly or messy, a city flat or a farmhouse—the research shows, counterintuitively, that none of these things makes much difference. The child who grows up in the orderly, well-run home is, on average, no more conscientious as an adult than the one who grows up in the messy one. Or rather, he or she will be more conscientious only to the extent that this characteristic is inherited.There was a short 'nature/nurture discussion in relation to adoption on Woman's Hour earlier this week where Professor Steve Jones was rather dismissive of some of the claims for genetic influence on behaviour. He clarified some of the confusion over genes versus environment with this telling observation:
On April 16, three men—a retired bankruptcy judge from Alabama, a former litigator with expertise in transportation industry economics and a career attorney for the Copyright Office—made a decision that has profound implications for the future of webcasting, and for the music and Internet industries in general.
Aram Sinnreich interviews Pandora founder Tim Westergren to find out whether the ruling will put an end to Internet radio as we know it.
Faced with a flighty female and some serious doubts over paternity, the anger of the jealous male knows no bounds. How would a man feel if he had just returned home to Scotland from a long sojourn in Africa only to find that his wife had given birth to two offspring that were clearly not his own, given that he had been abroad for so long?
On a more serious note. 
