The UK is offically nuts, or WTF? Just... WTF?

Well, they had me at the title: BBC News - Schools 'should let children help pick teachers'

But only 18% of children had been involved in choosing a teacher, the survey added.

The Nasuwt teaching union said putting pupils on an interview panel undermined the authority of teachers.

The survey suggested some 87% of children feel they know what makes a good teacher.

And many of those quizzed in depth on the issue identified a number of attributes they felt were important.

Now, I also knew what makes a good teacher: Less homework, less those pesky little math problems in class and more fooling around. And I know that the Russian army in WWI was destroyed not by the Germans, but by the soldiers themselves, via electing commanders who were saying things that the troops wanted to hear.

As I see it, both army and school are environments where discipline is vital. Not that remaking schools in the image of military will do any good, mind you, but still it is vital for children to learn not only to express themselves as they see fit, but to learn to obey the rules of society.And of course it is vital for society to make it's children learn the rules while at the same time teaching them how to think. That's not the result you get while electing teachers, that's the result you get when your teachers love their work and want to teach the children everything they know.

On the importance of learning, or Cheenglish strikes back

So I came to the digital market of Ningbo. Found some useful stuff, browsed the stalls, that sort of thing. I am usually not that easy to scare, but seeing the mouse branded, of all things, "JIZZ" is a bit too much even for me…

Trip down the memory lane, or My, it was such a short time ago!

While reading BBC feed I came upon this bit of nostalgia. While my firs very own computer was not a ZX81, I do remember the spawn of Sir Clive Sinclair quite fondly. Mine was a Soviet copy of ZX Spectrum with whopping 48 kilobytes of RAM. As my only tape recorder had that annoying Dolby noise reduction you can't turn off, I was deprived of any way to save anything, but it never stopped me from learning some Z80 assembly and trying to connect floppy drive to it and playing games... I even modified my B&W TV set (year 1976 vintage vacuum tube job, with a circuit diagram the size of my room) to accept composite video input. And reading that article made me wonder...

British science is... different.

I have that habit of reading news feeds in the morning. Mostly it's the usual stuff like murders and wars, but sometimes you get a real gem like this one. You see, this so-called scientist looked for the new horizons in science, for some great breakthrough that will give mankind new meaning of life... only to forget about it and look for the perfect way to eat his toast. Ok, maybe I'm dense as a lump of... dense stuff, but I fail to see any use for this so-called "research". Actually, you can tell that some "science" news have nothing to do with science. If you see any news about British science, it's going to be something like "the best way to butter your toast while having a really bad hangover". Sadly, that seems to be the direction the science on this planet is going to take.