How about a nice pair of second hand knickers then?

As the saying goes, "one man's muck is another man's brass". Given this saying, some people will go to great lengths to display thrift and get a bargain.

In fact, if any proof was needed that people are pulling in their purse strings and making savings wherever they can, folks in Ghana have been buying second hand knickers, yes I repeat, "second hand knickers" in order to make ends meet (all puns intended!).

However, now it appears market traders in Ghana will be banned from selling second-hand underwear from next February. According to the Ghana Standards Board, used pants - and other second-hand goods like handkerchiefs and mattresses - are unhygienic and could pose a health hazard. No kidding? Really? I had no idea!

Cynthia, a market trader, defended the business saying "Second-hand underwear and other clothes we sell here at Kantamanto Market and are better quality than new undies in the stores".

It's interesting though as to what the local words are for such items:

Apparently second-hand clothing is often referred to as "obroni wewu", which literally translates as "white man's deads". Yes, indeed!

Mecca makeover: how the hajj has become big business for Saudi Arabia

For those who thought that Saudia Arabia was only for those interested in performing their Islamic duties in the form of the Hajj, they might be surprised to find out that this has become big business these days. An estimated 2.5 million Muslims now begin the annual hajj pilgrimage, but the total number of tourists to Mecca and Medina, home to the prophet Muhammad, is expected to rise from about 12 million to almost 17 million by 2025.

In terms of tourism in the kingdom, scuba divers tend to flock to places on the Red Sea like Jeddah, but tourism isn't really that well developed other than religious torusism sector which is seeing a huge boom. Hotels have been springing up to cater for this increase in demand.

"The level of pampering offered by some of the hotels – Asprey toiletries, 24-hour butler service, $270 chocolate selections – may jar with the ethos of sacrifice, simplicity and humility of hajj but it is not a contradiction felt by the customers snapping up royal suites at $5,880 a night, eating gelato or milling around hangar-like lobbies of polished marble in their Hajj clothing of bedsheets, towels or burqas. Raffles is reporting 100% occupancy for it 211 rooms."

I guess we all need to pamper ourselves from time to time!

Fathers are happier when doing more housework, says study

Fathers are less stressed when sharing childcare and domestic chores, new research shows. This has to be something that most women around the world will be happy about. The fact that men are happy when they are home will also deal a blow to the feminist movement which has always asserted that men have little or no interest in staying at home, rearing children, and helping the woman with housework. Or maybe it’s a sign of the times and the fact that, finally, Feminists can claim their teachings have at last helped change the dynamics of home life to the benefit of the female.

“It will be music to the ears of working mothers everywhere: fathers are happier when they do more of the housework themselves, spend longer with their children and have working partners who are in the office just as long as they are, a major new study has found. The best way to de-stress a father is for his partner to share the weight of domestic burdens with him, rather than ironing his socks, making his breakfast and taking the lion's share of responsibility for the kids.”

Evidence was also found that social attitudes towards childcare are in a period of profound change: fewer fathers than mothers, for example, believe that it is a mother's job to look after children. "The problem is that although families are changing, this is – largely – being completely ignored by employers," added Gatrell.

As usual, companies are a huge step behind what society both wants and expects from its employers. Too often nowadays, employers have complete control over their workforce to the detriment of the family. Interestingly, this is less so in extended families or in countries where extended families thrive e.g. sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia.

Electric current to the brain 'boosts maths ability'

This all sounds a bit wacky to me. That you can stimulate some part of the brain and produce a particular response is something I talked about in an earlier blog, so I have no doubt about that but to say that it can improve a skill in a tangible way like say an improvement in math score is frankly a little hard to swallow.

"Applying a tiny electrical current to the brain could make you better at learning maths, according to Oxford University scientists. They found that targeting a part of the brain called the parietal lobe improved the ability of volunteers to solve numerical problems."

What's more interesting is that even six months later when tested again, the respondents still seemed to have retained some of the ability which is even more remarkable as it suggests that the effect is somewhat long lasting. However, the scientists have a word of caution - an academic caveat emptor:

"Dr Cohen Kadosh, who led the study, said: "We are not advising people to go around giving themselves electric shocks, but we are extremely excited by the potential of our findings and are now looking into the underlying brain changes."

Another scientist, Dr Christopher Chambers, from the School of Psychology at Cardiff University, said that the results were "intriguing", and offered the prospect not just of improving numerical skills, but having an impact on a wider range of conditions.

"The ability to tweak activity in parts of the brain, turning it slightly 'up' or 'down' at will, opens the door to treating a range of psychiatric and neurological problems, like compulsive gambling or visual impairments following stroke."

You have to agree that it's intriguing but equally, if there really exists a possibility to tweak parts of the brain to perform specific functions, in the wrong hands, like a Kim Jong-il or a Pol Pot, that could open up a Pandora's box of unmentionables to have to deal with as the Natzis discovered with their Eugenics programs in the early part of the last century!! It is also reminiscent of Frankenstein and the literature of the early to mid nineteenth century.

Now that's an amazing story...

They say it takes several negative things to happen simultaneously to bring down an airliner which means it's still one of the safest ways to fly these days.

How about this one? How lucky can you be? This week, a 15-month-old baby girl survived a fall from a seventh-floor apartment in Paris almost unscathed after bouncing off a cafe awning and into the arms of a passer-by, police said on Tuesday.

Now that's amazingly lucky to (1) have a passer-by notice that you're in potential trouble or at least in a precarious position, (2) that the shop owner decided that day not to haul in the awning, "I usually close it to stop it catching fire as people tend to throw their cigarette butts onto it," he told the television station i-tele, and (3) the passer-by who saw what was about to happen must have played rugby for years to have developed reflexes like that and had the nerve and skill to catch the baby after it bounced off the awning!!

One wonders what the almighty has in store for this baby!!

George Soros donates $1 million to campaign to legalise cannabis

George Soros is known for his sometimes wacky crusades to offer moral guidance to the world through his own peculiar prism or moral compass. However, this is a strange news story. Why would a billionaire financier like George Soros fund a campaign to legalise or at least decriminalise cannabis? I mean, what's in it for him personally?

"Billionaire George Soros donated $1 million (£630,000) on Tuesday to a campaign to legalise marijuana in California through an initiative placed on ballots in the November 2 election."

I guess he does feel there's something in it for him personally? But what exactly?

Legalising the recreational use and small-scale cultivation of marijuana and regulating and taxing its sale "would represent a major step forward, and its deficiencies can be corrected on the basis of experience," Mr Soros wrote.

Somehow, I can't get past the idea that a man who is a central pillar in world economics as well as geo-politics is concerning himself with this. There has to be an ulterior motive for nobody as greedy as this man does something like this and not expect something out of it?! Either this is a case of misplaced philantrophy or he knows something we don't.

Neuroscience, free will and determinism: 'I'm just a machine'

This is an interesting new idea. If we can be affected by forces outside of us for example by magnetism, does that have a bearing on whether we should be held responsible for all of our actions?

In the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, in Queen Square in London, the nerve centre – if you will – of British brain research, Prof Haggard is demonstrating "transcranial magnetic stimulation", a technique that uses magnetic coils to affect one's brain, and then to control the body. One of his research assistants, Christina Fuentes, is holding a loop-shaped paddle next to his head, moving it fractionally. "If we get it right, it might cause something." She presses a switch, and the coil activates with a click. Prof Haggard's hand twitches. "It's not me doing that," he assures me, "it's her."

The point here of course is not simply to perform a simple parlour trick - a rather dull experiment to affect the involuntary movement of someone's fingers, but to illustrate the larger question of how our world, the surrounding atmosphere in which we inhere every day, actually has a profound effect on us and in ways we cannot often imagine. And what happens when some of us are hot-wired differently from others? Doesn't that also mean that we are affected by nature in lots of different ways as well? Both negatively as well as positively? And if this is true, what happens when some people do odd things, for example, murder another human being? Can we really hold them to account in the way we always have?

As Prof Haggard says,

"What happens if someone commits a crime, and it turns out that there's a lesion in that brain area? Is that person responsible? Is the damage to the machine sufficient for us to exempt them from that very basic human idea that we are responsible for our actions? I don't know." He refers to a major project in America, where "lawyers, neuroscientists, philosophers and psychiatrists are all trying to work out what impact brain science has on our socio-legal sense of responsibility".

It seems we may have to re-evaluate what truly constitutes our notion of true free will.