The Amazonian tribe that can only count up to five?

This an amazing story of the way humans use numbers. It's hard to believe that with I-pods, huge machines in Switzerland that can smash electrons to see what's inside them, and operations that can transplant pigs hearts to humans that there's still people out there who are oblivious to all of this?

"For the last 10 years, the focus of Pica's work has been the Munduruku: an indigenous group of about 7,000 people in the Brazilian Amazon whose language has no tenses, no plurals and no words for numbers beyond five. To get to the Munduruku, Pica had to wait for some locals to take him to their territory by canoe."

What kind of language must that be with none of the usual things like syntax, tenses for time, and only four numbers to count with? The funniest thing when reading this was when the scientist, after returning back from the Amazon rain forest, was asked how the indigenous people got by with such a limited set of numbers?

"Still, I thought it odd that numbers larger than five did not crop up at all in Amazonian daily life. What if you ask a Munduruku with six children how many kids they have? "He will say, 'I don't know,'" Pica said. "It is impossible to express."

It made me think of the man scratching his head and counting his six kids - "One, two, three, four, five, and...sorry don't know!" It makes you realise that without numbers we have very little and the question arises as to what you have if not the means to express it? It's a bit like the tree falling down in Sweden conundrum, and if there's nobody there to witness it, did it really happen?

Lip reading mobile promises end to noisy phone calls

This should help stop all those people on the train, bus and tube in the mornings who seem to think it perfectly acceptable to wax lyrical about the curry they had with their lover the evening before or the unbridled sex they had with their neighbour's husband or wife.

It will be great to still see those mouths opening and closing but not to have to endure any of this claptrap that comes out. It's so annoying to have to listen to some people who clearly have no sense of propriety or shame in telling everyone, complete strangers all, about their personal lives!!

Come on!! We actually would prefer not to know and listen to your drivel no matter how much you are prepared to spice it up for our apparent benefit!! Get a life will you!!

Switzerland referendum on providing lawyers for animals

While I agree that animals are not always treated all that well either by their masters or other members of the family, I do think this is somewhat of a step too far when animals are given their own lawyers? WTF?

When so many people in the world are disenfranchised and don't even have access to a good lawyer or even enough food and water to drink, can any country really justify spending all that money on protecting the so-called rights of a furry animal no matter how cute and innocent it is?

This is yet another sign that the world is completely out of sync and that capitalism gone mad results in this uneven distribution of wealth! This is clearly a sign where a country has too much of a resource, in this case money, and is distributing it in a bizarre and haphazard way!

I mean, what good has ever come out of Switzerland? Cuckoo clocks, chocolate, cheese, cantons, Swiss bank accounts, and Natzi blood money! Someone should tell them to give that money to people who need it rather than spending it on such frivolous activities!

Not such merry men?

Brain food: why single women eat salad

I guess this is something we've always known - that men and women, when in social situations, eat as a way of sending a message to those around them. If you are with your friends, say, an all male or female group, then you're quite likely to pig out and stuff yourself with complete impunity because you know they don't really care.

However, if you're in a public place, say a canteen, a restaurant, Starbucks or wherever, then you're much more likely, if you're a woman, to eat a salad or something with almost zero calories. So says a recent study into thee eating habits of us humans.

"Young women use their food to send a signal to men, suggests the study. Just like clothing accessories, they pick meals to enhance their desirability to the ­opposite sex. "The salad leaves are meant to say, 'I'm pretty; I'm attractive; I take care of myself'," says Young. And the pressure increases with the number of potential partners around. As for the men, they didn't watch what they scoffed at all."

Of course this data is probably only accurate with the younger generation as I can't imagine older men or women really selecting food for some communicative" purpose unless it was, say, a special occasion like a birthday, anniversary and so on.

"In arriving at their hypothesis, the researchers made some reasonable ­assumptions: that the undergraduates (largely between 17 and 22 years old) hadn't yet settled down, were in the market for relationships and that the majority were heterosexual. The argument fits with other evidence that our tablemates affect what we eat (close friends tend to push the boat out; strangers are far more uptight), and that others judge us by our food."

I find it hard to believe some aspects of this namely that, as Young and her researchers note, their female undergraduates appear to ­"believe that men find women who eat less more attractive". Is this actually true? Don't some men actually like a healthy women who doesn't eat lie a stick insect? A woman who eats healthy portions and doesn't select rabbit food on social occasions e.g. when eating out at dinner parties etc.

I know one thing for sure - next time I'm out at a public place I'm going to observe what the women are eating and see who they're trying to impress!!

Women told to stop looking for Mr Right

This must be one giant kick in the teeth for feminism. After years of trying to educate (some one say indoctrinate) women, the feminists find that what women "really, really want" is not a managerial job in an office, to be the head of a multi-national, or a small waistline, bigger boobs, a smaller bum. No, what they "really, really want" is... a good, reliable husband.

"Of course, women are loth to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won't tell you it's a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she'll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child)," she writes."

And if you're a medium rated kind of guy on the handsomeness scale like me, you'll perhaps feel a bit better knowing that some of the really pretty girls you chased at school and in the discos and pubs of your late teens that you are the one that gets the last laugh as they rejected you in favour of a better looking guy. And, according to the statistics, your marriage was quite likely (or still is) to end up in divorce,

"The theme of holding out for true love (whatever that is – look at the divorce rate) permeates our collective mentality," writes Gottlieb, a 40-year-old single mother who now admits she wishes she had "settled" for any of the "perfectly acceptable but uninspiring" men she rejected during her search for the perfect man."

What does this tell us about love? That while it may be fabulous, exhilarating, jaw dropping while it lasts, at the end of the day, it's the practicalities of life that concern us most.

'Worthless qualifications' give false hope to state pupils, says Harrow head

There seems to be a clear and inexplicable disintegration of the UK education system in the last few years. I read this as an expat, an outsider looking at the system that educated me and, I think, from such a safe distance, I look at it objectively. What I've noticed is starting in 2006, all UK students had to start paying for their university studies where hitherto it was free. This is on top of the 1992 law that removed maintenance grants for universities meaning that there was to be an introduction of student loans for this first time. Only recently I read that the government is considering reducing degrees from 3 years to 2 years. An alien from outer space might reasonably consider that the government doesn't want an educated populace for fear it may stop it from doing its own thing. Am I just being a conspiracy theorist again?

The head of Harrow school, Barnaby Lenon, berates the trend for smart kids to be told to take soft subject and get a so so degree while the bright kids in independent schools are told the opposite, "take the toughest subjects, such as sciences and modern languages". Here's what he said,

"Bright children from poor backgrounds are being short-changed by those who lead them to believe that "high grades in soft subjects" and going to "any old university to read any subject" were the route to prosperity, he told a conference of leading private and state school headteachers."

We seem utterly incapable of producing adults that will have a part to play in shaping our society and seem to be farming our children to produce nice reliable, dependable consumers who will keep the economy ticking over while the fat cats in Wall Street and in Whitehall reap the financial benefits society has to offer.

I also saw also Sir Ken Robinson's 20-minute talk at the world TED conference which I thought was outstanding. In it he argues that we are failing our kids by not recognising their talents. He mentions Picasso saying that all children are born artists and it is us who educate them away from their natural creativity and artistry. We do this by creating rigid boundaries for them stigmatising the making of mistakes and telling them that,, when they leave school, they should go for a job that will be safe and not a job they will necessarily be any good at or enjoy. Again, we return to the subject of soft skills.

Isn't it about time that something major was done about educating children using a system that hasn't changed in 150 years, certainly since the advent of the Industrial revolution?