J_mo of course I don't agree.

Yes sure in regular schools children also take their own lives because of bullying and unbearable pressure.
But if the lack of guidance is institutionalised, in my mind the problem is far bigger. The school I was referring to was a Dalton-school, based on the ideas of Helen Parkhurst. And sure other Dalton shools will likely do better because of different idea's of the staff.

I'm not missing the fact that ‘traditional’ schools for working & lower middle class children only started to exist as we know them in the early 20th century but in Europe has it's roots well into the 16th Century and that has a centralised and uniform definition since the early 19th-Century - It's not part of my argument since I refer to ideas about education that go back to at least Classical Greek times: Our human youth gets it's best education by being guided and taught by older learned and more experienced elders/teachers. That is what I refer to.

So call me a Moron, but I know for a fact that if I as a child would have had that freedom, I would have made an utter mess of it- I needed that more strict guidance and education otherwise I would not have succeeded. And that is what I see also with lots of people all around me- we turn out well because of that sometimes so despised school and stricter guidance - Why some even need it even stricter and they have to be sent onto military styled education. Okay so perhaps you L-mo are one shining exception to the rule. Respect. But even you in the end went to university so you conformed, didn't you? Perhaps you were a shining light as a kid in that you could make all the right decisions for yourself and your parents were overly proud of you and even your environment looked at you in utter glorification. But you seem to be an exception and not the norm. For most of us, society has become far to complicated to just start out on our own and then just take what we need to cope with our situation in society. And that ranges from the social interaction within the schoolwalls to the factual education that we get there.

I had some friends that sent their kids to a school that worked on about the same principles- There was a curriculum, but the pupils had to make their own descisions on when and even how to make use of it as long as they finished it before the end of the total term.
The teachers did not intervene when the kids bashed eachothers brains because the philosophy was that the children eventually would ask for help themselves.
The result was that most kids just made a mess of it- some got completely traumatised and dissapeared from that school by themselves. And others eventually started to learn to some degree pure out of survival-strategy. To me it sounded like hell and luckily those friends saw that too.

Human children have to learn from elders and have to be pointed in the right direction. That is the way we humans have evolved and that is the way that sofar over the eons has proven to be the most effective way.

Every now and again there are people who want to throw that knowledge and experience overboard and who want to re-invent as it were the wheel on how children grow up and gather knowledge best. And every time again it has been proven that these people fail miserably if they discard the need for active education and guiding of their children.
I wonder how many thousands of children have to become victim of that while all these thousands of years we already know how things work best.

The paradoxical thing about this is that most likely those parents only could make that choice because they themselves did go through traditional education. And they could only make the the descision not to send their kids to school based on their own experiences in the system.

These kids are in for a very hard adult life and they will "thank" their parents for it...

In my country this is not allowed- Those parents would go to jail and they would lose their parenting rights.
It is not allowed because it is considered proven all to often that by far the most people who do not go to regular schools just will fail to find their place in society.
And since there still aren't that much opportunities for most of us to find trouble-free happy places outside society, all of us have to go through the system before they are free to make their own choice on wether they want to take their place inside or outside the system.

Inch by inch, electronic cirquit by new bit and bite and new algorithm we get closer to autonomous robots that cruise our world...

:-D Extra convincing argument during rows over speeding tickets and what not...? :-P

Strange- I see distorted faces, true. But, like "The Vexed Man" that would look "truly troubled"--- No. I see a bust of a man that holds his face all tensioned for a pose like in childsplay and nothing more. Some of the other faces look somewhat like cartoons, but even those are very posed. Like VM says Da Vinci has drawn far heavier distorted and therefore disturbed faces.

He was intelligent and very much aware of his own state. He seems to have tried to get a grip on his own compulsion to tense and distort his face, to compulsioningly need to grimace. He seems to have created them to be able to look and wonder at his face -perhaps in bemusement or despair- in quiet and to discuss them with others, because it is rather hard to look in a mirror and just look while grimacing so hard.

Chrome this is Army issue so they don't care about the odd splinter- any user is supposed to be rough and tough just like this tool.

I want one of those too, but I think that there will be the odd problem or two when I carry that next to my cellphone, creditcard and drivers license...

This kind of moviereels were available even before the internet- about as long as camera's and helicopters have been in eachothers vicinity.

Amanda 949 your friend the military wife as they say in Dutch -loosely translated- has heared a bell sounding but she hasn't got any idea where to look for the clock that made it sound. Explanation is done by several others here.

:-D

Y.u.Dodat perhaps it is because this man was proud to be just that? By mentioning / introducing him like that, one honours him for what he was- A self-conscious proud Puerto Rican national. Mind you- here on Neatorama not all of us are Puerto Ricans -or Americans for that matter.

aware - If they would use hardening type resins to inject the corpse with, they practically would have to hack it in pieces to bury or crmate it after this ceremony. So that would not be wise and rather gruesome. There are different forms of embalming. Most of them are non-evasive except from injecting the body with preservants and treating the skin with products that keep it from deteriorating all to fast. If you look at the positioning of the body, it mostly just rests on the fueltank. For the hands and the feet they can use several different glues that can be quickly and quite harmlessly dissolved after use.

The times they really are achanging- Back in the days the youngsters could make some bucks by clearing snow for the neighbors. Nowadays some dude buys a few hundreds of dollars worth of electronic components and a coffin and six wheels and a blade and hey presto now it's unemployment for the kids in the hood... I tell ya this thing will be responsible for the rising of youth-criminality!

We're a long way from the Bajoran lightship yet....

http://images.google.nl/imgres?imgurl=http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_JA8dAMMyMr4/Roeimbn5xgI/AAAAAAAAAKY/5TRVWg-n5JE/s320/solarsailer_bg.jpg&imgrefurl=http://turricanoid.blogspot.com/2007/07/solar-sailing.html&usg=__r3BAOIbz2EPTcHRHJ2eHQjGf4EY=&h=320&w=266&sz=24&hl=nl&start=97&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=Av9E7N9ZDQyVRM:&tbnh=118&tbnw=98&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dbajoran%2Bsolar%26start%3D90%26um%3D1%26hl%3Dnl%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:en-US%26ndsp%3D18%26tbs%3Disch:1

R.I.P. 3.5" ? Now there's some nostalgia...
I still must have my stacks of WordPerfect 4.0 and DrDos 3.5 lying around somewhere. What was it? about 7 or 8 disks for one program? And there must be some disk with (how exiting for the young lad I was back then! :-P ) early computerporn too- Mostly text and about 30 very low-quality pics on it because that was all that my computer with VGA-screen and without internet capacity could handle. Thas was back in 1988. I still have a floppy drive on my current home computer, but I haven't used that in ages.

:-D

The universe as we see it all around us is incredibly large. In that universe, hundreds of thousands of alien lifeforms could have risen and grown into even intergalactic spacetravel- even without ever reaching our little corner of the universe.

With all those 100.000's of possible lifeforms out there, there are just as many possibilities of how these aliens would act upon finding other alien lifeforms. All the logic in the world that we humans can unleach on that theme ever stays human logic and nothing more than that.

So I would say it makes complete sence to us humans to be very quiet and not stirr any attention, because eve peaceful gestures by aliens could completely accidentally mean the end of us or them. But that has nothing to do with any logical reasoning on my part. That is just one possibility out of a universe full of unknowns...

I don't know who she is and undoubtedly she will be one of the Great Actors of the Hollywood-Planet.

But am I the only one who -listening and looking at this vid- at the end found that all his teeth had fallen out from all the droopy-eyedness, sweetness and sugaryness...? Geez...!