Purgamentum init, exit purgamentum

Purgamentum init, exit purgamentum (Garbage in, garbage out!)
I am currently re-learning Latin. I haven’t studied it for forty years but back in my school days I had the best Latin teacher ever. He was also the very best teacher of anything I ever learned. His name was Albert Wilson and he retired in the early 1970s so either mortuus est or he is heading for ‘oldest living Briton’ title. He made Latin fun which is something not many people can achieve, and yet at the same time was a strong disciplinarian. Such was his success with his pupils that some folk who left school with only two ‘O’ Level GCE’s managed to have Latin as one of them. I particularly appreciated the fact that he was the only one of my teachers who took the trouble to visit me in hospital after a road accident put me there for a month at the age of 16.
If you want some fun Latin quotes to impress your friends you could either buy the book “Latin for all Occasions ” by Henry Beard or visit
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/omnibus.html
I have to go now - Tintinnuntius meus sonat – there goes my bleeper!
Radicitus, comes!

Ancient Mysteries

http://www.ancientx.com/nm/anmviewer.asp?a=75&z=1

Ignoring the English what is poor, this is a super article on a few unsolved mysteries. I have heard of the Baghdad Battery before and it featured on a television program recently.
As Hamlet, aka Will Shakespeare, once said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

We may laugh at those who believe the World was created in 4004 B.C. (and who argue about whether it was the Spring or Autumn of that year), but I wonder if in a few decades time we ourselves will be the subject of equal derision for our current level of scientific ‘knowledge’.

Breast Cancer

The Breast Cancer site is having trouble getting enough people to click on their site daily to meet their quota of donating at least one free mammogram a day to an underprivileged woman. It takes less than a minute to go to their site and click on "donating a mammogram" for free (pink window in the middle).
This doesn't cost you a thing. Their corporate sponsors/advertisers use the number of daily visits to donate mammograms in exchange for advertising.
Here's the web site! Please pass it along to people you know
http://www.thebreastcancersite.com/

Dead as the Dodo

For many years the expression 'dead as a dodo' has been synonymous with extinction. The Dodo (Raphus cucullatus) was a large, clumsy-looking, flightless bird that inhabited the island of Mauritius. Its nearest surviving relative is the common Pigeon. It had only rudimentary wings, a short tail, large, strong legs, a large head and a heavy, hooked bill. A terrestrial bird it nested on the ground and ate plants and fruits and seeds that had fallen from trees. It weighed up to 20kg and although no complete specimens still exist we have a good idea of what it was like from sketches made when it was still around. It needs to be borne in mind though that the sketches were usually from captive birds which might well have been fatter than wild ones.
The Dodo had evolved into a flightless bird because it had no enemies. The island had no mammals or other creatures that might prey upon it.

In 1505, the first humans to set foot on Mauritius - Portuguese adventurers and traders. The island was used as a port of call on the spice routes and the dodo became an important source of meat for the traders. was a welcome source of fresh meat for the sailors. Indeed, the name doudo was Portuguese for simpleton or fool since the birds just waited around to be killed. In addition to those killed for food the Dodos suffered through the predation of rats which accompanied the humans to the island. Subsequently the Dutch took over the island and used it as a penal colony. They introduced pigs and monkeys which, like the rats, impacted on the Dodos by eating their eggs. By the early 17th century the Dodo had gone from being abundant to rare. The last one was killed in 1681.
The Dodo belonged to the family Raphidae which had two genera and three species all of which becale extinct around the 17th and 18th centuries. Raphus solitaire syn Pezophaps solitarius, the Rodriguez Solitaire had a smaller head and lighter bill than the Dodo but in other respects seems to have been similar. The othwer species was the White Dodo ( Ornithaptera sp.) from the island of Reunion.
The dodo is only one of the bird species of Mauritius which was to become extinct. In the 19th century much of the island's forest was turned into tea and sugar plantations and of the 45 bird species once found on the island only 21 survive.
Only recently has one of the knock-on environmental effects of the Dodo's extinction become clear. One particular species of tree, unique to the island, was dying out and conservationists realised that the few surviving ones were all over 300 years old. It was heading for extinction. Upon investigation it was realised that no new specimens of the tree had grown since the Dodo died out. The reason seems to have been that the seeds of the tree need to pass through the gut of the Dodo before they can germinate. Fortunately it seems that the domestic Turkey can fulfill the same function and seedlings of the tree - now known as the Dodo Tree - have now been raised for planting out in the wild.

Bricked

I have mentioned the Urban Dictionary before. I subscribe to its daily delivery of a word definition a day. Sometimes they are pretty obscene and sometimes pretty useless but every few days a really good one comes along. Today we had the word Bricked meaning -
To render your computer useless, as useless as a brick.
Usually the result of tampering with the insides and doing irreversible damage. Bricking your hardware leaves you with a new paperweight. Can be the end effect of a faulty flash or [firmware] update, a [modification] (mod) gone bad or being struck by lighting, to name a few.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/