Jamais Vu

Sometimes when I am reading or writing a word over and over again it ceases to look real. I learned today that this phenomenon is called jamais vu. This is when a familiar situation is not recognised by the observer. There is evidence that it can be caused by brain fatigue such as I described in the opening sentence.

I like to think it can explain why people constantly repeat the same destructive cycle.

The far side of the moon

As a child I always liked to see the moon at night. Now scientists believe that the moon used to face the other way but was flipped around by an asteroid billions of years ago. The astronomers discovered this by studying the impact craters on the moon, apparently the oldest impact craters were on the wrong side which suggest that the moon used to face the other way.

Either way it's still mooning at us (oh yes I went there).

The Return

From 1936 to 1939 Spain suffered a Civil War which in many ways divided Europe. Thousands of Spaniards fled Spain never to return. However the Spanish government has just announced that it will allow descendants of those who fled to claim Spanish citizenship and will not have to give up any existing passports to get their Spanish one.

Evidently Spain can.

Barack Obama

You may be aware that today Barak Obama becomes the first non-white man to be sworn in as President of the United States of America. His family is an interesting ethnic mix, much like the USA itself. His inauguration was attended by his Kenyan grandmother who speaks Luo; his black mother-in-law from Chicago; his American Indonesian half-sister and her Chinese American husband.

Yes we can? Looks like it.

The Plague

Attending university can be a dangerous business, as can using public transport. Just think of all those people and their germs. Well, you can imagine my delight to learn that plague, aka The Black Death, has never been officially eradicated. The World Health Organisation reports between 1000 and 3000 cases of plague a year. Thankfully plague is very treatable provided it is recognised quickly enough for what it is.

Which is true for a lot of things actually. Like potholes in the road...

Corona and....

The chances are that if you order a Corona in a bar it will be served with a lime wedge. Corona, for those of you who don't know, is a Mexican beer that is very popular in North America (and elsewhere) and is almost always served with a lime wedge. The story behind the lime wedge is not what you may expect. You might think that the wedge somehow helps the flavour of the beer. Alas that is not so, the tradition is alleged to have begun in 1981 after a bartender placed a lime wedge in a bottle of Corona having made a bet with his friend that he could start a trend.

I think he may have won that bet.

Land measure

Today I found myself reading some cases from the Israeli Supreme Court regarding the proportionality of security fences. The judgements made frequent references to dunams of land. Naturally I was curious as to what a dunam of land actually was. A dunam is a unit of land measurement that was used in the Ottoman Empire and continues to be used in countries that used to be part of the Ottoman Empire. In Israel the dunam is equivalent to 1000 square metres or 0.1 hectares.