• I've learned ... That the best classroom in the world is at the feet of an elderly person.
• I've learned ... That when you're in love, it shows.
• I've learned ... That just one person saying to me, 'You've made my day!' makes my day.
• I've learned ... That having a child fall asleep in your arms is one of the most peaceful feelings in the world.
• I've learned ... That being kind is more important than being right.
• I've learned ... That you should never say no to a gift from a child.
• I've learned ... That I can always pray for someone when I don't have the strength to help him in some other way.

goto Sad and useless for more quotes on photos

Protest however you want, but do not go onto the streets and squares!

Libyans do not know Denmark, they do not hate Denmark. They know Italy and they hate Italy.

I cannot recognise either the Palestinian state or the Israeli state. The Palestinians are idiots and the Israelis are idiots. 

Nations whose nationalism is destroyed are subject to ruin. 

There must be a world revolution which puts an end to all materialistic conditions hindering woman from performing her natural role in life and driving her to carry out man's duties in order to be equal in rights.

The invasion of Iraq was not justified because Saddam had already abandoned weapons of mass destruction.

Democracy means permanent rule

No representation of the people-representation is a falsehood. The mere existence of parliaments underlies the absence of the people, for democracy can only exist with the presence of the people and not in the presence of representatives of the people.

A woman has a right to run for election whether she is male or female

Women, like men, are human beings. Women are different from men in form because they are females, just as all females in the kingdom of plants and animals differ from the male of their species

I will stay in Libya till I die or death comes to me

Stop taking drugs. They’re not good for you, for your heart. Don’t destroy the country… Shame on you, you gangsters. Surrender, give up all weapons, or they’ll have massacres, drugged kids with machine guns… tonight and tomorrow, youth, all of you, not those who are rats on drugs–form committees for security.

Were it not for electricity, we would have to watch our televisions in the dark.

I’m not such a dictator that I’ll shut down Facebook. I’ll just imprison anyone who dares log in to it.
Sources: brainyquote, joecrazy, 

I'M COMIC SANS, ASSHOLE.

The Beatles made from lyrics of 290 of their songs

A portrait of Sir Winston Churchill

made of the phrase Never, never, never, never give up - a quote from a speech he made on October 29, 1941 at Harrow School

Juan says: "Words are powerful, they go straight into the human mind and really add something to my pictures that you can't get from a regular picture taken with a camera. Mine have stories behind them that can be read, which is pretty unique. I've made so many now that I've got the process down to a tee and can churn out a lot in a short space of time - maybe just a few days each."

A portrait of Charles Darwin with the most frequent words in the book On the Origin of Species

The Words of Jesus

a picture of Kate Middleton and Prince William.

is made of words from their engagement announcement

A portrait of Kurt Cobain made using words from Nirvana lyrics

A portrait of John Lennon made using words from the song Imagine

A portrait of US President Barack Obama made from the transcriptions of more than one hundred of his speeches

A portrait of Pablo Picasso made up with words from titles of his paintings

The famous picture of a man standing in front of a column of tanks on Tiananmen Square

made using the word 'Freedom' in about 50 different languages

Vincent van Gogh's painting Starry Night

made with the words of his quote: "I often think that the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day"

Juan Osborne at his computer

He says that he now plans to create a colossal super picture consisting of one million words: "My biggest one so far was a mere half a million words, but I want to go one better - or half a million better. The only problem I have is finding somewhere to print a picture that big."

As Dehaene explains:

Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is 'si' and 7 'qi') Their English equivalents—"four," "seven"—are longer: pronouncing them takes about one-third of a second. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length. In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers. In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits.

It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, so one would think that we would also say one-teen, two-teen, and three-teen. But we don't. We make up a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty, and sixty, which sound like what they are. But we also say fifty and thirty and twenty, which sort of sound what they are but not really. And, for that matter, for numbers above twenty, we put the "decade" first and the unit number second: twenty-one, twenty-two. For the teens, though, we do it the other way around. We put the decade second and the unit number first: fourteen, seventeen, eighteen. The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten one. Twelve is ten two. Twenty-four is two ten four, and so on.

That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster. Four year old Chinese children can count, on average, up to forty. American children, at that age, can only count to fifteen, and don't reach forty until they're five: by the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.

The regularity of their number systems also means that Asian children can perform basic functions—like addition—far more easily. Ask an English seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty two, in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is nine and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It's five-tens nine.

They can hold more numbers in their head, and do calculations faster, and the way fractions are expressed in their language corresponds exactly to the way a fraction actually is—and maybe that makes them a little more likely to enjoy math, and maybe because they enjoy math a little more they try a little harder and take more math classes and are more willing to do their homework, and on and on, in a kind of virtuous circle. When it comes to math, in other words, Asians have built-in advantage. And also Asians are more willing to try harder than other students.


Read the full story here: Rice Paddies and Math Tests