Don't call my country a cunt, and don't call my fraternity a frat. "Frat" is generally derogatory when used by outsiders. It's analogous to "nigger" being used by non-blacks.
No, it really isn't. Blacks have been (and to some extent still are) oppressed by the majority. The word "nigger" is an artifact of the oppression. It was used as a weapon against them.
Fraternities, however, have never been oppressed. Occasionally, they have been in the position of power (being a white-boys-club), with documented cases of people hiring brothers preferentially.
There is also a lot of evidence contradicting the Whorf hypothesis. In <The Language Instinct> by Steven Pinker, Pinker suggests that humans think with separate thought-modules and then only express the substance of thoughts through arbitrary languages.
That being said, I think there is something to be said for diversity of culture, and perhaps better more fluid translation services are the true solution.
The reason Boston and Palo Alto are such great locations are due to the locations of the elite neighboring universities and abundant reverse brain-drain
You have to ask someone to watch your laptop. I'm a psych major, and there was a study that demonstrated that people have a _much_ higher rate of deterring thieves when asked to look after someone's items, for some reason.
Or, get a laptop with built in GPS and 3G internet, and hack the firmware to autoemail you the location on boot-up.
There are a lot of high-powered investment analysts who had proven their credibility with a string of years of success, guided, I'm sure, by logical and well-reasoned investments.
That's just not how it works pal. Everyone is bound to be wrong in the long run. Sorry.
"bump the thread" doesn't work here, but would a version of it be useful? Should a story's comment activity over the past X hours be a factor in how it ranks?
As a group, the crows show remarkable examples of intelligence, and Aesop's fable of The Crow and the Pitcher shows that humans have long viewed the crow as an intelligent animal. Crows and ravens often score very highly on intelligence tests. Certain species top the avian IQ scale. Crows in the northwestern U.S. show modest linguistic capabilities and the ability to relay information over great distances, live in complex, hierarchic societies involving hundreds of individuals with various "occupations", and have an intense rivalry with the area's less socially advanced ravens. Wild hooded crows in Israel have learned to use bread crumbs for bait-fishing. Crows will engage in a kind of mid-air jousting, or air-"chicken" to establish pecking order.
One species, the New Caledonian Crow, has also been intensively studied recently because of its ability to manufacture and use its own tools in the day-to-day search for food, including dropping seeds into a heavy trafficked street and waiting for a car to crush them open. On October 5, 2007, researchers from the University of Oxford, England presented data acquired by mounting tiny video cameras on the tails of New Caledonian Crows. It turned out that they use a larger variety of tools than previously known, plucking, smoothing and bending twigs and grass stems to procure a variety of foodstuffs. Crows in Queensland Australia have learned how to eat the toxic cane toad by flipping the cane toad on its back and violently stabbing the throat where the skin is thinner, allowing the crow to access the non-toxic innards; their long beaks ensure that all of the innards can be removed.
