I wasn't raised bilingual but we used to watch a lot of television and luckily us dutch don't dub but subtitle everything. So I spoke fairly good english and german before I started learning it at school. My english is still a bit of a mish-mash between english and american english. Later I added french and spanish to my vocabulary, but I noticed that the older you get the harder it is to learn a new language. When I was working in Berlin for a while I started to dream in german. And the use of english is now a very large part of my life that I do that in english too. And sometimes a specific language has the best way of communicating a certain meaning that others don't.

This site has some good documentaries, although it has a lot of crackpots (mostly in the conpiracy theory section) in it too: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/ My personal favorites are Cosmos by Carl sagan and The History of Britain by Simon Schama.

Or you could just be very rich, then they'll take you up.

So any people with the same birth date will have the same former lives?

Slower as relative to what? My guess is that the observation of the slow photon is in fact a small change in spacetime due to the mass/energy influence of the "mask". The photon was travelling at the speed of light, but time went just a bit faster.

I can't find any evidence in this story that the girl was in fact a prostitute.

Watch this: Bonaparte with "Me so selfie".

I thought it was strange that the saunas in Finland separated men and women. We don't do that in the Netherlands. The sauna I go to has one day per week for women only and invites families with children on sundays. But the rest of the week it's all unisex. There's no rule against talking but there's an advisement to keep down the volume.

There's so much great music coming out of Sweden these days. This band, Jeniferever, from Uppsala is one of my favoites:

Again, no mention of the million dead Iraqi's. If you're going to be sceptical about the war, let's be honest to the people you are inflicting it on.

The Great Train Robbery (1978) with Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079240/?ref_=nv_sr_1

By the mid century it will be clear that wars are no longer fought between two armies but that they,ve become a media show where the object is to kill as many civilians as possible and then blame the "other" side. Armies become state sponsored terrorists who keep their populations hostage, with a silent agreement not to shoot other armed forces (because they might shoot back!). Refugees will be the responsability and social/economic burden for your enemy, so if they flee your way, turn them around or kill them. (actually what Julius Caesar did in Gaul.

My job at the theatre has the benefit of listening to music through a NEXO-Geo line array with extra sub and infill speakers. The venue is for 435 people and when there's nobody around I can play as loud as I want. It has also an artificial acoustic array of many little speakers throughout the walls which can be used as surround sound for movie screenings. The best way of listening to music there is when there is a dance performance. It's always loud and seeing movement on music makes you focus on it much better. A nice light show also helps.

A passive objectivist. He would be interesting but has no chance.

I was attending a lie-in-concert yesterday of Canto Ostinato with 4 grand pianos, and organ and a dervish dancer. This piece from 1979 keeps being a fantastic event. Play while working, reading or just relaxing.

Belgian electro band The Klinik goes wee=ll with Bioshock II:

The most popular name in the Netherlands for a coffee shop: High Times

Don't bother asking him anything. Just throw a shoe at his head.

To answer the endless debate as to wether things would turn out better if the boys happended to be girls, you should read Libba Bray's "Beauty Queens": http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/books/review/young-adult-books-beauty-queens-by-libba-bray.html?_r=0

My first encounter with Violent Femmes was Country Death Song:

I think it's a kind of fascist youth group thing. Get them when they're young. Get them to wear uniforms, salute a flag and have contempt for anything foreign. Learning about the world and about culture is what you should do at school anyway. Making a semi religious/political bootcamp of it is very scary indeed.

A list of my great books (some I've read many years ago and I'm not sure if rereading them would still make me feel they're that great, but younger minds can more easily be overwhelmed by a book thana cynic old one): "The Piano Teacher" - Elfriede Jelinek "The Golden Pavilion" - Yukio Mishima "The Island of the Damned" - Stig Dagerman "Cloud Atlas" - David Mitchell "Foucault's Pendulum" - Umberto Eco "1984" - George Orwell "Poison" - Kathryn Harrison "The Sandman" - Neil Gaiman "Accelerando" - Charles Stross "Chasm City" - Alistair Reynolds "A Catcher in the Rye" - J.D. Salinger "The Satanic Verses" - Salman Rushdie "The Shadow of the Wind" - Carlos Ruiz Zafon "Mythago Wood" - Robert Holdstock "Dirty Weekend" - Helen Zahavi "Imagica" - Clive Barker

Do we really want to watch a reality TV show for months with depressing, suicidal people?

We are the Borg. Resistance is futile.

It was a trap and Nye fell right into it. You don't debate insanities and put creationism on the same level as science. It's like debating the universe with an astronomer and an astrologer. Fools don't deserve our respect, not even our sympathy. They should be exposed for what they truly believe or at least ignored.

Carl Sagan's Cosmos was one of my favorite TV shows when I was a teenager. Sagan's had the ability to be awesome yet modest and science was his driving ambition. I don't feel that with Tyson at all. The choice for music by Clint Mansell is great though. In the first series the music by Vangelis made also a deep impact on me.

Hispanics have mixed with other races (native or african) for a much longer time than "white" americans. Their gene pool is much larger and their anti-viral and bacterial resistance is better evolved. White americans have hardly mixed at all.

You could read the mindblowing SF novel "Accelerando" by Charles Stross. Almost a new idea on every page.

After playing Tombraider 3 I decided to travel to a jungle, any jungle and I ended up in Thailand. I always get a bit of a Lara croft feeling when travelling the unbeaten paths of this world.

I think you should start in the theatre not the library. Midsummernight's dream has been an awakening for a lot of my friends (theatre can be fun!).