New Scientist: Europe’s worst ever floods linked to poor land management:

Engineers have channelled all the major rivers that flooded this month – draining wetlands, straightening meanders and cutting them off from their flood plains with high banks.

The aim was to protect surrounding land from floods and send the water down to the sea as fast as possible. But instead it has tended to create massive and comparatively sudden surges of water down the rivers, where in the past the water would have been delayed for days or even weeks as it meandered across the river’s natural flood plain.

Oh dear, a genuine public goods problem. I suppose cities downstream could contract with owners of land in the floodplains upstream, but that just transfers the free rider problem.

Omniglot – a guide to writing systems. I have seen nothing like this on the Web. It even shows some scripts missing from my various books on the field.

Some say a woman ought not to try to defend herself with a gun, because her attacker will just take it away from her and shoot her with it. Ha ha ha!

It’s ages since I got a spam of the form “For $39.99 we’ll submit your site to 273 top search engines . . . .” Remember them? I always wondered who the heck would buy that service.

We’re living in the future: I just got spammed by Hamas.

Reason: Forever Young: The new scientific search for immortality. (Thanks to Paul Hsieh for the link.)

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

School officials in California are warning parents that they cannot educate their children at home unless they obtain professional teaching credentials.