Asylum in Tennessee

German family seeks asylum in the US. in order to be able to home school. Uwe Romeike and his wife, Hannelore, have alleged religious persecution back in Germany and have moved to Morristown, Tenn., last month. Snip from cleveland.com:

Lutz Gorgens, German consul general for the Southeast United States, said he's not familiar with the Romeikes' specific situation but believes the claim of persecution is "far-fetched." He defended Germany's requirements for public education.

"For reasons deeply rooted in history and our belief that only schools properly can ensure the desired level of excellent education, we go a little bit beyond that path which other countries have chosen," Gorgens said.

Germany's approach to homeschooling is starkly different from the United States and other European countries. Homeschool students have been growing by an estimated 8 percent annually in the United States and as of 2007 totaled about 1.5 million.

As upset as you may get with the laic public school system - in the end, is home schooling a good idea?

Google front page spoof

On Mar 31 2009, at 11:59:99 PM, the following was linked through the Google front search page:

[...] But close though we may have come to a theory of the brain, the body - computer hardware - wasn't capable of handling the extraordinary processing demands that any reasonably "intelligent" brain would place on its circuitry until Moore's Law really kicked in a few years back and the modern ultra-dense machinery of atomic scale-sized gates and their light-based interconnections finally reached the scale of brain neurons - and then surpassed it, when, in early 2007, a tight-knit, vaguely feared quantum computing group here at Google
extended computers with quantum bits of Einstein-Bose condensate, polynomially speeding up our machines' data-processing ability.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/cadie/tech.html

The Google 'shadow quantum computing' group may very well exist, but I wonder if the joke is on them.