Category: Need more MoPo? Check Out These Random Posts

North Korea is sending an onslaught of faxes to South Korea, blaming its neighbor for tensions over a disputed island, an official said Wednesday.

Earlier this month, faxes started arriving at South Korean companies, South Korean Unification Ministry deputy spokeswoman Lee Jong-joo said Wednesday. The faxes blame South Korea for the November 23 artillery attack on Yeonpyeong Island. Four South Koreans, two military personnel and two civilians, died when North Korea hit the island with artillery.

As much as I love to see things blown up like this, I can’t help but think that the ten consoles used for this could have made some less-fortunate kids really happy this Christmas.

Remember memorizing the periodic table in high school? Well, forget it. Some information on the table is about to be reset.

The world’s top chemists and physicists have determined that the atomic weights of 10 elements – ones you’ve actually heard of – need to be expressed as an interval (or range) rather than a static number, Science Daily reports.

The new atomic weights of hydrogen, lithium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, sulfur, chlorine and thallium will more accurately reflect how those elements occur in nature.

Some years ago I had a colleague I’ll call June. It seemed that every time I went to the ladies’ room, June was there, applying mascara, combing her long, dark tresses and chatting. She also spent lots of time out on the sidewalk smoking, and in the cafeteria.

Exceedingly friendly and warm, she knew everyone and devoted much of her day to catching up on their personal news. What she didn’t spend much time on was work. A guy who sat in the cubicle next to hers once told me that he estimated she put in just two hours a day of what could be described as productive labor.

Eric Abrahamson, a professor at Columbia Business School who specializes in leadership and organizational problem solving, calls people like June “Michelangelos of work avoidance.” Abrahamson studies workplace fads and time management and has looked closely at the ways some employees manage to get paid to do nothing. He doesn’t advocate their practices, but he says that understanding them can help managers address office inequities and make their teams more productive.

There are many things to dislike about Christmas: the bloated newspaper ads, the second-rate music repeated endlessly in shopping malls, the inane evangelical bleating that “Jesus is the reason for the season”, and the pressure to conform lest you be labeled a Scrooge, or, even worse, a Grinch.

But there’s one Christmas tradition that my wife and I have never shared: deceiving our kids about the real nature of Santa.

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The Kangbashi district began as a public-works project in Ordos, a wealthy coal-mining town in Inner Mongolia. The area is filled with office towers, administrative centers, government buildings, museums, theaters and sports fields—not to mention acre on acre of subdivisions overflowing with middle-class duplexes and bungalows. The only problem: the district was originally designed to house, support and entertain 1 million people, yet hardly anyone lives there.