this might be us ...

Today, the Google image is replaced by this image. The skeleton, nicknamed Ida but actually called Darwinius Masillae, may or may not be a link between primates and us, humans.


Do note a couple of things :
- may or may not be, not is
- a link, not the link or the missing link

For that my readers and only friends, that is how science works. Science makes premises, then tests them. Sometimes the tests show that the premise is false, but that is not failure. No, it successfully marks a premise that can be discarded in favor of another promising premise.

That's how science advances and today the premise that floods the news is that Ida might be a step in our own advance ...

she sells sea shells on the shore

The shore here being the Dutch shore in Den Helder. The shells were not sea-shells, but training ammunition from a Belgian unit there for training. And they didn't sell the shells, they passed them out - for free - to children.

A lot of questions have been asked about this, all of them about the conduct of the Belgian troops ...

Back in the day, my parents took me on walks in the border area between Belgium and The Netherlands, just above Antwerp. There's some nice walking areas there, with forests, fields, bunkers from the second World War ... Sometimes we would pass an enclosed piece of forest and along the borders of those, especially in the morning and the early evening, you could find fired shells from hunters.

I took an interest in those. And the more they looked as if they had not been fired, the better. It was rare to find a really unfired one, but when that happened it was just great.

Just as my father had once taken me inside a bunker, he now explained to me how dangerous these shells were. And when he saw that the lesson did not take, he took me one evening when the hunters were still there. I saw everything that evening and when you see what one such shell does to a rabbit or a bird ...

The questions I would ask about the so-called incident in Den Helder would mainly be about the children :
- Were they out there hunting for shells ?
- What were they doing in the area of a military training ?
- Were they under proper guidance in such an area ?
- ...

Because yes, the soldiers were wrong to give the children unfired ammunition, but they would not have been so different from the hunters on that long ago trip, who wanted to show the child in attendance everything (and let him hold the gun and showed him the shells and the game they had shot).

I hope that at least some of the parents of the children concerned had a good talk with their offspring about this.