Skype, clans and why Scotland looks crumpled

Here's a motley collection of things that fascinate me right now:

Phone free
Internet telephony, or, more precisely Skype. I discovered this via someone's blog. It's free software that allows you to make free phonecalls of unlimited duration, worldwide - according to their website. Yes? This sounds like my type of software. Just think of the possibilities - trans-Atlantic life coaching, trans-continental language lessons or just listening in while your nephews play the piano in Hong Kong!

Stay free
Skype was mentioned in the NRC Handelsblad, the Dutch newspaper which is the source for this fascinating piece of information: five African tribal clans, who live on the Andaman Islands, escaped the tsunami largely unscathed even though the islands took it full blast. According to anthropologists and Survival International - a UK organisation that keeps an eye on threatened groups of indigenous people - the tribes may have been saved by their intuition and by watching the behaviour of birds, animals and the sea itself.

Clan-in-a-box
The clans live on different islands and don't speak each others' languages. One clan that was decimated by the British (so much for our glorious Empire) in a previous century now numbers only 43 members. They have all been evacuated into a hotel for the time being as the damage to their island is so considerable. Bizarre. A whole clan in one hotel...

Spears and stones
Even more fascinating, in the same NRC news feature, is the fact that one of the five tribes attacked a rescue helicopter with spears and stones. Apparently, this has been their reaction in previous instances where Indian government help was offered. I find it heartening to know there are still real people like this around who've never heard of Starbucks and won't ever toe the corporate line. They're right, too. Let us lot in and your life as you know it is finished...

An ocean of difference
And, thinking about ancient times, how about this fascinating little fact from the BBC book 'The British Isles: A Natural History' by Alan Titchmarsh: 450 million or so years ago, Scotland and England were separated by an ocean as wide as the Atlantic. Scotland's mountains were formed when England crashed into it. (Or, in other words, England was always bad news for Scotland).

Scotland was apparently attached to Northern Ireland in those days - and located next to Newfoundland - while England was together with current-day Wales, somewhere around Africa. Snowdonia, in Wales, is an extinct marine volcano. Birmingham used to be in a desert. North Yorkshire was once a tropical sea and Britain used to be located round about the equator.

Amazingly, the line where England and Scotland finally joined corresponds pretty much to the present day political border between the two countries. I find useless facts like that really interesting! They add zero to anyone's Gross National Product but just amaze me.