【正文】 self. And so it does — and all would be well were reason the only judge in the creationism/evolution debate. 9701 It was 3:45 in the morning when the vote was finally taken. After six months of arguing and final 16 hours of hot parliamentary debates, Australia39。s world history. The full import may take a while to sink in. The NT Rights of the Terminally Ill law has left physicians and citizens alike trying to deal with its moral and practical implications. Some have breathed sighs of relief, others, including churches, righttolife groups and the Australian Medical Association, bitterly attacked the bill and the haste of its passage. But the tide is unlikely to turn back. In Australia — where an aging population, lifeextending technology and changing munity attitudes have all played their part — other states are going to consider making a similar law to deal with euthanasia. In the US and Canada, where the righttodie movement is gathering strength, observers are waiting for the dominoes to start falling. Under the new Northern Territory law, an adult patient can request death — probably by a deadly injection or pill— to put an end to suffering. The patient must be diagnosed as terminally ill by two doctors. After a cooling off period of seven days, the patient can sign a certificate of request. After 48 hours the wish for death can be met. For Lloyd Nickson, a 54yearold Darwin resident suffering from lung cancer, the NT Rights of Terminally Ill law means he can get on with living without the haunting fear of his suffering: a terrifying death from his breathing condition. I39。t take in the stranger and take care of him, there was no one else who would. And someday, remember, you might be in the same situation. Today there are many charitable anizations which specialize in helping the weary traveler. Yet, the old tradition of hospitality to strangers is still very strong in the US, especially in the smaller cities and towns away from the busy tourist trails. I was just traveling through, got talking with this American, and pretty soon he invited me home for dinner — amazing. Such observations reported by visitors to the US are not unmon, but are not always understood properly. The casual friendliness of many Americans should be interpreted neither as superficial nor as artificial, but as the result of a historically developed cultural tradition. As is true of any developed society, in America a plex set of cultural signals, assumptions, and conventions underlies all social interrelationships. And, of course, speaking a language does not necessarily mean that someone understands social and cultural patterns. Visitors who fail to translate cultural meanings properly often draw wrong conclusions. For example, when an American uses the word friend, the cultural implications of the word may be quite different from those it has in the visitor39。 the biological Utopia has arrived. Strangely, it has involved little physical change. No other species fills so many places in nature. But in the past 100,000 years — even the past 100 years — our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not. We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us. Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution: they “l(fā)ook at an anic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his prehension.” No doubt we will remember a 20th century way of life beyond prehension for its ugliness. But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us. 0003 When a new movement in art attains a certain fashion, it is advisable to find out what its advocates are aiming at, for, however farfetched and unreasonable their principles may seem today, it is possible that in years to e they may be regarded as normal. With regard to Futurist poetry, however, the case is rather difficult, for whatever Futurist poetry may be — even admitting that the theory on which it is based may be right — it can hardly be classed as Literature. This, in brief, is what the Futurist says: for a century, past conditions of life have been conditionally speeding up, till now we live in a world of noise and violence and speed. Consequently, our feelings, thoughts and emoti。 on the contrary, many of them lie deep in the interior of a plate. Most of the hot spots move only slowly, and in some cases the movement of the plates past them has left trails of dead volcanoes. The hot spots and their volcanic trails are milestones that mark the passage of the plates. That the plates are moving is now beyond dispute. Africa and South America, for example, are moving away from each other as new material is injected into the seafloor between them. The plementary coastlines and certain geological features that seem to span the ocean are reminders of where the two continents were once joined. The relative motion of the plates carrying these continents has been constructed in detail, but the motion of one plate with respect to another, cannot readily be translated into motion with respect to the earth?s interior. It is not possible to determine whether both continents are moving in opposite directions or whether one continent is stationary and the other is drifting away from it. Hot spots, anchored in the deeper layers of the earth, provide the measuring instruments needed to resolve the question. From an analysis of the hotspot population it appears that the African plate is stationary and that it has not moved during the past 30 million years. The significance of hot spots is not confined to their role as a frame of reference. It now appears that they also have an important influence on the geophysical processes that propel the plates across the globe. When a continental plate es to rest over a hot spot, the material rising from deeper layer