"Losers are not traitors", what did George Washington look like?, and Genghis Khan, wordsmith

Yep, another link roundup. I love Yahoo! News’ Oddly Enough.

As China witnessed defeat early last week in some of its top events, such as women’s football, many blamed state media for creating a tense atmosphere and putting pressure on athletes.

Mari, Kelly, Chris and I were eating at Ruby Tuesday’s last week and watching the female gymnastics events. When the Chinese girls made their blunders, we joked to each other about how they were going to be executed when they got home. Apparently they were already thinking along the same lines. (And yes, yes we do have poor taste.)

Specialists at Washington’s home in Mount Vernon, Virginia, 16 miles (25.5 km) outside Washington, are gathering dozens of artefacts including snippets of hair and clothing that will be analysed over the next year.

Based on that information, they will make life-size models of the former president at three different points in his life that will go on display in 2006 as part of a new $85 million (54.17 million pounds) education centre and museum at Mount Vernon.

Sounds pretty neat.

I was interested to see that he lost his teeth at twenty…something that happens to people even today. In fact, it has occurred in my family.

The science of how they will reconstruct his face is remarkable. While it won’t be exact, it’ll be the closest we’ve ever gotten.

Historians have long assumed the ancient Mongolian ruler was illiterate, primarily because the Mongolian written language was created in the early 13th century, when Genghis Khan would have been in his 40s and not have had time to learn, the official Xinhua news agency said.

But now it looks like that wasn’t the case at all. Well, the man had to have been brilliant to do what he did. Maybe it just makes people uncomfortable to think so…