Here is an interesting article about babies and language identification. Pretty fascinating stuff. My sister and also k's uncle are part of a bilingual household and what I've observed in both seem to bear this out.

I also picked up "An Ordinary Man," by Paul Rusesabagina yesterday. Paul was the manager of the Hotel Mille Collines in Rwanda, and inspired the film Hotel Rwanda. It is extremely well written. He breaks it down this way:

"Between April 6th [1994], when the plane of President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down with a missile, and July 4, when the Tutsi rebel army captured the capital of Kigali, approximately eight hundred thousand Rwandans were slaughtered. This is a number that cannot be grasped with the rational mind. It is like trying--all at once--to understand that the earth is surrounded by billions of balls of gas just like our sun across across a vast blackness. You cannot understand that magnitude. Just try! Eight hundred thousand lives snuffed out in one hundred days. That's eight thousand lives a day. More than five lives per minute. Each one of those lives was like a little world in itself. Some person who laughed and cried and ate and thought and felt and hurt just like any other person, just like you and me. A mother's child, every one irreplacable. "

"At the end, the best you can say is that my hotel saved about four hours' worth of people. Take four hours away from one hundred days and you have an idea of just how little I was able to accomplish against the grand design."

The same thing, over a longer arc, is happening in Darfur as we speak. 400,000 have died so far.