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VISIT: the Hotel de Oriente Convention Centre at Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar

THE REPLICA of the Philippines’ first luxury hotel, the Hotel de Oriente Convention Centre, opened its doors for public tours this month at the heritage resort by the sea, Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar.

Stop playing Candy Crush. Here are four better commute killers

By Drew Beebe

HEY, watch this short video on your phone, OK?

Wang Fam

A HORROR-COMEDY from Viva Films, Wang Fam follows a family of aswang as they attempt to transition into a living a more normal, less monstrous life. Directed by Wenn V. Deramas, it stars Pokwang, Benjie Paras, and Wendell Ramos.

MTRCB Rating: PG

It’s the end of the word as we know it

By Jessica Zafra

EVERY YEAR the Oxford Dictionaries declare a Word of the Year, and this year it’s . Not “face with tears of joy,” which is the official name of that emoji, or “emoji,” the digital icon used to express emotion in text messages, but the pictograph of a weeping smiley face. is said to be “the word that best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015.” It won over competitors that included “sharing economy,” “refugee,” and my favorite, “lumbersexual” — one who cultivates the look and manner of dress of the rugged outdoorsy woodsy profession — and presumably other emojis (, you’re so 2005). We don’t know if “pabebe” was on the long list.

That’s right, the Word of the Year isn’t even a word.

For years we in publishing have dreaded the demise of the printed word, and now it’s official. Our devolution from “writers and editors” to “content-providers” is complete. Now that the worst has happened, it’s not so bad. It’s actually made our lives easier. No longer do we have to agonize over the exact turn of phrase to describe someone’s emotional state. Those style dictators Strunk & White have always told us to omit needless words. You can’t get more concise than .

Just as the Paleo Diet preaches a return to the eating habits of hunter-gatherers before evil, evil agriculture, emojis encourage us to revert to the modes of expression of cave painters. Although the bison of Altamira probably didn’t get emotional.

How many generations of students might have been spared the reams of tortuous prose with which Dostoevsky captured his protagonist’s guilt, or the miles of insomnia-curing paragraphs with which Proust described how he went to bed early. Granted, their lives would’ve been drearier and less worth living, but they would’ve had more time for other things, like staring at the wall until it was time for dinner, or drinking themselves to death. Consider the opening sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

But I’m wasting time, as word people always do. We’re in the thick of the Digital Age where the ability to express a thought the millisecond it occurs to you trumps depth, complexity and the boring stuff. On the bright side, and its brethren give me more time to produce the retro, irrelevant longform writing that gives me reason to live. I declare dibs on the word “obso-lit.”

Yazz ads zing with stars

Ads & Ends — Nanette Franco-Diyco

AFTER A TEXT that I received over the weekend suggesting that I download “a fascinatingly cute ad campaign that [my friend] stumbled upon on YouTube”, I viewed the Yazz pre-paid card’s advertising campaign — all four in the series — and was admittedly fully entertained.

Going batty: secrets behind upside-down flight landings revealed

WASHINGTON — It is an aerial maneuver far beyond the capabilities of even the most sophisticated modern aircraft: landing upside down on a ceiling. But it is routine business for bats, and now scientists have learned precisely how they do it.

Researchers using high-speed cameras to observe bats in a special flight enclosure said on Monday these flying mammals exploit the extra mass of their wings, which are heavy for their body size compared to those of birds and insects, in order to perform the upside-down landing.

They land that way in order to roost, as bats do, upside down on cave ceilings or under tree limbs.

Brown University scientists observed two species: Seba’s short-tailed bat and the lesser dog-faced fruit bat. They tracked their motions using three synchronized high-speed video cameras taking images at 1,000 frames per second, and studied weight distribution in the bats’ body and wings.

They found that by flapping both wings while folding one of them just a bit toward their body, a bat can shift its center of mass to perform a midair flip in order to alight on a ceiling.

“Flying animals all maneuver constantly as they negotiate a three-dimensional environment,” Brown biology and engineering professor Sharon Swartz said. “Bats employ this specific maneuver every time they land, because for a bat, landing requires reorienting from head forward, back up, belly down, to head down, toes up.”

When approaching their touchdown spot, bats are not flying very quickly, making it difficult to muster the type of aerodynamic forces generated by pushing against the air that could help position them for an upside-down landing. But their heavy wings enable them instead to generate inertial forces to reorient themselves in midair.

“This is similar to the way in which divers twist and turn during a high dive,” said Kenny Breuer, a Brown professor of engineering, ecology and evolutionary biology.

Ms. Swartz said bats are generally under-appreciated as skilled aviators because they are primarily nocturnal. “People have many opportunities to observe birds and insects flying, but the bat world is hidden in the night. The more we observe flight behavior in bats, the more we are impressed,” Ms. Swartz said.

The research was published in the journal PLOS Biology. — Reuters

Ukay-ukay from all over APEC: Philippine imports of worn clothes in 2014

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Global Terrorism Index 2015

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The Suman Index

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Which country is home to most generous OFWs?

OFW Remittance

Putting money where their mouth is: Philippines’ net FDI from APEC members

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Visitor arrivals in the Philippines from APEC members in 2013

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