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2005-10-28 15:09
I never go to seminars but I went to this one, and the following quote
was quoted in Norwegish, and everyone seemed to know what it meant:
Divergente
R�kker er i det Hele noget Fandenskap, og det er en Skam at man
vover at grunde nogen Demonstration derpaa. Man kan faae frem hvad man
vil naar man bruger dem, og det er dem som har gjort saa megen Ulykke
og saa mange Paradoxer.
Abel, 1826
(He's disapproving with some strength of divergent series, which such
attitude is out of date since probably at least Poincar�, of course.)
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2005-10-28 10:57
We're not going home tonight, we're off instead to Cheltenham for a
dawn raid on Birmingham to get Lufthansad to M�nchen for viel
bier to drinken and sossage eaten.
Between now and then there's laundry, work, job-applications
(computational 'Wegian linguistics in Groningen? Sign us up!), and
bank details for Espanish expenses from long ago to be sorted. The
latter worries us most since it will involve the justly dreaded
Faxmachine.
After that, we'll need a holiday, for sure.
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2005-10-27 17:38
It
is dolphinic ultrasound and its beneficial effects of babies's
spicy brains, of which there are of course none known or plausibly
conjectured:
Forskningen �r fortfarande i sin linda, men Elisabeth Yalan, dekanus
p� barnmorskeh�gskolan i Peru, �r �vertygad om att det fungerar.
-Energin och de h�gfrekventa ljuden delfinerna ger ifr�n sig
registreras av barnets hj�rna n�r de �r inne i magen. Ljuden
stimulerar deras hj�rnaktivitet och h�rselorgan, s�ger hon till
tidningen Komo News.
The research is still in its infancy [ho ho!] but Elisabeth
Yalan, dekanus at the Midwiferycollege in Peru is convinced
that it works.
"Wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble. Wibble wibble spicy brain wibble
wibble", she said to the newsbladet Komo News.
This strikes us as an excellent way to separate over-rich Californian
hippies from some of their over-richness, of which we certainly approve.
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2005-10-27 13:39
For shame, honkballers, for shame!
De honkballers van Chicago White Sox hebben de World Series
gewonnen. De ploeg won gisteravond voor de vierde keer op rij van
Houston Astros in de finale van het Amerikaanse
landskampioenschap.
(Here is a poll to tell if you are a Whitesoxes supporter too, Varied
Reader: Did you know that the Houston Astros used to be the Houston
.45s? And that the number of blackpersons on their World Series
roster was precisely zero? And they are the preferred team of at
least one President Bush? The Whitesoxes might be honkballers, which
is certainly to be regretted, but they aren't the Astros.)
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2005-10-27 12:31
It is the
BBC world service again!
German-language broadcasts were stopped in 1999 after 60 years. The
BBC announced that audience research indicated that a large number of
decision-makers in Germany now listened to the BBC in English.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper retorted that "From now
on, anyone who doesn't speak English well enough isn't worthy of the
BBC".
Dutch, Finnish, French for Europe, Italian and Spanish all disappeared
over the years - as did Japanese, Hebrew and Malay.
But we should like to know exactly when; we should be
especially amused to hear BBC Dutch.
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2005-10-27 10:07
Les White Sox de Chicago ont remport� les honneurs de la S�rie
mondiale de baseball pour la premi�re fois depuis 1917 quand ils ont
battu les Astros de Houston 1-0 mercredi pour balayer les honneurs de
la s�rie en quatre matches.
Nous n'aimons pas beaucoup ces Astros de Houston, nous, puis nous
sommes ravi !
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2005-10-26 16:46
Computers are replacing radios, isn't it? I can get lots of radio on
my computer that I can't get on my radio, and that is fine and it is
also dandy. We like the future, especially when it has Stuff in it.
However, computers are either heavy and bulky, or big and clumsy and
limited in battery like, and that's bad. What we want, therefore, is
a system where the computer slurps down streams, yum yum, and recasts
them on some kind of local radio protocol within our house or
dwelling, and a local radio protocol receiver shaped like an
old-fashioned tranny that you can pick up that picks them up. This is
obviously way better than Digital Radio Proper (DPR), because DPR is
an idea whose time never was.
You could do this with Blootooth and a bit of 'puterside software, but
we're buggered if we can find anyone who has - searching for
Blootooth radio gets you a lot of admirably geeky stuff, but
it doesn't get what we want.
We suspect our new colleague could build one of these, if he wanted,
so our mission is to persuade him to want it. (We've slightly maybe
just blown the patent, though, isn't it?)
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2005-10-26 14:19
TT, the Zwedish equivalent of Reyters or AP, is being frozen out of
lah-di-dah DN and (more interestingly) Metro:
Gratistidningen Metro, som tidigare inneh�ll n�stan bara TT-telegram,
har ocks� sagt upp avtalet med TT och ska fr�n �rsskiftet klara sig
helt p� egen hand.
- Nyhetsfl�det sammanfattas p� m�nga st�llen i dag. Det kanske �r s�
att tiden f�r nationella nyhetsbyr�er av traditionell modell �r �ver,
s�ger chefredakt�ren Sakari Pitk�nen.
The freebladet Metro, which previously contained TT-telegram content
almost exclusively, has also cancelled its agreement with TT and from
the end of the year will go it alone.
The newsflood is gathered in many forms today. It may be that the era
of the tradional model of national newsbureaus is over, say
chiefeditor Sakari Pitk�nen.
We could do with knowing a lot more about the newssupplychain in the
'bladets, for sure. In particular, who has deals with whom. (We
often follow stories as they diffuse around the world, of course, but
we don't have a good networkmap.)
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2005-10-26 10:48
�1. A Giant kebap!
A sprightly 1800
kilos!
Costas Dasios driver restaurant i byen Patras, vest i Hellas. Der
selger han blant annet kebab, eller �gyros� som grekerne kaller den
popul�re matretten.
Costas Dasios runs a restaurant in the town of Patras in the west of
H�llas ("Greece"). There he sells kebabs or "gyros" as the Greeks
call the popular food-dish, amongst other things.
We found a counter-example to our theory that d�ner kebaps are very
globalised in the FDR. They call them, knowing no better, "gyros"
there too, but we didn't see any sensible ones and the unsensible ones
we saw were made of beef rather than the statutory lamb. (There is no
particular need to tell us that kebaps can be found in parts of the
FDR - our point is that there are places where they can't be
found, and we found them.)
�2. The end of an era
It
is the World Service, or rather it was, or ratherer it will have
been:
The World Service said broadcasts in Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech,
Greek, Hungarian, Kazakh, Polish, Slovak, Slovene and Thai languages
would end by March 2006.
We're not 100% on Kazakhstan, but for the rest you can't really argue,
isn't it?
�3. Foreign Feta Fetish? Forbidden!
This story has been a celebration of parochialisme in 'bladets near
and far, for
sure:
A North Yorkshire food producer has revealed her disappointment after
an EU ruling stopped her using the name "feta" on her locally-produced
cheese.
[... O]n Tuesday, judges ruled Greek feta had "Protected Designation
of Origin".
That's the Beeboid coverage, that is.
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2005-10-25 15:37
It is Billy
"O'Naire" Gates! And for some reason he has chosen to contemplate
the future of 'bladets in the langwidge of Dante!
E' sempre pessimista sul futuro dei libri e dei giornali? Dovranno
cambiare ancora?
�Tutto deve cambiare. Le auto, la tv, persino i musei. E' evidente che
la carta � destinata a perdere la sua posizione dominante. Se i suoi
figli le chiedono un' enciclopedia, lei d� loro un libro o un
computer? Per� ci sar� sempre bisogno di buone enciclopedie, e di
buoni articoli. Con il tablet-pc li scriverete ancora meglio �.
Lei legge i giornali americani? "New York Times", "Washington
Post"? Le piacciono?
�S�. Leggo tantissimo. Pi� on-line che su carta, per� �
(Executive paraphrase: Paper is doomed; everything flows; he reads the
'bladets, but online rather than treeware; tablet PCs!
But does he RSS? Enquiring minds need to know! With an RSS feed you
can smurf down the FT, the BBC, the Indybladet and the Scotsman and
still have room left over for the Globe and Mail, the Mail and
Guardian and the Associated Press base-ball feed. Put that in
your cambiare and smoke it, Mr Gates, we dare you!
[Permalink]
2005-10-25 12:12
So, like all right-thinking persons we have always favoured
watches with digital 24-hour displays and quartz timekeeping. (Atomic
radio clocks are very cool too, of course and for sure.)
However, digital watches - while excellent in every possible way
- are not always greatly admired among the greater public, who often lack
sense even when they were not born in that condition, so a while back,
contemplating the necessity of disguise, we bought a pointy-pointy
("analogue") watch.
The recent catastrophic failure of our digital watch's strap and our
jetlagged fuelled success in adjusting the strap on the pointy-pointy
means that we are now wearing it and we are thus contemplating the
aesthetics of such things and in particular the relationship between
the archaic interface and the timing technology. Here are some
possibilities that have occurred to us:
� The interface should be considered as a charming (or otherwise)
anachronisme, and therefore one should seek a mechanical movement with
n or more jewels to correspond to the "crap-tech" theme. This
is our position, pretty much. Our watch is only a Seiko - and it
isn't waterproof, has no alarm, can't set the hour separately from the
minutes (for timezone fun), and doesn't know what month it is nor how
many days are likely to be in it - but it has twenty-one (21) jewels.
So that's OK, then.
� The interface is very excellent and intuitive (there are persons who
think this!) and should be combined with the excellence of quartz
timing, because it is also nice to keep accurate time.
� Digital watches are for socially-maladroit geeks, but
technologically-deficient but chunkily dial-encrusted crap-tech
chronobling is cool and suave and groovy, especially when several
Formula 1 cardrivers endorse it.
(We will not hear, incidentally, of any suggestion that fountain pens
belong in the same class or category of things or entities, since we
happen to like them.)
[Permalink]
2005-10-25 10:25
From the Jargon
file:
At Stanford, `logical' compass directions denote a
coordinate system in which `logical north' is toward San Francisco,
`logical west' is toward the ocean, etc., even though logical north
varies between physical (true) north near San Francisco and physical
west near San Jose. (The best rule of thumb here is that, by
definition, El Camino Real always runs logical north-and-south.) In
giving directions, one might say: "To get to Rincon Tarasco
restaurant, get onto El Camino Bignum going logical north." Using the
word `logical' helps to prevent the recipient from worrying about that
the fact that the sun is setting almost directly in front of him.
Like Simstim, we
hold that Barcelona is on the southcoast of Espain, and we were very
confused to learn that conventional illogic ("wisdom") puts it in the
north of the country.
[Permalink]
2005-10-24 16:25
It is the Collins Dutch phrasebook ("Clear and concise for travellers
abroad")!
Wilt U wat sandwiches voor me laten klaar maken om mee te
nemen?
Have some sandwiches packed for me to take on the journey.
U hebt zeker wel zin een kopje thee (een borrel)?
You're probably dying for a cup of tea (drink)
IJs en weder dienende hopen we morgen vroeg te vertrekken
Weather permitting we hope to leave at dawn
Dit is voor het buitenland
This is for abroad
De lakens op dit bed zijn klam
The sheets on this bed are damp
Ik kan geen tango dansen
I don't know how to dance the tango
They go with Ik zou graag een glas bier willen hebben for "I
would like a glass of beer"; we always ask for an Amsterdammertje oop
north or a vaasje down south or these days often a Wiekse Witte
(a yummy Dutch white bier) en een something else.
But it's only fair to concede that we are often dying for a cup of tea
- the Dutch generally serve tea via glasses of not-quite-hot-enough
water and separate teabags on strings, and then only to cissies and
pregnant ladies (and occasionally the sillier sort of English).
[Permalink]
2005-10-24 12:17
�1. Is that the time?
We thought the clocks went back this weekend, but it's next weekend.
Given that we were on Yoorp time yesterday, we're not scheduling
anything more precisely than �1 hour.
�2. Prinsessstory
Daniel Westling �r p� v�g in i kungahuset och blir d� en av Sveriges
mest betydande m�n.
Daniel Westling is yet again featured in the 'bladets with the
flimsiest excuse imaginable.
�3. Base-ball!
It is the "World" Series! The Sox of Whiteness (Chicago) vs. the
Astroboys of Houston! They report it like so:
Chicago
pressured reliever Dan Wheeler on Juan Uribe's one-out double in
the seventh and Tadahito Iguchi's walk, and the White Sox loaded the
bases when Dye was awarded first base on a 3-2 pitch that umpires
ruled hit his hand.
Our detailed research reveals that Houston - notorious mostly for
being told about problems with spaceflights - is in fact in Texas, so
we are vigorously cheering on the Soxes, for sure.
�4. Zombie bone-eating snot flowers!
They're the best kind of bone-eating snot flowers that it is that
there are, for sure!
A new
species of marine worm that lives off whale bones on the sea
floor has been described by scientists. [...]
Such "zombie worms", as they are often called, are known from the deep
waters of the Pacific but their presence in the North Sea is a major
surprise. [...]
Adrian Glover and Thomas Dahlgren tell the journal the new species has
been named Osedax mucofloris, which literally means "bone-eating
snot-flower".
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