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2005-10-28 15:09

Seminarity

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(He's disapproving with some strength of divergent series, which such attitude is out of date since probably at least Poincar�, of course.)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

Holidays are (almost) here again!

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

Hello! Axe handle!

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

The Whitesoxes secret shame!

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's still in Albanian, though

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

Quelles chaussettes ? Les Chausettes Blanches !

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

What we want: an invention

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

Who will inform the informers?

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

Sm�rg�spost

�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

Plus �a cambio, innit?

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!

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2005-10-25 12:12

O tempora! O mores!

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.)

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2005-10-25 10:25

Why I am so logical

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.

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2005-10-24 16:25

Frasebook special pheature!

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).

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2005-10-24 12:17

Sm�rg�spost

�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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