Life as a Goldfish

It is often claimed that goldfish have a three second memory. Therefore, if you put two goldfish in a bowl, as soon as they turn around, they would forget about the other fish, and they would be obliged to say: "How do you do. It is a pleasure to meet you. Have you come far?"

Luckily for the goldfish that is just a myth. Goldfish can remember things for months. Just try to borrow money from one. I can guarantee that it will not let you do it a second time.

Now to the interesting part. Some adults actually have the mythical three second memory. They see another person do something silly, and the adult says: "is that not amazing, how silly he is?" Three seconds later, they see someone else do something silly, and they repeat: "is that not amazing, how silly he is?"

This can go on for ever. These adults simply cannot learn that a lot of people do stupid things.

It always amazes me, when I meet that kind of adult.

Business Advice

If you are taking a business decision or a political decision, and you think all the consequences will be good, you can be certain that there are factors you have forgotten.

If you are taking a decision and you think all the consequences will be bad, you are just silly.

The Right Selection

It is easy to stand back and scorn Bush and Blair for their misjudgement of their failure in Iraq. However, it is very likely that their original mistakes were perfectly explicable. They had a lot of high quality information from very good sources, which to a good part hinted that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The rest of us had much less information, and from that we judged that it was unlikely to be any WMD in Iraq. The problem was that our information was low quality. It turned out to be a very good selection of data, but the quality was low. CIA provided very good quality data, but unfortunately the selection was very bad.

Picasso's Inspiration

If one were to select the greatest of all the 20th century artists, it is very likely that Picasso would be on the top. He made a fortune of his genius in the later part of his life, and his family goes on doing so today, licensing his name to right and left.

However, if the laws of intellectual property of today had applied in the beginning of his career, it is very possible that he never would have made it. Cubism was created by him and Braque together. It is not unlikely that Braque would have claimed ownership of the style, won a law case and thereby prevented Picasso from ever using it again. Picasso would then not have been able to paint Les demoiselles d'Avignon or Guernica. He would never had risen to fame, and the 20th century would be one great artist short.

According to NPR, Shakespeare wrote only three original plays. The stories for the rest of them he stole from someone else.

Which means that the application of property laws of the 21st century would have killed off both Shakespeare and Picasso.

Which here is mentioned to anyone who thought the laws were there to support great art.


"Bastubadaren" by Tora Vega Holmström

Hooray for government power!

Once upon a time, it was thought that it was the responsibility of the government to make sure public services worked: roads, defence, and later on public communications like mail and phones.

However, in this brave new world of electrons no government, as far as I know, has taken the step that seems logical: to guarantee that we all have a free mail-account and server space to save our data.

Both the technology and the cost is now at a level where it would be very easy.

"It is not needed", you say. "There are plenty of free services out there already."

As far as I know, there is no free service, but there are plenty of ad-sponsored services. And I do not know about you. I freely admit that I do not trust my government very much to honour the confidentiality of my data, but I trust it much more than any commercial provider.

Inbreeding

It is completely illogical that we have borders to restrict people from moving. The result is that people from the same country mostly stay put and breed strange ideas among themselves - often ideas which foreigners are very quick to recognise as silly.

The effect is the same as when people from a small village only marry each other, or when the royal houses of Europe did so. The result is that defects are magnified.

There is nothing wrong with the idea of borders, of course. But they should be used the opposite way round. At birth, every human should be given a passport. After the age of twenty, each human should be prevented from ever again going back to the country where he was born.

That's the only way to make sure we share the rich experiences of all the world's cultures.

Personal Ad

My grandmother, who is not internet savvy, asked me to post the following ad without reading it. I promised to do that. I will just type it:

"Found the meaning of life. Looking for the person who dropped it. Also looking for person who can tell me what to do next in life."

The perfect level

My daughter's company is currently looking for new staff. They have had problems in the past with employees who were too smart and who could not adapt to the common stupidity level of the company. Their new vacancy advertisement lists as first requirement:

* Ability to tell which is the largest island in the Baleares.

The really stupid people will not be able to find the answer. The really smart people will not bother applying for a position which such a silly requirement. And only the ones with the perfect stupidity level remains. Clever, isn't it?

God is a result of evolution

I am sure that there have been societies in the past, where most people had no religion. No such society has survived. This proves that religion is necessary for the survival of society and man.

The only way for creationist to prove that they are right, would be to show up a society without religion, because only in a world created by God, such a society could survive.

Creators' Rights of Intellectual Property

Several hundred years ago, there were no copyright laws. If you got hold of the music to Bach's Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, you were free to perform it as much as you wanted without paying him a dime.

This was not so, because no one thought he was worth any money, but because it was difficult to trace where his music was performed, and it was difficult to transfer him money, if you happened to be far away.

It was only in the 19th century that better communications made it easier to trace where a composer's music was performed. Concerts are after all often announced in newspapers. And it became easier to send him the money he deserved through a more developed banking system.

We are now at the beginning of the 21st century, and the situation becomes increasingly more like what it was like in J. S. Bach's times.

If I buy a DVD with the musical Starlight Express, I can watch it as much as I want. Within shortly it will be easy to transfer the entire copy as a disk image to all my friends, who in their turn can transfer it to their friends and so on. It does not really matter if the DVD producer adds copy protection and digital signature. In the end, I can always point a video camera at the screen, just like my eyes and ears do, and record the whole thing. Soon that can be done extremely quickly at very high quality and you will get a file that weighs nothing, takes no space, and which you can send to all your friends. This makes it virtually impossible to control where a piece is performed and enjoyed.

The system is imploding. But then, who in his right mind would prefer to listen to Starlight Express rather than Das Wohltemperierte Klavier?

A slow stream

All reports about this seem to come from the same source, so one should not necessarily believe it, but it is kind of important, so let's just assume that it is true.

The Gulf Stream stopped.

It did not stop for ever. It is not all over. It is not a case of imminent winter and huge glaciers for all of Northern Europe.

However, it did stop for ten full days. And that is worrying enough. It does not make you think, because you do not know what to make of it, but it does make you worry.

You know all you need to know

If you think you can trust that your local newspaper or television station keeps you up to date with the major events in the world, ask yourself if it reported on the expulsion of 150,000 Arabs from Niger with a notice of a few days.

One hundred and fifty thousand is the equivalent of a fairly big town. Imagine that everyone in your block and all the surrounding blocks, until you reach 150,000 persons, were asked to leave the country you live in within a few days. Would you think that was of no concern to the rest of the world?

The expulsion started 26 October, but the decision has since been withdrawn, and you can now forget about it. However, if your local news source did not mention this case of ethnic cleansing, when it was announced, don't forget that it sometimes leaves news out.

Tale of Two Numbers

Currently 2,782 Americans have died in the war in Iraq (العراق). That is a very high number. Imagine that you go to work by bus every day. Imagine that the bus is full in both directions. Then imagine that every bus during one month falls down an abyss and everyone in that bus dies - both in the morning and the evening. Then you get roughly the number of American deaths in Iraq.

And yet, this was not a war in America. How many Iraqis have died? According to research referenced to by The Economist, the number probably is around 650,000 and it may be close to one million. This is excess deaths, the number of persons who died due to the war, and who probably would not have died, if Saddam Hussein (صدام حسي) had stayed in power.

That means around 4% of the Iraqi population has died. And about 0.001% of the American population has died.

If you ever wonder why some Iraqis are not grateful for having been liberated by America, consider those numbers.

Unless you know what they want, you cannot give it

The UN exercises "pressure" on North Korea. Well, it may be no pressure at all. Unless you know what the North Korean decision takers really want and what they really want to avoid, it is impossible to exercise any pressure.

And it seems no one knows what the North Korean decision takers want.

It is not enough to be right

The French parliament has adopted a law which makes it illegal to deny the Turkish genocide of Armenians 1915-1917. It is a law against the freedom of speech, but even if one in general loves laws against the freedom of speech, this is not one of the ones to love. This is a law about something that happened in Turkey 90 years ago. The genocide did occur, but a lot of Turks have decided not to believe it - mostly out of national pride, one would assume. And a law against the belief of the majority of another country's government and parliament is rarely a wise move.

And what good comes?

It is easy to attack the American activity in Iraq based on news reports:

* suicide bombers
* 25 local policemen killed or so injured that they have to be removed each day
* lack of respect from the American side for the huge number of dead Iraqi, while the count of American lost lives is cautiously observed
* increased extremist activities in Iraq and in the rest of the world
and so on...

However, surely there are some positive things that come out of it as well. Where are the reports of new Iraqi roads built for American money, improved telecommunications, huge campaigns of cultural activities all over the country, increased access to high quality products in ordinary shops and so on?

Are there no reports of these activities?

And are there any such activities?

Democratic Criminals

The president of the Swedish Social Democratic youth organisation, Anna Sjödin, was charged for violent assault on a guard at a restaurant in Stockholm a few months ago. She was recently sentenced for this and for stealing his badge and calling him racist names. She does not want to resign.

In the new right-wing government, the minister of Culture, Cecilia Stegö Chilò, has not paid television licence for the last 16 years. She does not want to resign.

The new minister of trade, Maria Borelius, employed baby sitters without declaring it; she has not paid her television license since she recently moved back to Sweden from England, she has not paid any tax for the benefit of living for free in a house in Sweden owned by a company from Jersey and she has failed to follow laws to prevent insider trading. She does not want to resign.

These people should be sacked straight away. This would be undemocratic. To prevent people who have committed petty crimes from taking part of the government would exclude a large part of the population, who actually are Swedish citizens, and who have citizen rights. However, even though it is undemocratic, they should be sacked. Honesty is more valuable than democracy.

Hit and run

The only possible punishment to North Korea, 조선민주주의인민공화국, for its nuclear test seems to be hit and run.

Military action is out. The risks in human lives is far too high - especially considering Seoul's (서울) close location to the Northern border.

Economic sanctions are also out. They would isolate the North even more, and it would victimize the population much harder than the decision taking leaders.

One possibility is a sudden and hefty sanction. During one month, there will be no contact with North Korea. No food, no fuel, no contacts at any level. After that, go back to full economic exchanges to help the poor fellows out.

A one month sanction would certainly be felt in the North. The government would have big difficulties explaining to their population what was going on, when suddenly electricity and heating got cut off suddenly. And it would be difficult to explain to workers in foreign factories, why they were locked out from their jobs for one month without pay.

It would send the signal "the rest of the world will and can act".

Let them in

There is no cost letting large numbers of poor people into a rich country. It may be tricky to organise the integration fast enough, but it will happen sooner or later. The immigrants will be productive in a few years, and everyone will be richer.

Don't let them sink

It is said that The People's Republic of China, 中华人民共和国, and South Korea, 대한민국, Daehan Minguk, are very reluctant to see the government of North Korea, 조선민주주의인민공화국, Chosŏn Minjujuŭi Inmin Konghwaguk, crumble. The reason would be that it might trigger floods of millions of refugees, which will be very difficult to take care of.

If this is so, it is immoral. The potential refugees currently starve in their own country. Unless the regime goes, the high death rate in the North will continue. Not toppling the North Korean government means that we indirectly kill a large number of innocent victims in the North, who otherwise could have been saved.

Take as a contrast the European way. Western Germany merged with much poorer Eastern Germany. Helmut Kohl denied it would cost anything, but most people knew better. And yet they went for it. And Eastern and Central European countries are being admitted into the European Union at a high speed. We know it costs, but it would cost even more to leave them outside.

To History

A friend of mine is president of a major superpower. He has achieved several things which will make him go to history.

* He started a war against something that was not there. That war has so far cost around 50.000 lives.

* He insulted and provoked a country with a liberal president so they elected a new president which denies the holocaust and wants to erase Israel from the map of the world.

* He provoked another country so that they developed and detonated a nuclear bomb.

Sometimes I have a feeling my friend has not understood that the important thing is to succeed. Whether you are firm or flexible does not matter. Just make sure that you don't mess things up.

North Korea's Needs

North Korea claims, or at least pretends, to have performed its first nuclear test. It may also have been a lot of conventional explosives set off just to give the impression.

The news sites do not tell us why they do this, for the simple reason that no one knows why North Korea deliberately chooses to annoy the rest of the world.

However, it seems likely that they simply want attention. They are like the little boy whose parents do not care for him, so he does something - anything - to catch their attention. He breaks a flower pot, they shout at him, and he got what he wanted - a recognition that he is there.

The cry for help from North Korea may be more than that, however. It may be like Grand Fenwick, which in the story started war against the US only in order to lose and subsequently get plenty of American help to become rich. It is in other words a very ill expressed cry for help.

Not all knowledge is needed

There are few things as fascinating as the hunt for the inner truth about everything - elementary particles, quanta, the most distant parts of the universe.

However, to be honest, do we need to know it? Did God intend us to know it? Or was his purpose with these enigmas just to give us something to think of? Perhaps he sits there and invents new enigmas for us, as we find the answers to the previous ones. Once we find the atoms, he invents the neutrons, protons and electrons. And once we find them, he invents the quanta. And now he has come up with this clever string theory, which he knows we cannot possibly verify.

Let's work together

Nicolas Sarkozy wants all Europe to have common standards for immigration.

That is an excellent idea. However, instead of having a tough standard, which Sarkozy for some reason seems to want, it would open up the possibility to make sure that no European country locks non-Europeans out.

Intelligent Design - Simply Wrong

Intelligent design is fascinating, as there is absolutely no argument for it, and yet there are people who believe in it.

It claims to fill in the holes in the theory of evolution, but it does so in such a clumsy way that it fills the holes with nothing but air. At the same time it removes all the explanations there are in the theory of evolution, and replaces them with air as well.

Paul A. Hanle writes that "the notion of intelligent design is clever". No, it's not. It is brain dead from beginning to end. There are some questions to ask about evolution, and not all of them are stupid. However, "intelligent design" is not the answer to any of them.

It is true that our current knowledge of the evolution of species does not explain every detail of what has happened during the past billion years. However, that only means it is incomplete - not that it is wrong.

The Bible is not complete either. It does not tell you which means of transport our souls will use to reach heaven - by train, by helicopter, carried by flights of angels? Nowhere does the Bible specify this. That does not mean that the Bible is wrong. Just that it is incomplete. Like the theory of evolution.

Pan-African

There are a lot of things to say about the expression "ubuntu". It is used to describe some very nice and important things like the necessity of inter-human relations and kindness. The hitch is that it probably does not exist. In Xhosa and Zulu, where the word comes from, it is certainly used with a different meaning from what it has acquired when it became an international word. One dictionary translates it simply as "humanity".

But one thing is certain, it is not "an African worldview". Talking about "an African worldview" implies that people in Egypt have more in common with people in Swaziland or Angola than they do with people in Jordan.

If you are European, try giving an example of a "European worldview", which applies from Albania to Iceland. If you are Asian, try giving an example of an "Asian worldview" which would apply from North Korea to Turkey. If you are American or a journalist at the BBC, just trust me: it makes no sense.

Kant was wrong

The Berlin Opera is hesitant about a performance of Mozart's Idomeneo, as the scenography includes the cut off head of the prophet Mohammad. This, it is said, generates a security threat, considering the ardent responses to the Mohammad cartoons in Jyllandsposten.

Anyone who thinks the answer here is clear, is wrong. Kant's idea of a categorical imperative, which is supposed to be applied to all situations that resemble each other, is an idea for lazy people, who do not bother looking into all the circumstances of each individual case.

Whether the Berlin Opera should perform this scenography of Idomeneo or not, is impossible to tell. Anyone who says they have an answer is wrong.

Let's Solve it Ourselves

A very wise man, me, has reported that the speed by which species disappear from the earth approximates that of a paleontologic mass extinction.

But that is just the natural selection.

Luckily we can create our own new species with gene technology.

Is there anything as beautiful as nature?

Yugoslavia remains

Looking at a map of the remaining candidate countries for the EU, it turns out that the only countries who are left in the line are Turkey, Albania and Yugoslavia. At least that would have been the case, had the maps stayed the way they were 15 years ago.

The situation is a little more complicated now, as Yugoslavia broke up into: Slovenia (already a member in the EU), Croatia and Macedonia ("official candidates"), Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro (why-not? countries).

But for us who grow up when Yugoslavia was still a real country, the mnemonic is "Yugoslavia is in line for the EU".

We are getting two more friends

It was confirmed today that Romania and Bulgaria may join the EU in January 2007.

Let's just not forget that we are not getting two new friends. It is just two of our existing friends that are invited inside. Dear Serbia, Ukraine, Albania, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Swaziland and Belize and all of our other friends out there. We have not forgotten you. We are ashamed of having to say that we have no more room inside right now. You will be invited inside, as soon as we have made some more room.

If it is a day when we happen to behave decent.

Respect or Accept?

The pope has received ambassadors from 22 mainly moslem countries to stress the respect we Christians (agnostics or not) have for Islam.

Personally I have no respect at all for Islam. I think it is a religion that is nuts. But I realise that a lot of of other religions must think the same thing about my own Christianity. Jesus, God's son! Wine turning into blood, and then Christians drink it like vampires! Talk about crazy beliefs!

The important thing for man is not to find good things with and respect other people's beliefs. It is much more important for man to accept other people's crazy beliefs than their sensible ones. Accepting madness is the most urgent challenge.

Our Enemy: The Young Ones

After unrest at Nørrebro in Copenhagen (København), 266 people have been arrested.

The strange thing here is that no one seems to know why it all happened. There was a demonstration "for" Ungdomshuset (the House of the Youth) at Nørrebro. The demonstrators had not told the police about the demonstration in advance, and some of them claim they simply "defended themselves".

When we are young we want to see results - quick visible results. If the result happens to be arson and vandalised buildings, so be it - as long as it is a result.

Unfortunately it is quite common that we stay young the first 90 or so years after our fifth birthday.

A Proof of the Obvious is Usually Wrong

It is now claimed that the Iraq war worsens the terror threat.

As it is so obvious that it is true, it is likely that the report that concludes it is bad. The New York Times realises it is obvious, but "this is obvious" is not news. They need a report or something to refer to - something new that happened.

Consequently they look desperately for any source that says anything remotely like it, and then publish it without critically evaluating the source. It is not needed, as it came to the obvious conclusion.

Sadly, this kind of less than serious journalism may be the only way to get the truth through the thick skull of a rather dim friend of mine who is president of a superpower somewhere.

No surprise, but a waste of... everything

The Saudi government has predictably denied the reports of yesterday.

Yesterday newspapers all over the world reported a guess. Today newspapers all over the world say "oops".

It is no surprise. But it is remarkable that so much time and resources were spent on such a meaningless exercise.

A great story

There are reports that Osama Bin Laden, أسامة بن لادن , is dead. There was originally one article in one fairly small French newspaper, L'Est Républicain, which claimed that "it is said that" he is dead. That has been taken up by newspapers all over the world.

One cannot tell from this incident that he is alive. Or dead. But one can tell that reports are easily accepted worldwide without criticism by journalists who see a good story.

And what if it does not stop there?

There have been different calculations how long it will take China to get to the same development level as the industrialised world. The poor countries of the world together already have as big a Gross Domestic Product as the rich countries combined. China is likely to become the biggest economy of the world around 2040.

And what happens if it doesn't stop there? If China not only becomes as rich as the Europeans and Americans, but if it just steams ahead, and leaves the West behind? And what if this happens without their introducing free elections and democracy?

Pleading Innocent

It turns out that the dinosaur Coelophysis most likely was not a cannibal after all. It is embarassing that this horrible calumny has lasted for so long. An excuse to the poor animal is needed.

As unfortunately no Coelophysis are alive any longer, you can instead apologise to its closest descendants - the birds. Next time you see a sparrow or an ostrich, don't forget to ask for its forgiveness.

Cinematographic History

Max Pégas (1925-2003) was a French film producer. The ingredients of a good film are an interesting story, good humour, talented actors, beautiful scenery, skilled photographers and a surprising ending. Pégas' films lacked all that. He tried to compensate by using settings where the textile costs were very limited, like the beaches of St. Tropez. One could claim that his films were a waste of time and money. In fact, one should do so.

Democracy is no religion

It would be irrational to treat democracy as a religion or a god, which had to be obeyed. There is nothing sacred with democracy. Democratically elected officials have made millions of mistakes during the past millennia. And democratic referendums have given ridiculous outcomes.

There may be many cases, where other systems would have served a much better purpose.

But the funny thing is that those cases seem very, very rare. It is not difficult to find examples of democracies making mistakes, but it is very difficult to find cases, where one could be certain that another system would have avoided those same or even worse mistakes.

When Sonthi Boonyaratglin, สนธิ บุญยรัตกลิน, takes power in Thailand, ราชอาณาจักรไทย, there is no reason to believe that this improves anything. Sure, some of the mistakes of Thaksin Shinawatra, ทักษิณ ชินวัตร, will be corrected. However, there is no safe guard against the flood of brand new mistakes Sonthi Boonyaratglin may commit instead.

The World is Run by Taxi Drivers

Not only do taxi drivers control a big part of our transport industry, they control our media.

I just made a search on news.google.com for the words "thailand", "taxi" and "driver". It turns out that I get 120 matches from professional journalists around the world, who used taxi drivers as an important source of information about the recent undemocratic coup d'état.

Nobly Wrong

The UK defence secretary, Des Browne, claims the West has a noble cause in Afghanistan.

I perfectly agree, but that is without importance, as long as he cannot convince the Taleban he is right. Yes, I said "convince" them, not "fight" them.

Who cares about the Panda?

If the pandas were to disappear from the earth, that would actually not be a big deal. If our grandchildren won't be able to see any tigers or bald eagles, so what? And to be honest, when was your life last disrupted because of the lack of dodo birds?

Plenty of species go extinct all the time. That is the way it has always been since the beginning of life on earth. If one species more or less goes extinct today does not matter.

What is more disturbing is that the number of species that disappear is increasing. A lot. There is something called a "background rate" of extinction, which is the natural rate of extinction, when nothing particular happens, like an asteroid hitting the earth or so. Current estimates give that we currently are at least 50 times above the background rate. And the earth may within a few decades reach 10000 times the background rate. This would mean that we currently are entering an era of mass extinction comparable to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Ours is a time of record breakers.

There is much more information about this available on the net including a very simple graph.

Beautiful Lies

When you watch a documentary, be it about nature or some exotic place, where you never have been, it is always a good idea to try to watch around the corners. What may be just outside the picture? Why did the cameraman cut at that place?

In general, the more beautiful the photography, the less trustworthy the content. If a photographer is able to evoke extraordinarily amazingly pretty pictures, that means that he is very skilled in doing that. And that also means he is very skilled in avoiding the ordinary and ugly, which is the most representative of any place in the world.

Take any famous and beautiful city, Rome, Heidelberg, Nice, Kyoto (京都), Macao (澳門, aò mén, ou mùn), Boston, Timbuktu, Cape Town, Buenos Aires, San Francisco... They all have nice parts, but the most representative picture of any of them is one of utmost normality.

Oops from the Pope

The Vatican is concerned that the protests against the Pope's recent talk about Islam "might develop into violence directed at the tiny city state".

It is of course not a matter of "the Moslems" being a threat. The threat is that among the more than 1 billion Moslems in the world, a tiny fraction may be so upset that they choose violence to vent their anger. Even if only 0.000001 % of all Moslems do so, that still means a group of ten people, who with the right skills may do some serious damage to the church.

Freedom of speech

It was so much easier to defend the freedom speech in the past, when there was no technical solution for people to publish their drivel to the entire world. The advance of technology has made the subject much more sensitive.

Damn you, Gutenberg!

That's not a Language. THIS is a language.

When you learn a foreign language in school, you are usually exposed simply to vocabulary and grammar of the spoken language. However, there are such a lot of other communication means that are linked to different groups of people.

When an Italian shakes another Italian's hand every day in the morning, the message is not different from the Japanese who bows to his compatriote or the American who waves his hand and says "whazzup!" They are all different ways of expressing a greeting.

Far too often one can hear things like that the Italian in the situation above is more formal than the American. He is not. He just manifests his greeting in a different way. He greets in a different language.

But language goes further than that.

The way the Japanese keeps saying "mmm" during a conversation is a way to express a range of feelings - not just an acknowledgement that he is still awake, as when a German does the same thing. It can mean "that surprises me" or "I know, but I appreciate that you know it too" or "I wish I had something sensible to say".

Even facial expressions can be language dependent. All humans smile. That is universal. But some people have a habit of constantly raising their eye brows to stress that something is astonishing. All humans understand it, but some people have made more of a habit of using it than others.

Fashion is an obvious part of our language. Fashion changes from one country to another. If you were in Moscow in the mid 1980s, you could see thousands of people in jackets of a reflecting fabric in pale colours - not entirely different from science fiction films of the epoch. In Shanghai at the same time, everyone wore Mao uniforms. And in Piccadilly Circus people had green hair and safety pin through their cheeks. All of those were simply a way of telling the world "I know what kind of clothes other people wear, and I conform to it." The ways of telling it was different, and the groups of "other people" were very different indeed, but the message was the same. Wearing a Mao uniform in Moscow or green hair in the City of London would have sent a completely different message.

Even the way you walk can be part of your language. Once, late one evening in the suburbs of a Chinese city, I saw the dark silhouette of a woman walking in front of me. It struck me that that way of walking hardly occurs anywhere outside France - and sure enough, she was dijonnaise. Like the mustard.

Three Kinds of Lies

If you watch television you are likely to be exposed to three kinds of lies.

The first one is the worst one. It is the documentaries and news programs. They are horrible, as they claim to show the truth, and some gullible people may think they do so. In addition they often talk about important matters, like politics and the state of the world, which means their lies have horrible consequences.

The second lie is almost as bad. It is the shows and dramas. Think of Friends, Othello or East Enders. The bad thing here is not that anyone believes they describe real events. No one does. The bad thing is that some people may believe that the world works that way. People may believe that there are people who react like the actors in Friends. That people laugh like they laugh in East Enders. Or that the good way to speak is the way they speak in Othello.

The third lie is not really that bad. That is my favourite. It is the advertisements. There is not a grain of truth in them, but everyone knows they are there just to sell, so no one believes them for a minute. And how could one claim a lie is a true lie, if no one believes it?

Never Trust a Documentary

There is a 1996 documentary by Isabelle Roumeguère about the yáodòng, 窑洞, 窯洞, in the Shǎnxī, 陕西, province of Northern China - Le peuple des cavernes. A yaodong is a dugout in the mountains used as dwelling. The word means "oven cave". The program is about the construction of a new yaodong.

What is striking is how exotic it all seems compared to Europe. Especially, as it is not exotic. Like in other documentaries, the cameras carefully avoid everything that looks normal and zooms in on anything that looks exotic. In some of the dialogues the people talk like bad actors. This may be partly because they are too conscious about the camera. But in some cases it is clear that the scene is staged, and that they are told what to say.

And yet it is a both interesting and entertaining program.

Eat Less Fruit

Apple had an event today when they presented a range of new product updates and a new little box which will make your television do some useful things.

Apple is scary. I have used their products for about twenty years, and I will go on doing so, but it is not my own choice. The problem is that they have an absolute monopoly. If you want a useful computer, there is only one brand available - and that is Apple. If you want an mp3-player that is not ugly, there are a few ones available: iPod, iPod nano and iPod shuffle, and they all come from Apple. If you want an intuitive and safe way of buying music online there is only one provider, and that is iTunes from Apple.

I really wish there had been at least one more high quality electronics and media provider.

Don't know why, there's no sun up in the sky

Some research now hints that man is responsible for the recent strong hurricanes.

Assuming this is right, the US may finally accept that it needs to control its carbon dioxide emissions more. However, it is possible that it claims it needs to maintain present levels. It is possible that the US will claim it has the right to keep its current emissions, and that the third world should avoid increasing theirs.

The complication here is that we need a price on natural resources. The US can claim that it has the right to continue as it does today, in the same way as South Africa has the right to the diamonds that happen to be within its habitual theory and Zaire to its own gold.

The US needs to actually cut its own emissions. It needs to make itself poorer through political decisions - and that is rarely a vote winning idea.

Got no milk

Danish export was seriously hit after the row with Muhammad cartoons earlier this year.

However, it would be wrong to say that the publication of the cartoons caused the hit. The cartoons were published 30 September 2005. Not until at the end of January, the first Moslem country started boycotting Danish products.

What caused the hit was the orchestrated response by a large number of Moslems. They were told how to react, and they reacted accordingly. And the reason they were told so, was because the Danish government was unable to handle the issue properly.

The annoying thing is that the Danish government claims it was "right". Of course they were right. That is not the point. The point is that if everyone stands by their right, chaos will reign.

94 too many

94 Taliban, طالبان, fighters have been killed.

This is excellent news from a military short term tactic standpoint. However, it is very bad news from a long term strategic standpoint. If 94 Taliban were killed, that means that there were 94 Taliban there, who were willing to fight for what they believe in. And what they believe in does not seem to be Western democracy.

The fact that 94 were killed, means that there are hundreds and thousands more, who are prepared to fight. The failure of the West is that we have not been able to communicate well enough with those people to convince them to put down weapons.

Operational Skills

Kenneth Branagh has directed a film of Mozart's The Magic Flute, Die Zauberflöte.

According to this article, he admits that he did not know much about opera, but that he claims he learnt some in the process. One thing you cannot learn is what it is like to have an experience of opera year after year and, perhaps, even remember it from when you were a kid. Branagh will not be able to relate to that kind of long time familiarity.

On the other hand, that is not a big problem. A lot of his filmgoing audience will not be able to relate to it either.

Resolving a sixty year old issue

To get some more Korean friends after that last post, I will now, for free, offer a solution to the problem with North Korea 조선민주주의인민공화국.

The huge problem with North Korea is not that it is difficult to get rid of. It might easily disappear overnight, if they suddenly realise that they are on the wrong track.

The huge problem is how to handle the reunification with the South. There are more than half as many inhabitants in the North as in the South, and the difference in development is much bigger than it ever was between East and West Germany. And East Germany's population was less than a third of the Western population. Besides almost all East Germans had West German television, so they knew what was going on elsewhere. The North Koreans do not have the privilege of access to foreign media. And in spite of those advantages, the reunification of Germany was fairly painful, and still now, 17 years later, there are big differences between the two parts of the country.

So how can Korea handle that kind of reunification successfully?

Easy. Don't reunify. Unify with another country!

Once the North Korean government falls, it can be incorporated into China, 中国, instead of South Korea. The level of development is closer, and with China's population of 1.3 billion inhabitants, it won't hurt much with just 23 million poor new citizens.

The North Koreans cannot complain, because they get access to a more developed country than their own. The South Koreans cannot complain, because they will not have to take care of their poor brethren. And the Chinese rarely seem to complain when they can grab some more territory.

Resolving a thousand year old issue

To many of us the recent row between South Korea and China over academic research about Balhae, 발해, 渤海, Bóhǎi, is simply bizarre.

How can you take "diplomatic measures" against an academic paper? If an academic paper is wrong, you refute it with another academic paper, not by aggressive demonstrations.

However, in this realistic world of ours, you have to accept the importance many South Koreans attach to this issue. If it is important to them, it is a delicate issue, in spite of the fact that what they claim is completely wrong.

You are welcome. Yes, all of you.

1400 African immigrants have arrived to the Canary islands recently, and there seem to be more and more of them coming.

Let them come.

One of the things future generations are probably going to loathe us for, in the same way as we loathe the Romans for deadly gladiator battles, is border controls.

Morally, it is very difficult to argue for locking people out from certain parts of this planet, just because they lack the right country name on the cover of their passport. Why should someone from Boston have a better right to move to Los Angeles than someone from Tijuana?

When you are born into a citizenship, certain things can be extremely difficult to change in your life. Those of us who are happy enough to be born with a EU passport have the enormous privilege to move to any other country within the European Union. But what makes me, Mr. Agno, more suitable for this than Mr. Tanaka, 田中さん, who was born with a Japanese passport? What have I as an individual done to deserve it? And what has Mr. Tanaka personally done not to deserve it?

There is no moral right to exclude anyone here - just a traditional right, and as traditions change, this one will certainly do so too.

But what about the practical implications? What about all those millions of poor people who will come and live next door to us?

If we open all borders to all humans tomorrow, things will certainly change. However, there is a very common misunderstanding that "foreign countries" or at least "poor countries" are horrible places to be in. They are not (for the most part). There are happy people everywhere. There are sad people everywhere. There are rich and there are poor. There are people of all kinds.

If we open all borders tomorrow, things will change, but not as dramatically as most people seem to assume. Things will not change more than what we can adapt to.

In the economically poor world, things will change for the better. Unemployed people will be able to move to where they can get decent jobs. Rich people in the poor countries will get it much easier to travel and spend their money for the benefit of the tourism industry everywhere. And as people easily can move back and forth between countries, it will be much easier to get a common agreement on how the world shall be run.

Isn't all that just an unrealistic dream? May be so, but it is a beautiful dream.

Melting Gas

It is possible that a vicious circle speeds up global warming.

As the climate gets warmer, more of the Siberian bogs thaw and release methane in the atmosphere, and the methane contributes to global warming, so the climate gets warmer and....

This is not the only possible vicious circle with global warming. The melting of glaciers can also contribute, as snow and ice reflects sun rays more than earth and stone.

The obvious conclusion is that we're all going to die. We're going to die!

However, before we do that, we have to do some important things, like increasing our oil consumption, which is good for the economy. Who would like to die on a planet in a bad economic state?

A virtual Watergate

The liberal opposition party of Sweden, Folkpartiet, has intruded in the computers of the current ruling party, Socialdemokraterna.

They, or to be precise - some of their workers, have during a long time regularly logged into the social democratic net to get internal documents for the election campaign.

That is bad. Very bad. And unexcusable. And probably criminal. But is it as bad as the newspapers make it look?

The task of a journalist is to report facts - not to guess and phantasise as I do. And thereby they lose an important point.

The temptation in this case has been much bigger than the temptation of a house burglar. A house burglar has to at least leave the street to get into your house. In this case, the temptation was simply to guess a good password in the party worker's normal chair.

Assume the following situation. You have a house, and you decide to remove the front door completely, so anyone can come and go as they want. If someone enters your house, it is still against the law, but you can hardly play surprised if it happens.

And assume you have a dedicated room, where you never go yourself. It has no door to the street, so anyone can walk in. You install a one way window between this room and your main apartment, so anyone in this wide open room unseen can see whatever you are doing.

It is hardly surprising if someone repeatedly walks into this isolated room, if you do something interesting, like oil painting or cook exotic food.

It is not excusable, but neither is it very surprising if it happens.

And that is the point a journalist cannot make on this issue.

It is real steel this time

The profits of the biggest companies of China, 中国, are soaring. The growth is mainly in four sectors: energy, chemicals, banking and steel.

The last point is especially ironic.

In 1958 China decided to make a Great Leap Forward, 大跃进, dà yuè jìn, into the industrialised world. Do do so, they set as goal to double the steel production within a year. The long term goal was that China's steel production should surpass the one of the United Kingdom. People all over the country were encouraged to set up backyard furnaces and produce steel. Metal, in case you are not aware, is not anything you can eat. It turned out that one could not produce high quality steel in backyard furnaces, and the output was virtually useless, in spite of the amount of effort put into it. Why this came as a surprise to the enlightened leaders of the country is difficult to say.

And now, almost fifty years later, high quality steel is one of the leading sectors in China. It got there not through entusiasm and encouraging propaganda, as Mao Zedong, 毛泽东, tried to do it, but through the evil capitalism he so ardently had tried to fight. China today produces about 30 times as much steel as the United Kingdom (英国).

Washing Feet

South African former minister of Law and Order Adriaan Vlok has apologized for his past atrocities. He did this by washing the feet of Reverend Frank Chikane, who used to be an anti-apartheid activist and member of UDF.

This act of reconciliation has not been well received by everyone. The columnist Malala in the newspaper the Sowetan writes "That Chikane allowed this man to wash his feet was the sickest thing ever heard in this new South Africa."

In this The Sowetan is wrong. They are not wrong in expressing their feelings. They would not be wrong in saying "we feel sickened by this." That would be perfectly justified. Malala is not wrong in writing "This is the sort of infuriating, condescending rubbish that we have listened to from the assorted apartheid killers over the past 12 years and I am sick of it." But it is completely wrong to write that it is sickening.

Whether you accept an apology or not is a deeply personal thing. It is one of the things neither man nor God can judge over. Other people can say that they would not have done it. They can say that it should not have been done. But only each individual can decide what they get upset by. Each has his own feelings. Neither God nor the Sowetan has the right to change that.

No French, Please! We're Flemish.

In Merchtem, in the Dutch speaking part of Belgium, school pupils will no longer be allowed to practice their French.

It does bring up memories of Franco's Spain, where Catalan and other regional languages were forbidden.

The sad thing is that it seems to be a decision taken with no research into what it means. The goal, to make the pupils speak better Dutch, is of course laudable. The means, however, are idiotic.

To start with it is impossible to keep this rule up. Pupils who chat with each other in the corridors, where no one can hear them, will go on speaking French, when they find that more convenient. And the fact that they know they are breaking the rules, will make them lose respect for rules in general.

According to the article, parents will be allowed to use interpreters during parent's meetings. What that means, I cannot tell. Does that mean that a teacher, who is perfectly able to speak French, will talk Flemish to an interpreter, who will translate what was said to French? The parents will answer in French, and in spite of the fact that the teacher already understands it perfectly, the interpreter will bust in and translate it to Flemish.

In spite of this, I guess there is something more behind it, than what the article mentions. It is fair to assume that such a silly rule would not have been implemented, unless there had been a reason for it. It is possible that there is a clique of French pupils, who use French not only to communicate, but also to consciously annoy teachers and other pupils, who have a less than perfect understanding of it.

In that case, one can see that the school wants to do something about it. However, it is difficult to see why they chose to do this.

Four and Twenty Stress Cases

Blackbirds are apparently adapting to city life.

And just like us, they get more stressed in the busy cities than their relatives in the countryside.

But in contrast to humans, blackbirds in cities get more resistant to stress than blackbirds in the countryside. Each generation can take more and more stress, and evolution runs much quicker with these little birds than they do for us. A blackbird in the wild rarely gets older than five years.

Ironically, it seems birds adapt better to the stressful environment we create, than we do ourselves.

A High Record in Afghanistan

The opium harvest in Afghanistan attains the record of 6100 metric tons, which means that 90% of all opium in the world comes from that country.

Is is often said that the farmers need to survive, and they get the best return on opium. A farmer does not, after all, work mainly to get rich himself, but also to feed his wife and children. If he can do so better by cultivating poppy instead of wheat, of course he does so.

However, the story is not really that simple. The talibans at first encouraged poppy cultivation, but then banned it fairly efficiently, and it was only with the Western invasion that the cultivation took off again. Suddenly the farmers lost much of their moral reluctance to cultivate poppy, and criminal enforcement disappeared.

It is true that the Western powers try to get a good relationship with the Afghans and to help them get some order in the country. The problem is not that the Westerners do not try. It is that they fail.

Brainy Ignorance

A new gene has been discovered. It is not unique to people. It appears in for example rodents as well. And yet they claim this is "a remarkable discovery". The reasoning is that it appears more in humans than in other mammals, so it may have something to do with thinking.

More interesting than what may have something to do with thinking is what we do not know about it, and that is about everything.

Scientists have isolated regions in the brain that take care of different functions like visual input. They have noticed that those regions show more activity when these functions are performed. But that is about it.

We do not have any answer to the following really fundamental questions:

How is information stored? It could be stored with one bit per brain cell. There could be several bits by cell. Information could be stored using quantum physics. Or it may never be stored at all as discreet information, but only as fuzzy clouds that stretch over large areas of the brain. If the last thing is true, it would be impossible to tell when we have truly forgotten something. Let's say I see a rose the 1st of January, and I notice it is white. This information may be stored more or less densely over a large number of brain cells. After one week, the trace of this information may be diminished by 5%. If asked, I can still easily recall that it was white. After one more week, the trace is diminshed by another 5%. I can still recall it, but with a little more difficulty. After two months, I have really big difficulty to recall it. After ten years, the information has come so close to 0, that I to all intents and purposes have forgotten it. However, there is no fixed moment, where one can say "that was the moment you forgot it".

How is information identified? Currently we have no idea how information is recalled and identified. If I see a picture of a rose, I immediately know that it is a rose. However, no one knows how the picture is recognised. How does the brain know that a plastic red rose in your hand and an abstract painting of a white rose both are roses?

How is information processed? When I see a rose, I stretch out my bare hand to pick it, but I suddenly pull it back, realising that roses have thorns, and put on a glove first. No one knows how I connect the rose with the glove. And even less so, if I have to do something completely new, like using a sock instead of a glove, as I do not have any glove present.

How is information retrieved? The eye receives much more information than we get from standard internet connections. Just check the quality of the pictures of streaming video, and compare it to the quality of what you see, when you watch the view of a valley from the top of a mountain. How is all that large amount of information retrieved, filtered and stored? No one knows.

What is really frustrating is that we can simulate a lot of those things fairly well with computers. However, we know that we use completely different methods from the brain, and we do not know how the brain does it.

This ignorance of ours, I think is remarkable. The discovery of a gene that perhaps may have something to do with humans is not.

How not to Win a War

There are wars one can win, and there are other ones.

It is a fairly simple mathematical formula. If you can kill off your enemies faster than you get new ones, you can win the war. If not you cannot.

The conflict around Israel is not that complicated. However, all sides have children, who grow up and join the struggle on one side or the other, so the conflict perpetuates. It is a war that cannot be won with military means.

The current administration in Washington has succeeded in seriously pissing off even its own allies. It is therefore not surprising that young people around the globe take its politics as an encouragement to hit back against it.

If you want to win a war, it is never a good idea to encourage people to join the other side.

Bad Guys are also Good Guys - but Dangerous

People with dreams are not... and some presidents may disagree with me here, they are not evil. Misguided, yes. Often awkward, yes. Sometimes dangerous, yes. Almost always impossible to reason with. But that is not evil. "Evil" is a word that works in books like "The Lord of the Rings", but in real life among real people it is void of meaning.

Thought Provoking but Wrong

It has recently been said that Africa may be the next big stage for Al Qaida, القاعدة‎.

That is thought provoking and therefore probably very wrong. Al Qaida will never get a strong grip of Africa, as it is an organisation which claims to be Islamic, and the vast majority of Africans are not Muslims. And the vast majority of the ones who are Muslims, are sensible and peaceful people, just like most Muslims elsewhere in the world, when they do not feel threatened.

However, let the thought experiment go on a little. One of many complicated reasons why Africa economically is the poorest continent today, is probably the past influence of the Soviet Union. Not only did the Soviets encourage a non working economic model, they did so with such a fervor that the scared West did not have much choice but to fight back, supporting guerillas and stirring up a lot of civil wars in the continent. And as the West fought back, the Soviets got scared and had to fight back even stronger, stirring up more civil wars.

The base mistake here was when people believed in an economic theory which was rubbish. And the subsequent mistake was when people could not handle the people who were wrong.

Let us now assume that Al Qaida succeeds getting a lot of influence over Sub-Saharan Africa. The consequence could be that another misled belief in something replaces the decaying belief in communism. And the consequence could be that Africa's problems are prolonged even more.

As said before, it is not very likely. But if it happens, let us hope that the West finds other weapons of fighting it than it did against communism. Africa is worth a better fate.

An Emperor Less

It is almost exactly 200 years since Sacrum Romanum Imperium, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, finally disolved. This peculiar empire lasted in one form or other for almost 1000 years without ever being any strong monolithic body. It was more often like a loose federation of smaller states.

Like the European Union today.

Screaming Back

They have found Edvard Munch's paintings"Skrik" ("The Scream") and "Madonna".

Is that really news? Did it matter that they were gone? Few paintings have been so much reproduced as Skrik. We all knew it. We have seen copies and cartoons on the theme for more than a century. Did the world lose much when the originals were lost? Would it lose much if they were lost for ever?

Japan Joins Central Asia

The Japanese premier Junichiro Koizumi, 小泉純一郎, is off on a tour to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, the two biggest countries in Central Asia. Uzbekistan with 27 million inhabitants is the most populous one, and Kazakhstan with almost 3,000,000 km² has the by far largest area.

This is not just a polite trip to some poor countries who need some help. All Central Asia has recently shown a strong economic development. The countries are small compared to their neighbours China, India and Russia, but they seem to have got rid of the stagnating Soviet economic system at least as efficiently as Russia, and their economy is booming.

They work together with the giants China and Russia and the much smaller Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, Шанхайская организация сотрудничества, 上海合作组织, shàng hǎi hé zuò zǔ zhī, to further make sure that the countries of the old Silk Road will not be forgotten in the economic evolution of one of the most dynamic areas of the world.

One can note that neither Turkmenistan nor Mongolia is a member of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Hopefully that does not mean that they are forgotten, but only that they are busy with other things, like playing football or building hightech factories.

Kidnapped, but why?

Two Italians, Claudio Chiodi and Ivano De Capitani, have been kidnapped in Niger. (For the geographically challenged: this is not Nigeria. Niger is another country further into Sahara.) There is luckily not enough information to get a good picture of what is going on, and that makes it possible to make interesting guesses.

The kidnappers have issued a statement which says that Niger is not a democracy. However, no one knows who they are and what they are after. There are hundreds of millions of Chinese, who do not live in a democracy, and they do not kidnap foreigners to get their message out. Why would people from Niger do so? What makes anyone start fighting for democracy? It is often a good idea to do so - at least with peaceful means, but millions, probably billions of people across the globe to not bother doing it. Why would those people from Niger do it?

There is a possibility that the kidnappers believe that democracy will solve all their problems. There is not enough food. Bring on democracy! There are no good programs on television. Bring on democracy! There is a drought. Bring on democracy!

(Ironically, each of those problems may actually be somewhat helped by democracy - even the drought. With democracy there is fairly likely to be a discussion about droughts and their causes. If it is possible to solve it through better irrigation systems, a democracy is more likely to apply the solution than a dictatorship, where the ruling group may have little interest in actually solving the problem at all.)

There is also a possibility that the kidnappers want money. But then, why do they not simply say so? Perhaps they just begged the Italians for some money, and got more and more insistent. The kidnappers finally realised that they couldn't get any money from the Italians, unless they kept them there with violence, and then they had to invent an excuse for what they had done - and that excuse turned out to be a political struggle in which they had never before participated.

You will have to solve their problem

A third of China is hit by "acid rain" according to BBC. That is a silly headline for a serious problem. Rain is always either acid or alkaline. It is a simple matter of plus or minus. No one would write a headline saying "plus degree temperatures hit China" or indeed "minus degree temperatures hit China". Temperature is always plus or minus. pH is always acid or alkaline.

However, the problem is real. One of the big problems for China is pollution. In contrast to the old Soviet Union, China is well aware of the problems and tries to solve them. However, the problems are also inherently much more difficult. In the Soviet Union there was mismanagement and incompetence, which could have been avoided. In China there is a huge population with increasing very real needs to get the economy on par with Europe, the US and the rest of the industrialised world.

China has knowledge to solve many of its problems. It also looks for knowledge elsewhere. It is not a country afraid of learning from abroad.

However, it is very likely that the rest of the world also needs to help China solve its problems by cutting down. As China buys and consumes more of the world's resources, there will be less for the rest of us, and the prices of raw materials will go up.

This is not necessarily a catastrophe, but it is a challenge to handle. We will need to use existing resources more efficiently. The problem can be solved, but will it be solved fast enough?

Lottery Strategy

There is an absolutely foolproof way of winning on a lottery - or at least to lose as little as possible.

When you play on a lottery, you do not do it because you want to win a lot of money. Of course, you would not mind winning a lot of money, but if that had been your primary goal, you should instead spend your time on things like founding Microsoft.

In the long run you know you will lose. If you spend a small sum every week to win on a lottery, where they highest win is 100 euro, you know that on average you will spend about 120 euro or more for each 100 euro you win, and that is just throwing the money away.

The main reason you play on a lottery is for the excitement. You want to know that you have the possibility to win a lot of money. You want an excuse for your dreams about buying a new expensive car or a small island in the Pacific. And that excitement is quite easy to get.

Step 1. Identify one of those lotteries where you can win an awful lot of money for a very small fee. If you are European the EuroMillions lottery works fine. They have had several wins of more than €100,000,000.

Step 2. Wait until you know the expected jackpot is exceptionally high.

Step 3. Buy one (1) ticket and no more.

Step 4. Put the ticket in a drawer at home.

Step 5. Forget all about it.

Now, it is very important that you do not check if you won. Just let time pass. You are now the proud owner of the possibility of having won millions of euro.

If you happen to stumble over the ticket in the drawer after eleven months, you can of course check the list to see if you won, but it is hardly worth it. You will not win. And if you check it, you have to buy a new ticket to go on being excited about the possibility of winning.

The best way to win on a lottery is not never to play - it is never to check if you won.

A Simple Read

A researcher claims that Mein Kampf was widely read in Hitler's Germany. That is not very surprising. What is surprising is the journalist's claim that this is news: "Jahrzehntelang hieß es, kaum ein Deutscher habe sich durch Hitlers schwer verdauliches Werk "Mein Kampf" gequält."

This is a fairly common press trick. You invent a non existing "myth" and you debunk it. I have thought about writing books myself using the same method. "For a long time it has been said that Napoléon won the battle of Waterloo. This book shows that is not the whole truth." or "It is usually said that queen Elizabeth II tried to stage a Soviet coup in Britain. However, this book shows that she surprisingly enough did not."

Mein Kampf is not difficult to read, as the journalist claims above. There are no complicated parts. And there are no secret "revelations". It is just a load of very simple deluded statements. Hitler's attacks on the Jews are stronger than the attack of a Scottish tourist, who claims he cannot stand the French because they do not eat rollmops, but they are not any more sophisticated. There is only one reason to believe that the Germans could not possibly have read Mein Kampf - the book is such a clear proof that Hitler was an idiot, so it is a wonder he was not laughed out of power.

However, man has an unfortunate habit of accepting the leadership of idiots.

What Everyone Needs to Know

Pluto is no longer a planet. Millions, probably billions, of school children all over the world will now have to unlearn what they once learnt.

The unavoidable question is: what inspired the teachers to teach them it was a planet in the first place? Is there no other knowledge that is more important? Or at least true?

The First Reader

My friend Aaron requested a link to this page. I will send it to him very soon, and you all know what this means. I will finally get a reader! A reader! Hooray! I am no longer alone is this world!

Keeping a Secret as Open as Possible

There is a fascinating book about the holy grail by Dan Brown called The da Vinci Code. It is fiction from beginning to end, but it is fascinating.

The book raises no interesting questions or issues.

I do not mind that Brown comes with inaccurate descriptions of église Saint-Sulpice, or that he steals the lies of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail to build up a background to the plot. I want to be entertained, and Brown entertains me.

However, I do object to the riddles of Jacques Saunière. If you have something you want kept secret, you invent a safe code for it - not a series of riddles, which people can actually solve. That unrealistic bit struck me as far more disturbing than the bad prose and inaccurate descriptions of Christianity and the world.

Explaining the Wrong Track

South Korea (대한민국, 大韓民國, Daehan Minguk) helps the North (조선민주주의인민공화국, 朝鮮民主主義人民共和國, Chosŏn Minjujuŭi Inmin Konghwaguk) with 100,000 tons of rice after heavy floods in the North.

North Korea is one of the big mysteries in the world. What are they after? Even though even people at minister level and high party officials probably have very little contact with the rest of the world, they must realise that they are on the wrong track. Just one photo of any street in the South which actually has cars, instead of the vast emptiness you see in the North, should convince anyone that something is wrong. Or do they have some secret source of joy, we do not know of or do not appreciate?

More likely, it is a case of a locked situation. For some (to us unknown) reason, they cannot find any way to back out of their current system. Someone wants to save his (or his party's? or his family's? or his ancestor's?) face, and has found no way of keeping up appearance if the system would change.

Is the North Korean government evil? No. The only true definition of "evil" is "devil worshipper", and that they are not. However, they could be something much worse than evil: stupid.

Past Experience

We are very good at generalising from quick experiences. A restaurant owner in Paris runs in the rain across the street to buy me an umbrella. After that I have this image of really nice Parisians. I know it was a one time experience. It will not happen again in Paris and in no other city either. But the image of the nice Parisian will never go away.

Why can we not use this kind of quick learning to learn from the mistakes of past generations?

Falsifying Religion

Buddhism is the most powerful of religions. Not because it is the truest one, but because it is so cleverly designed that it is impossible to falsify. Christianity could theoretically be falsified, if it were shown that Jesus was not God. Islam could be falsified, if it turned out that the historic facts in the Koran (القرآن al-qur'ān) did not take place.

But how do you falsify that a soul is reborn, if there is no trace of the original soul in the newborn? And how do you falsify that people reach Nirvana (निर्वाण, 涅槃), if the only thing you can go on is their own tales?

Trusting a Company

Lenovo's profits have fallen a lot recently, mainly due to problems with the PC business it bought from IBM recently.

Some security conscious clients, mainly in the US, have chosen to stay away from Lenovo, as they do not want the Chinese company to get access to their data. That logic is not very clean. It is not because the owner of a company is Chinese that the risk is big. Any commercial company can have security holes at any level. No company is secure in this respect - regardless of nationality.

However, if it became public that a company's top management has authorised data theft from its customer, that company would immediately be dead commercially. There is no difference here between a Chinese and an American company. Both of them have the same interest in respecting their customers' privacy.

Ubi Bene Ibi Domo

We all long to go home occasionally. Yes, we all do. It is no oversimplification. There are no exceptions.

However, "home" can be so many places. Home is wherever you feel you are in control, where nothing can hurt you. To some, it is the house where they spend every night. To some it is the journey through distant countries, where each day is different, and every night a new bed is slept upon. But where they know the variations between each day are not bigger than they can handle them.

Rational Name Changes and Others

In South Africa they now consider changing some apartheid street names. It is one of those questions that do not have a right answer. Or, perhaps, it has too many right answers that happen to contradict each other.

The issue of changing names is of course an old one - probably as old as man himself. Lutetia became Paris. Byzantion (Βυζάντιον) became Constantinopel (Κωνσταντινούπολη) which became Istanbul. Except in Greece, where they still call the city Κωνσταντινούπολη, and why not? The "Turkish" name, İstanbul, is very possibly of Greek origin as well.

In communist times, there was a story about a Russian who was interviewed for a job.
"Where were you born?"
"Saint Petersburg (Санкт-Петербург)."
"Where did you get your exam?"
"Petrograd (Петроград)."
"Where do you live now?"
"Leningrad. (Ленинград)."
"Now, let's talk about your ambitions. If you could live anywhere you wanted, where would you like to live?"
"In Saint Petersburg."

If he survived until 1991, his wish came true.

People in that city by the Gulf of Finland often continued to call the city simply Peter (Петер) even during Soviet times. All other names were too unwieldy. And the name Leningrad has not disappeared either. The territory surrounding the city is still called Leningrad district (Ленинградская область) for example.

It should perhaps be mentioned that the city was named by, but not after, Peter the Great (Пётр I Великий). Peter the Great in no way was a saint. The Peter that gave his name to the city was the one of Christ's disciples, who is supposed to guard the gates of heaven.

The argument for changing names of places, is usually that you do not want any association with the person whose name it bears. And the argument against it, is usually that no one any longer think of the person. It is simply a name.

It often becomes a heated argument between people who say it is just a name, and people who claim it is not.

They are both wrong of course. It is just a matter of perception. If enough people are disturbed by the name, you have to change the name. It doesn't really matter if it is a rational feeling they have or not, as long as it is genuine.

Throw Away Your Books

There are few places I love as much as bookshops. It is often one of the most quiet places around. People walk around - pull out a book, read a few lines, put it back and check another one. Books for thousands and thousands of euro are there at your disposal. You have the right to go around for as long as you want - picking, choosing, discarding, and then, once you have found the perfect book, just the thing you need and desperately want, you can go up to the counter and...

That's where the dream usually stops for me nowadays. I love bookshops, but I hate owning books. Every book you own demands its own place - its own few centimeters in the bookshelf. It wants you to carry it around when you move. The bookshelf wants to take up wall space, which otherwise could have been used to put something that really was intended to be beautiful, like a painting or an old musical instrument or even a nicely shaped branch you found in the garden. The book demands all that, and you soon discover that the master is not you, it is the physical object of a book, which has you in its hands.

What about reading then? Well, I can easily load as many books on my Palm pilot, which fits in my pocket, as my grandfather read in his entire life. Why give in for the demands of books, when you can use computer files, which take no physical space at all?

The problem is the bookshops. I still love them. What I usually do is to buy at least one book at each visit. Then I throw it away in the nearest dustbin. Buying the book, I economically support the existence of bookshops. Getting rid of the book, I rid myself of its demands on me. And by not giving the book to any of my friends, I force them to buy books themselves, which then supports the bookshops.

The sin is not to throw away a book. The sin would be not to have bought it in the first place.

Shrinking News

Gannett is a newspaper holding company which prides itself with owning about 100 newspapers out of which none is important at all.

Anyhow, they now launch newspapers in the "Berliner" format, which is only slightly bigger than the size often referred to as "tabloid".

The shrinking newspapers is a strange phenomenon. In 2003 British The Independent introduced a tabloid version of itself, and for about half a year, their readers could choose between the full broadsheet form or the tabloid format. Most people choose the more convenient tabloid version, which obviously is easier to read in crammed places like buses, underground trains or supersonic jets. Svenska Dagbladet in Stockholm and La Repubblica in Rome also went for smaller formats, and since a large number of European newspapers have gone for either Berliner or tabloid format.

The question is not really why they change to smaller formats. The question is, "why on earth didn't they do it earlier?" It seems obvious that a small format is preferred by most people.

One thing that has prevented it is probably fashion. Especially in the UK and in Scandinavia, small newspaper formats have traditionally been associated with trash press and bad journalism. To distance itself from that, "serious" newspapers have stuck to big and inconvenient formats - something you would have to fight against to read.

With the advent of the internet, the papers have to fight with all means - even by making themselves readable.

The Fall of Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe is cutting three zeros from its currency. That leaves only around 250 Zimbabwean dollars for one American dollar.

The situation is in some way horribly tragic. Some twenty years ago, Zimbabwe was one of the richer countries in Southern Africa. President Mugabe had an excellent relationship with the productive white big farmers - so excellent actually, that one couldn't help asking oneself what was going on. In 1978 he had led a guerilla war against the black Prime Minister, bishop Abel Muzorewa, with the excuse that Muzorewa's government wasn't truly representing the black. Muzorewa's government did in fact involve a lot of white pressure groups, so, yes, one could easily argue that the black still didn't have the real power.

However, with the white farmers still there long after Mugabe won the elections of 1980, one could easily argue that he didn't truly represent the blacks either. That was probably what he tried to correct with the forced removal of white farmers from 1999 onwards.

The problem was that he forgot that the important thing was not to represent one group of people or another, but the good of the country as a whole. The small farms that replaced the big ones are often run by inexperienced people, and the grain production of Zimbabwe has dwindled. Since 2005, land in Zimbabwe has been largely nationalised - a move world history tells us is not always a wise one. Stalin's collectivisations and Mao's The Big Leap just to mention two, both led to widespread starvation.

It may be cynical, but I think it is more tragic when a country, which once was rich, suddenly turns poor, than when a country, which has been poor for a long period stays poor.

Let's hope Zimbabwe does not stay poor though. It still has the power to rise.

What's so Good with Doping?

One thing I never seen written down is why doping is so bad. Everyone knows it is bad, but why?

Surely it isn't just because it is "cheating". If everyone was allowed to use any substances they wanted, no one would cheat, and we would get excellent results in the sports.

However, the athletes do not want doping allowed - not the clever ones anyhow. If they were allowed to use any substance, they would end up with doses that far exceed what is good for them long term. The result would be short lived athletes who win for a short time and then die fairly soon from the drugs they have taken.

In 1904 a marathon runner collapsed after the event, and had he taken more drugs than he had, he might not have recovered at all. There have since surely been many other cases like that.

The cynicism of it is that no smart athlete wants doping to be allowed in general, but any athlete can be tempted to take drugs himself.

Your Favourite Pharmacist

In the exciting world of cycling, it turns out that the winner of this year's Tour de France may have used a little too much of substances that aren't really supposed to be used during that competition.

This potentially adds an interesting angle to the game.

You can support your favourite cyclist. You can also choose to support your favourite team, if you prefer that. Or if you prefer to identify with nations, you can support people from a particular country.

If they only published all results from the doping tests, you could support your favourite drug or pharmacological company as well.

Dangerous Success

There is a strange debate in Taiwan (台灣). Their problem is that they have too much successful contacts (!) with mainland China (中国大陆). Trade between the countries means that Taiwan gets richer. But at the same time, it becomes more dependent on their biggest enemy. What if the mainland suddenly starts exercising pressure on Taiwan through trade sanctions? The only way to avoid that risk, is to avoid the trade to start with. And lose business opportunities. And become poorer. And of course becoming poorer won't help Taiwan staying independent of mainland China.

It is probably not too bold a guess to assume that Taiwan and mainland China will get very close together in the future regardless of any present political will to do so or not.

Excuse Us...

I have heard complaints about "muslims" not standing up and clearly saying that they do not agree with the bombings of the World Trade Center or the suicide bombers in Israel. Surely, people have whispered, this means that "muslims" support this kind of acts.

I am not a muslim, so I cannot clarify that.

However, I'll do my bit as far as I can.

As a citizen of a country in the richer part of the world, I apologize to everyone in the third world for the richer countries obstinacy in the World Trade Organization talks.

As a Christian, I apologize for the crusades during the Middle Ages.

As a European, I apologize for the Opium wars against China.

I apologize for the holocaust.

I apologize for Communism and its horrible consequences for millions of people.

I apologize for the Vietnam war.

I apologize for Jack the Ripper, who was as European as I am.

I apologize for the hunt of Khoi-San people in Namibia.

I apologize for apartheid in South Africa and Rhodesia, and I apologize for the race laws of the USA.

I apologize for the Ku Klux Klan.

I apologize for inflicting two World Wars on the world.

I apologize for the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl (Чорнобиль).

I apologize for the ecological catastrophe of the disappearing Aral lake.

I apologize for Stalin's Great Purge.

I apologize for the concentration camps during the boer war.

I apologize for the internment of American citizens of Japanese and German origin during the second world war.

I apologize for the IRA, the ETA, the RAF and all their innocent victims.

I apologize for the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde.

And I apologize for Big Brother on television.


If you, dear reader, is a muslim, and if you hear other Christians or Westerners apologize for all crimes of other Christians and Westerners, I think it is your duty to stand up and say that you do not agree with the bombings of the World Trade Center or the suicide bombers in Israel.

If you don't hear of any other Christians or Westerners taking responsibility for all crimes of all Christians and Westerners, I frankly don't think you need to do it for other muslims either.

Protection at All Costs

China is not happy with Israel's killing of four UN workers, including one Chinese national. One can understand them. One also wonders about the consequences. Israel has the right to start a war to protect itself after two of its soldier's were kidnapped. However, doesn't this mean that China has the right to bomb Jerusalem to protect its citizens from being killed by Israel?

But, as mentioned before, the way to get peace, is when people refrain from exercising their rights.

An Old Irish Bog

They have found an old scripture in an Irish bog. It is ironic that it is a copy of the Book of Psalms, as the Russian word for God is "bog" (бог).

That stem appears in less reverent places in modern English.

During the Middle Ages, there was a sect in Bulgaria called bogomils, богомилы. The word бог conveniently meant "god", just like in modern Russian, and мил meant "sweet" (modern Russian милый) or "love", so the meaning would be something like "Godlovers".

The bogomils interpretation of Christianity was unusual. They believed Jesus was born man, and only became God through his baptism. They also seemed to have denied that God was omnipotent in the face of the power of evil. They denied most miracles, and they did not use crucifixes, as you were not supposed to make any picture of God.

It was not a time when unusual theories were taken lightheartedly, and as their ideas spread, they were despised by the established churches and called "heretic". Nowadays a person with unusual ideas is called a "blogger".

As the bogomils were known heretics, the term bogomil, in spite of its innocent original meaning, became synonymous with "strange". The last part of the word was dropped, and in today's English what remains of the word is used to describe the strange habits of a "bugger".

(The link above goes to an article, which calls the manuscript "Irish Dead Sea Scrolls". That is a silly thing to write of course. The Dead Sea scrolls contained plenty of original writing. The Book of Psalms is always the Book of Psalms and nothing more. Nor less.)