Det er da utroligt, hvad man kan få ud af nogle ganske almindelige tøjklemmer. Men det må nu have taget nogen tid at arrangere dem så perfekt.
Month: 78’1’39 (2006-08-31)
bookmark_borderDo butterflies eat bananas?
I spotted this photo on Flickr. I thought butterflies only ate nectar, but they do appear to be eating, don’t they? Perhaps it isn’t a sliced banana after all?
bookmark_borderWhere have I spent my life?
I just tried to figure out how long time I’ve spent in various countries. Denmark still dominates strongly, but of course I spent 10-11 months there every year till I was 30 (except for the three months in Germany and the one year in Georgia).
bookmark_borderSpielpreise
Ich habe eben die deutschen Spiele Siedler von Catan und Carcassonne bestellt. Zum Glück habe ich die Preise sowohl auf Amazon.co.uk wie auf Amazon.de untersucht – sie sind viel billiger in Deutschland! Ich habe zuerst gedacht, Spiele seien also viel teurer in Großbritannien, aber so ist es nicht:
| Spiel | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | |
|---|---|---|---|
| GBP | EUR | EUR | |
| Siedler von Catan | 22,90 | 33,87 | 20,00 |
| Carcassonne | 14,99 | 22,17 | 10,99 |
| Monopoly | 11,17 | 16,52 | 24,99 |
| Scrabble | 13,74 | 20,32 | 29,99 |
Es scheint mir, dass deutsche Spiele in Deutschland billiger sind, und umgekehrt. Nur merkwürdig, dass die EU noch nicht zu größerem Preisausgleich geführt hat.
bookmark_borderHvorfor ikke Pluton?
Forårsaget af al virakken om, hvorvidt Pluto er en planet eller ej, kom jeg til at undre mig over, hvorfor vi kalder den Pluto og ikke Pluton på dansk. Den græske gud, den er opkaldt efter, hedder jo Pluton på dansk (men Pluto på engelsk og latin).
bookmark_borderMedium-speed space travel
Most space-travel science fiction I know falls into two groups: Either people have found a way to travel faster than light (Star Trek, Star Wars and many others), or people travel for decades or centuries in sleeper ships (Jon Bing’s novels about the starship Alexandria, for instance).
However, it seems to me (I’m not a physicist, though!) that a fairly likely scenario would be the invention of spaceships travelling at a speed slightly slower than that of light. First of all, it doesn’t contradict the laws of physics as we know them, and secondly, we don’t get all these messy problems with deep-freezing people.
The big advantage would be that travel would be nearly instant for people on the spaceships, because time slows down when you’re moving very rapidly.
However, it would have some interesting consequences. First of all, it would be fairly boring for people back on earth because we wouldn’t hear anything back for a very long time (if we sent a spaceship to a planet 100 lightyears away, it would take more than 200 years before we’d find out whether the mission had been a success). It also means some people could visit all of the known galaxy, but if they ever returned back home, so many years would have passed that it wouldn’t be like coming home at all.
I guess the consequence would be that we’d only bother exploring the nearest star systems. Sure, we might also send colonisation ships to planets much further away, but that would mean cutting off all contact with them in practice, so I think only fanatics would want to do that.
I’m a bit surprised that I’ve never come across science fiction exploring this scenario – does anybody else here know more?
bookmark_borderPortrait of a Grasshopper.
Wow, what a photo! I’d love to be able to take photos like this!