en – Page 81 – Denseman on the Rattis

A world of photos

2006/09/02 20:51

Flickr has just added a nice new feature which allows you to place your photos on a map. You can find my photos here. You can also get a map of the most interesting photos in the world.

EN · FOODDRINK · KIDS · PHOTOGRAPHY

Real men love coffee Originally uploaded by phyl1. This photo that I found on Phyllis’s Flickr pages is just perfect. I know there’s probably very little coffee in the mug, if any, but wee Léon just looks so much like an addicted coffee drinker. I love the was he’s grasping the mug and watching the camera while drinking – it just signals that the most important thing in the world is getting his caffeine, and nobody is going to stop him. Possibly I find the photo so […]

EN · PHOTOGRAPHY · SCIENCE

Do butterflies eat bananas?

2006/08/27 19:22

DSC05461 Originally uploaded by BevinDragoo. 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?

EN · SCIENCE

Medium-speed space travel

2006/08/26 09:13

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 […]

EN · HUMOUR · WEB

Buy a god on eBay

2006/08/23 20:48

One of the Google ads here on my blog today is “Buy Ancient Greece Gods on eBay!” I knew you could buy lots of things on eBay, but this one surprised me! 🙂

EN · MEDIA

Alternate pasts

2006/08/20 11:03

Lying in bed this morning, I was trying to analyse the similarities between two of my favourite books, Between the Rivers and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Between the Rivers (by Harry Turtledove) takes place in Mesopotamia (hence the name) in antiquity. The basic idea is that gods are as real as people believe them to be, and the main plot is about a young man’s fight to liberate himself and his people from the gods. It has many similarities with the same author’s Thessalonica which takes […]

ALTHIST · EN · MEDIA

The Grapple

2006/08/13 22:24

I just finished reading Harry Turtledove’s Settling Accounts: The Grapple, taking place during World War II in an alternate world where the South won the American Civil war. As usual, the plot moves along at a snail’s pace, the dialogues are unimaginative, and the whole thing is totally predictable as soon as one realises that the Confederate States = Nazi Germany. So why did I buy it as soon as it came out, not even waiting for the paperback? I guess it’s like watching a sitcom. I […]

EN · POLITICS

How to drive less

2006/09/02 10:51

Inspired by a posting on Phyl’s Blog, I started thinking about how we can stop driving so much. The thing is that it’s fairly limited how many miles people drive for the fun of it. For most people, it’s all the short trips to work, to school, to the supermarket and so on that really add up to a lot over the years. And so, in order to really reduce car usage, one has to prevent commuting and shopping. In theory, we could all work from home […]

EN · LINGUISTICS

Naš jezik

2006/09/02 09:56

There’s an article in The Economist this week about how Serbocroatian is being revived in a fashion under the label of naš jezik (“our language”). It’s really an interesting linguistic situation in Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia. Even within one country, it seems that more than one variant is used. For instance, if one goes to the Serbian Wikipedia, one can view each page in four variants by using the selectors on top called ????, ??????, ekav and ijekav, or in other words, one can […]

EN · FEATURED · TRANSPORT

Where have I spent my life?

2006/08/27 12:11

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).

EN · PHOTOGRAPHY

Portrait of a Grasshopper.

2006/08/26 08:34

Portrait of a Grasshopper. Originally uploaded by wans2pics. Wow, what a photo! I’d love to be able to take photos like this!

BLOGGING · EN · LINGUISTICS

Phonetic blog

2006/08/25 16:50

I just found out from reading sci.lang that John Wells has a very interesting phonetic blog.

Large Lunch

2006/08/22 20:29

Large Lunch Originally uploaded by carpetmankent. I just saw this on Flickr. It’s cool how the web is almost invisible so that one could be fooled into believing the spider and the fly are falling together through the air. I hope the spider has a healthy appetite – it’ll need it!

ALTHIST · EN · FEATURED

Christian the Great, King of the Incas

2006/08/19 21:23

I posted the following to the soc.history.what-if newsgroup back in 2003. It didn’t attract any attention, though, so I’m reposting it here now, since I think it’s one of my better ATLs. PoD ca. 1518. King Christian II of Kalmar decides that fighting the Swedish rebellions will only harden their resistance. Instead, he sees possibilities in the Americas, discovered only a few decades earlier. He thus sends out exploration teams headed by the most able Swedish noblemen. The remaining Swedish nobility are easily silenced. Around 1523, a […]

EN · PHOTOGRAPHY · TRAVEL

Scorpions

2006/08/19 13:34

Bugs and Scorpions Originally uploaded by decadavide. I’ve always disliked scorpions (well, ever since Ötz found a scorpion crawling on his son’s duvet in his house in Italy very close to my parents’). That said, I’m in two minds whether I like them better roasted on a spit, like the seem to do in China. It has the advantage they’re dead, but on the other hand I’m not sure I’d really fancy putting one into my mouth. Oh well, I’m not planning any trips to China, so […]

EN · SIGN

No

2006/08/09 20:16

No Originally uploaded by The Blen. I found this on Flickr’s interestingness pages. Please follow the link and read the comments – there are many great suggestions as to what it might mean (blondes only?).

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