Sunday, August 24, 2008

It's the name, stupid!


Surfing. I have a cold, so I'm not worth much today.

I just tripped over this:New Alliance considers name-change (in Danish only sadly). Apparently the youngest political party in Denmark, New Alliance, who are roughly the political party-equivalent of a Marx Brothers-movie, are contemplating a name change. Though an applaudable effort in trying to right what is arguable an impressively disastrous first year, it somehow feels like trying to sell cans of spam, by saying "Hey! It might be spam; but now we call it 'SUPER-EXTRA PRIME-CUT ANGUS BEEF', so please buy it!"

This follow-up news Numerologist: New Alliance should change their name, sets a perfect context, I think (also Danish). The numerologist Mauren Pihl (note the splendid name), finally gives us an explanation of the hardships of the toddler party: Both words (in Danish) "Ny" and "Alliance" yield weak energies - apparently the double ll and the single c is an amateurish mistake. Taken together the two words yield a "fateful" and "unlucky" name, indicating that the party needs to "restart again and again". I'm in awe by the supreme explanatory power of the superior numerologic science.

Not content to critizise, she contributes with more expert advice: Apparently, the current favourite candidate new name is "Liberal Alliance". Though, the word "liberal" apparently contains ridiculous amounts of energy (I could have told you that, just read Newsbusters.org - Exposing liberal media bias for a while; check out their take on CBS: U.S. should be more like Denmark), but it does not "work together well" with the weak word "Alliance".

May I suggest, that instead of a precarious name-change, they should invite the guru, Mauren Pihl, to join the party? In my mind, somehow the madness of numerology and New Alliance fit each other perfectly.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Down the drain?

Having just my heard my blog referred to as "already going down the toilet", I haste to note that this is not the case - yet.

I have simply spent a little time reinforcing my touch with the so-called real world. Yes. I have a life when not surfing. I have, among other things, been cruising the Danish countryside in a Toyota Yaris, and spent a few days playing gardener at my in-laws. Very zen, very enjoyable, and very off-the-grid.

Oh, but such moments of innocent joy are fickle, of course. When I returned, Russia had invaded Georgia; Denmarks football squad had their trousers pulled down by Spain; and the world may be destroyed in September, when a few (mad?) scientists pull the switch and fire up an experiment in the Large Hadron Collider producing the universe's first man-made black hole - right before sucking Earth plus a goodly 6 billion humans into it. They say, the black holes which may be created are microscopic; they say there's only a one in 50 million chance of something going wrong; but when could we ever trust white-coated shifty-eyed men like these:



Technically speaking, this particular mad scientist is, of course, wearing a green coat. The tricks they invent to confuse us.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

Singularity divides?

A few years ago, I read a tech-report from Microsoft research about the Singularity project (a name with sooo much nerd-appeal). It was fairly interesting reading - a micro-kernel system building on managed code, from kernel drivers and up; strong typing; specification of invariants allowing static analysis, etc. (Notably, they also had a fair amount of high-profile people attached to the project, Aiken, Fähndrich, Abadi,... )

Now it seems the grapevine is flowing over with talk about a higher-profile succesor to the Singularity project: Midori; which apparently means "green" in Japanese (everything - I mean everything is on Wikipedia).

The SDTimes article: "Microsoft's plans for post-Windows OS revealed" gives a good overview. (And here is a brief summary in danish on Version 2.)