Two very nerdy jokes

If you understand both of these jokes right away I beg you to comment on this post! Let's start out with a control theory joke:

Q: Why do Eastern European airlines fly half empty?
A: There must be no poles in the right half-plane

Secondly, we have a hardware-optimized programming joke:

Adam and Eve were walking through the forest when they came across some snakes with chain saws cutting down trees and making rustic furniture. Adam asked, "what are you doing?"



One of the snakes hissed, "God told us to go forth and multiply ... but we're just adders, we can't multiply without log tables"

(Update: There are of course more excellent nerdy jokes. Go ahead, knock yourselves out)

Swedes have a few vowels to spare (any serbian buyers?)

For comic effect regarding the Swedish language, I told the following story:

A Finn and a Swede were arguing which ones mother tongue sounds more beautiful. Since they couldn't find any solution they asked help from an english linguistic, who asked both of them to translate the following poem by Percy Shelley into their own languages:

"Island, island, Grassy island, Grassy island's Bride."

It was the Finn's turn first. He translated:

"Saari, saari, Heinäsaari, Heinäsaaren Morsian."

Then the Swede translated:

"Ö, ö, Hö-ö, Hö-öns Mö."

I recorded myself reading that, check it out here.


Admittedly, I did that to have an excuse to experiment a bit more with Audacity, a great open source multi-platform sounds editing tool. It is fairly easy to use even though you of course have to get to understand some basic sound editing concepts (there are great tutorials for the program), then it's just rock'n'roll. Record or import, give it a few seconds of just background noise to analyze, remove the noise, crop the clip, amplify to normal levels and export to mp3. Very simple.

PS. Speaking of open source and free software, TestDisk saved my ass the other day, when Boot Camp Assistant deleted the opposite partition it said it would. TestDisk rapidly analyzed my disk and recovered the original filesystem like a charm!

Elb^H^Hstonia has computer security competence too!

... though can they see through a demoralizing business plan?

Bloggers are yappy chihuahuas? (On obeying copyright claims)

Yesterday Fredrik Svedjetun of Dagens Media wrote an editorial where he decided to compare the community of at least Swedish bloggers to yappy chihuahuas. The generalization and silliness aside - this is a part of a long running discussion (both pages in Swedish, sorry about that) about how DM request payment for when their copyright protected material has been used by bloggers, which in turn has made the bloggers furious for more or les wellfounded reasons (therefore the yapping).

Before giving my view on this debate, I'd like to display a picture of myself depicted as a roundabout dog:


Now to the issue at hand - obviously there is a bit of friction between what is with some despise called "old media" and the new media represented by bloggers (though which to be fair should include also microbloggers, youtubers, podcasters, shoutcasters, livestreamers etc.), on the way things are done, accountability and licensing. My simplistic judgement is that the new media of course will play according to different rules, you cannot register a legal entity for every space in which you would like to share your thoughts, comment or communicate, and you can't keep track of if your material may be dissipated in either of these spaces. Though if someone manages to catch and complain to you (as was the case with Blondinbella and deeped), I suggest you follow the law and fold as much as you have to. Simple as that - they have the law on their side so quit whining!

On the other hand, we of the new media are also in our every right to make a lot of noise about copyright holders choices to greedily charge us if we'd without buying a license use their material, and it's not making Dagens Media look very good. Don't whine - notice, complain and show disliking by buying your services from someone you like better the next time.

To the point of diminishing the Swedish "blogosphere", indeed they are largely Stockholm-residing latte-sipping MF's, but they have also proven a couple of times that they are being heard and that they can accomplish some very real changes on society, which is enough reason to want to consider myself part of them. It's a bit curious though - the Swedish blogosphere is so much more tightly knit through sites like knuffa (Swedish digg.com) that even with a smaller potential audience, I would probably reach a much larger actual audience if I would write in Swedish than I do currently, writing in English. The global internet is simply to big and I'm excluded from the Swedish blogosphere since I want to be read also by my Estonian friends and others. I will have to suffer that for now I guess.

(Update: Simon has generalized the whole thing into a simple yet efficient scheme for achieving more visitors to your web sites. Yes, sometimes a small fine or bill is cheap to pay compared to the publicity you get - now if I only would be able to make money off the doubtfully legal things I do...)

You don't need a GPS? Your cow does!

Cnet Asia Crave writes:

"From the plains of southern New Mexico, we bring you a story of headset-wearing cows. The US Department of Agriculture and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are teaming up to remotely corral cattle using a wireless device that sends sound straight into the bovines' ears. HDTV-watching pigs can't be far behind."

Considering the friend of my girlfriend who wrote his thesis on "The ergonomy of the dairy farm", and how I have seen extensive prototypes for automatic sorting systems using wireless ZigBee networks for huge Saudi dairy farms... this isn't such a bad idea. Also, it's sort of an innovative location based service... where the wearer doesn't even have to be able to read the guidance device.

Indians are protesting that it's undignified for the cows and that they "look funny wearing that right on top of their heads".

It's silly, but it's phun!

Some lunaticEmil Ernerfeldt at Umeå University (we hang out in the same IRC channel) has created the game2d physics sandbox Phun, and the introduction video for it says it all. I once heard my nephew speak about building an automatic popcorn popper involving a conveyor belt through an oven and a robotic hand to put the popped corn into a bowl - I wonder what Phun would become in his hands. You can download it here. I don't dare to try it, I will get addicted, I'll just stick to Transport Tycoon when I need my fix.

PS. Unless I manage to pry my PS2 back from the hands of my other nephew and niece...

(Update: Now we're just wanting programmable PID-controller functions, then it could be cool to be able to script things like you do in Colobot. Please?)

(Update 2: While I'm at it, let's suggest games like Totem Destroyer and the Orisinal games. Happy waste of time :-P )

Vad är ett roligt spel egentligen?

Ny Teknik skriver om ett av mina favorit-spel, Lego Star Wars. Jag testade det bara för att mina syskonbarn är så tokiga i det, och sen var jag fullständigt hooked! Nästan i.a.f. ... jag berövade min brorsson att få låna mitt PS2 en vecka extra för att få spela det några timmar till. Det är rätt mycket som Ratchet & Clank, med söt grafik, Star Wars-sagan, och tuuusen saker man kan samla på sig genom spelet. Mycket beroendeframkallande.

Annars var jag på Café Delirium (stans bästa pub) ikväll med Philip, vilket förde tankarna till urfåniga arkadspel baserade på pissoarer (har ni tänkt på att man måste handla i baren för att få "ammunition" att spela med?)... men bland annat så pratade vi om att hellre än spel som suger in en i en alternativ verklighet, så är det ännu intressantare med saker som förbättrar, förenklar och gör den befintliga verkligheten trevligare och roligare! Effektivare roligt! Vi är rörande eniga om hur grymt Last.fm events är, och nu har jag nog fått Philip hooked på MoYuMe ("More of You and Me") också, ett trevligt sätt att komma närmare sina nära och kära även på distans, och en kul tillämpning av MMS (Jag kan bjuda in folk... hahaha... ).

(Update: CD kommenterade just för mig att det ju finns en mängd "alternate reality games" som t.ex. "killer - the assasination game", och sen såg jag en artikel och video om en så sjukt lyckad Japansk marknadsföringskampanj för chips)

My Nerd Score: Nerd god, I am nerdier than 95% of all people

(Update: I had to do the other test as well)