Keys Corner

There was an interesting article on Genevieve Bell a cultural anthropologist employed by Intel, in The Oregonian last May. Bell spent the last two years looking into how Asians interact with technology. She turned up some interesting things.

Did you know for instance that LGE, a Korean company, produces a mobile phone with a built in GPS unit to allow the user to find out which direction Mecca is?

Or that some middle-class women in India classify themselves as regular Internet users, despite never having touched a PC, because they dictate e-mail for other members of their family to send to their children and grandchildren on their behalf?

The article is here if you are interested.

The Halifax and Bank of Scotland (HBOS) publish a set of regularly updated excel sheets, showing how UK house prices have developed since as far back as 1983. Probably only of interest if you live in the UK, or like us, used to. (They make depressing reading, if you invested in the Geman property market in the 1980’s, rather then the UK market.)

The BBC reported on criticism of lack of government action by the Benfield Grieg Hazard Research Centre earlier this week. If Cumbre Vieja volcano on La Palma (in the Canary Islands) erupts, 500 cubic kilometers of rock (approximately twice the volume of the Isle of Man) are likely to slide into the sea, causing an initial wave 900 meters high. Waves (tsunami), initially traveling at over 800 km/hr will reach the west coast of the USA 9 hours later, where they will still be 20 – 25 meters high.

The Research Centre points out that the waves are likely to inundate the coastal regions of Florida and the Caribbean for several kilometers inland, causing immense devastation. As there is no way to prevent the eruption occurring, it is crucial that we monitor the volcano, says spokesman Bill McGuire. Only then, will sufficient warning for the evacuation of the millions people affected, be possible. The cost of such a tsunami is likely to dwarf the cost of the 9/11 attack in the USA - the Research Centre places the potential cost of damage in the multi trillion USD range.

The wave will also hit the coasts of the UK, Spain, Portugal and France, but because the Cumbre Vieja is on the west coast of the La Palma, the main wave will be directed towards the USA. The wave, when it reaches the European coasts will probably “only” be 5 – 7 meters high.

The warning is a result of a research paper published by Steven Ward and Simon Day in 2001, which has so far been ignored. The paper (pdf) is only four pages long and quite readable.

Everyone (at least in Germany) seems to have an opinion on the reform of the German language, which 2 major publishers have put on hold last week – to the annoyance of the government. As the reform has been implemented for 5 years, one can almost have sympathy with them – if it wasn’t so full of inconsistencies that the (1106) new rules for spelling (12 000 new spellings!) and punctuation / hyphenation are impossible to remember.

We shouldn’t, however, overlook the European spelling reform, aimed at simplifying English:

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European nation rather than German which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty’s Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would become known as “Euro-English”.

• In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c”. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard “c” will be dropped in favour of the “k”. This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.
• There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced with the “f”. This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
• In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent “e” in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
• By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th” with “z” and “w” with “v”.
• During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining “ou” and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

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The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has been approached by the US State Department to monitor the November US presidential elections, the Guardian reports today. The news has also been reported in the US press. Assuming this actually happens, this will be the first time ever, that US presidential elections have been monitored by an international independent body.

The OSCE usually monitors elections in third world countries, but given the bad blood caused by disputes which took place after the 2000 elections (problems with invalid ballot papers and also concerns raised subsequently about the possibility of tampering with voting machines), this seems like a smart move.

El Corte Inglés department store on the Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona sells ham (jamón serrano, actually) at 125 Euro per Kilo – if you buy some, it will be locked into an electronically tagged plastic box so that you can’t nibble it until you have payed for it at the cashier…

Via GirlHacker’s Random Log.

Kassel is a couple of hours drive from where we live and home to the Documenta exhibition, which happens every five years – the last one was in 2002 – we visited and enjoyed it greatly.

However, that is not the only reason to go to Kassel. The natural history collection in the Ottoneum is also worth a visit. They have a collection of 530 wooden books, made of 441 different sorts of wood by Carl Schildbach, the park administrator at the end of the 18th century.

Each “book” is actually a wooden box, made of wood from the trunk and branches of the specific bush or tree, and containing preserved samples of the leaves, flowers and fruits of the species- when Schildbach couldn’t successfully preserve an item, he made life-like wax copies for his collection.

The spines of the books are covered by the bark of the shrub or tree (complete with any moss or lichen that had been growing on it at the time). Inside the lid of each box is information about the species of tree or shrub and of how much energy it releases when burnt.

OK - who knows what a kibibyte is?

No, it is not a new cat food – it is 1024 bytes. You might think that that is a kilobyte and, until 1998, you would have been right.

But several major insititutions, decided that it was nonsense having telecom manufacturers and hard disk manufacturers using the kilo-, mega-, and so on prefixes in line with the SI (International System of Units) definition, which means 1000 , 1000000, etc. and the remaining computer nerds using it to mean the nearest power of two value instead (i.e. 1024 rather than 1000). In 1998 the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) came up with new prefixes to denote the power-of-two values: kibi-, mebi-, gibi-, and tebi-, being the most commonly used ones. These new standards were adopted in 1999 by several important organisations, including the IEEE.

(Thanks to Martin Klein, for pointing this out to me.)

I just ran across an interesting guide to living in Bangalore (the Silicon Valley of India), here an excerpt on how to communicate:

• If you want to clarify a thought, state it and then ask "No?". eg: "Today is Monday. No?".
• If you want to present a thought, state it and then add "only". eg: "Today is Monday only".
• If you want to agree to an idea, say "it is like that only".
• If you want to agree hesitantly to an idea, it follows from previous rules that you say "it is like that only, no?".
• If you know one thing and you think there are additional things, say "and all". Eg. "This US and all are in Iraq"; implies US, UK and their coalition are fighting in Iraq. You can say "and all" to fill in the gaps too.
• If you want to talk about things that are not known to the audience, prefix each sentence with "actually", "basically" or "generally". For example, "My name is Babu. I am from Kerala. I go there every weekend." translates to "Actually my name is Babu. Basically I am from Kerala only. Generally I go there every weekend."

I must admit, having read the whole article, that it doesn’t quite sound my cup of tea – too frenetic, too dusty, and it seems, too many people driving the wrong way up roads on the wrong side of the street… OK - and I’m too old

Digital Camera Shopper magazine has been putting the five most common types of digital memory cards through gruelling physical abuse – with surprising results. The tests included being washed in a washing machine, dropped in cola, being run over by a skate-board and being dunked in a cup of coffee. All the cards survived undamaged. As long as the memory card doesn’t get stolen with your camera, and you don’t accidentally delete them, your pictures have an excellent chance of surviving the roughest of treatment on holiday.