Tøjklemmer
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.
Do 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?
Where 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).
Spielpreise
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.
Hvorfor 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).
Medium-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 if 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?
Portrait of a Grasshopper.
Wow, what a photo! I’d love to be able to take photos like this!
Phonetic blog
I just found out from reading sci.lang that John Wells has a very interesting phonetic blog.
Buy a god on eBay
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! 
A-imperium
Ligesom man kan opdele mennesker i A- og B-mennesker, ser det ud til, at det samme kan gøre sig gældende for lande. Lige siden vi første gang var i Slovenien, har mig og mine forældre undret os over, hvorfor alting (inkl. barer) lukker kl. 22, og hvorfor forretninger åbner allerede kl. 6 om morgenen. Jeg kom så til at tale med nogle forretningsforbindelser fra Tjekkiet om det, da de sagde, at de begynder kl. 7 om morgenen.
Og de havde en forklaring! De sagde, at kejser Franz Joseph af Østrig-Ungarn var udpræget A-menneske, og han tvang hele riget til at følge sin døgnrytme. Og han var jo kejser i mange år (1848-1916), så det blev hængende, selv efter, at hans kejserrige var blevet til selvstændige lande. Nu mangler jeg bare at finde ud af, om det også gælder Østrig og den vestlige del af Ukraine…