News for November 18th

I got back from the beach, had my lunch and now it’s time for the after-noon tea. I still don’t like the hotels, but I must admit it’s very comfortable to live here. And it makes me lazy, which is probably a bad thing. 

So here are my readings for today. I started off by reading about the repressions of freedom of speech in today’s Russia. Recently a journalist has been seriously injured for his criticism of some of the Moscow’s bosses and politicians. When I read that, a slide show on the same page led me to these great photos of wrestling Pakistanis. Obviously wrestling is their national sport and they’ve been doing it for over thousand years. Now a little no tech news. RED is soon releasing a new digital video cam aimed at the professional market with its… 261 mega-pixel resolution! Should be enough for a while, I think. But you shouldn’t make stupid comments when it comes to technology, like that one famous quote of Bill Gates about “640K ought to be enough for anybody” (for those who don’t get it: we’re talking about 640 kilobytes, 0,6 megabyte, okay?). Yeah funny, except he never said that – he says now. Something else he said is this:

“To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination — and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.” – Bill Gates, at a conference on the Macintosh (1984) Quicktime clip at osdata.com (1.1 MB)

And this one is as much true today as it was in 1984. Amazing foreseeing there, Bill! One last tech thing is this cool app for the Mac which is made for writing long texts, such as books or research thesis. It seems like it has everything to organize the text and even the references (crucial when writing a thesis). Check out the Scrivener. 

Of course I couldn’t stay away from Wikipedia today either. I read on some of the Pan-Slavic topics and found something interesting: have you heard about the Czech Corridor? According to Wiki, there was a proposal which “would have carved out an area of land to connect Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.” And thus connecting the Western and Eastern Slavs with the brothers in the South, just as it was before Hungarians invaded the central Europe in the 9th century! Comments on this one folks?

Coming up next: A "new" ocean

This is something we already knew, you could hear it throughout the summer: the ice in the Arctics is melting and reaching new, record-low levels. This has led to some political dispute, when Russia about a year ago claimed a vast territory of the Arctic as Russian, and also placed their flag below the North Pole. If somebody back then – in 2007 – doubted the Russian imperialistic ambitions, I guess they can stop hesitate now: just take a look at the development in Georgia recently (English BBC, Swedish Dagens Nyheter and Polish Gazeta Wyborcza all have special service about the on-going conflict). 

This development on it’s own is of course a great storyboard for blogs like this, but it’s not what I was intending to talk about in this post. Something else is a big issue, and as I said, I’m sure that pretty much everybody have heard about the melting Arctics. Well, hearing about something and seeing it are two different things, cause – as they say – a picture is worth a thousand words. So here are the pictures I wanted to show you in the first place: the world with an ice-free Arctic Ocean. Scientist say we can expect this somewhere between 2030 and 2050. But than again, remember how they underestimated the melting so far? So this 2030-2050 looks to me as a conservative calculation. But hey, let us hope we’re all wrong!