Took a lunch break and my camera to the Van Tuyll – Van Serooskerkenplein. There was snow-like frilly stuff on all the traditionally green things, er, plants.

(Due to untranslatableness of some words, rest of this entry be in Dutch.) Om de een of andere reden associeer ik creatieve, kindvriendelijke scheldwoorden zo zeer met Hergé’s Kapitein Haddock, dat toen ik dergelijke scheldwoorden tegenkwam in een boek uit 1869, de bijzonderheid daarvan me niet eens opviel. Tegenwoordig kun je iedereen een koektrommel of … Read More

A couple of lessons I learned from my distributed translation experiment: 1. Don’t worry about volunteers showing up. Initially nobody seemed to be interested in participating, but after a while somewhere from ten to twenty people turned up, which was more than enough for my purposes. I had advertised my experiment in four places: this … Read More

Christians like to pretend that they are meek, they like to put themselves in a victim role and turn that other cheek (“and turn, two, three; turn, two, three…”). But if you want to convince others of the friendliness of your religion it helps to have a friendly holy book, and this is where Christians … Read More

“Buffer States are just anvil States.” H.G. Wells in his essay “Holland’s Future”, in Current History, A Monthly Magazine: The European War, March 1915.

I feel like such a rube! The Discovery Channel is organizing a reality show “in which the contestants will build elaborate Rube Goldberg machines“, according to BoingBoing. Being of a sometimes curious nature, I decided to check out the site they linked to, RealityWanted.com, but in order to view the entire application form I had … Read More

About a month a go I promised I would blog a bit about the difference between the major Dutch projects for public domain e-books. I’m talking about: books in electronic format with the copyrights expired in Dutch available for free over the internet in a format that allows mix, rip and burn. That’s a pretty … Read More

Summary: two years ago, I asked people on the internet to help me create a public domain translation of a public domain source text, Poe’s The Tell-tale Heart. The goal was to help establish whether it was possible for a disparate group of translators to create a literary translation. You will find both a description … Read More

Coolest song on the eighties channel, mainly for the complete change in mood right smack in the middle. Edit: I am talking about the Tainted Love/Where did our Love Go? version. The mood change is the switch to Where did our Love Go.

The British “Federation Against Software Theft,” a sort of RIAA for software, wants ISPs to determine whether their paying customers are file sharers. Until now F.A.S.T. had to go through that most horrid forms of mediation: the legal system. The organisation’s boss John Lovelock thinks that to “go through the courts and get a court … Read More