more on drugs and harm reduction

Today the Swedish minister of public health Maria Larsson announced that she would like it to be possible for the Swedish state to buy drugs.

The situation in Sweden today is that the police has to arrest someone carrying a new designer drug to have a sample to analyze she want’s to rationalise things buy letting the goverment proactive buy drugs for analyze and by that means spead up hte process of criminalizing the new drugs.

And finally she says the classic statement that shows that she has missed the whole pont: “The discussion about drugs must be brought up at the kitchen table and in schools.” It will not work! Today the Swedish official stance is that all drugs are “killers” and that you immediatly will get addicted and fall out of society. But the kids are not stupid, they see friends using drugs, they do research on internet and they discuss with their peers. And the conclusion for many of them? That the state and other authorities are lying! (There is a open letter to the minister stating the same thing here.)

So the day when we really need to warn about a new drug or a bad batch the kids will not listen.

In the modern transparent society we need to have policies based on evidence and facts, we also need to regain trust from drug users, drug abusers and teenagers at risk. This is one part of what i call harm reduction. Another Swedish blogger commented on that here.

Another part is needle exchange programs for those who inject drugs. There has been a trial program for over 20 years in the Malmö/Lund region and the other day there where an evaluation of the program. The conclution was that the needle exchange program did not help. But read this comment from the top medical officer handling epidemic diseases in the region:

(Translated from Swedish, se the link above for the original.)

“Last year 25 persons got HIV from sharing needles, 24 of theese live in Stockholm”

Mind you Stockholm does not have a needle exchange program… And one! case in the rest of the country, and we don’t even know if he is from the region with the needle exchange program. Not starting with needle exchange programs right away is just cynical!

And then we havn’t even considerd all the other possibilities of vaccinations against hepatitis, health checks and actually meeting and building up trus amongst the abusers.

Happily the city of Helsingborg has realised this, congratulations for doing something right in figthting the downside of drugs!

I have had some feedback on my post the other day about errors in the translation of official EU documents translating “drug use” to “drug abuse” when translating to Swedish and Danish. Some have asked me in private: “But shurly it must be a misstake on that page or a misstake by that translator” But no this is systematic.

For you that are billingual check out another English page and it’s Swedish translation. Note that “drug use” have turned into “Narkotikamissbruk” (Drug abuse in Swedish). The danish page is here, there the phrase is translated into “narkotikamisbrug”. And there is several examples all over those pages.

Please submit komments! And if you find any more misstranslated pages please let me know. Naturally not only pages related to drugs. All systematic translation errors are interesting, i will do something about them even if they go against my political compass. Cause it is so totally wrong to change the meaning of a text!

And to them who dissagree with my vievs above, would you fell ok if Swedish documents with “drug abuse” where to be translated into documents stating “drug use” instead? This is a 2 way street you know…

oracle to buy sun microsystems

Today Oracle and sun announced that they will be buying Sun Microsystems. And this is big!

Imagine the biggest non opensource database company not only owning their biggest rival MySQL but also a lot of other key internet technologies such as: java, solaris,  netbeans, virtualbox  (virtilisation software) , openoffice (A microsoft office “clone”). Not to mention the great technologies SUN has turned out in the last years, amongst them ZFS. (A totally new way of implementing an in theory unlimited journaling filesystem with end to end check summing on all data, and for many considered the best thing since sliced bread.) But also their own CPU architecture the SPARC and will be producing their own hardware to run all this software on.

I still haven’t decided if i should be scared or happy for the effects this will have on a lot of open source software. Interesting times we are living in!

And i’m not the only one thinking that and it is worrying that Oracles website could not cope with the load, but SUN‘s could.

Content server request failed

But sun's did handle the load.

Some quotes from sun:

Press Release Quotes

“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems. Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”

Larry Ellison
CEO
Oracle

“Oracle and Sun have been industry pioneers and close partners for more than 20 years. This combination is a natural evolution of our relationship and will be an industry-defining event.”

Scott McNealy
Chairman of the Board of Directors, Chairman of Sun Federal, Inc.
Sun Microsystems

“This is a fantastic day for Sun’s customers, developers and partners across the globe, joining forces with the global leader in enterprise software to drive innovation and value across every aspect of the technology marketplace. From the Java platform touching nearly every business system on earth, powering billions of consumers on mobile handsets and consumer electronics, to the convergence of storage, networking and computing driven by the Solaris operating system and Sun’s SPARC and x64 systems. Together with Oracle, we’ll drive the innovation pipeline to create compelling value to our customer base and the marketplace.”

Jonathan Schwartz
CEO and President
Sun Microsystems

Even Swedish mainstream media have started to cover the story. For example Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter .

Antarctic ice is growing not melting away

Antarctic is is growing! Not melting away as is stated today in an Expressen editorial.

I guess this is against what people think, but as normal when global climate things arn’t as simple as they seem. (I tend to be very sceptic to anyone who is totally shure about global warming.) Look over here at news.com.au for the story i read the following:

Ice levels are decreasing in western Antarctia, but growing in the east. And since east anterctica is about 4 times as large the net effect is that there is more ice on Antarctica today than for ten years ago. Actually last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m. The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m.

But please note the article isn’t published yet by the British Antarctic Survey but will be in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded.

drug use or drug abuse

It may seem that i have a hangup around drugs.

And that’s correct i love drinking beer and a occasional Becherovka or Tuzemský slinks down. But nothing else, it just isn’t my cup of tea. But i hang out with drug users, and have no problem with them using drugs. I actually have a much bigger problem with people getting to drunk and violent…

But i have an even bigger hangup of the Swedish system of criminalising and hunting drug users. I think it’s counter productive. And it’s so established that even official translations of EU documents is translated wrong to suit the official stance.

I guess you don’t believe me. Official EU documents being forged while translated? No way!

Ok time for some proof, when an English document says “Drug use” it is translated as “drug abuse” (Narkotikamissbruk or drogmissbruk in Swedish.)

Take for example this site in English and in Swedish.

This is just outrageous! How can this be allowed? Is there any way to complain and eventually get an ending to this?

Also what kind of trust can we have in other more important documents? Is all material rigged in this way?

Big questions i know, but i would like to have an answer. And a stop to this!

By the way i would like to have some feedback from you all. Which other translation of the page above does the same? Please give me that feedback and i will keep this page updated. And only real persons with knowledge in the language, i don’t trust translation engines in this matter.

Wrongly translated:

Swedish: Narkotikamissbruk (Narcotic abuse)

Danish: Stofmisbruget (substance abuse)

Rightly translated:

English: Drug use

Estonian: kasutama (use)

Finnish: käyttö (use)

French: consommation de drogue (consumption of drugs)

Portuguese: consumo de droga (consumption of drugs)
Spanish: consumo de drogas (consumption of drugs)

German: Drogenkonsum (Drug consumption)

Polish: zażywanie (use)