It’s the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that picked up a story that someone might have found El dorado an hidden paradise. They also claim that it is an ancient city that was discovered on google maps. But if they would have read the original article in The Online times they would have found the following quote:

Hemming says that while the paper in Antiquity is “significant work by serious people … none of this has anything remotely to do with El Dorado or that racist, incompetent nutter Percy Fawcett. It’s as though someone tried to link a discovery at Stonehenge with, say, Edward Lear’s travels in the Balkans”.

They would also have found that the original paper was published in 2003 by Martti Parssinen and Alceu Ranzi. If they would have tried a little bit they would have found their report in Antiquity. There you can see that they totally missed the whole thing. The sites was discovered by airplane. The news in the report is that they discovered some earthworks (Ditches and soil hedges!) in an area they did not expect to find them. And it is not a city, it is earthworks. The authors speculate that the earthworks might have been for defense, ceremonies or for storing live aquatic food. Far from a city…

So why did this pop up now? Could it be due to David Grann mentioned in the article? Well at first it seems like that. He has written a book called “Lost city of Z” that was published in 2009 and is now being prepared for a movie. But i found a more plausible reason on amazon, the store not the rainforest… His book is being released as a pocket on January the 25th..

Good work David Grann, you got yourself some nice pr for the release of your book.

Naturally  Swedish blogggers swallowed the bait, but some had operating bullshit detectors.

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It’s the mathematican Matt Parker that have found that the Wollworths store are placed to form exact equilateral triangles much in the same way as Stonehenge and other monuments are arranged. Naturally he is just illustrating how stupid the whole argument of alien assisted construction of ancient monuments is. The later according to an article in the Daily Mail a couple of days ago.

Personally i am convinced that if you draw lines in beetwen selected pubs here in Prague you will see a picture of Vaclav Klaus drinking a pint of Staropramen…

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What about these for an example:

• A woman who suddenly can’t open her eyes. It usually keep on for three days, then she is normal again for a couple of months.
• A man who can’t freeze. Or rather his body copes so good with cold that he has swum under the north pole and climbed mount everest in shorts!
• Allergic against cold! A ice cube on the skin will give a huge blister, even snowflakes in the face will give responses. And yes antihistamines help…
• A boy who almost never sleep. (Poor parents, young children’s sleep patterns are stressful enough…)
• People who can’t remember and others who can’t forget!
• A girl who can not feel pain.

And there is alot more details about theese and other strange deseases over here. Check them out!

There is also a story of a girl who doesn’t get older. She is 16 now and still look like a 6 month old baby….

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This sounds like a great solution, beefing up SAAB and at the same time giving Koeningsegg a lot of production capacity. Also it’s a way for the Swedes to bring back SAAB to Swedish ownership again. But then it’s a strange deal. A small company with 50 employees that builds a handful of cars each year, buys a company with thousands of employees building approx. 100000 cars a year!

But then some people think it’s a joke...

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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)

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Basically they collect manure (that’s a nicer word for shit), leftovers from schools and restaurants and other organic waste and mix this with spirits confiscated from smugglers. Now they ferment this slurry for about 25 days and in the process a lot of methane is generated. Enough to cover 20-25% of the heating in the area and 21 million kilowatt hours of electricity. When they are done they return the dry remnants of the slurry to the farmers to use as fertilizer.

A translation by google translate can be found here.

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It was mostly filled with articles regarding the Czech presidency for the European Union and the economic crisis. But in the editorial i found an interesting side effect of the global economic slowdown. A garbage crisis!

That is, the Czechs used to export a lot of garbage to China! And now due to the economic crisis China, the worlds biggest buyer of “secondary raw materials”. Have stopped buying and transporting garbage to China. I guess they don’t expect to refine so much Czech trash into Chinese trash and export it back to Europe.

Strangely enough a couple of days later i read as they used to do about the opposite problem in Gothenburg, Sweden. During the last six months the Swedish garbage production has dropped by 20%. So now there isn’t enough garbage to feed the remote heating system in Gothenburg. According to Dagens Industri they have started to import garbage from Norway and Holland to keep the Swedes warm.

So Swedish tourists visiting Prague, please bring your garbage with you back home and you will help two nations

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At first it seemed to be yet another of these new social network sites, promising to offer you the same thing as myspace, facebook or linked in. But i am the type of guy who wanted to see the thing before dissing it.

Wow was i in for a suprise! The site is empty and have almost no content and no functions what so ever!

But they have a new twist to viral marketing. They offer members 250 shares in the company just for joining and another 500 shares per member you get to sign up. And the membership is free. At a face value of 0.001 GBP per share that is 0.25 GBP for joining and 0.50 GBP per member you get to sign up.

Shure thats not worth the effort, but their ambition is to get en active user base in the millions of users by 2012 and their own estimate is that the shares would be worth 0.58 GBP by then. That translates to 145 GBP for signing up and 290 GBP per user who signed up. And if you manage to get a lot of users signed that could easily result in some serious money.

According to some information i found while researching this that the site will offer the following features.

• - Meeting friends

• - Chatting

• - Shopping

• - Paying Games

• - Watching Videos

• - Creating Art Galleries

• - Reading Virtual Newspapers

• - Making money from your own online store

Ok so they are trying to do a new facebook and combine it with online stores and subscription services. My guess is that these stores will cost money or is driven on a revenue share basis.

So what do you think? Is this a scam or a new smart viral marketing scheme to make sure they have a huge user base when going public with their real services?

Personally i think it is the later, but i think they will have a troublesome time when enabling services for all those users at once. After all the invitation only schemes uses by google, spotify etc. is there to be able to gradually increase the number of users and to be able to stear around bottlenecks and other problems poping up instead of crashing the whole site.

Also i must say that they don’t ask for any other information about you than your email address, so there is not really much they can use to scam you.

So please give me some feedback on this. What is your opinion?

And while you are at it, why don’t you register and check things out for yourself?

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But just a couple of moments ago i ran into a strange facebook bug, i was looking at someone elses inbox!

Just out of the blue when i returned to my inbox after browsing a friends profile, my facebook page was in Turkish and i was looking at someone elses inbox. This is the moment when i should have done a screen dump, but unfortunatly i got so stunned that that thought didn’t strike me. Instead i was fascinated by the fact that slowly (when looking around) the user interface started to go back to English bit by bit. I also noticed that the applications installed was applications i had never seen before. And suddenly the whole page was in English and looking normal again.

No i’m not on drugs, and i’m not drunk. Actually if this would have happened yesterday while drinking a glass of Tuzemska i would have stopped drinking and gone directly to bed…

Anyone else who have noticed this strange glitch? Please comment below, and preferable include a link if you managed to get a screen dump or have a link to any more information!

Btw. Im running Mozilla Firefox 3.0a2 under FreeBSD 7.0-STABLE

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The short story is that i read an article somewhere (sorry i can’t remember the link) that Senator Obama was an “open networker” on sites like linkedin etc. And since his email address where in the article i decided to give it a try. And a couple of days later he accepted my request to connect. (Btw. i have no illusions what so ever that he personally klicks and accepts the thousands of request to connect that he receives!)

An open networker basically is someone who accepts (almost) all requests to connect on social networks, this means they try to take full advantage of “Metcalfe’s law” but applied to social networks.

Metcalfe’s law states: “that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n²).” In plain English this means that the value of your network increases more and more for each new connection you have.

And i totally agree that in business oriented social networks like linkedin there is power in numbers to how many you are connected to. This way you maximise your exposure to others and increase the chance that you can get introduced to someone you need to get in contact with. So i’m an open networker there to with almost 1000 connections, mainly with headhunters and other peers in the Internet industry.

Business oriented social networks is one thing, but purely personal networks like facebook and others i have another strategy. There i only link to people who i have had a (not too negative) relation to. The difference here is that information here, pictures, who i know and what i do is a much more private thing affecting me directly and my family. Not to mention friends and colleages who i connect to and meet in real life. My life rubs off onto theirs and i don’t want a complete stranger to be able to rub it in their face.

So please hook up with me on linkedin with my email chris@arnold.se and if you need to link with Senator Obama please feel free to send me a request and as long as it isn’t rude or spammy i will pass it on to him. But if you would like the same on facebook make shure to tell me why i should open up myself towards you. The same goes for senator Obama! (But in relaity i guess i would be so flattened that ill accept right away and send him a message asking for a postal address so i could send a hard copy of my familly album…)

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