eldorado found or swedish newspapers dont check their stories

The story that eldorado might have been found is so flawed…

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.

swedens energy crisis

Today it’s an extremely cold day in Sweden. Down to about -40 in some areas and in Stockholm it has been -20. This has put a big strain on Swedens electrical grid. Also a couple of nuclear power plant’s is down for maintenance. And even thou today approx. 7-8% of Swedens electricity is imported from neighboring countries supply still have a hard time meeting the demand. So Swedish newspapers have been warning about the issue and are recomending people to conserve energy. Also a couple of emergency power plants have been ordered to power up to try to meet the demand of electricity. This means starting to burn oil to produce electricity.

The solution is quite easy. And even reduces emission of greenhouse gases. Build some more more nuclear power plants and at the time increase transmission capacity to our neighbors. This way we have some headroom for cold days. If that’s not enough we could import more electricity when needed. But it works both ways, when not using the extra capacity we could export cheap and clean nuclear power to Germany and other countries that use a lot of power plants using coal as a source. And if we use the thorium reactors i mentioned  the other day we could actually get rid of our nuclear waste at the same time.

Unfortunately it takes so long time to build new power plants that Sweden would face this issue many times before they are operational.

why forbidding thoughts is a bad idea

Being a liberal i have always had problems with forbidding thoughts.  And now when doing some research into “climate gate”  i stumbled upon a blatant example.

During 22 years from 1984 to 2006 Sweden had a “thought ban” on nuclear reactors.  It was forbidden to design nuclear power plants or calculate costs for running these plants. This was one of the consequences of a referendum in 1980 about the future of nuclear power in Sweden. (One could note that this was a strange referendum, 3 options existed but none of them was an yes. They where all about stopping nuclear power in Sweden.)

So where are we now 30 years after this referendum? Well we are trying to stop emission of greenhouse gases, mostly focused on reducing carbon dioxid. One of the easiest and quickest ways to do this is to build more nuclear power plants and phase out the ones fueled by coal.

Sure and what about all the nuclear waste we have to keep secure for 10.000 years? Thats a relevant question and leads me to why i wrote this article.

There are “new” (They where first described in the 50’s and some where running in the 60’s!)  types of reactors that instead of using uranium as a fuel uses thorium. In the process they can transmute our old reactor waste. That is they reduce the waste we already have produced! The result is nuclear waste with a half-life time of less than 100 years. So the waste only needs to be stored for 100’s of years instead of 10.000+ years for conventional nuclear waste.

The Chinese and the Indians are already doing serious research into thorium based reactors and an US-Russian consortium is adapting thorium based fuel so it can be used in the reactors we already have built. A lot of this research have been done in the 30 years Sweden in principle banned nuclear research. Yes 30 years. It was first in 2009 that the Swedish government again started to give grants to nuclear power research.

This thought is not new, already in 2004 the Swedish newspaper DN published a debate article (Sorry it’s in Swedish) written by Niklas Ekdal covering this subject.
One could just wonder where Sweden would have been today if they used at least some of the approximate 20 billion SEK  that went into designing a long term solution to the waste problem into nuclear power research instead of forbidding all thoughts about constructing new reactors…

And bye the way, thanks for the comments on the Swedish blog “Klimatbluffen” that gave me the idea to write something about the Swedish “thought ban” before finishing my article about green nuclear power plants.

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…

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)

trafficing and giant lizards

Reading the Swedish online tabloids is getting on my nerves (yes i know i should stop instead of complaining…) The other day it was a fabricated story about a mind reading machine. And now today in an article about a fossile of a pliosaur aka. predator X in Svalbard. They managed to place Svalbard in Scandinavia. Well it is quite a long way from the Scandinavian Peninsula to Svalbard…

In another article someone is upset about prostitution on one of the boats inbetwen Sweden and Latvia. And they call it trafficking.

Human trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, harbouring, or receipt of people for the purposes of slavery, forced labor (including bonded labor or debt bondage), and servitude. (Definition frrecruitmentom wikipedia.)

Well i guess there could be cases where trafficking wictims are transported or recruited on the boats, but prostitution is the act of selling sexual services. And trafficking is the slave trade. So could we please keep the two things seperate so we know what we are talking about, that would help much more that whining in a tabloid.

how to take two stories and make a horrifying device

Well Aftonbladet a Swedish tabloid has made it again. This time by combining two different technological advances, and then combining them in an article to make it seem like researchers have invented a mind reading machine.

First they write four sentences about a British experiment where scientists have managed to discover where in a virtual world a subject is using a MRI to scan the brain. (Yes they are noisy, and claustrofobic you would notice if someone where scanning you…) Basically just reading out a trace of your spatial abilities. BBC have written about if here.

Then they continue with copying the content of a FOX News article about  “Future Attribute Screening Technology” (FAST) which is a technique to monitor how nervous a person is. This is all done by analyzing sweat, temperature, micro movements and breathing. Far from mind reading… (Also they manage to claim that it was a British invention when it in fact was American, also called MALINTENT developed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

So by this simple method people can now be scared of riscing having their minds read.

Naturally the blogers got it right. For example here and here.
By the way, no idea to whear that foil hat. It will be dectected too..

shit and alcohol eq energy

Yesterday i wrote about garbage and “secondary raw materials”. Today i stumbled over another strange way of generating energy. In the Swedish cities Laholm and Båstad they extract heat and electricity from, hold your breath! Shit and fine spirits…

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.