While the Medison Celebrity $150 laptop was obviously a good idea, it was — as some have noticed — very, very poorly executed. While debates on whether or not it’s actually at all possible to produce a laptop that cheap are still heated, I don’t think anyone disagrees that a $150 laptop would be nothing but great.

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This morning I found this in my inbox…

To: madsen@sjovedyr.dk
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2006 02:21:23 -0500
Subject: php contract work
From: #####@########.org

I saw your ad posted on phpbuilder.com for php contract work.

I have a survey form / MySQL database project I am working on and am wondering
how much you would charge to complete it.

Here is a link to the form, and what I am looking for is explained there:

http://www.friendsofdenmark.us/.

If you want to call, my number in Washington, DC is ### ### ####

Thanks,

##### ######

From IP Address: ##.##.###.##
From Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5)
Gecko/20060111 Netscape/8.1

Two words: Hell no!

Apparently the Danish government considers rewarding the universities for the number of master students that get employed after the education instead of — as they do now — for the number of students actually completing a master. (Link [da])

Once again our government shows absolutely no understanding for science — they think it’s all about filling jobs and making some of the green — but they fail to see that science may just as well be a passion — I know it is for a lot of scientists. The state pays for our education, so of course they expect to get something back, but they may end up getting far less back than ever, because it will mean that the departments will have to constantly think about what “the state needs” or “what can give jobs” and modify the classes to match that, which is not always a Good Thing™. This may on long term have the effect that studies such as linguistics and other weird, small studies will cease to exist, because there simply is not a whole lot of jobs for us linguists out there and linguistics solely aimed at getting a job is just not that interesting. It’s not uncommon that linguists mix their profession with something else, say a specific language — or programming. So what if they get employed as translators from that specific language to their native language or they get a job at Google working on e.g. Google Sets (which will require some knowledge of semantics)? Will that count? Who’s going to decide if it counts? What if I complete my major in linguistics and get a job sweeping sidewalks? Will the Department of Linguistics at the University of Aarhus be “rewarded” for that?

On top of that, it may result in the “wanted” studies becoming flooded with applicants because “it’s all about getting a job”.

Ass-hats!

I came to think about various ways of finding a needle in a haystack - and I mean an actual needle in an actual haystack. I’m not speaking metaphorically or talking about searching arrays or anything like that. Just imagine a huge pile of hay and somewhere in there there’s a needle that you - for whatever reason - absolutely must find.

Well, I came up with a couple of ways…

1. Start digging through the pile with your hands and hope that the needle will prick you.
2. Wreck a couple of bass speakers and use the magnets to go through the pile.
3. Burn down the stack and use the speaker magnets mentioned in 2 to go over the ashes.
4. Ask someone to have sex in the haystack (don’t tell them about the needle) and count on Murphey’s Law doing a satisfactory job.

I’m sure there’s a lot of great analogies in these approaches and you’re very welcome to use them, they’re GPL’ed.

The danish television/radio station DR just brought podcasting to the danes! Simply go to http://dr.dk/podcast/ and start downloading/listening (in Danish). They don’t seem to support Linux, but it’s as easy as reading an RSS feed and finding the tag. ;-) Thank you DR!