The power to change Google

So, you assumed you had to be a major player to change Google results, like Oprah or China? Think again. You can write a small stick figures cartoon and make results jump with just one picture. This picture is way beyond being worth a thousand words; it is more like thirty nine thousand seven hundred (and going up). Will this entry have the same result?
On related news, I've been watching The Big Bang Theory; I have never seen such a thing happening in real life (except the time I've played ONE board game from 1 pm to 10 pm on a Saturday, random discussions about the theory behind moving a couch upstairs and the fact that I will not allow my children to have any inheritance if they even think of using derivation to get the area below a curve).

My own three words

Since today I helped my friend writing her three English words, I think it is a great opportunity for a shameless act of self-promotion. So, you can check what I've written here.

Counting in Spanish

In my entry "Counting in French" I have explained the strange way of saying 90 in French. In this video you can see some strange way of saying 55 in Spanish.

Scientific Hebrew term

Some Hebrew and Yiddish words have been incorporated into English; words such as schmuck, bagel and Chutzpah come from Yiddish, and some words like Armageddon, Satan and amen are so well integrated that you'd have never guessed they came from Hebrew. However, no word is less likely to have become a scientific term than Glitch (quite an appropriate term too); since a glitch is a slippery surface, what better term to describe a slip in the frequency of a pulsar (a rotating neutron star [the leftovers of large collapsed star, but not so massive as the ones that give origin to a black hole]).
Note: Unfortunately, my research in the Internet couldn't confirm if the origin of the term for pulsars comes from this slip in frequency, or because a spurious or defective signal in an electric device is also a glitch, and it could have been the first explanation for the change of frequency in a pulsar.

Are there more forms for ice than eskimo words for snow?

It is an urban myth (debunked here) that Inuit people (formerly known as Eskimos) have more than 100 words for snow. However it is not a well known fact that there are 14 different ice phases. Only 3 of them are occur naturally in Earth, but many more exist and can be obtained in laboratories. A fact that I found amazing is that Ice XI is ferroelectric. I would also like to know whether it is true that the Hungarian parliament was refrigerated until recently with ice from Lake Balaton. Unfortunately, all the information I've found in English doesn't state a precise date, so I am a bit suspicious about the authenticity. If some kind Hungarian speaker could point me to a source in Hungarian I'd be extremely thankful. In addition, he/she will get the dedication of my next post.

Esperanto as a victim of network effects

Esperanto was a good idea. A really good idea, as the Euro was a good idea. However, while the Euro is thriving, Esperanto is spoken by very few people (I wouldn't dare to compare the number of Esperanto speakers to the number of Klingon speakers). One big problem with Esperanto is that it suffers from large negative network effects; if many people speak Esperanto, it becomes useful, and so, more people learn it. However, if very few people speak it, it is not useful, and therefore, very few people (just curious ones) will make that big effort.
In addition, Esperanto suffers from a lock-in problem: people have spent a lot of time learning English and maybe some other language; they've become proficient in them. So, the utility of learning Esperanto should be larger than the effort they must make in order to reach the same level of proficiency than the other languages.
This is another example of systems theory: those two effects are trivial to prove in systems theory, but quite hard using any other model.

PS: I have found a similar article from Semisane

Counting in French

Opinions about the French are quite divided: some people hate them, others, like me, love them. They are different; they know that and are proud of it. It begins at the very basics. When you learn to count in different languages, you usually start with small numbers, and then go up to the tens. Usually, there are some special cases in the 11-20 area, but then it becomes quite regular, each group of ten starting with some variation of the first number and then, the second number is regular.
So, you are quite jolie learning numbers in French, you reach soixante-neuf (69) and you go to septante.
Arretez! All your instincts are wrong: It is soixant-dix. Yes, sixty-ten. And as if this weren't fou enough, how do you say eighty? Quatre-vingt; exactly, four times twenty (and don't get me started on ninety three)
This post was inspired by a colleague who explained me that accountants actually use the other form, more traditional in other languages in order not to mix numbers, but you would never use them in the street. After some research, I have realized that these numbers might be used in Belgium and Switzerland, but I didn't experience that first-hand. If you click in the links (come on, do that, I spend a lot of time linking), you can see that other European languages use these vigesimal numeration; really mainstream languages like Basque and Gaelic . Just opposite of what Asterix said, Ils sont fous ces gaulois! (and I love them for that!)

PS: cheap Google ad, it is really fun when your colleagues explain these strange things!

Learning to fly in the third world

This post will be a bit strange, but I think it's funny.

Flying is supposed to be the safest means of transport.
Until you try learning to fly in the third world.

Things are a bit different between different countries, as I've stated in my previous post. Unfortunately, everything I'll write here will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

First, let's talk a bit about radars. Or lack thereof. If you are learning to flight in small airports or airfields there won't be a radar. Most probably, there won't be a radar in large airports either (just check a bit in Google, about Beijing and Ezeiza). OK, since they are small planes, are quite maneuverable, and you can depend on the well-trained controllers.
Except when these controllers tell you to land in the same runway where a plane is about to take off at the same time.
And of course, the planes' airworthiness is carefully checked; for instance, in my case, when I realised that the oil gauge looked a bit strange, as if it didn't really belong there. When I asked my instructor he answered:

"Certainly, it belongs to a Citroën; but they both use oil, don't they?"

The transvestism of the Sun and the Moon

Another obvious attempt to rank-up in Google, isn't it?
Well, what I was thinking with this post is to see how funny it is that words have different genders in different languages. Of course, there are obvious cases where the gender is, well, obvious (you would never say that Julia Roberts is an actor in any language). On the other hand, in Spanish the Sun ("el Sol") is male and the moon ("la Luna") is female as the links show. However, in German, it is exactly the other way around, "die Sonne" and "der Mond".
Right now I have managed to turn fairy tales in R-rated stories! That's the power of the Internet!