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Showing posts with the label Carl von Linne

Blogging Anniversary - 10 years

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A while ago I checked when I did my first blog post, in order to celebrate with an anniversary post. Well, that day came and went without any reaction from me. Better late than never, so here a reminder of my very first blog post from 24 October 2012.  The book was New Finnish Grammar  by Diego Marani. Marani is an Italian novelist, translator and newspaper columnist. While working as a translator for the European Union he invented a language ‘Europanto’ which is a mixture of languages and based on the common practice of word-borrowing usage of many EU languages. It was a suitable book to start with, being a book about letters, languages and memories. With a beautiful prose, the novel went directly to my heart.  "One night at Trieste in September 1943 a seriously wounded soldier is found on the quay. The doctor, of a newly arrived German hospital ship, Pietri Friari gives the unconscious soldier medical assistance. His new patient has no documents or anything that can ide...

The Most Famous Person in the World?

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This morning I read in DN (Swedish daily paper) in the scientific section (yes, it happens) that researchers have used algorithms from Google to find which persons are mostly linked on Wikipedia. That is; links to and from in the world total, and different countries and language areas. The first writer on this research is Young-Ho Eom and the paper is on arXiv.org  (not that I could find it but maybe you can).You will not believe who is the person that has the most links to his (yes, it is a his) name? Carolus Linneaus , or as we say in Swedish Carl von Linné! After him on the international list are Jesus, Aristoteles, Napoleon, Adolf Hitler and Julius Ceasar. The article refer to The Guardian who is surprised by the result, since the English speaking list, is topped by Napoleon and Barack Obama according to one way of counting and Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson according to another. Benjamin Disraeli is alleged to have said that there are "three kinds of lies: lies, dam l...