"Google" challenges Sweden!

Famous "Google.com" is unhappy with Sweden's language!

Sweden wants to "Ungoogle"!

Most people have heard of “Googling” something, but have you ever heard of “ungoogling”?

Google, the  search engine and Web service provider, has apparently objected to Sweden’s right to formalize the word “ogooglebar,” or “ungoogleable.” According to the Swedish Language Council, the government agency was pressured by Google to remove it from a list of new words because of copyright concerns.

The Swedish council has made a decision to include “ogooglebar” in their computer language. Swedish computers also have the term “emoji” (an animated symbol used to express emoticons); and “grexit”  and “kopimism” (a religious and political ideology focused on freedom of information if I googled it correctly!)

“Ogooglebar” refers to something “impossible to find on the Internet using a search engine,” according to the agency. However,
the Swedish council gave in to the California-based firm’s demand to kill “ogooglebar” this week and removed the word from the list. But the word isn’t dying a quiet death.
“We neither have the time nor the will to pursue the outdrawn process that Google is trying to start,” the council’s president Ann Cederberg said in a harshly worded article posted on the council’s web site, under the headline      “Google doesn’t own the language!”

Swedish keyboard

Google representatives in Sweden could not immediately be reached. So who does own the language? According to the Swedes, its users.“If we want ‘ogooglebar’ in the language, we should use it, and it is our usage which determines the meaning, not a multinational company with its means of pressure,” Ms. Cederberg said.A look at the history of ogooglebar’s root word supports her point. The verb “Google” was included on the 2003 list in its Swedish form “googla,” meaning "looking for information" on the Internet. However, like Xerox, Google Inc. is trying to keep its company name from becoming  a common word.  It wasn’t happy with the definition of ungoogleable. The search giant argued that the definition should refer specifically to Google and demanded a change and a disclaimer noting that Google is a registered trademark.

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In the U.S., the company is in legal questions regarding the argument that “google” as a verb has become so common that it no longer refers to a specific search engine. If Google loses, it could find it hard to protect its trademark, and could face the nightmare scenario of following the same path as extinct or diluted trademarks like “escalator,” “aspirin” and “yo-yo.”
      

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while Ph.D. students at Stanford University. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998.
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Anything can be “Googled” and information-fact or otherwise is readily available. For instance..
April First is an interesting day for the fun-lover..Asking “Google” for April First history, we find that in sixteenth-century France, the start of the new year was observed on April first.

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 It was celebrated in much the same way as it is today with parties and dancing into the late hours of the night.Then in 1562, Pope Gregory introduced a new calendar for the Christian world, and the
new year fell on January first. There were some people, however, who hadn't heard or didn't believe the change in the date, so they continued to celebrate New Year's Day on April first. Others played tricks on them and called them "April fools." They sent them on a "fool's errand" or tried to make them believe that something false was true.

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 But then we can get into fun and games! We might “google up” some mischief: (or find something ogoogleable.Putting salt in the sugar bowl for the next person is not a nice trick to play on a stranger. College students set their clocks an hour behind, so their roommates show up to the wrong class - or not at all.

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The Spaghetti Harvest

      On April 1, 1957 the British television news show “Panorama” broadcast a three-minute segment about a "Bumper spaghetti harvest" in southern Switzerland. The success of the crop was attributed both to an unusually mild winter and to the "virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil." The audience heard Richard Dimbleby, the show's highly respected anchor, discussing the details of the spaghetti crop as they watched video footage of a Swiss family pulling pasta off spaghetti trees and placing it into baskets. The segment concluded with the assurance that, "For those who love this dish, there's nothing like real, home-grown spaghetti."

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Nixon's Farewell

The 1 April 1992 broadcast of National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation revealed that Richard Nixon, in a surprise move, was running for President again. His new campaign slogan was, "I didn't do anything wrong, and I won't do it again." Accompanying this announcement were audio clips of Nixon Nixon's voice  impersonated by comedian Rich Little.

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But sometimes, you have to check for accuracy:..A gas-station was offering a discount on a great gas-price. Apparently, they were advertising “Day-old Gas” at a discount and drivers wanted the attendant to point out which pump contained the advertised special. Perhaps, it would be nice to be able to hit the ogooglebar at times..

          By the way, “Be careful, your shoe’s untied!”... April Fool!

Recalculate..Recalculate!

           Recalculating....Recalculating....

The winter season is slowly coming to an end and people are beginning to make plans to enjoy the warm outdoors.Travelers are anxious to get under way, while students are plannng their spring-break.
              The question is: “Where and how do we get there?”

While birds and other wild-life seem to have built-in guidance systems, we humans must develope and depend on artificial intelligence. Road-maps are now ancient documents, due to the fact that no one could
master refolding them. Then, there was Map-quest, a computer-generated program displaying the possible routes to the chosen destination.This proved too rigid while on the road when plans would change. Along comes Mrs. Garmin, the electronic female voice that, once given the destination, had the ability to guide us block-by-block. But even the skillful Mrs. Garmin would become confused if the driver made a wrong turn. While this system remains very helpful, there must be a better way. The modern GPS system depends upon contact with approximately

twenty-four satellites, triangulated to determine the traveler’s location. This seems like a lot of technology to help us get from point A to point B. Our ancestors managed to sail across open waters for a month without the aid of electronics. How did they do it? They used the sun, stars and ocean currents when conditions were favorable. Fog, storms,  heavy winds and long nights might have caused many changes in routes.

                    They might have had a “Secret Weapon” for their navigational needs!  A “Stone”.

Viking legends tell of an “sunstone” or sólarsteinn that, when held up to the sky, revealed the position of the sun, even on overcast days or below the horizon. One Icelandic saga describes how, during cloudy, snowy weather, King Olaf consulted Sigurd on the location of the Sun. To check Sigurd's answer, Olaf "grabbed a sunstone, looked at the sky and saw from where the light came, from which he guessed the position of the invisible Sun".
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Viking explorers travelled far and wide based upon evidence of Viking settlements  excavated in North America. In remembrance of Scandinavian immigration,  The state of Minnesota has maintained Kjemkomst Center, a Moorhead, Minnesota museum and tourist attraction.  Residents decided to build a Viking Ship capable of the trans-Atlantic voyage and sail to Norway. One hundred oak trees were selected and cut for the construction of  the Kjemkomst Viking Ship. The voyage was to commemorate the Kjemkomst Expedition that originated from Norway to North America. Built in Moorhead, the replica of the long boat and it’s American crew set out in June, 1982 for their oceanic voyage. Soon, problems arose, including malfunctioning of their VHF radio that was essential for communication. After 34 days and 4700 miles, the crew had battled  storms and mechanical difficulties to reach their destination in Bergen, Norway. Their voyage was difficult, even with modern communications. How could “King Olaf” and his crew navigate this route successfully?

   Legends claim he used the  “Sunstone” as his navigational guide.

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 The Viking routes in the North Atlantic were often subject to dense fog, and the stone could  be used to locate the sun on very cloudy days.Apparently, these legends may be true!  Researchers have determined such sunstones could have helped the Vikings in their navigations from Norway all the way to America before the discovery of the magnetic compass in Europe.  They would have relied upon the sun's piercing rays reflected through a piece of the calcite. The trick is that light coming from 90 degrees opposite the sun would be polarised, so even when the sun is below the horizon, it is possible to tell the location of the sun if they used the “sunstone”.

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Scientific experiments have shown that a crystal, called an Iceland spar could detect the sun with an accuracy within one degree – allowing the legendary seafarers to navigate thousands of miles on cloudy days and during long nordic nights, even when the sun was below the horizon.  This crystal can help in detecting the  distance of some object that is viewed through it ,and that is why Iceland spar was even used during World War II  by bomb squads .

An Iceland spar, which is transparent and made of calcite, was found in the wreck of an Elizabethan ship discovered thirty years ago off the coast of Alderney in the Channel Islands after it sank in 1592, just four years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

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Early voyagers used the double refraction of calcite to pinpoint the sun by rotating the crystals until both sides of the double image are of equal intensity. A light ray falling on calcite will be divided in two, forming a double image on its far side.  Vikings could have used a device like this to navigate.  By rotating the apparatus and determining the direction at which  two images were equal in brightness, voyagers managed to pinpoint the sun’s position on a cloudy day .

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The Vikings might have had  a “compass in a box”. As the available light was beamed into the box, rotation focused the double polarized images into one, determining the sun’s location.
                             Perhaps the Vikings had the first GPS!

 At that time, the Viking sailors would be able to re-calculate.

Have a nice trip!