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Hermione

That name may sound familiar: Hermione is the name of a main character in Harry Potter. I suppose it isn’t a too common name since I’ve never heard it elsewhere. But today I’ve learned that Hermione is also the name of the fregate that brought Marquis de La Fayette in 1780 announcing French reinforcements to George Washington during the American revolution. And it appears that the Hermione is being rebuilt as we speek.

It’s interesting to know that J. K. Rowling may not have made up this name out of nowhere. But there still is a couple of other things called Hermione too: there were seven ships HMS Hermione in the Great Britain Royal Navy, there is an asteroid 121 Hermione, and a couple of other things.

If you followed the previous link, you’ll trace the origins of Hermione to a figure in Greek mythology. After twenty years of the Trojan War, Helen was retaken by Menelaus and gave birth to a daughter named Hermione.

“Safe” nuclear bombs?

Nuke or not, today’s wars with modern weapons are always tragic for the health of the surrounding populations, thanks to depleted uranium and all the chemicals released by bombs. Jason Miller now speculates Iran may get the first nuke attack since World War Two, a “safe” nuke designed burrow itself into the ground before exploding.

The Pentagon claims that these “bunker busters” would pose no threat to life outside of the underground targets. However, Dr. Robert Nelson of Princeton University offers a significantly differing opinion:

“No earth-burrowing missile can penetrate deep enough into the earth to contain an explosion with a nuclear yield even as small as 1 percent of the 15 kiloton Hiroshima weapon. The explosion simply blows out a massive crater of radioactive dirt, which rains down on the local region with an especially intense and deadly fallout.”

Safe? Aren’t these the same people who are using white phosphorus fragmentation bombs in the middle of cities in Irak because they are not classified as chemical weapons?

I’m wondering what the earth will look like in the next 100 years. Is war is going to be a big environmental and health problem. Pollution doen’t stay where we make it; it travels everywhere, thanks to the winds.

Writing twice about everything

There are many forms of bilingual blogs. Some will post entries in alternance between the two languages. Others will mix languages inside the same entry. And some rare ones will write every entry in both languages. Guess which one is the most difficult…

Writing an entry in two languages takes about twice the time, sometimes more when you need to double check some translations. For articles about politics, because I often try to find references in the original language, it’s often even longer. Ideally I’d translate everything I write. Unfortunately I’m not doing that simply because I’m generally eager to move on to something else once I’m finished writing.

And so this is the compromise: or I write less, and less spontaneously, and every one of my entries are available in the two languages; or I write more while neglecting more often to do a translation. It never is an easy decision.

Note that while my native language is French, I do not always write in French first and then translate. I’m writing this paragraph in English first for example because while translating the rest of this entry I thought it was laking an explanation on my methodology. I often use the translation phase to improve my text both in French and in English. But alas, it just makes it even more time-consuming and removes what’s left of spontaneousness.

Currently, there is more entries in French than in English on this weblog. There are unilingual articles in both languages however: the one about WordPress Text Flow for instance is available only in English. And others entries on Canadian or Quebec’s politics (like all my « Questions d’élection » series) are only available in French.

Pixel Is Not Screen Pixel

It looks like the Safari teem is preparing grounds for the advent of scalable user interface which could come in the forthcoming Mac OS X release. Scaling the user interface means that you change the size of windows, buttons, icons, menus, and everything else to adapt it, say, to a screen having four times the number of pixels in the same area. And since it affects everything that is on the screen, it affects web sites too.

All this means to application programmers that there will be two pixel units to deal with: virtual pixels relative to the user interface scale, and real pixels for screen pixels. Web designers won’t be set apart. That’s what’s needed to improve image definition on the screen, applying to applications and the web.

Surfin’ Safari welcomes you to High Definition Web Sites. Well, to make things clear, they never really talk about scalable user interface in there, but there are other signs pointing it is comming. So did 1+1 and found 2.