At least according to this Xinhua headline: Kenya’s Nobel laureate lauds ex-Ireland leader. The Nobel peace prize had been awarded to the former president of Finland for his efforts from Europe to the Middle East to Asia.
But hey, what’s the difference between nations? I speak with the experience of a man who was once asked, during the immigration procedure, if he should be listed as coming from Iceland. “Iceland is same as Ireland, yes?”
Which version do you prefer? Is it sacrilege to even like a cover of a Neil Young song??
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JJ70SBKWeA[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0bHCY865xs[/youtube]
How does one balance it all?
Also, a good number of my RSS subscriptions through Bloglines have failed to update since earlier this month, even though they’re not all showing error messages. What’s up with that? But then maybe no news is good news, especially with the economy skipping toward the dark ages.
An interesting enough science bit from AP:
Mathematicians at UCLA have discovered a 13 million-digit prime number [one divisible only by itself and 1], a long-sought milestone that makes them eligible for a $100,000 prize. The group found the 46th known Mersenne prime last month on a network of 75 computers running Windows XP.
Hang on a sec. “Mathematicians discover”… but it was the computers actually doing the thing. I could run the Boinc app on my PC and do calculations for SETI, but that wouldn’t mean I “discovered” anything. Now, if it had been a group busily working away with pens and paper, or maybe an abacus, that would count as mathmaticians discovering. But then one could argue that many scientific discoveries should be attributed to the equipment, rather than the individual.
Maybe I’m just bitter and twisted. And maybe that explains why I think this: If it was Windows Vista, they’d still be looking.
Does anybody else think it’s a bit cheeky that Bruno Metsu has agreed to be Qatar’s manager, given that he quit the UAE soccer team a very short time ago?
From Reuters:
Ireland’s was the first eurozone economy to slip into recession this year, figures showed on Thursday, as the bursting of a property bubble ended 25 years of sustained growth in the once mighty ”Celtic Tiger”.
Official data from the country’s Central Statistics Office showed gross domestic product (GDP) fell for the second successive quarter in the three months to end-June, the technical definition of economic recession.
I thought we were already in a recession, but hey, what do I know?