The things going on in my country without me knowing about them!!!
Thanks for enlightening me, Beyond!
It's fitting that the Dutch Santa Claus won the Santa Winter Olympics. The Dutch are incredibly Santa-minded, or rather, "Sinterklaas-minded". They call Santa Sinterklaas, and they have celebrated him, patron saint of children, with gifts and revelry since the 17th century or even earlier!
Ann
Re: I Didn't Know That
Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2012 5:39 am
by Beyond
Ann, it's a strange thing that the people around the area of things happening, are usually the last to find out about them. Ho Ho Ho. I would have said that in swedish, but Bing translates it the same as english.
Re: I Didn't Know That
Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2012 9:17 am
by Ann
Beyond wrote:Ann, it's a strange thing that the people around the area of things happening, are usually the last to find out about them. Ho Ho Ho. I would have said that in swedish, but Bing translates it the same as english.
Santa Claus rarely says "Ho Ho Ho" in Swedish. And Swedish kids don't expect Santa to really come flying in the sky drawn by flying reindeer, and they don't expect him to enter their house by the chimney. They do, however, expect a visit from Santa Claus, which might look like this:
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
The title of this video is "Tomten kommer", or, "The Christmas Man arrives". I watched this video without any sound, which means it was about as boring to me as it will probably be to you. But at least you can see how tomten (or "jultomten") generally behaves. I'd expect him to come walking to the house he is visiting rather than cycling there, but to each "jultomte" his own.
Ann
Re: I Didn't Know That
Posted: Thu Nov 22, 2012 4:51 am
by Beyond
Ann, i watched it with the sound. I quit at 3-minutes! I didn't want to go to sleep early.
Re: I Didn't Know That
Posted: Thu Nov 22, 2012 5:40 am
by Moonlady
Is this really Santa Claus? He looks to me like a white bearded Samurai
Moonlady wrote:Is this really Santa Claus? He looks to me like a white bearded Samurai
It's what a Swedish "jultomte"-mask-and-costume generally looks like. When my brother and I were small, our neighbour used to wear one of those and come to our house and deliver our presents. My brother, the smart kid, figured out who "jultomten" really was by recognizing our neighbour's shoes! Busted!
But, I don't know, they say you can use those bird droppings for fuel? Maybe, you know, if this winter gets to be really harsh, and there are power outages, then maybe we can put those ecclesiastic bird droppings to good use?
But, I don't know, they say you can use those bird droppings for fuel? Maybe, you know, if this winter gets to be really harsh, and there are power outages, then maybe we can put those ecclesiastic bird droppings to good use?
<<Uguisu no fun (鶯の糞), which literally means “nightingale feces” in Japanese, refers to the excrement (fun) produced by a particular nightingale called the Japanese bush warbler (Cettia diphone) (uguisu). The droppings have been used in facials since ancient Japanese times. Recently, the product has been used in the Western world. This facial has been referred to as the “Geisha Facial”. The facial is supposed to lighten the skin and balance skin tones that have acne or sun damage. In the novel Memoirs of a Geisha, Chiyo repays Hatsumomo’s cruelty by mixing pigeon droppings with her face cream that contained unguent of nightingale droppings.
The use of nightingale excrement dates back to the Heian period (A.D. 794 – 1185) where it was introduced to the Japanese by the Koreans. The Koreans used the guano to remove dye from kimono fabric which allowed them to make intricate designs on the clothing. The Japanese used the bird droppings to remove stains from silk garments, like kimonos. Then, during the Edo period (A.D. 1603–1868), the Japanese expanded the use by using it as a beauty treatment. Some sources, however, report that as early as the 3rd century, Japanese women rubbed bags of rice bran on their faces and used nightingale droppings to whiten the skin. Geishas and kabuki actors used heavy white makeup that contained zinc and lead, which could have caused skin diseases and other issues. Uguisu no fun was used to thoroughly remove the makeup and whiten and even the skin. Also, Buddhist monks used the droppings to polish and clean their bald scalps.
The way the facial works is not entirely clear. The guano from the nightingale has a high concentration of urea and guanine. Because birds excrete a fecal and urine waste from a single opening, called the cloaca, the fecal-urine combination give the droppings a high concentration of urea. Urea is sometimes found in cosmetics because it locks moisture into the skin. The guanine may produce shimmery, iridescent effects on the skin. It is claimed that because of the short intestine of the nightingale, the droppings have protein, a fat-degrading enzyme, and a whitening enzyme that acts on fat and scurf to whiten skin and even out blemishes.>>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightingale_%28fairy_tale%29 wrote:
<<"The Nightingale" (Danish: "Nattergalen") is a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about an emperor who prefers the tinkling of a bejeweled mechanical bird to the song of a real nightingale. When the Emperor is near death, the nightingale's song restores his health. Well received upon its publication in Copenhagen in 1843 in New Fairy Tales, the tale is believed to have been inspired by the author's unrequited love for opera singer Jenny Lind, the "Swedish nightingale". Andersen wrote in The True Story of My Life, published in 1847, "Through Jenny Lind I first became sensible of the holiness of Art.">>
<<Guano (via Spanish, ultimately from the Quechua wanu, meaning "dung") is the feces and urine of seabirds, cave-dwelling bats, and seals. Guano manure is a highly effective fertilizer due to its high phosphorus and nitrogen content and its relative lack of odor compared to other forms of organic fertilizer such as horse manure. In agriculture and gardening guano has a number of uses, including as: soil builder, lawn treatments, fungicide (when fed to plants through the leaves), nematicide (decomposing microbes help control nematodes), and as composting activator (nutrients and microbes speed up decomposition).
The word "guano" originates from the Quichua language of the Andes and means "the droppings of sea birds". Andean peoples collected guano from small islands located off the coast of Peru for use as soil enricher. On the basis of archaeological objects recovered from some of the Peruvian guano islands, which display stylistic elements characteristic of the Moche people, Andean people had visited the islands for well over 1,000 years. Spanish colonial documents suggest that the rulers of the Inca Empire assigned great value to guano, restricting access to it and punishing any disturbance of the birds with death.
In November 1802, Alexander von Humboldt studied guano and its fertilizing properties at Callao in Peru, and his subsequent writings on this topic made the subject known in Europe. The Guanay Cormorant has historically been the most important producer of guano; its guano is richer in nitrogen than guano from other seabirds. Other important guano producing species off the coast of Peru are the Peruvian Pelican and the Peruvian Booby. The ideal type of guano is found in exceptionally dry climates, as rainwater drains the guano of nitrates. Guano is harvested on various islands in the Pacific Ocean (for example, the Chincha Islands) and in other oceans (for example, Juan de Nova Island and Christmas Island). These islands have been home to mass seabird colonies for many centuries, and the guano has collected to a depth of many metres. Guano consists of ammonium oxalate and urate, phosphates, as well as some earth salts and impurities. Guano also has a high concentration of nitrates. Bird guano has a fertilizer analysis of 11 to 16 percent nitrogen (the majority of which is uric acid), 8 to 12 percent equivalent phosphoric acid, and 2 to 3 percent equivalent potash.
Bat and seal guano are lower in fertilizer value than bird guano. Bat guano is usually mined in caves and this mining is associated with a corresponding loss of troglobytic biota and diminishing of biodiversity. Guano deposits support a great variety of cave-adapted invertebrates, that rely on bat feces as their sole source of nutrition. In addition to the biological component, deep guano deposits contain local paleoclimatic records in strata that have built up over thousands of years, which are unrecoverable once disturbed.
The high concentration of nitrates also made guano an important strategic commodity. The discovery during the 1840s of the use of guano as a fertilizer and its Chile saltpetre content as a key ingredient in explosives made the area strategically valuable. In this context the US passed the Guano Islands Act in 1856 giving citizens discovering a source of guano the right to take possession of unclaimed land and entitlement to exclusive rights to the deposits. However, the guano could only be removed for the use of citizens of the United States. This enabled U.S. citizens to take possession of unoccupied islands containing guano.
In the second half of the 19th century guano extraction was eclipsed by saltpetre in the form of caliche extraction from the interior of Atacama Desert, not far from the guano areas. After the War of the Pacific (1879–1883) Chile seized much of the guano as well as salpeter producing area making its national treasury grow by 900% between 1879 and 1902 due to taxes coming from the newly acquired lands. The importance of guano deposits faded after 1909 when Fritz Haber developed the Haber-Bosch process of industrial nitrogen fixation (nitrogen gas from the air converted into liquid ammonia fertilizer). The Haber process is important today because the fertilizer generated from ammonia is responsible for sustaining one-third of the Earth's population. It is estimated that half of the protein within human beings is made of nitrogen that was originally fixed by this process, the remainder was produced by nitrogen fixing bacteria and archaea.>>
Well, I knew it, but it's possible you didn't: today is Lucia in Sweden! Here is everything you need to know about it:
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
When I came to Malmö train central today after returning home from work - and the temperature in the place where I work was twenty degrees Celsius today, minus twenty degrees, that is - most people in the rather crowded train station were smiling. A Lucia performance was going on! A Lucia, two handmaidens and a Santa were singing our most beautiful Lucia songs, and they were doing it splendidly!
Ann
Re: I Didn't Know That
Posted: Thu Dec 13, 2012 5:04 pm
by Beyond
Ann wrote:Well, I knew it, but it's possible you didn't: today is Lucia in Sweden! Here is everything you need to know about it:
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
When I came to Malmö train central today after returning home from work - and the temperature in the place where I work was twenty degrees Celsius today, minus twenty degrees, that is - most people in the rather crowded train station were smiling. A Lucia performance was going on! A Lucia, two handmaidens and a Santa were singing our most beautiful Lucia songs, and they were doing it splendidly!
Ann
WoW!, Ann. Snow... a cool place to work (how come?) and now Lucia! You Swedes sure have a lot of excitement there.
Re: I Didn't Know That
Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2012 12:49 am
by Ann
Beyond wrote:
WoW!, Ann. Snow... a cool place to work (how come?)
Well, I live in Malmö and work in a smaller place, some 80 kilometers north of Malmö and away from the coast. That other place is certainly often colder than Malmö in the winter! It's a bit of a bother to commute, but Malmö can be a tough city for teachers. Plus, I can be totally myself when I return home, and I can enjoy the rather rich smorgasbord of cultural events and activities here.
Ann
Re: I Didn't Know That
Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2012 2:09 am
by Beyond
Ann wrote:
Beyond wrote:
WoW!, Ann. Snow... a cool place to work (how come?)
Well, I live in Malmö and work in a smaller place, some 80 kilometers north of Malmö and away from the coast. That other place is certainly often colder than Malmö in the winter! It's a bit of a bother to commute, but Malmö can be a tough city for teachers. Plus, I can be totally myself when I return home, and I can enjoy the rather rich smorgasbord of cultural events and activities here.
Ann
Oh, ok. I thought where you worked -inside- was where it was 20' C. I guess i just don't understand Swedish godunov, Oh-wait, that's Russian. Well, anyway, looks like you have lotsa fun in Sweden. That's all that counts
It reminds me of a film I saw way back when, in the early days of computers. The main character was a computer programmer who had created a whole artificial world populated by people who thought they were real, but who were, of course, only "figments of programming". These "computer simulation ghost people" were used by sociologists and others who subjected them to various tests and experiments, to see how human beings react in different situations. The main character could turn himself into a computer simulation too, and visit the world he has created. He had a contact there, da "person" he talks with. One day, when he was inside his own simulation, his contact told him that he, too, was a computer simulation, created by (presumably) real people who used him and his world for their experiments. So there were "two levels of computer simulations", one of which was created by the inhabitants of a simulated world! (Wonder if you got all that?)
Anyway, I have to wonder - what would we do if we find out that the universe is indeed a computer simulation, and we are "lab rats" created to satisfy someone else's need to experiment on us?
Sure would be a waste of simulation to create so much universe just to get a shot at experimenting with us, though!
- most people in the rather crowded train station were smiling. A Lucia performance was going on! A Lucia, two handmaidens and a Santa were singing our most beautiful Lucia songs, and they were doing it splendidly! 
