No updates from me for a while... Spent most time lately with wife and newborn son in hospital. Regular service will be resumed shortly.

One of the many oddities of the English language is the multitude of different names given to collections or groups, be they beasts, birds, people or things. Many of these collective nouns are beautiful and evocative, even poetic.

I started to write an article explaining how to package a Perl module but it got too long and detailed. Let's start with a simple case and build the smallest possible but still sane package. Later we can go in more details and see alternative ways.

The Japanese government is launching a large-scale cleanup of the fields, forests, and villages contaminated by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. But some experts caution that an overly aggressive remediation program could create a host of other environmental problems.

...

Ten months after the nuclear disaster, trust in the authorities is nearly nonexistent. Without it, Japan’s government risks the biggest cleanup fiasco of all: a decontamination effort that carries huge financial and environmental costs but still fails to convince Fukushima residents that their homes, farms, and forests are safe once again

For future reference: to produce the telnet escape character (^]) on a Swedish keyboard, hit Ctrl+5. Then type quit, or whatever.

Conversations of preachers of official religions acting on official duty are privileged conversations, meaning they can’t be eavesdropped on or forced as evidence; a priest can even go to jail for inadvertently disclosing something that was said under the privileged conversation of confession. In this case of this religion, the preachers are defined as the ones facilitating holy copying (and remixing). Translated to nerdspeak, that means the communications between operators of trackers/hubs and the people who partake in the sacrament of copying now carries confessional status, by and large making it illegal and impossible to collect as evidence in a trial.

If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.

Dec. 2011: I closed 35 to-do items (goal was 30), created 45. Not setting a goal for Jan.; the baby will surely change my priorities anyway.

It is virtually impossible to find any example where leaders are not acting in their own self interest. If you are a democrat you want to gerrymander districts and have an electoral college. This vastly reduces the number of votes a president needs to win an election.

Then tax very highly. It’s much better to decide who gets to eat than to let the people feed themselves. If you lower taxes people will do more work, but then people will get rewards that aren’t coming through you. Everything good must come through you. Look at African farm subsidies. The government buys crops at below market price by force. This is a tax on farmers who then can’t make a profit. So, how do you reward people? The government subsidises fertilisers and hands it back that way. In Tanzania vouchers for fertilisers are handed out not to the most productive areas but to the party loyalist areas.

@lilprincessperl Thanks a lot, couldn't find it elsewhere. Saved my New Year's Day. Have a great year!