The most common use case for books is a one-at-a-time, one-after-another process. Each unit requiring a huge personal investment in hours. When compared to other media types (music, movies, news) that have easily shed their languishing formats (tape, film, disk) when technology offered up a new digital, transient version - books stubbornly buck the trend every time.

Book users don’t require a searchable, jukebox at their fingertips. They need psychological support and rewards for their lengthy start-to-finish endeavors, which is exactly what a traditional book offers - a physical progress bar that charts the journey inside each unit (using pages and the shift in weight from right hand to left hand) and the trophy cabinet of the bookshelf.

- This article is of course only discussing the virtues of novels and text books and standard usage. The ‘problems’ of other written formats along with the requirements of insubordinate book users, such as students with their parallel consumption of many titles, have already been solved with the latest wave of laptops and the rise of new media.

However, I got all tied up in my pseudo-analytical nonsense and so it still remains unfinished. Therefore I come to you with nothing, but this simple apology and a couple of snippets of personal news.

- Spoiled Milk have launched their new identity and website: www.spoiledmilk.dk

- Spoiled Milk Zweigniederlassung (the Swiss foreign branch) is now up and running and recruiting for iPhone and Ruby on Rails developers (More information). Andreas will be joining us at the start of September.

- I am now settling into a new Swiss life at Klingenhof in Zürich with Lucy. It’s very nice being here with her. Our first few months are mainly pictorially documented at Flickr.

- I will be DJ’ing for the first time in Zürich on Friday, 26th of September at Abart before and after The Futureheads play.

- I will be in Berlin from the 1st to the 4th of September for RailsConf. Let me know if you’re attending too.

I promise to return soon with some more rambling posts, in the meantime my Twitter is probably where I’m writing the most.

Various self-appointed mavens frequently take the moral high ground on how language ought to be, and you only have to question the general population to discover that perceived language erosion by the younger generations is top of the threat list in how they feel alienated from their own species in later life (related post: progression).

But yet scanning the etymology of any given word reveals a rocky and fascinating history and any golden age of language is of course immediately debunked. Someone’s God be with ye is someone else’s Goodbye, which is yet another’s Bye that is by now something I probably don’t understand. What we may consider slang is actually highly evolved language reduction. Just think about how much emotion and meaning can be conveyed by the shortest and “dumbest” idioms that seem to flow out of the USA! Genius!

There are two approaches that governments take to language: dictation or reaction. Ownership of a language by a governing body seems to be the memetic equivalent of eugenics; an attempt to control and command hereditary traits of something that no living being can possibly judge. Blonde hair and blue eyes are the best you say? Hmmm.

The French are of course famous for their stringent L’Académie française. Here the appointed members (knows as “immortals”) scrutinise daily life for signs of decay while cleansing society of all foreign loan words. Danish and Norwegian are very similar languages, expect the Norwegian Language Council decided to invent new “Norwegian” words for every part of the microcomputer, while Denmark’s own body, the Dansk Sprognævn, is more than happy to let CPU, RAM, bits, bytes and indeed “computer” itself though the iron curtain.

The difference here is that Denmark’s bureau appears to understand their role is to document and record the naturally occurring phenomenon (their main objective: “new words which have appeared enough in print and speech to be considered notable are added to the Danish dictionary”, but note that this doesn’t stop the population’s sky is falling reaction to the recent American-English overload they are experiencing).

So while a country taking ownership of its genes or planning its economy is generally considered morally dubious or fascist, dictating totally irrational language policies is still rife. Just check out the list of the world’s language regulators. Of course, in reality, language dictation can never have the reach or control of eugenics or communism in the countries we are discussing (although that didn’t stop the Welsh from trying to dictate their own suicide), but that just highlights further how futile their purist approach is!

English appears to be relatively unique because not only does it have no dictatorship, it also doesn’t have an appointed body. Whether its touted rise as the first “global language” is because of this, or a consequence of it being so wildly distributed in the “free-world” that it’s impossible to control or monitor (although France seems to try hard with French) is a topic for debate. But it seems clear that its sheer diversity and richness can in some part be attributed to the cultural freedom it has received.

The nearest that British English has to an authority is the Oxford University Press whose dictionary is the result of a long-running mission to “record the word’s most-known usages and variants in all varieties of English past and present, world-wide”. More like an ornithologist than a genetic engineer then.

So, how does this analysis of linguistic imperialism and study relate to Google?

The internet is fast approaching a tipping point where it will contain almost all human knowledge, past and present, in textual form and from a multitude of different authors and viewpoints. It’s only a short step to proclaim that this can be considered a complete data bank of language. Google therefore, as the world’s leading organiser of this data, has on-tap access to the historical sum of human language, limited only by the integrity of their algorithms.

Their seemingly benign, but useful, “Did you mean” feature (the one that corrects your spelling errors and lazy typing) works on a simple premise that is made powerful by its knowledge rather than process. Unlike a typical computer spell-checker, which works from static word lists, “Did you mean” compares similar phrases to the one entered to see if they might produce more search results. Because it indiscriminately uses occurrences of all words on the internet, it can find common usage spellings for proper nouns and slang, and remember common usage is what is important for language norms at any given time.

The service is therefore essentially a rapid, constantly updated, language usage analyser that is performing an automated version of the Oxford University Press’ mission, only on a scale unimaginable in a manual world. The natural reason that “football” is not “foot ball” is because of usage frequencies, whether or not dictation played a part in the past. It’s also the reason why “dubstep” is not “dub step“.

As the information age takes hold and language enters a free-fall state of growth due to the thirst for global communication, hopefully it will shake free of its oppressive regimes and the more archaic forms of language planning, to join eugenics on the list of ethical horrors and pseudoscience.

Anyway, I am pleased to launch the latest iteration of my website today. It retains the content of my previous blog, but with a fresh new design (with thanks to Casper), a little more information about some of the projects I’m involved in and big hopes for the future as I attempt to angle the content more towards a discussion platform.

For those of you reading this via the RSS feed… now is the time to actually visit its home. For those of you browsing by… syndicate here!

By last Monday morning I finally hit the jackpot: shooting cramps, nausea and a tender spot right by my appendix! After an emergency appointment with my doctor I was duly shipped off to Bispebjerg Hospital for 24 hours of blood tests, ultrasounds and CAT scans. After everything very serious and mildly serious was ruled out, the final verdict was an inconclusive guess that maybe a hernia operation I had three years ago had become aggravated. Oddly it turned out that said operation was exactly three years ago to the very day. I can’t help thinking that some guarantee ran out.

“Bispebjerg Hospital was designed by the architect Martin Nyrop and covers 48 acres. During the German occupation of Denmark 1940 to 1945 in World War II, the hospital treated those illegally resisting the occupying forces, harboured jews and helped transport about 2,000 of them to safety in neutral Sweden.”

I’ve not believed in setting goals for a while now. Goals by their nature are a win or lose variable. Why lock yourself into something that’s going to make you feel sad if there’s a chance you might not achieve it? In my experience goals tend to be unattainable “magic bullets” of happiness that supposedly mark a future point in life when everything will be perfect, or at least much better. The danger of this projectionist lusting is that you soon loose the ability to evaluate your day to day life (the one you’re living in the meantime). What if the goals aren’t achieved or they’re not what you imagined? That’s a lot of wasted time you’ve spent on hold.

The ability to have short term direction and an open mind is far more important to me. I don’t think any goal I’ve ever set has made me happy, whether I eventually ticked it off or not. What keeps me fascinated with the world is the pursuit of immediate dreams with little or no expectations and the chance to change directions with no sense of guilt or failure. With this more fluid approach, I can always find something that I want to put my energies into.

This is what first brought me to Copenhagen and set Spoiled Milk into action. Next it’s taking me to Zürich to start a foreign office of the company and live with my girlfriend Lucy (and her research PhD). We have a lot of half-baked plans for when we get there, but I have no idea what my life will be like in six months time and that already makes the move worthwhile.

I will be leaving Denmark on May the 26th. Spoiled Milk Zweigniederlassung will open mid June at Mainaustrasse 50, 8008 Zürich.

The kitchen is where boundaries are established, borders are erected and names are scrawled on packs of butter. Resident’s supplies are hoarded away behind cupboard doors and tidied from the work surfaces. But even this falls short of the true communal horror… the fridge.

This glossy, chilled box is the front line of shared living, where notes and bills are posted and war rages inside. It’s a head on crash of irrational ownership emotions. Classification by shelves is an obvious but flawed approach, which holds up only until personal ration quantities become uneven. Encroachment tactics are deployed and soon enough there’s a wide spread labelling and level-monitoring epidemic. Oh for the casual ambiance of the living room and its naive social transparencies!

After debating this for a while at a recent house meeting, we hit upon two great discoveries. Firstly that everyone spent around the same amount of money on food each week, and secondly people were sad to wake up on a Sunday to find their cupboards bare and all supermarkets shut(*).

So, Haraldsgade 54 decided to launch the Grocery Liberation Experiment, in order to purge all mental guards and instilled social norms from the kitchen area. After the uprising, foodstuffs were brought out of their isolated cells, categorised and then put back on to appropriate shelves with their new friends.

The results were visibly stunning, particularly as the duplicates started piling up: six half-full margarine pots, five opened jars of pesto and enough stock cubes to flood the streets with bouillon. Boosted by this iron curtain collapse, we declared a free state under the following constitution:

1. A weekly shop for listed essentials will be performed by house members in turn from a money pool.
2. All personally purchased food lies in the public domain by default.
3. Teaming up at meal times is encouraged and leftovers should remain on the stove.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out. Personal grievances are nearly always irrational and so everyone just has to focus on keeping theirs in check for the greater good.

Initial feedback is that this evening I wanted a leek for my soup and there was one waiting for me in the fridge. I’m now going for ice cream I didn’t know I had, while trying not to mind that hunk of cheese that’s missing from ‘my’ block.

(*) Danish trading laws

If we start with a historically unifying event such as World War II and plot the USA’s capitalistic divide since, we might see the following:

We can think of the central axis as representing the degradation of a shared sociological perspective over time. That is to say, a common outlook based on history, culture, religion and tradition that is shared by the majority of a population. It’s important here to note that I am referring to an ingrained, ‘evolved’ culture built up incrementally by many generations of a population. We can also consider the central axis to be a kind of magnetised core that pulls the two opposing results of capitalism towards the centre. As this force becomes weaker, so the graph splits further.

Here we consider the generalised capitalist fragmentation of the United Kingdom and Denmark:

Capitalism brought about huge benefits during its initial and mid-phases, propelling society forward at a rate biological evolution could only ‘dream’ of, but the unavoidable endgame is where the system breaks down. In order for an ideology with this kind of exponential decay to maintain its success, the left hand side of the graph must be regularly truncated and discarded thus resetting the unifying point. However in the world-views of most people and some governments, this is rather tricky to consider.

There are many factors that cause historical, incrementally-built, shared cultural values to become ‘broken’. Globalisation and the resulting mass-migration cannot be ignored as a primary cause. No matter whether the incoming population is viewed as scrounging, violent, rich, benevolent, humourless, wonderful or odd, there will always be a clash between them and established ways of life. This is something that a capitalist system can not tolerate. Anything that weakens the unity axis hastens the end game, whether it’s “damn yuppies buying up rural cottages”, “damn freeloaders taking advantage of welfare cheques” or “damn advertisers targeting new markets”.

Mass population migration only causes problems because current economic systems can’t cope with it. Remember they were doomed anyway, this is just accelerating the failure. Capitalism has given the world fantastic opportunities at a rampant pace, but it’s about time we started planning something that will fit for the future instead of persisting with something that’s looking more and more fragile. National capitalism is no longer capable of empowering a globalised world at once. Shared historical and religious values are no longer enough to keep the unity axis powered up. We need to shift to a whole new economic system that offers tomorrow’s society a single, positive trajectory.

DISCLAIMER: This is vague, philosophical speculation based on non-scientific observation and expressed using coloured pens. It is not meant to form a foundation for your revolution.

At one time immigration policies seem to have been drawn up by governments keen on expanding their skilled workforce and/or their cheap labour and were dutifully accepted by voters on this premise. Without these economical issues to guide ‘free-thinking’ thought, would cultural migration have come anywhere near as far as it has? Some people think not, leaving us with the concept that world markets have actually contributed to emotional-society in a positive manner? Hmm.

Anyway, even in countries with supposedly forward thinking policies, things seem far from harmonious. Where has mass generational migration of a culture ever really resulted in workable, lasting integration? Maybe the single, global understanding we are all supposed to strive for is being driven at a speed dictated by the economy’s lust for a generic consumer, instead of by something more in tune with its delicate nature?

Two extreme examples of culture mixing could be: the marginalisation of Native American and Aboriginal cultures (newcomers destroying culture), and immigrant quarters/enclaves (newcomers living outside of national culture through choice or society-imposed segregation). Neither of these methods are championed by the collective conscious, but why is this result so common in practise?

An hour after leaving the train station at Sølrod in a westerly direction, I was beginning to regret not bringing a map. The area is a hotchpotch of tiny villages and vast open countryside. All I had to go on was a brief glimpse at Google maps twenty minutes before I left home.

I decided to stick to the roads and just enjoy the exploratory walk. During a total walking time of four hours, I remarkably managed to not only find the anticipated kalkgrave, but also to navigate myself to the distant village of Karlslunde and a bus journey home. The only upsetting part was that by the time I reached the quarry, the light was too disappointing for any photography or excavating.