Viking

A Couple Interesting Articles

Bush Is Not Incompetent - it's worth reading and it won't be what you expect.

Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection Pattern - an older computer science/programming article, but I found it enlightening. (Perhaps the title doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but if something has a title that long and still isn't clear then I can't succinctly explain what it's about either! ;-)

Flickr

I created a Flick Account for myself. I've posted photos and commentary from the London lag of my vacation. I plan to add photos from more cities as time permits.

Vacation

I'm back from my (second) great European adventure. I started with a visit to my cousin Michael and his girlfriend Katie in London then travelled around Zealand/Øresund in Denmark and Sweden (i.e. Copenhagen). Afterward I went on the Berlin to Budapest Contiki tour (that also included intermediate stops in Prague and Vienna).

It was a lot of travelling (14 towns and cities in 8 countries, 6 airports, 6 train stations, 2 boats, well over 100 km of walking, and far too many buses, subways, and taxis to count), but I had a great time and so many unforgettable experiences - an English picnic in Hampstead Heath, sailing a Viking ship across a fjord, visiting the Tivoli amusement park, World Cup parties in Berlin, enjoying plum wine with friends in an open-air cafe on Prague's Old Town Square, cruising down the Vltava River, riding the famous Prater ferris wheel, and relaxing in the Gellért Thermal Baths.

I'm always willing to try new food and drinks, especially while travelling - salmon carpaccio (oops, I thought it was going to be cooked!) smoked eel smørrebrød (interesting...and I learned that the point and pick method of choosing food can yield some unexpected choices!), a giant pork knuckle with a 1 litre beer mug in Berlin (this meal can only be described as 'massive'), Sacher Torte chocolate cake at the Sacher Hotel in Vienna (very yummy), and a shot of absinthe ("Prost" to the 'green fairy'). And of course, I would be remiss if I did not have a 'Danish' pastry (weinerbrød) in Denmark!

I visited a lot of churches including Vor Frue Kirke with Thorvaldsen's beautiful marble statues of Jesus and the twelve Apostles, the ornate Berliner Dom, the singular Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächniskirche (the shattered bell tower is all the survived World War II), the beautifully rebuilt Dresden Frauenkirche, and St. Vitus in Prague Castle.

Of course, I also stopped at museums (e.g. HMS Belfast on the Thames, the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, and the famous Pergamon in Berlin), as well as palaces and castles (e.g. Kronborg Slot, Christiansborg, Prague Castle, the giant Schönbrunn (summer) and Hofburg (winter) palaces in Vienna).

The sights - Charles Bridge, the Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag, Fernsehturm TV tower, etc. - and history - a walking tour through Berlin (e.g. Checkpoint Charlie, Bebelplatz book burning commemoration, etc.) as well as the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and the Berlin Wall, etc. - were also numerous.

With all that, somehow I also made it to three concerts! - The Red Hot Chili Peppers in Prague (awesome), a classical music concert in Vienna, Pink in Heroes' Square in Budapest.

Lastly, I should mention all the wonderful people I met - the friendly and polite Danes as well as all the great people and new friends from the tour.

I'll post pictures (with stories) once I have time to sort through all the photographs that I took.

Another Move From The Bush Playbook?

CTV: PM, press gallery draw battle lines on the Hill

"The Press Gallery at the leadership level has taken an anti-Conservative view," [Prime Minister Stephen Harper] said Wednesday in an interview on A-Channel TV in London, Ont.

He added: "I have trouble believing a Liberal prime minister would have this problem.

The article goes on into great detail about the current squabble between Prime Minister Harper and the Press Gallery who cover him as well as covering a lot of history (all the way back to the 1950s).

What Came First - The Chicken Or The Egg?

CNN claims that Chicken and egg debate unscrambled:

Now a team made up of a geneticist, philosopher and chicken farmer claim to have found an answer. It was the egg.

Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal's life.

Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg.

This is a very compelling argument. However, I'm not sure that I can agree with it.

The Natural History Museum in London has a marvelous exhibit on Darwin and Natural Selection. (There is an online section about Evolution, but it is much briefer than the actual exhibit). In particular, it has a discussion about how new species are created. In species X, individuals will differ genetically due to the various possible combinations in genes that are possible, and these variences and combinations will expand over time due to mutations in the genes (whose utility and survivability are determined by environmental factors). Eventually, a subset Y of individuals of X, will only mate (reproduce) with other members of Y, and not the rest X, possibly due to factors such as geographic isolation. Consequently, this subset Y will (can) diverge more and more (genetically) with the rest of X as time goes by and more mutations occur. Eventually, individuals from Y will no longer mate with members from X (even if the other factors, such as the geographic isolation are removed). i.e. The members of Y now see themselves as different from the rest of X (due to their genetic differences with X that have grown over time). Hence, Y is now a distinct species from X. So for chickens to be different from the pre-chicken birds (PCB) from pre-history you need a bird to decide that it is not a PCB, but is instead a chicken. Thus, the chicken came before the egg.

If that was too confusing, try this argument: Suppose the egg came first and begot the first chicken (as suggested by the CNN article). This chicken is the first chicken. So how is she going to reproduce and make more chickens? The Mrs. Chicken needs a Mr. Chicken to make some baby chickens. But how is Mrs. Chicken going to do this if she's the first (and, likely, only) chicken? (She was created by random genetic mutations. So in all likelihood she is the only chicken). The answer is that she won't be able to reproduce! So there will be no baby chickens and, consequently, no chicken species. Hence, Mrs. Chicken will be the one and only chicken ever. She will have died off long ago in pre-history and no will have ever heard of chickens. Therefore, the egg cannot have come first. Per Sherlock Holmes, It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth., it now follows that the chicken preceeded the egg.