EuroEnglish

Here is a funny take on irregular spellings in English. By irregular spelling, I mean, the mismatch between spelling and pronunciation in English words. Of course the German negotiators take it one level further.

"The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five-year phased plan for what will be known as EuroEnglish (Euro for short).

In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c". Sertainly, sivil servants will resieve this news with joy.

Also, the hard "c" will be replaced with "k". Not only will this klear up konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced by "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20 per sent shorter.

In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"s in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go.

By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" by "z" and "w" by " v".

During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou", and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand each ozer.

Ze drem vil finali kum tru ! "

-Unknown Author

Iterative structures

Seemingly complicated forms arising out of simple iterative structures is more than just intriguing. Traditional Euclidean geometry is just incapable of identifying the regularity in these structures. Ironically nature is predominantly composed of such iterative structures, what we call as "fractals". Fractal geometry to a good extent can represent these structures mathematically is quite satisfying.

Apparently, scaling in nature seems to happen in "fractals". While the traditional examples of ferns, blood vessels, corals, mountains, trees, etc., perhaps best represent these fractal structures in nature. I stumbled upon this documentary where scientist studying "rain forests" in Costa Rica, seem to have extended this a little further. What they claim is that the distribution of width of the branches of a single tree matches the distribution of the width of the trees in the forest. In medicine, apparently it can be used to identify cancers at an early stage. The idea being, the networks of a blood vessel in a healthy person is different from that of a network that usually accompanies a tumor.

I can't help but wonder how the same principles could be used to study brains. Perhaps the seemingly complicated personalities, which if I may assume are products of thought processes, could be mathematically represented using fractals. After all thought process, in simple terms, itself is just a product of neural feedback system. Of course this would require phenomenal mapping of sections of brain along with their synapses.