As the Beijing Olympics come to a close, it is interesting to rank the participating countries. But not in total medals per country, but in medals per participating athlete per country and medals per million inhabitants per country. 87 countries have won medals in these olympics. This brings us to the following two tables.
[Continue reading: Beijing Olympics: country rankings]

I had a wonderful week in Iceland, visiting natural wonders and discovering new experiences like whale watching and swimming in the geothermal blue lagoon. To cut a long story short, here's my list of ten things to do in Iceland, of which I already did eight.

1. Geyser watching

The big geyser Geysir has gone silent, but his nearby brother Strokkur is erupting about every five minutes.




2. Whale watching

Take a three hour whale watching trip and you will see big humpback whales, smaller Minke whales and dolphins.

VIDEO
[Continue reading: 10 things to do when you're in Iceland]

I was at the iAOC conference in Reykjavik this week. The keynote speech was given by Peter Gloor, a Swiss researcher at MIT. With social networks and Web 2.0 gaining importance, his research and publications about the impact of swarming and collaboration on innovation are very relevant. He blogs and he has written books on swarm creativity and coolhunting.

In this hour-long video of his presentation, Peter Gloor explains why collaboration, networking, sharing, coolhunting and coolfarming can make the difference between success and failure in projects and business ventures. His talk is based on research using social networking analysis of e-mail correspondence and forum messages.

VIDEO

There are excellent summaries by Steve Lubetkin of the other sessions of the conference at the Philadelphia PRSA blog, and a transcript of the liveblogging at Philippe Borremans' (the other Belgian participant at the conference) Blackline blog.

Steve Ballmer was in Belgium today for a keynote speech at Microsoft Mix Essentials. Blogger Bruno Peeters of BVLG asked him if he had a Facebook profile.

[video]

Steve Ballmer: "I do have a profile on Facebook. If you actually look, there's about ten Steve Ballmer, and I'm only one of them! I'm the one that has a picture that actually looks like me. I'll tell you again, I'm hitting a golf ball. That's the real Steve Ballmer. So yes, I do have a site on Facebook. I will tell you, it's hard to keep up, I get many friends requests of people I don't know (...) We obviously value our partnership with Facebook, we provide advertising services and technological services to help sell over half of the advertising inventory in Facebook. (...) Nowadays I get as many new invitations from new friends networks. And I expect to see a lot of innovation. As the minister said: when you encourage inclubation you also encourage competition (...) and that's a great thing."

That was the important question. On less important matter, a journalist asked him if he was still confident on the Yahoo offer.

Steve Ballmer: "I'm very confident that we've offered a very good price. There's not much new to say than that it's a good price. If you let us know, if you don't let us know, maybe your shareholders will think it's a good price. I like what we're doing in this case, because everything we say privately we're also saying publicly. So there's not much new, I think, for me to say today."

When Ronald Reagan died in June 2004, I wrote:

It's remarkable how in Europe streets, squares and tunnels are named after Democratic presidents (Kennedy tunnel in Antwerp, Avenue Franklin Roosevelt in Brussels, Clinton Park in Roeselare), but how reluctant local governments are to pay the same honor to Republican presidents. When, if ever, will there be a Ronald Reagan Square?

Yesterday I realized that I had all the necessary tools and information to prepare a small showcase. I have a list of all the street names in Belgium, I can semi-automatically filter those streets which are named after US presidents, I can distinguish between Democrats and Republicans, and I can display everything in a table:



The high scores of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt are due to the US role in ending both World Wars. Eisenhower's score will probably be due to his role as a general and not so much to his role as president. Still, it's puzzling why not a single street or square has been named after Ronald Reagan, whose role in ending the Cold War was significant.

I can also display everything on a map of Belgium, using Google's geocoding service and maps API and GmapEZ.



The blue markers are streets named after Democratic presidents, the red ones are named after Republican presidents. You can zoom in or out by clicking the plus and minus signs, you can drag the map with the mouse, and when you hover the mouse over a marker, you will see the street and town names.

Bram Souffreau, web editor at Concentra (publisher of newspapers Gazet van Antwerpen and Het Belang van Limburg), talked about "Writing for the web" at Barcamp Ghent. HIs presentation focuses on the writing style that bloggers and web publisher should use.

In a remarkable move to protect the privacy of its customers, DNS Belgium (the administrator of the .be top level domain) is hiding the names and addresses of all private persons in its public WHOIS service. The only element that is made public of the owner (or "licensees" as they call them) is the email address, which can of course be chosen in such a way as not to divulge any name.



For organizations, the name, address, phone and fax numbers are still made public.
[Continue reading: .be domain names are anonymous by default]

During lunch break at today's Plugg conference I had the opportunity to talk with Cain Ransbottyn, founder and big boss of ZatteVrienden, a successful Belgian blog with a focus on entertainment, celebrities, virals and gossip. I asked him how ZatteVrienden uses Drupal and what kind of platform they use, so the video you will see has a highly technical content. By the way, Cain and Drupal founder Dries Buytaert are former classmates!


[this video is also available on YouTube]

I've had a (free) membership of Ecademy for years now, and I thought: let's expand my network and import my address book, so that I can make connections to selected (remember that word: selected) people that are already members of Ecademy. So I imported my address book, but what happened? Automatically, and without any confirmation or ability to select, messages were sent out to Ecademy members found in my address book. Fortunately, no mails were automatically sent out to non-members. But still, I had at least expected some possibility to select and confirm before anything was sent out.

Here's the message that was sent out:



No, I was not "sending invitations", I was merely importing my address book, and the Ecademy software decided to send out invitations without my permission.

I find that this practice goes against basic internet netiquette. I feel embarrassed by the blunt and intrusive behavior of the Ecademy software. I have sent a request to Ecademy support to delete my account completely. No mercy.

Here are my videos of 8 Drupal-related presentations from yesterday's Fosdem devroom sessions in Brussels.
[Continue reading: Drupal at Fosdem 2008 - videos]

Waking up at 5 am in order to go to another hotel where a bus will pick you up at 6am to go to Kennedy Space Center where that same bus will pick you up at 11 am to go to the NASA Causeway (10 kilometers from the launch pad, the closest you can get) where you will wait three hours to see the launch of the space shuttle Atlantis at 2:43 pm... It's definitely worth the trouble!



Shot with a Sony HDR-CX6 with a 10x optical zoom and without a tripod. Notice how in the first 30 seconds, you only hear the clicking of cameras and the cheers of the crowd. The sound of the launch needs more than half a minute to bridge the 6 miles.

My impressions: the flames were brighter than I had expected, even in plain sunlight. The sound was less thundering than I had expected: roaring, but not deafening. Oh, in case you didn't know: Atlantis carried the European research module Columbus to the International Space Station, as well as a French astronaut.

On 11 December I attended a presentation by professor Johan Albrecht of Itinera Institute. He talked about "Climate relativism" which is also the title of the book (at this moment only available in Dutch) he wrote on climate change and its effects on the economy. His ideas on this matter can be summarized as follows:

• Scarcity of fossil fuel can create new opportunities for innovation.
• Radical innovations are coming in which CO2 is used as a resource (e.g. to promote algae growth).
• Adaptation to climate change is better than mitigation of our economic growth.
• The IPCC scenarios do not take into account the effects of this market-driven adaptation.
• Only entrepreneurship can provide us with the innovations which will be necessary to adapt to climate change.

Here are the last 15 minutes of his talk, in which he focuses on mitigation versus adaptation and how transitions in energy production can create new wealth. Press the green "play" button to hear the talk while watching the slides.

Usually I'm not much into Christmas, but this year is different. When Belgian state-funded public radio VRT and weekly radio and tv magazine Humo campaigned to let the Christmas shopping season start not earlier than 15 December...



... I campaigned against it with "Christmas Every Day".



So, as a statement against the anticonsumerist enemies of Christmas, here's a Christmas greeting from The Great Communicator.

85% to 90% of the people in Brussels are French-speaking, according to French-speaking politicians and Wikipedia. But is it true? Not so, says Freddy Neyts, a Dutch-speaking citizen from Brussels and husband of former minister Annemie Neyts. He did some calculations based on census data from the Belgian Directorate-General of Statistics (Statbel) and presented them last Tuesday at a debate in Brussels. The result: during the day 44% of the people in Brussels are French-speakers. At night, when commuters and tourists have left, this mounts to 48%. The numbers are summarized in the following table:



And Mr Neyts concludes: "Every day, 400,000 Dutch-speakers and 430,000 people whose mother tongue is not French or Dutch are staying in Brussels. And 650,000 French-speakers, which is a relative majority but not an absolute majority. At night, people sleep, and there is not much need for multilingual services. But during the day and in the evening, it is all but normal that the Brussels Capital Region is bilingual (French/Dutch) for government services, health services, institutions and companies. Preferably multilingual, out of respect and politeness for immigrants and foreign visitors. Which city or region in the democratic world does not function this way? Only in Brussels it is possible that an arrogant French-speaking class imposes its language upon the population and the visitors, and constantly tries to humiliate people who do not speak French."

On November 29th, 185 citizens filed a joint petition [PDF, in Dutch] with the Belgian Constitutional Court in order to annul newly modified racism and anti-discrimination legislation.

The 185 citizens are men and women of all ages, from all Belgian Regions (to wit, Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels) and representing a broad cross-section of the Belgian population. Among them, there are unemployed persons as well as managers, independent professionals, employees, civil servants, lawyers, students and retirees. A number of petitioners work in the media or publish regularly. One of their chief concerns was the abrogation of free speech by the new legislation.

The three laws [1, 2, 3, in Dutch] entered into force after the Belgian Constitutional Court on October 6, 2004 annulled important sections of the anti-discrimination law of 2003. The Belgian government then decided to draft three new laws: one law replacing the old racism law of 1981, a second law replacing the anti-discrimination law and a third law regarding the equal treatment of men and women. The laws entered into force on June 9, 2007, one day before the June 10, 2007 federal elections.

The new legislation contains very vague and very broad provisions. Freedom of speech, but also religious freedom and freedom of peaceful assembly and association are severely restricted.

The provisions on the prohibition of discrimination and the criminal sanctions imposed by the new legislation are so vague that a strict interpretation of the law renders persons criminally liable for reading out certain quotes from the Bible or the Quran, or even for disseminating major works by Darwin or Shakespeare. In addition, anyone cooperating with a 'group that repeatedly and apparently spreads discrimination and segregation' may be punished, even if such cooperation would have been extended unwittingly.

In civil matters, the burden of proof is reversed as soon as a presumption of discrimination has been demonstrated by means of statistics or anonymous tests. Citizens who are unable to prove they have not been acting in breach of the new laws, may be condemned to pay lump sum indemnities (up to six months gross salary in case discrimination by employers or potential employers), without it being necessary for alleged victims of discrimination they actually incurred damages.

Further information may be obtained from Mr. Matthias Storme or Mr. Jelle Flo, who represent the petitioners in their capacity as attorneys at law.

Today Belgium has been without a government for a record 149 days. On Monday Euronews broadcasted this report (in English) on the Belgian crisis:


[Continue reading: Information and disinformation about Belgium]