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I previously wrote that I suspected Italy to be involved in the merge between Gazprom and the EU. The answer to my question marks just appeared on the New Yok Times. So that was a correct guess. There really appear to be two parties within NATO, one of which has interests that are totally diverging from the American interests. This game is getting interesting... let's see what happens :)

The first effects of the falling dollar already appeared: NATO suddenly started to speak european. The Ukraine and Georgia have been told the current expression for forget it in EUese, which sounds "Great! we will surely find the right time to discuss it!". Only it never says when such friendly search is supposed to start. Turkey is listening to this very song since ages, they must have heartily laughed on hearing it repeated in Bucharest, today. So here we are... no bucks, no power. Even the interests of Greece now appear to be stronger than Emperor's Bush's will. 

One of the things we initially used for this project was Alexa. When i-iter started, almost a year ago, we could not use proper stats as we did not control our own server, as we do now. So there wasn't much we could do to track traffic, apart from using Google and Alexa. So I was happy to install the Alexa bar on my Firefox and proudly show what appeared to be a massive traffic. In a few months we jumped up to the top 100k positions.

In Kiev today one euro is worth 8 hriven, while the dollar is down to 4,9. This is pure theory, obviously, because there are no more euro in town. According to official declarations it will take a couple of days to convert enough (now) useless US$ to euro and restore liquidity. The rate is not expected to get any better for the US$, but nobody excludes that it could get even worse.

After years of fight and a death toll that we cannot even try to estimate, it is time to make a few realistic considerations. When the USA started to spread democracy along the planet many simply took sides. Some love the US, others hate them, so it was simple for these people to state their positions. Other less ideologized observers, basically it was people dealing with economics and energy, noticed that this spread of democracy seemed to be more or less directly connected with any announcement that an energy exporter was going to move away from the US$, in order to adopt a now pricer Euro for their transactions. They more or less directly suggested that the US were fighting to save their own economy, rather than caring for big words.

When I published my half-serious issue about the implicit relational map for Piedmontese native speakers I did not really plan to open a Pandora's box. I was simply amused by the number of usual misunderstandings that happen when concepts get broadcast through a network of speakers belonging into different native languages.

Language is a simple thing: it is the capability of assigning a symbol to a structure, and to use this symbol to generate more complex structures, which again can be assigned a symbol a further be re-used in the very same way.

It looks as if it was possible to emulate such a simple thing by writing a simple viral mechanism that would act in the same way, yet there is a set of limits that we are currently unable to trespass.

The structure of the family as mapped by a language is also an extremely interesting source of information about social behaviour in a culture. Since many people seem to have like my previous quick how-to, here you get a follow up.

An heavily context depended set of mind obviously produced different naming conventions, depending on the position of the viewer. So we start from the social titles. This is the way in which we address people belonging to external families. It's basically our system of public social titles.

A word about granularity

When you are raised in a culture, no matter which one, you end up being shaped by it. It's not a matter of blood, and no stupid racist theory can apply. It's more a matter of imprinting, as Lorenz would put it. The imprinting you get shapes your vision of the world, your relational map and the way you relate to people. Since you develop your maps for you to interpret reality and to send out signals from within a culture, you naturally "become" a member of that culture. Easy and fascinating, isn't it?

So we have grown up to the size of a small provincial town. According to this request for translation there are now some ~50K eligible voters (I'd say a good 60% of them should be native English speakers). This is good news.