Chewie and the Babel fish

 It’s a small world. There is only a couple of thousand languages. That is what Ellinor probably thought when she was teasing Dirk aka Chewie   (http://blog.volapukblog.com) in her Swedish mothertongue.

O thou of little faith! As a fervent adept of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Chewie has his own little Bable fish. The Babel fish is a fictional species of fish described by Douglas Adams in his too funny book, that can instantly translate any language to any other language. It is described thus: (I’m sure he would not mind the quote)

“ The Babel fish is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish. ”

We miss you, Douglas!  I’m sure you would have been the man to describe Web 2.0 in a perfect way. Not too serious. As life should be.