mélangea tumblelog

What the Internet was Made For

This morning I found an email from MyHeritage.com stating that I had 5 “Smart Matches”. Clicking in the email, I discovered that this service had matched my immediately family with an existing family tree on their service. Okay, this is cool if its accurate, right?

I click into MyHeritage.com to check out the family tree belonging to the other guy (who I later found out was actually a 20-something girl from Oklahoma going by the handle ‘trjumpet’.) and see if it matched my own or contradicted anything I knew about our genealogy. What I found blew me away.

Not only was this genealogy spot-on, but it included information such as my family’s middle names (mine is ‘Arjay’, which isn’t exactly easy-to-guess), my parent’s anniversary date, shows a total of 7844 members of my very-extended family, and traces back my great grandfather’s male lineage (mother’s mother’s father) to 1678 in Cork City, County Cork, Ireland through three patriarchal surname changes. Amazing!

Surely, without such a collaborative and perseverant tool as the Internet, such a genealogy would be orders of magnitude harder to compile, and out-of-reach of those other 7843 people in the family who did not order the genealogy study completed. We’re moving into a time where the ‘novelty’ of the Internet is dying down to be replaced with true functionality that can bridge the real-and-digital divide, such as reconnecting generations-lost families together. Facebook can bring old friends together, but MyHeritage has the potential to connect people who may have never known each other but share a common, er, heritage. The Internet has the potential to reconnect us to our real-world roots that could otherwise be lost forever.

On another, slightly related note, I later stumbled upon Google Me (the Movie), which describes the adventures of one slightly-crazy man to meet, interview, and hang out with his counterparts (those sharing his name) all over the world. The goal of this movie is to connect with other people, even around something as small and “silly” as sharing the same name. The Internet provides the bridge to make these real-world connections.

#

Germanic English

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union 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 5-year phase-in plan that would become known as “Euro-English”.

In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c”.

Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy.

The hard “c” will be dropped in favour of “k”.

This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced with “f”.

This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expected to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent “e” in the language is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th” with “z” and “w” with “v”.

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords containing “ou” and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

Unt Ze drem vil kum tru.

#