Este senhor dá cabo da minha dieta, será que ele consegue cozinhar algo que não pareça apetitoso e não me dê vontade de correr para a cozinha????Chama-se Jamie Oliver para quem não conhece.
Um blogue em constante movimento mesmo quando parece parado!
Este senhor dá cabo da minha dieta, será que ele consegue cozinhar algo que não pareça apetitoso e não me dê vontade de correr para a cozinha????
picture in Lote 5 - 1º Dto



Google, it could be said, conquered its first Romance language last week.
The Portuguese parliament voted last week to change its national language to reflect the more popular Brazilian Portuguese, the language used by about 80 percent of the world’s 230 million Portuguese speakers. In the next six years, European Portuguese will be phasing in three new consonants – k, w and y – and dropping confusing hyphens and silent consonants. So from now on, when you are IM-ing a Portuguese beauty, the correct style is otimo, not optimo, when she suggests meeting for a drink.
Why such a radical change for a language that had been doing fine for the past 2,000 years? The impact of globalisation, an ascendant former colony and the influence of the internet made the decision to go Brazilian unavoidable.
Linguistic experts say that we are in an unprecedented period of language extinction, a side-effect of rapid globalisation, but the impact is usually felt by tribal languages spoken by small groups with little economic clout and comparably low cultural prestige, not the Romance languages. Of course, this is hardly the death of Portuguese. It’s a spelling change. But even that has language scholars buzzing.
“It is really remarkable that a European colonial power changes its spelling to match that of a colony,” Eric Hewett, a Rome-based linguistics expert whose field of study focuses on the Basque language, says. “Normally, a European power insists that their version is correct, that the colonial speaker has an inferior grasp of their language.”
In this case, he says, the standardisation of the Portuguese language was inevitable. Brazil is the world’s fifth most populous country and is a much more powerful cultural and economic force than its European cousin. There are nearly 190 million Brazilians, compared with about 10.5 million Portuguese, and on the web Brazilians outnumber Portuguese by six to one, a disparity that will only increase in the coming years.
This is important because the internet is now the medium of global intelligentsia and business. If you want to establish a worldwide influence, the net is your medium. And to be influential you must be able to communicate in the language that is most accessible and most comprehensible to your audience. The nature of the net and the importance of search engines like Google means that spelling is crucial: the law of averages tells us that fewer people would find the Optimo Global Shipping Co in Lisbon than the Otimo Global Shipping Co in Sao Paolo.
With this in mind, politicians said that a standardised language, one that is to be taught in schools across Portugal, Brazil and other former Portuguese colonies such as Angola and Mozambique, is a necessary way of strengthening the language’s influence in the internet age. The decision has its detractors, but the logic of the move seems to be indisputable. Only 33,000 Portuguese signed a petition protesting against it.
Does this mean that the twin forces of globalisation and Google will affect more languages in our lifetime?
Linguists are divided. The first camp tells us that whenever the means of contact and interaction increase between two cultures, languages tend to coalesce. This can be benign (as in the case of Italians adopting “weekend” into their everyday vernacular) or destructive (the extinction of a tribal language spoken in Papua New Guinea). The latter phenomenon is killing off languages at an unprecedented clip.
But the increased human interaction unleashed by the net can also have a very different effect, creating new forms of communication introducing such rich net creations as “LOL” (laugh out loud) or new verbs such as “to Google” and “to friend”.
There really is no reason to fear (or hope) that in our lifetimes the net will turn the planet into a mono-linguistic sphere. No, British English will not be subsumed by American English, and Mandarin will not become the lingua franca of the net or global trade. The basic rule appears to be that if the language is spoken by a large enough population, and if those speakers have enough economic clout, education and cultural prominence, it will survive. People will use these languages for contracts, web searches, books, laws, and so on. In other words, Google searches alone cannot eradicate them.
Smaller, regional languages such as Irish, Welsh and Basque are a different story. Linguists consider them to be much more precarious, and suggest that they could fall out of use in a matter of generations. With these, the net may well be vital to their survival or extinction, as technology will either spread their adoption in the wider world or elevate a competing language instead.
What will forever be altered by the net – and this affects the big guys: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin – is spelling and grammar. Already, the shorthand for chat and texting, which rely on abbreviations and the removal of pesky vowels, is second nature to the younger generations. They have learnt to communicate successfully even by ignoring basic rules of spelling and grammar. Indeed, this medium has the ability to create a new language of text-ese arising from our informal chat, e-mail and SMS messages, one that would render the rigid rules of spelling and grammar unnecessary.
“We will see dramatically different spellings in our lifetime,” Mr Hewett predicts, “and it’s because of technology.”
Not exactly the otimo scenario."
in Times Online
In most depictions of the activity, the practitioner envisions an endless series of identical white sheep jumping over a fence, while counting the number that do so. The idea, presumably, is to induce boredom while occupying the mind with something simple, repetitive, and rhythmic, all of which are known to help humans sleep.
Although the practice is largely a stereotype, and rarely used as a solution for insomnia, it has been so commonly referenced by cartoons, comic strips, and other mass media, that it has become deeply engrained into popular culture's notion of sleep. The term "counting sheep" has entered the English language as an idiomatic term for insomnia. Sheep themselves have become associated with sleep, or lack thereof. For example, an ad campaign of the Serta mattress company features the Serta Counting Sheep, a flock of animated sheep with numbers on them who resent the said company's mattresses for supposedly rendering their services unnecessary.
According to an experiment conducted by researchers at Oxford University, counting sheep is actually an inferior means of inducing sleep. Subjects who instead imagined "a beach or a waterfall" were forced to expend more mental energy, and fell asleep faster than those asked to simply count sheep. Sleep, by the same token, could be achieved by any number of complex activities that expend mental energy."
1976 At precisely 9:47 am on April 1, Pluto will pass behind Jupiter, causing a brief reduction in Earth's gravitational pull. Astronomer Patrick Moore urges his BBC Radio audience to jump into the air at that exact moment to experience a floating sensation. At 9:48, dozens of light-headed listeners begin calling the station to report their success.
1984 Never mind the Cold War; the Soviets want to initiate unfettered discussions with Americans via Usenet newsgroups. This according to a message from what appears to be a Kremlin server (kremvax.UUCP). Thus the Internet hoax is born. When Moscow's first real Usenet site appears years later, it's named kremvax.
1994 A proposed law will ban online sex chat and inebriated Web surfing. "Congress apparently thinks being drunk on a highway is bad no matter what kind of highway it is," editorializes PC Computing. The bill's supposed sponsor, Senator Ted Kennedy, is not in on the joke. After an onslaught of complaints from drunken perverts, he issues a formal denial.
1997 Between March 31 and April 2, the World Wide Web will be closed for cleaning. Five Japanese-built, multilingual Internet-crawling robots will remove "electronic flotsam and jetsam." But don't believe everything you read in an email.
1998 In accordance with a biblical passage describing the circumference-to-diameter ratio of a bowl in the Temple of Solomon (1 Kings 7:23), the Alabama legislature has voted to round the value of pi to 3.0. Well, that was the claim made by the New Mexicans for Science and Reason in their newsletter ... or rather, circular.
1998 Disney has bought MIT for $6.9 billion. The School of Engineering will be renamed the School of Imagineering and the campus will move to Orlando, according to hackers who altered the MIT homepage. Hey, anything's better than trying to work in an Athena cluster.
1999 To fund the US government's $4 billion next-gen Internet project, millions of Internet nodes are available for an initial price of $100 each at Webnode.com. The Business Wire press release induces nearly 2,000 would-be investors to try to buy in. Another name for this April foolery was "the tech boom."
2003 Bill Gates is dead, shot by a lone gunman at a charity event in Los Angeles. After three South Korean networks broadcast the story on local TV, ensuing panic triggers a 1.5 percent drop in the Seoul stock exchange — a value loss of $3 billion. Just another Windows-related crash.