I came across a website the today, while trying to read the Danish article, that had the ability to be translated into a variety of languages. I thought being able to reach a significantly wider audience seemed like a cool idea, so I did a little digging around and settled on a WordPress plugin, the Taragana Translator Pro. You can see it there in the right-hand sidebar under the heading “Translate the Bulletin.” Simply click on the flag representing one of the thirteen available languages, and voilà, it will reload the page in that language. You can then navigate to any post or page on the Bulletin and it will stay in that language. To return to English, simply click on the Union Jack flag.

The 13 languages you can now read the Bulletin in are:

1. German
2. Spanish
3. French
4. Italian
5. Portuguese
6. Japanese
7. Korean
8. Chinese Simplified
9. Chinese Traditional
10. Arabic
11. Dutch
12. Greek
13. Russian

Of course, I’m barely competent in English, so I have no idea how accurate the translations are. It could be complete gibberish for all I know. Anybody remember Monty Python’s Hungarian Phrasebook sketch? For all I know, every phrase could simply be rendered “my hovercraft is full of eels.” If you’re bilingual and fluent in one of the languages above, please take a look and let me know if the translations are reasonably accurate.

A maddeningly sparse article in Denmark’s Copenhagen Post today reports that a thesis done by a graduate student at the University of Copenhagen seems to suggest that “[o]rganic beer production emits substantially more greenhouse gases than ordinary beer.” The study’s author, Jakob Majcher, compared CO² emissions between conventional brewing and organic brewing and found that organic beer production produced 12% more. As far as I knew, the only difference between organic and non-organic beer was the ingredients used. I don’t know of any real differences in the “process” of brewing organic beer, so I’m somewhat stumped as to what might account for his findings. There’s almost no details about how he he did his study, just his declaration of the results, which is more than a little frustrating.

There is what looks to be a slightly more thorough, or at least longer, article at Information DK. Unfortunately, it’s in Danish and none of the popular web translators offer Danish. The only one I could find, InterTran, provides a translation that is almost unreadable. Hopefully, this will get picked up by English-language news outlets and we can figure out what’s really going on.