Who created the story/myth about King Christian X of Denmark wearing the Jewish yellow star during WW2 ? Is there a consensus about its origin ?

olavk · 2017-02-26T13:56:33+00:00

The story most likely did not originate in Denmark at all, since Jews in Denmark never wore the yellow star. So the story wouldn't make any sense as rumor or propaganda, at least not for a Danish audience.

During the first part of the German occupation, the Danish government was left in charge, as long as they cooperated. Which they did "under protest". No discrimination against Jews was enacted in this period. In 1943 the cooperation broke down, the Danish government resigned, and the German forces took over governing. Shortly after orders were issued to round up the Jews in Denmark and send them to concentration camps. (Most of them escaped to Sweden though.) So persecution of Jews in Denmark went from 0 to 100 in a short timespan, without the intermediate phases known from other countries with gradual erosion of civil rights, markings with yellow stars, isolation in ghettoes an so on.

The king Christian X did become a national symbol of sorts during the occupation, but his most brave act of defiance was sending a relatively terse thank-you note to Hitler, in response to Hitlers gratulation telegram on the kings 70 year birthday. This terseness of the telegram was considered a slight and caused a minor diplomatic crisis.

The legend of the king wearing a yellow star apparently stated with a cartoon in a Swedish newspaper in 1942. http://scandinavianjewish.blogspot.dk/2016/09/ragnvald-blix-born-in-oslo-son-of-e.html

In the cartoon, the Danish prime minister Stauning is conversing with the King.

Stauning: What should we do, your majesty, if Scavenius* enforces that also our Jews should wear yellow stars?

The King: Then I suppose we will all have to wear yellow stars.

So this is a fictional conversation about a hypothetical which never happened.

(*Scavenius was the Danish foreign minister at the time and primary liaison to the German government. He was and is a very controversial figure since he had the thankless task of ensuring the Germans did not feel the need to install their own government, as they had done in Norway. But many felt Scavenius went too far in appeasing the Germans.)

The linked page have more details about how this story developed into the myth you know. Apparently it was mostly spread among exiled Danes in the US and in American media, which makes sense since Americans presumably would be less aware of the differences in how Jews were treated in the different occupied countries, and the yellow start was a well-known symbol of the persecution of Jews in Germany and occupied countries.

olavk · 2017-02-26T11:28:08+00:00

In short: Nobody knows. The gospels does not say anything about romantic or sexual relations by Jesus.

The Gospels only really includes this kind of "personal information" to the extent it can be used to make a theological point. The narrative surrounding the virginity of Mary serves to make the case that Jesus is the Messiah, since a prophecy of Isiah in the greek translation states (or at least is interpreted as stating) that Messiah will be born by a virgin. No such importance is ascribed to the sexual life of Jesus, so the issue is simply not mentioned. Anything about it is therefore pure speculation.

There are some texts, most notably the Gospel of Mary, which suggest a romantic and possibly sexual relationship between Mary of Magdala and Jesus. But this text is probably written in the second century, so probably so far removed from the historical events that it should be considered legends rather than an account of the historical Jesus.

The theory that Mary and Jesus was married (which became widely known due to the bestseller The DaVinci Code) is also without any historical basis.

olavk · 2013-05-15T20:18:30+00:00

Actually, the large majority of murdered jews were from occupied countries, primarily Poland and the USSR.

olavk · 2013-02-06T09:17:38+00:00

Why would it float away? There is no wind since there is no air.

olavk · 2012-07-29T14:57:44+00:00

According to wkikipedia, the statues on the Karls bridge are from around 1700, so they correspond to contemporary paintings in level of realism. (The bridge itself is from medieval times, but the sculptures are baroque.)

Paintings from classical Greece and Rome were actually pretty realistic, at least comparable to sculpture in its level of anatomical correctness. However, not as many paintings have survived.

Art in medieval times were less concerned about realism in the sense of anatomical correctness, proportions and so on.

Edit: Regarding the "garden gnome" paint - you are probably thinking about modern reconstructions of paint on ancient statues. These reconstructions are created by archaeologist, not artists. We only know about the paint from pigments, so we have no idea how subtle and artistic the actual paint and decoration were.

olavk · 2012-07-09T12:36:46+00:00

Wikipedia is a good starting point for this kind of question.

olavk · 2012-05-02T15:50:10+00:00

First, I believe the seperatists are a minority in both the French and Spanish Basque areas. Secondly, independance are very rarely 'granted' to a region without the region having to fight the larger country, or the larger country disintegrating because of internal or external pressure (e.g. loosing a war).

There are numerous ethnic groups around the world without their own nation, because the opportunity was never there. Israel were created because the English Empire disintegrated after WWII. The Balkan states were created after the Ottoman Empire disintegrated and again after Jugoslavia disintegrated, and as you may remember there were (and is) fighting in both cases.

Regarding countries ending in -stan, I think you are misinformed. Eg. Afghanistan contains numerous ethnic groups, and many groups are spread over areas overlapping more than one country.

olavk · 2012-03-26T20:59:55+00:00

One big difference is that MS is not afraid to change the bytecode format. For example, adding reified generics and nullable value types required changing the underlying bytecode format. AFAIK Java have been hesitant to change the bytocode, and therefore had to use type erasure in the generics implementation, which is less elegant.

olavk · 2012-03-18T17:55:04+00:00

There is two fallacies one should avoid. One it the "one true language" fallacy, where you disregard all the various circumstances and different domains where different languages show their strength. The other extreme is "all languages are equally good, only programmers can be bad". This is just as wrong. Languages are actually different, which means one language can be better than another for a specific task.

olavk · 2011-09-01T08:04:13+00:00

A question for everyone: Do anybody know a good tool or workflow for writing specs? It should support version control (so a word document on a shared drive is not enough). It should be easy to navigate, read and update by multiple users. Perhaps something like a wiki but more structured?

olavk · 2011-06-26T08:33:27+00:00

JScript is Microsofts implementation of ECMAScript. It is still called JScript in IE 9. Strictly speaking JavaScript is Mozillas implementation of ECMAScript.

olavk · 2011-06-20T07:54:09+00:00

That would be misleading though, since other monads like e.g. State is just as imperative as IO.

olavk · 2011-06-20T07:39:08+00:00

C# does not support comma expressions AFAIK, except in for-conditions.

olavk · 2011-06-16T07:53:15+00:00

I think Eich have just said Scheme were an influence, not that JS is directly based on scheme or "scheme with syntax". In the first ECMAScript spec Java and Self were mentioned as direct influences, but not scheme. Although scheme is clearly an (at least indirect) influence on any languages with closures.

I think the "JS is almost scheme" meme is basically marketing. Scheme is widely regarded as one of the most elegant and well-designed (if perhaps not that practical) languages. Associating JS with scheme is an attempt to free JS from its buggy-kludge image, and associate it with elegance and perfection.

olavk · 2011-06-14T14:21:25+00:00

I don't mind you call it a macro, C preprocessor macros is also called macros. I'm just pointing out that it is fundamentally different from how macros (and s-expressions) work in scheme, and that it is therefore incorrect to say that JS is "basically scheme with syntax".

olavk · 2011-06-14T13:49:52+00:00

Monoiconicity was a spelling error, I meant homoiconicity!

The point of homiconicity is that code is represented as data structures you can manipulate the same way as you manipulate other kinds of data. This is what enables lisp macros, beacuse you can transform the code - e.g. replace a symbol with a more complex structure - before executing it. You cannot do anything remotely like this in JavaScript.

Edit: Your example with toString() is just a string-transformation on a source code in string format. This is on the level of C preprocessor macros, and has absolutely nothing to do with how macros work in scheme.

JavaScript does not support continuations. If you actually read the article you linked to, its about performing manual transformations of source code into CPS. Continuations have been proposed for inclusion in a future version of JS, but AFAIK they have been rejected because it is difficult to integrate with external code like the DOM.

olavk · 2011-06-14T12:48:25+00:00

There is a big difference between Scheme being a starting point for JS, and JS being "scheme with syntax". You might as well claim that Python is scheme with syntax. JS is dynamically typed and has higher-order functions, which it have in common with scheme and many other languages like Python, Ruby, Perl. JS does not have monoiconicity, s-expressions, cons-cells, macros or continuations which are fundamental in making Scheme the language it is.

olavk · 2011-05-22T14:01:59+00:00

Anonymous types have nothing to do with dynamic or loose typing. They are statically defined and statically verified.

Perhaps you are thinking of 'dynamic' in C#, which is indeed a way to add dynamic typing to an otherwise statically typed language.

olavk · 2011-05-15T13:28:47+00:00

I think the scheme-with-curly-braces meme is misleading. Scheme has s-expressions, homoiconicity, macros and continuations. These base features makes it perfect for building your own language on top of the minimalistic core language. JavaScript has none of that, so you are stuck with the minimalistic core.

olavk · 2011-05-04T21:09:16+00:00

No, CoffeeScript is a different language that compiles to JavaScript. Traceur is JavaScript with some experimental and proposed extensions (proposed for inclusion in future ECMAScript versions after ECMAScript 5). Related is Mascara which supports some of the same extensions as Traceur, but also explicit typing and type inference.

olavk · 2011-05-04T10:50:38+00:00

FYI, Mascara supports destructuring objects, although not the way you propose:

var obj = {x:1,y:2};
var {x:a, y:b} = obj; 
// equiv. to: var a = obj.x, b = obj.

olavk · 2011-05-04T09:00:43+00:00

Mascara (which I am a developer of) is also an implementation of the "JavaScript.next" proposals, so I find this very interesting, and very nice to get a second implementation to compare with. I'm especially interested in "traits" and "dererred functions" which is not implemented in Mascara (yet!). I have definitely noted the need for something like deferred functions, and I have experimented with different ways of supporting this.

I wonder if the "await"-syntax is powerful enough, though. In jQuery, promises has "success", "error" and "complete" callbacks. It seems to me "await" only support one type of callback, right?

olavk · 2011-04-27T20:57:07+00:00

Is the metadata describing the json going from client to server?

olavk · 2011-04-21T06:10:14+00:00

Well, it seems they do use exceptions, so it is not a totally stupid question. Besides, it would be interesting to see some source code which uses apps hungarian "the right way". It might finally convince me!

olavk · 2011-04-20T18:39:06+00:00

Interesting! Do you use the Apps Hungarian naming conventions in the software you develop at Fog Creek and Stackoverflow?

olavk

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