Veckans ord: anti-agesuccé

Bris och Rädda Barnen har arbetat i decennier mot barnaga, men det verkar som om Olay, av alla, äntligen lyckats finna bot: anti-agesuccén Regenerist.

Ice art

Arrived in Huddinge Centrum after dark to buy food and detergent and saw something glittering around the corner. There had been an ice sculpture competition earlier in the day and the entries had been left standing there. Most of them were rather uninspired, but the winning entry ”Frusen” was a glittering marvel that changed aspect with every new angle as I walked around it—an embracing couple, a sea horse, a deconstructed face, a facetious play with light.

Veckans ord: könsord

Vi diskuterade under vilka omständigheter tunnelbanevagnar meddelas ha fått ”vagnfel” och tas ur trafik. Uppenbarligen ses det inte som nödvändigt om nån spytt ner halva vagnen, men om någon klottrat det minsta på den så åker den i depå. Enligt uppgift är klottrade könsord högst prioriterade och det måste vara sant, jag har aldrig sett en vagn som det stått ”KVINNA KVINNA KVINNA” på i svart sprayfärg.

Decrepiter and decrepiter

So, a year later a visit to the optometrist indicated that it was time for reading glasses. This time I decided to go for a wide-field frame, just to try things out.

I suffer from conflicting emotions: With the new glasses most of the world is fuzzy and weirdly distorted but it's both embarrassing and heartening how much better I see things things 0.4 m away—puzzling has become much easier with the glasses.

Happy Darwin Day!

To celebrate the anniversary I have started reading Evolutionary Analysis. Expect a report in the fullness of time.

Ordnung muß sein!

Jag irriteras då och då av att vissa formuleringar förlöjligas som varande ”politiskt korrekta” – varför skulle det vara mindervärdigt att vara korrekt? Vakteln är politiskt korrekt vilket innebär att hon är mycket, mycket precis. Precision är bra.

Not even running in circles

I was debugging an application somebody had created in framework X when I ran into a parameter I hadn't seen before so I wondered what it might do and what its legal values might be. I looked up the function in the manual. The entry for the function referred me to the separate manual for command line functions. I retrieved that manual and located the relevant chapter. It referred me to the man page for the function. I typed in man function and the man page referred me to the online help in the function. I typed function help and got the explanation that the parameter does, in fact, exist.

(Names redacted to protect me from the guilty, but their name ends with “pple”…)

“Oh, it's an exhibition of elderly men!”

The Museum of Science and Technology currently hosts Mälarmodulmöte, model railroaders connecting landscape modules to each other, thus being able to run their trains much longer than any individual can do. MMM are doing their modules in H0, i e 1:87 scale, so they're relatively large.

Honeybuns and I went there to look at the trains. Clearly model railways, like plastic modelling, is a hobby for gentlemen, I probably was at the younger end of the audience and participants. Railway modellers have differing approaches to the landscape, so it was not surprising that there were clear differences in the interest in making a realistic landscape between different modules, but that there often were large quality differences between different features within a single module—a module could have carefully sculpted rock sides (probably created with Woodland Scenics moulds), while having just a featureless slab for a road section, trees and greenery could be flawlessly executed with plastic-looking houses just plopped down somewhere. Very strange. Still, the main joy is of course in the running of the trains, and we were shown lovingly detailed cargo cards, attached to car cards, assembled in bunches to form trains and run according to time tables for all the stations on the huge railway.

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Update
An old school mate shows remarkable forbearance with a stupid TV reporter.

Though this be method, yet there is madness in't

Honeybuns and I expect to stay together a long time.

Our appetite whetted by our earlier puzzling exercises, we went looking for more and found…The Big One. Ravensburger's “Historical World Maps”, 18 240 pieces, 2.76 × 1.92 m when finished.

The box was heavy enough that we had to bring it home on a cart.

After some consideration it was clear that the only place where we could assemble it was on my bedroom floor, given a bit of moving furniture about.

So far we have just started sorting pieces into categories and assemble some obvious features.