OK, it's an ad

…but it's still a seriously weird example of what you can do with digital post-processing.

Finsmakare

Zeno berättar om sin släkts Tacksägelsefirande och noterar att lille B ännu inte talar rent, till omgivningens munterhet. Jag påmindes då om den Enfödde Sonen, som länge inte kunde uttala ”r”. Han var också mycket förtjust i pommes frites, så på hamburgerrestaurangen meddelade han glatt och mycket ljudligt:
 – JAG VILL HA FRITTAR!

Veckans ord: hovleverantör

Gelatin tillverkas av diverse slaktavfall – hudar, ben, klövar o dyl. Man får förmoda att Törsleff har en hovleverantör.

Professor Balthazar home page

Since I was just writing about Eastern European animation of my childhood, of course I must present the history of Professor Balthazar.

In Soviet Russia, films watch you!

In my childhood, it was acceptable to show Eastern European films on television, and I tended to prefer Czech and Yugoslav animation to productions from, say, Hanna-Barbera. So, now The Only-Begotten Son and I found Russian Video from Russia, with over 500 video clips of Russian and Soviet origin. We spent the evening watching Aleksandr Nevskij, but with my low bandwidth and slow computer it wasn't the most enjoyable way of watching film. If others have wider broadband, let me know how good the videos at Viddler look.

Living fossil

Films that take place in a given past period usually very carefully play contemporary music, so as to establish the time, but in reality tunes are of course played not just in the year they were published, but long after. So, just seeing the title of “Just Walkin' in the Rain” made me hum it. Obviously it must have been frequently played in my childhood, long after it was written in 1952.

A new project

I've just found Cooking for Engineers. I will have to try out the recipes. I wonder if I can make good clam chowder with oat milk.

Veckans ord: konkurs

En vektor har i verkligheten alltid en viss mätosäkerhet, den bildar som en kon runt det verkliga värdet, så färdas man i rymden får man ta ut en konkurs.

Sorry, didn't work

Honeybuns and I recently watched Coraline. When we got to the extras on the DVD, we found out the film had been made with stop-motion puppetry, which the producer thought gave a unique feel to it. I'm sorry, we had unhesitatingly taken it to be computer generated imagery. Good film though.

Problem symptoms

I have found it a persistent urban legend that Swedes would be particularly prone to suicide. In order to demonstrate that this is not the case I looked up the relevant WHO statistics. As you can see, Sweden is not particularly high on the list, but we knew that. However, what did stick out as a sore thumb was that the People's Republic of China is the only country in the world (for which there are statistics) where women have a higher suicide rate than men.

Googling around confirmed that I am not the only one to have noticed this. Explanations seem centered on Chinese women's subservient position and low chances for poor people to improve their lot, and somehow I can't help but make the connection between this and the Google ads that turn up in the margin…

Not Hogwarts

A public school in Britain where teenagers with strange talents get trained in esoteric subjects, where there are ghosts in the gigantic buildings that don't always stay the same when you turn your back. But where there are also armies of robots, virtual reality simulators and where a good set of lockpicks gets you further than an Alohamora.

This is Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell.

Word of the week: scientoloogie

When they come and ask you to do a personality test, it's time to load up a scientoloogie.

Finished model 2009-V

Wood Elf Lord, model from Games Workshop, scale approximately 1/60, donated by the Only-begotten Son. This is a dragon rider, therefore the strange sit. (Dragon forthcoming.) I'm actually mostly satisfied with this one, but next time I'll try to paint stars on the caparison.

Finished model 2009-III–IV

Two Wood Elf Dryads, model from Games Workshop, scale approximately 1/60, donated by the Only-begotten Son. Cast as one piece, but contain an impressive amount of detail, good practice for trying to create wood tones. Not that I succeeded particularly well. I realise I need to use a magnifying glass for painting at this scale.

Finished model 2009-I–II

Two Night Goblin Fanatics. Models from Games Workshop, scale approximately 1/60, donated by the Only-begotten Daughter. Those chains with the heavy balls, they're just made for breaking, I don't know how many times I've repaired them. On the other hand I'm quite proud of having been able to have the one stand, attached to the stand by just the toe. Works as long as you don't breathe too heavily in that direction.

You have already seen this…

…so watch it again, it just gets more beautiful for each time.



What I remember strongest from watching Cosmos is the extraordinarily beautiful photography, and now I am able to better appreciate the poetic strength of Sagan's text. I doubt we will ever reach the stars, but let this then be a memorial to us lucky people who lived in the time when we were, in fact, visiting other worlds.

Light coming on

Once upon a time I did the IQ test at tickle.com and got a reasonably good result. I then followed it up by doing the EQ test in which I bombed completely—I couldn't even understand the questions, or to be more precise, I couldn't understand how to answer the questions with the given alternatives. Typically a question would describe a person behaving in a certain manner, and the alternatives would require me to explain why. This was patently impossible from the given information, so I was forced to just select random responses.

I told Honeybuns about this and she explained to me that the point was to answer the questions in such a way as to interpret the behaviour of the posited person in as positive light as possible. The truth of the matter was irrelevant. Oh. No wonder engineers score badly on such tests, being trained to find out the truth rather than making up the most pleasing alternative.

I will now have to mull this over.

Veckans ord: elefantbete

Om man ska ut och meta sjöelefant måste man ha med sig elefantbete.

Environment news

The latest issue of Råd & Rön contains a number of evaluations of what is the environmentally most sound choices for various consumer products. Interesting news is that life cycle analysis indicates that cardboard packaging is way superior to either glass or metal. So crushed tomatoes in cardboard it will be in the future.

They also compare flying as compared to taking the train, but it seems the journalist wasn't even aware of the travel planner at DB, but complained mightily about how difficult it is to find tickets abroad. I've sent a letter to the editor, outlining my experiences with booking train tickets. (Basically, SJ International staff are Good.)

There is a discussion about whether ecological food is good from an environmental perspective—is it possible to feed the Earth's population on ecologically grown food? Not enough numbers to convince either way.

It would have been even more awesome with Tom Bombadil included

Fattigbloggen

Not satisfied with Buy Nothing Day, Honeybuns and I thought we'd try to spend all of November without spending anything. This will of course be impossible—rent, insurance, electricity, etc have to be paid, but we will try to live as frugally as possible within external constraints. So yesterday we stocked up on beans, rice, lentils and other non-perishables and now we're off into November to see how far we get.