Beautiful betrayals

When the Iron Curtain fell, there were great hopes and expectations on both sides and one of the buzz phrases of the day was “joint venture”, so at the computer graphics conference I attended in St Petersburg in 1993, there was a hall dedicated to various proposed joint ventures between Russian and Western companies, hopeful Western computer manufacturers showing off their latest hardware to Russian customers who couldn't afford to buy any of it. The hall was, as such things are wont to be, pretty noisy, but suddenly something like a sonic blowtorch cut through the noise and on one of the screens I saw things you people wouldn’t believe, but then it ended and I realised I had just caught the last few seconds of a computer animation with music, but of what, I did not know.

A couple of years later I attended a computer graphics seminar at a conference hotel in Linköping. The speaker was fast-forwarding through a VHS tape and I glimpsed this same animation, but it was not part of the presentation. However, I asked for, and received!, permission to return to the room and go through the tapes on my own after dinner.

So, there I sat, late at night in a dark conference room in Linköping, watching and listening to the L’Opéra imaginaire version of « Dôme épais le jasmin » from Lakmé, tears streaming down my face.

As soon as I could I bought the full opera recording with Sutherland, Vanzo, Bacquier, and Berbié, conducted by Bonynge. I immediately brought it to the lab to share all this beauty with my coworkers. They were mostly amused by my excitement, but one person, composer of electro-acoustic music, rushed out of his room, screaming: “Of all the noise you make here, this was the worst!” and slammed the lab door closed, so as to keep the rest of the institute secure from the noise pollution.

I myself was pleased to find that apart from the Flower Duet there were several other songs that lingered in my ears. I was however a bit put off by the orchestra crescendo at the death of Lakmé, I felt a solemn fadeout would have been more respectful.

I noted that the plot, with a Western officer seducing and then abandoning an Asian woman, was quite similar to that of Madama Butterfly. Only much later did I find out that both operas may have been based on stories by Pierre Loti—the English Wikipedia entry for Madama Butterfly asserts that it is based on his novel Madame Chrysanthème, whereas the French entry denies this. (The Italian does not mention Loti at all.)

Går det så går det

Looking at Trumpeter’s USS England I decided that a Buckley class destroyer escort would be a nice thing to build to improve my ship modelling skills. References are of course needed for a good build, so I did a search on Amazon and lo and behold, there was even a book specifically on USS England. But…the cover picture? And what does the star “High quality content by Wikipedia articles!” mean?

A search unearthed this investigation by Chris Rand. Apparently what’s going on is that some guys hit on a brilliant idea: Write a script that downloads a Wikipedia article, follows the links to some pre-determined depth, concatenates all the gathered material and calls it a book. Repeat for all articles in Wikipedia. Print on demand and charge an outrageous sum = profit! There are already thousands of “books” under the imprints of Alphascript and Betascript being distributed through Amazon and other web shops to unwary shoppers happy to find a book on the obscure subject they were investigating.

Beware! Beware!

Sinking feelings

Honeybuns and I went to see the Titanic exhibition in Boathall 1 by Galärvarvet (The Galley Wharf). It was somewhat pricey at 120 SEK, but waving my Friends of the Vasa card at least gave me a discount. We were equipped with rather bulky items that turned out to be mil-spec MP3 players with the guide voice track to the exhibition. Then we were photographed on a simulated gangway before we entered the exhibition itself.

The voice track pretty much locked one to a particular, pretty high pace of going through the exhibits, which in the case they were, for example, written documents, couldn't be read while listening to the guide. With time I figured out how to pause the track and use the chapter skip buttons to adjust the timing, but that required conscious effort and some training. The voice track also had background music, which I quickly realised came from the famous film. As I haven't seen the film, I asked myself whether the exposition in fact followed the run of the film, but there were no overt references to it elsewhere. But the stated meaning of the exhbition was to remind us of the people behind the legend, who'd once lived, loved and worked.

Accordingly, each exhibit was typically a huge photograph of a person who had been on the Titanic with a case next to it, often showing personal items belonging to that person, postcards, diaries, watches, but also samples of cutlery, china, etc from Olympic, the sister ship of Titanic.

The final room listed the names of all who had perished and I noted an impressive proportion of not only Swedes, but also Finns, among the third-class passengers—emigrants to America. In an appropriately solemn mood we exited, passing the desk selling photographs of us boarding the exhbition and the souvenir shop with extremely expensive Titanic souvenirs. On the way home we thought about shipping disasters—while that of the Titanic may be the most famous, certainly it's not the worst? Wikipedia to the rescue (and several hours of reading)!

As I had remembered, Wilhelm Gustloff was the sinking with the greatest loss of life, but now I found that the latest estimates suggested around 9400 dead. What I had not known was that Wilhelm Gustloff was part of a huge rescue operation, perhaps a thousand ships moving over a million Germans from East Prussia to Germany and Denmark from under the Soviet army. Several of these ships were sunk, including the Goya with another 6000 dead.

In peacetime the worst accident is the Doña Paz sinking by the Philippines with perhaps 4000 dead, and the Kiangya, lost by the Chinese coast with around 3000 dead.

Closer to home, Estonia didn't have as many victims, but a much higher proportion of the passengers died than on the Titanic, due to the ship capsizing within minutes, trapping the passengers in their cabins.

I've always thought that a major advantage of air travel is that you die instantly if there is an accident.

Internationally renowned

It was a bit of a surprise to me to find that the Polish Wikipedia entries on the Stockholm underground network are more extensive than the Swedish ones—I'd thought the Slavic conversations I hear on the trains were in Russian.