Incidents and accidents

Every now and then I end up reading crash reports in some detail. I am not quite sure what attracts me, ghoulishness or the sobering descriptions of how seemingly trivial things end up ending the lives of hundreds of people. Chekhov’s missing bolt, as it were. An excellent online collection of analyses of aviation accidents is being produced by Admiral Cloudberg. I will never have the time to read them all, but it is good to know they are there.

Arrangements

In preparation for the sale of my flat, a photographer has been booked to take selling pictures of it. Home photographers are infamous, but hopefully this won’t turn my home into a Catalog Living horror.

H/t Charger.

Useful maps

Jon Griffiths is not a very prolific blogger, but he has made a nifty Google map of locations Biggles visited during WW I.

Rule 34

Bookshelves, be they sparse wooden frames, stern steel cabinets on rollers, trendy String shelves, or carved floor-to-ceiling giants of tropical hardwood, are all promises of excitement and knowledge. The more of them, the better. Even though they are off to a side, my bookcases are still the mental centre of my sitting-room, creating at least a little nook where one can hide from noise and commotion. I tend them, sort them when new books arrive and occasionally grudgingly cull books that are just too awful to keep.

It heartens me that others feel the same about their bookshelves and care enough to have created a site for Bookshelf porn.

Ask The Pilot

A frequently referred-to, but now obsolete, volume in my bookshelf is Titta, vi flyger!, the Swedish edition of The Flier’s Handbook, which covers most of what you need to know as an airline passenger. Now I found an excellent replacement, replete with opinions and anecdotes: Ask The Pilot. Do not miss the story about the exploding toilet.

Unthinking privilege

At one point I had applied for a position as Reader at one of the local universities. During the interview I was asked how I proposed to handle diversity. I responded that I was a white male engineer (with blue eyes and speaking Stockholm Swedish), so I would certainly be at a disadvantage in that respect. While I may attempt to consider diversity issues, it is by necessity a conscious, intellectual effort, as I belong to the privileged part of humanity and seldom need to think about this.

Mark Chu-Carroll has written an insightful comment on how one, enlightened and liberal as one may be, through upbringing and a constant barrage of threat projections, has so many ingrained behaviours and reactions going counter to one’s stated standpoint.

The point is not that a person, claiming to be, say, a feminist, yet will behave in a sexist manner, is necessarily a hypocrite, but that behaving in a correct manner requires effort. During my first year studies in mathematics, I learned that one cannot simplify an equation by dividing both halves by an unknown quantity, since that unknown might be 0, so one has to partition the solution into two cases, one for the case = 0, one for the case ≠ 0. I thought this was a huge onus to place on the equation solver. With practice, though, it became a habit and less of an effort to do this. Would that politically correct behaviour can also be internalised by conscious practice of one’s principles.

The price for the liberty of others is constant vigilance on one’s own actions…

Music in Finnish

When I was young, hit songs were normally translated in every European country and artists on international tours sang in the local language of each stop as a matter of course, but at least in Sweden (Anglo-Saxon) music is hardly ever translated these days.

Now I stumbled on a treasure trove: FINNPICKS, where “DM” methodically goes through Finnish covers of popular music with comments in English giving bios of the artists, the history of the original version (and quite often the original artist is not the one who made the song famous) and full-length recordings of both the original and the Finnish version (or sometimes versions, when there have been notably different renditions of either). I grew up to this music.

Many covers are fairly straight-forward translations, or at least retaining the spirit of the original, but some have completely unrelated lyrics, which always makes for an amusing shock.

Stats

I just noticed that Blogger is collecting statistics on the blog since May this year and found to my surprise that I seem to have a lot more readers than the three or four I was aware of. Hi there, unknown people!

Then there are a lot more passers-by, as it were, and as seems to be common, they end up here via Google searches for terms basically unrelated to the blog topic (whatever that is). So, the all-time most popular page read on Pointless Anecdotes is: Veckans ord: ytterliggare. Why are all these people googling for ”ytterliggare”? It’s not even a proper word, for heaven’s sake.

Then I get quite a bit of traffic from Åsa at Ting och Tankar. Hi there, archaeology fans, sorry I don’t have more in the way of Beaker culture grave finds, the only ancient artefact here is me.

Like a ferret

A recent research article indicates that people’s blogs correlate with their personality type, at least in the choice of words used.

Mattias Östmar has independently developed Typealizer, which analyses the contents of blogs and determines their personality type. This is the analysis of Pointless Anecdotes:

ESTP - The Doers

The active and playful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

I recognise the character, but it’s not me—Honey, you have taken over the blog…and I love you for that!

How to handle dead animals

Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology is currently taking a break from blogging, but there’s plenty of old stuff to read through. Among other projects Naish has spent considerable time figuring out the best way to make skeletons in your home.

Hairplanes

The talented Emma Persson makes airplane models of wool.

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!

Let them eat cake

On my first trip to the United States we were in San Francisco when the US Fathers' Day coincided with the birthday of the Only-begotten children's mother, and she decided we should get a cake to celebrate the joint event. So we went out for a walk to locate a cakery. We noted that US cakes were considerably more imaginative than the usual Swedish choices of Black Forest Cake and Princess cake, often making up entire stages with dinosaurs in primeval forests, Dorothy with friends on the Yellow Brick Road and so on. We still settled for a fairly simple chocolate cake. I, having just withdrawn cash, took out a fifty-dollar note to pay with at which the guy behind the counter hissed:
“Put that down! Do you want to get killed!?”
Oh, apparently I hadn't gotten the current USD/life rate right.
I found smaller denominations to pay with and then we repaired to our hotel room.

I had a little bit of cake and found it very rich. The OBCM, considering herself a major league cake-eater, had a larger bit but had obvious difficulty finishing it all.
“It's (oof) rather rich…”
We looked at the cake, its full caloric content now apparent to us, realising we wouldn't ever be able to finish it. Accordingly we invited all our travelling companions. They eagerly took a piece of cake each and their widening eyes showed they also found it quite rich. After some forty male engineering students in the prime of their lives had had a piece of cake each we still had half the cake left. We decided it would probably do as a tip for the cleaning staff.

Since then, I consider American cake as a weapon of waist destruction. There is a blog dedicated to other kinds of cake-related disasters: Cake Wrecks.

Outside eyes

It is an interesting phenomenon that while Martin R and I both blog in English, we seem to be at heart Swedish patriots, convinced that only in Sweden are things as they ought to be—or at least that Swedes know how things ought to be, even if we have not gotten around to fixing everything just right yet.

So, it is good to be reminded every now and then, that others see Sweden, that is, the world, somewhat differently. Probably the readers of this blog already read Paddy K, so today I wanted to highlight How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons. (And what is it with these Americans that never get around to learning Swedish properly, hmm?)

Better this way?

I have upgraded to a fancy new Layouts-based template. Some things seem to have not transitioned exactly the same. Is it an improvement, or should I tinker a bit more with the details?

Useful knowledge alert!

Revere blogs about a couple of recent articles that suggest new procedures for cardio-pulmonary resuscitation: if a person has collapsed with circulation failure (because they have had a heart attack, been electrocuted or drowned) it seems more important for survival to keep up circulation than inflating the lungs. So, if you are alone, don't bother with mouth-to-mouth, just keep compressing that chest.
If you don't know how to perform chest compression, get in contact with your nearest Red Cross centre, they regularly give courses in first aid. (CPR is visible and dramatic, but I think the most important thing taught in these courses is the habit to go up to people lying on the ground and check on them instead of just stepping over them.)

My new goal in life!

Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) is one of my heroes. Now he has divulged yet another reason to worship him: instead of a sofa, he has gotten himself a ball pit. I am so getting one for my next home!

In hard competition with bog rolls

I've just been placed on my first blog roll! Check out the sidebar (and the rest) of Trauma Queen.

Ow, I've been infected!

Martin R has tagged me with explaining why I started to blog.

It was simply because I came up with the name. Everybody else seemed to be blogging and I thought: “If I had a blog I'd call it ‘Pointless Anecdotes’.” I mentioned this to my friend Mats Li and he immediately responded that if I wrote a blog, he'd read it. (Are you there, Mats?)

Then, I saw Martin's Salto Sobrius in its original black splendour and realised that that was how I wanted my blog to look and getting a Blogger account was rapidly done. With time both Martin and I went for a design that was easier on the eye, but I still retain a lot of elements he came up with and I thought were cool. The English was not directly inspired by Martin, but there for the same reason: I try to include my non-Swedish-speaking friends, though I reserve the right to occasionally do bits in any other languages that strike my fancy.

I will not explicitly tag anyone else, but if you feel infected and write something, leave a link in the comments.

A new blog

John Bowers has started his own blog, Suborderly, with a link to his Flickr photopages. In the first posts you will find a poignant and sad reminiscence of a childhood friend of his who died doing cold fusion research.

Alas, computer science offers few opportunities for sudden and glorious death.