Analysis of Evolutionary Analysis

Biology is a hot subject. There's already a fourth edition out of Freeman and Herron's Evolutionary Analysis, but such is life that I tend to get books faster than I read them, so I only recently got around to reading the book I bought a couple of years ago.

We know that currently existing organisms, plants, bacteria, fungi, animals, etc, are descendants of earlier, different, organisms. This book gives an introduction to how we know this to be the case. This ranges from what features are naturally selected in plants of the same species growing in different environments, to the “deep homologies” that tie together bacteria and kangaroos in the same tangled tree of life.

So how do we know? Sometimes you observe, which may imply that you sit in a hideout from sunrise to sundown for weeks and watch a flock of birds nesting to check if any of them nip out of the nest for a bit of nookie with the neighbour and then work the statistics on the results of those liaisons, to see if reality matches your theory of mate selection.

Or you do experiments, formulate a hypothesis of how a certain feature benefits the organism and then try to manipulate that feature for a group of individuals to see what happens. Superglue turns out to be useful in many of these experiments. (My unhappy experiences with superglue make me even more impressed with scientists who can use it properly.)

Other work involves searching through gene databases and using various mathematical means to determine at some level of probability how genes have been duplicated, modified, deleted (and how we can tell that that is what has happened) over time to result in organisms greatly different from their ancestors.

The book lays this out in an easily accessible manner, not without humour—merely reading the first chapter using the case of HIV to explain evolutionary thinking and put it in context managed to clarify a number of things to me. The exercises and suggestions for further reading in each chapter show ways in which to go beyond the material that has been presented in the chapter proper. One reason it took me so long to read the book was that I tried to work through at least some of the exercises. Often I felt handicapped by my high school biology crash course not having gone into detail on exactly how DNA is copied during mitosis, why crossover takes place and how transcription proceeds in detail. Surely I'm not so old it wouldn't have been known at the time?

An important thing which struck me was the way in which the scientific method was presented, many of the exercises were concerned with the proper way of phrasing a research hypothesis, how to design an experiment to test that hypothesis, and how to analyse the results of the experiment. This is an undergraduate text book. When I was an engineering undergrad the idea of hypothesis generation and testing was quite alien, rather the sentiment tended to be: “if it works, you're home”. When I went into graduate studies and teaching I tried to amend this as best I could, given my own barely adequate studies in the subject. I remember one time giving an exam question: “Explain how to design a formal experiment to test X.” and a (fourth-year!) student looking confused and asking “How can an experiment be formal, experimenting means just trying random stuff, right?”.

I do not know to what extent things have improved since then.

The stage is all a world

The Only-begotten Daughter's theatre class had developed a play of their own again, yet again touching on the theme of struggling for a better world while people are as they are.

The setting was of a house scheduled for demolition being squatted by a disparate gang of youths, ostensibly to turn it into a house of youth culture, but the high-flying plans coming to nothing. A dizzying ambiguity underlay everything, not allowing any easy taking of any given position, putting every interpretation into question. Their soliloquies on how life could be more beautiful or their own pain were just enough over the top to possibly be taken as ironic subversions of themselves, yet perhaps not. In the end the police storm the building and the group stand together, lighting up the dark with their little cigarette lighter sparks of hope, singing “Imagine”, yet defecting into the dark one by one.

Certainty? Nowhere.

Don't mess with me or my baby will kick yer arse!

As foreshadowed earlier, the balcony is the next renovation project after the bathroom. Honeybuns expressed great delight at the opportunity to smash something up, so I gave her free hands with the ugly home-made furniture made of rough planks slathered in a particularly unpleasant shade of bright blue. Not only did she make short work of them, but she bent my hammer in the process.

A full day

The midday sun found Honeybuns and me having lunch on the verandah of a restaurant by the water in Södertälje, a Salvation Army band playing old standards nearby. We could have stayed there the rest of the day, contentedly basking in the sunlight like well-fed snakes, but we had other goals with the day and soon walked past election campaigners on the shopping street to Tom Tits.

The most noticeable additions since I had been there last were some fairground rides out in the yard and considerably higher ticket prices. The latter however included a thickish booklet briefly explaining each of the 600+ available “experiments”, but we it put in a locker with our jackets, so as to be less encumbered while exploring. Then off to play!

We started with the outdoor activities. The helium balloon was inflated, but not available for rides yet, but lots of water was available for diversion. No trout in the salmon ladder, but the camera obscura was perfect for hugging in (yeah well, but it's more fun to do it on the sly). Honeybuns, as always fascinated by wild rides, explained how cool the freefall ride was but was put off by all the children queueing for it, so I talked her into going for the ride. Unfortunately, as I belatedly realised, this meant that I, too, would be repeatedly dropped from a great height, but I held on to the safety harness with all my might and was at no point smashed into the concrete below.

Nearby was another threatening device, The Rotor, which once, when it was standing at Gröna Lund, turned my face green, which my sister upon witnessing noted she had always thought was just an exaggerated saying. However it was not active at the moment, so I bravely walked around it and made faces at it without fear of retribution.

Crawling through the old sewer pipe below the yard was on the whole a calmer experience and pleasantly cool.

In the Earthquake house stood a young man, licking an ice lolly, repeatedly pressing all the buttons that would shake the structure in various directions while looking very bored. Apparently a mere earthquake was nothing to the jaded ten-year-old.

Then we ascended to the top floor and the Human exhibition. On one wall I found Lajos Zilahy's short story „Mikor halt meg Kovács János?”, which must have been in some high school literature reader, since so many other people of my age relate to it.

Illusions, optical and otherwise, and then a lecture hall with the seats placed according to the periodic system.

The final thing we had time for was “Recollections”, a VIDEOPLACE lookalike. Honeybuns danced for me.



Then Tom Tits closed and we went home to smash some furniture.

Word of the week: lecturd

Sometimes teaching feels like crap and I deliver a lecturd.

Covering all the bases

Calamities of Nature, another web comic playing with words.

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.

Veckans ord: kokostopp

Det finns för många puckon, vi behöver ett kokostopp!

Creative process

To add to the earlier post on pre-canon versions of Paul Simon songs, here is a clip showing no less than two of his songs being developed and explored.

桜

The cherry trees in Kungsträdgården are blossoming.

We must tend our garden

Honeybuns was formally introduced to my mother and they (as I had surmised) immediately started discussing gardening. Before long we were on our way to Zetas market garden. I've been flower shopping with Honeybuns before but not quite gotten the point, but this was a place that was a delight to all senses—the place itself was a huge garden with the rows and rows of plants for sale nestled among rooted trees and rock gardens. There was even a shaded “Green room” with all-green plants without visible flowers which was hedged off from the rest of the garden so that it became a contemplative resting spot. The detailed labels for each type of plant gave the impression that the staff knew what they were doing. There was also a selection of various…objects that you could decorate your garden with, of which I found most fairly tasteful. Ooh, shiny! The polished steel balls I will have to get no matter what.

In the end we left with three clematises for my balcony, me feeling very cross-referential in getting a “Blue Angel” and a “General Sikorsky”. More stuff (including a shiny ball) will be be procured as the balcony renovation project proceeds.

The middle-class intellectual calculating his gut reaction

We were for a change shopping dinner at Coop Forum Rotebro and marvelled at the huge range of foods. We found a shelf with halal meats and I thought: “Cool, they even have halal bacon now!” before I did the double take. Apparently someone had just decided to offload an unwanted packet of bacon on the shelf. Funny place to leave it, though. But then there was a packet of bacon in the halal freezer as well, which was too many coincidences. Probably someone was deliberately attempting to offend the presumed buyers of halal meats. I attempted to determine my appropriate reaction to this. There are right-wing extremists in the area, as evidenced by posters and graffiti, and that makes it more than a mere prank, but I couldn't quite gauge how offensive it would be perceived to be—probably completely subject to personal predilections. Afterwards I realised I should have resolved the issue by simply buying the bacon, thus earning myself breakfast while removing any perceived offence.

Veckans ord: ohållbart

Lokalen var dubbelbokad, så mötet var ohållbart.

Veckans ord: vandarhem

Den eviga frågan till ouppfostrade slynglar: ”Gör du så där hemma också?” Förmodligen, om det är ett vandarhem.

“We are all individuals!”

Searching through the customer database, finding 1064 companies all named versions of “Creative”…

Two cops

I wonder, if we could hear the thoughts of Frank Furillo, if they wouldn't much resemble those of Sam Vimes.

Veckans ord: lättledd

Det är inte särskilt svårt att få flickvännen att dra på munnen: hon är lättledd.

Pneumatic art

We passed the Stockholm International Fair a couple of weeks ago and found this wonderful contraption:

She's all right

A song I've been looking for since it aired here in the early 1990s: “She's all right” with the Chipmunks. Marsha is impressively broadly skilled but what on Earth is the notation on Simon's blackboard? (2:17–2:44)

Taking the B train

Nynäshamns järnvägsmuseum and Stockholms ånglokssällskap arrange various steam train excursions from time to time. This Easter Sunday they offered a tour of Lake Mälaren, with a stopover in Eskilstuna, it not only being a nice little town, but having several industry museums presumably of interest to people interested in steam engines.

Honeybuns and I managed to get tickets before they were sold out and so joined a huge throng of people at Stockholm Central all admiring the B class locomotive puffing steam and smoke in the bright morning sunshine. A woman with a big camera was taking detail pictures of rods and pistons. Lots of children had been brought along by their parents to get the experience of a real train ride such as we all imagine it to be, with a chugging choo choo and small cars with wooden benches. Some child was heard to comment that the locomotive was smelly and not very nice. Presumably she would ask “Are we there yet?” within minutes of getting on the train.

We got on board and found seats and soon the station pulled away from us to be replaced by a springy Mälar valley. In spite of the warm weather there were still thin ice sheets in many inlets and in places clumps of ice still clung to the walls of rock cuts. Trainspotters, who'd realised you wouldn't get any good pictures from inside the train, dotted the landscape, with their cameras at the ready.

A short break in Västerås to lubricate the locomotive and then the lake continued past us, Eskilstuna soon arriving. The trainfull of people created a considerable crowd on the streets of the Sunday-lazy little town, presumably boosting the local economy some infinitesimal amount as they spread out for their various goals.

Honeybuns and I skipped the museums this time and instead opted for an Asian buffet and a stroll around the old town, peeking into backyards, navigating narrow alleys, passing by all the many cafés, their patrons basking in the sun.



Eventually we were back at the station, where people already waited for the depot to return the train, which had been serviced and polished in our absence. Unmoving pillars of smoke rose from the depot for the longest time, but finally the platform pulled up to the train and we got on. Sun-heated and well-fed, we dozed while I eavesdropped on two gentlemen who'd run into each other for the first time after their studies at Lund University in the late 1960s. I picked up some interesting information on telephony standards development that filled out my more contemporary experiences.

Eventually Södertälje Hamn, the old Södertälje Södra station, hove into view and I noted with delight that it still had not been modified from its original design with wooden shelters and narrow stairs. (Otherwise most commuter train stations were remade in the 1980s into a standard mold of tiles, glass and metal; while in most cases a necessary improvement, still somewhat reminiscent of public lavatories in the general design.)

Finally Stockholm C arrived and we had closed the loop.

Veckans ord: bankomat

I Indien går en ko på banvallen och söker sig sin bankomat.

Behind the scenes

The first weekend in April is traditionally the time for IPMS Open, the major plastic modelling event of the year. So also this year.

As all such events, what the public sees is just the tip of the iceberg of work. Planning work in principle started as soon as the previous Open ended. This is one event I thankfully do no organise, but I followed the committee out of the corner of my eye, as it were, as they revised rules, sent out invitations, booked the premises and necessary equipment, dealed with traders, enrolled judges and did the hundreds of lesser and greater things that have to be prepared even for an event of this relatively modest size, typically counting around a hundred exhibitors and a few hundred visitors. And of course, when the call came, I volunteered my muscle power for the weekend itself.

So, 08:00 on the sunny Saturday (on time, despite an unnecessary public transport detour), found me and others waiting by Skytteholmsskolan for someone to come by with the keys. A number of traders were already there and had started unloading their vans and trailers. Kipper spotted Tamiya's Mitsubishi “Betty” and immediately claimed it for his. The first sale of the day and the traders hadn't even unloaded. A couple of minutes later the key person arrived and we started turning the school's gym and canteen into exhibition spaces, moving chairs and tables. The secretariat set up their computers, printers, lists and other paraphernalia and when the contestants started checking in, everything was ready.

I had time to browse the trader tables a bit and noted that I was much more fascinated going through the old Airfix and Matchbox kits, the ones I'd once built and the ones I hadn't gotten around to, than the modern high-tech kits.

A tour round the exhibits. Exceptionally large ship classes, seems ships have come into fashion. Lots of helicopters, too, this year. Diorama and figure classes relatively small, maybe the masterpieces are being prepared for next year. Another Supermarine Swift model—someone must be into Swifts. (Pictures of the models available here, here, here, and here.)

The public arrived. The judges were briefed and then proceeded to carefully study each model of their assigned classes. The day went on until it was time to close to the public. Judges still bent their backs over the tables but one by one dropped off their notes to the secretariat where the points were tallied through the evening. Joint dinner for those who had time for that and then home for a few hours' sleep, except for those who remained behind overnight to guard the premises against theft and vandalism.

In the morning judges still milled around, picking out the winners of all special prizes, more work for the secretariat and eventually the result lists were posted, the winning models received their little labels and the award ceremony started, all winners and honorable mentions receiving their plaques, or, in the case of the special prizes, various symbolic objects of much honour and encumbrance.

Soon after the exhibitors started packing down their exhibits, but the traders held out and hawked their wares until the bitter end. (I got in twenty seconds too late to get a Frog Avro Shackleton I'd had my eyes on, but so it goes.)

After the official closing time, work started in earnest. Before we could return all furniture to their original places we had to clean up the place. We pride ourselves on leaving the premises in better shape than we found them. (Which, alas, is not too difficult, the pupils don't seem to care very much for their school so the rooms are quite worn-down and grungy.) A little piece of plastic was found on the floor, hm, apparently the left main wheel cover from a 1/48 Mustang, better send mail to all who exhibited one of those to see whose it is.



Finally we were satisfied, hauled our stuff to the loaned van and left for home, leaving the drivers to dispose of the garbage and put the rest of the stuff in storage. On the tube, the planning started for next year.

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Update: Official photo galleries here, here, and here.

Veckans ord: trosskydd

Sådana är svenska stavningsregler att det här är ett trosskydd.

Spring!

This morning I decided I would change from boots to shoes and then when I got out on the yard a formation of squawking swans flew over on their way northwards.

…and there was light

City commissioner Ulla Hamilton did not consider Earth Hour a worthwhile activity and it seems her constituents agreed, judging by the view from my kitchen window last night:

Veckans ord: underpris

I allmänhet brukar snusare stoppa prillan under överläppen, men somliga gör tvärtom och tar en underpris istället.

Done!

I just did my taxes, i e I got the forms from the tax board, glanced at the figures, shook my head a bit at my income last year, logged in on their web site and signed the form. All done.

Veckans ord: vindruva

Ett duvpar har tagit sig in och byggt ett bo på vinden, där ska duvhonan lägga ägg och sen vindruva tills de kläcks.

My dreams arrived…now?

I went to Norrköping today to visit the Norrköping Visualization and Interaction Studio. Ow, how performance has increased since I myself worked in the area.

We were treated to a demo of the Uniview interactive planetarium software. Our guide put us in space somewhere above the Earth, and then zoomed in on the International Space Station, its real-time position computed, but then time sped up and we could see ISS move around the Earth and then various other classes of satellites were added until the Earth was wrapped in a dense cloud of orbiting dots with an almost equally dense torus of geostationary satellites further out. Then they were gone and the surface of the Earth was mapped with economic indicators for all countries, but soon we left Earth for Mars, having a look at its surface before we sped out of the solar system, the Oort cloud enveloping it, continuing out of the galaxy and on and on until we passed the boundary of the visible universe. To my surprise space was hour-glass-shaped, an artefact due to the disk of our galaxy hiding most of the universe from our telescopes—clearly there is so much more to find out for us!

In the next room, another surprise: a Mitsubishi television screen, 73" across and perhaps 0.4 m deep. The screen was back-projected from a DLP projector inside the housing and not only did it do $1920\; \times \; 1080$ pixels progressive display, but it could be switched into active stereo 3D mode, displaying a crystal-crisp image. (The skydiving video really made me consider taking up skydiving.)

How cool that all the things we dreamed of then finally have appeared!

After taking leave of the NVIS people I returned to the station by way of Hobbyhörnan, where Håkan was in such a garrulous mood that I had to all but gnaw my leg off an hour later in order to catch the bus home. (Yes, bus. Due to track repairs, rail communications between Stockholm and Norrköping are limited at the moment.)

A filmy Sunday

Honeybuns and I went to Stockholm City Museum to see the recently opened exhibition on Stockholm on film. One suspects that the exhibition has been sponsored, as the exhbition featured a large number of props from the recently premiered Kenny Begins film, which is not placed in Stockholm, but they did not detract from the overall ambition of showing scenes from Stockholm, and how the Big City has been used symbolically and concretely in films. Short excerpts are shown in loops everywhere in the exhibition halls. The leaking-over of sound from adjacent films is luckily not large enough to be too bothersome. In the end, the time we had allotted for seeing the exhbition was not enough and we will have to go back. So far my favourite is the tourist propaganda film from 1932 in now badly faded colour, showing off exotic Stockholm, full of happy and healthy Stockholmers. The American speaker made a good job pronouncing Swedish words, but finally stumbled on ”skärgården” and ”Saltsjöbaden”.

When the museum closed, we moved on to Filmstaden Sergel to see Watchmen. Oy, I didn't think you could cram that many explosions and bullet-time fight scenes into just the first few minutes of a film and it continued to be quite violent—tender-hearted Honeybuns probably had her eyes shut about half the time. The soundtrack on the other hand was quite exquisite with well-chosen music. Presumably most of the images would have been computer-generated pixels, but with impressive detail levels (but I think Dr Manhattan's crystal construction on Mars was pretty dorky and pointless, sharp edges notwithstanding). Watching the credits I realised I must have missed out on a lot of details, apparently there is plenty for those with the DVD to look through in slow motion.

Not significant

With regards to the recent school shooting in Winnenden, there was some question whether the perpetrator had primarily aimed at women, as 11 out of 15 victims were female. In case you wonder, as I did, Table D in Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences indicates that the probability of this distribution being random is 5.9%, i e it's not statistically significant at the 5%-level.

Veckans ord: nakenchock

En nakenchock måste helt klart vara en tropp ridande polis, iklädda enbart sablar, som bryter upp en demonstration. Rimligen rider de också barbacka.

Spring cometh

The two tits outside my window have returned and seem to be refurbishing their nest for the season.

Veckans ord: snarlik

Har man hängt sig blir man ett snarlik.

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.

Word of the week: opulation

The ostentatiously rich citizens: the opulation.

Discriminated against, again!

I decided I need an electronic ID. Can I get one? Sure, it doesn't cost anything, except…I have to run Windows, and I have to run Internet Exploder.

I feel very much like kicking someone.

There and back again

As foreshadowed earlier, Honeybuns and I have been on a cruise to Helsinki. We don't need any particular excuse to spend time holding hands and looking at each other, but it was nice to be able to go away, not have to cook dinner and get up early to make breakfast.

As we arrived in Helsinki the weather wasn't the most welcoming, just enough above freezing that there was a thin sleet and we had to jump over slushy puddles as we walked towards the city centre with trams trundling past us, their sound indicating an immense weight not to be hit by. There was still lights in the trees along the Esplanade, but the Christmas market was long gone.

Finland still considers Sunday to be a day of rest, so we had few opportunities for shopping, though we visited the SOKOS S-Market where I was fascinated and embarrassed by this food store managing to (presumably) turn a profit with manual service and a much larger assortment than similarly sized shops around Stockholm.

Naturally, I had to pay my respects to the Ukko-Pekka model at the railway station. Sadly, you can no longer put in a coin to make the wheels spin (achieved by rollers hidden in the tracks, I now found).

We trudged up Mannerheimintie, peering through shop windows at cleverly designed lamps and furniture.

The Opera House was closed, the Finlandia House likewise. But the National Museum was welcoming as always, with a brand-new exhibition on the War of 1808–1809 and the loss of Finland. It wasn't flawless, but it absorbed us completely until we had to head back to the boat. (Later, I realised that the corresponding exhibition at the Army Museum in Stockholm had just closed.) On the way back we passed through the celebration of the Chinese New Year at the Glass Palace.

On the way home the sea was as calm as a glass floor.

A puzzling event

During our long Christmas holiday Honeybuns and I spent some time doing jigsaw puzzles. It seems that puzzle makers too are feeling the pressure from all other possible time-wasters, so while Ravensburger persist with the classical alp landscapes, Jumbo have lots of various gimmick puzzles. What caught our fancy was their line of „Wasgij?“ puzzles. In spite of the Dutch name, the subjects are very British. The gimmick is that the cover image on the box does not match the image on the puzzle, rather you get the view from behind the upset people on the box image.

Here is the “Home makeover” puzzle:



Another effect of the apparently decreasing sales of jigsaw puzzles is that the assortment available in shops is quite limited, the best range I've found so far is at Akademibokhandeln in Stockholm and even that isn't very impressive.

Veckans ord: köpepök

Den Enfödde Dottern noterade: Ett palindrom för prostitution: köpepök!

Veckans ord: pumpar

I Klippiga Bergen finns inte bara ensamma getter utan också pumpar.

A lesson in interface design

I got a promotional ticket for a free cruise to Helsinki on Silja Line and thought it would be an excellent use of a weekend. So I brought up the Silja web site, clicked on “Cruise” and started filling out the cruise booking form. This was divided into multiple pages, requiring input of lots of things and only on the last page did I get the chance to input a discount code. This made no difference to the price. Maybe the code was wrong. Instead I tried the serial number of the ticket. This was also accepted by the form, but didn't cause any change in the price either. Weird.

The next day I called the online booking helpdesk and explained my problem. The helpdesk person explained, in a tone suggesting he did this for nine out of ten calls, that I had to do an “online booking”
Well yes, that's what I did?
Push the button on the right marked “Online booking”.
On the right? Oh, that's a button?
Clicking the marked region brought up a form similar to the earlier one but with the difference that it had an extra field for entering a discount code at the bottom (visible by scrolling).

I leave it as an exercise for the readers to enumerate the ways in which this interface design can be improved.

Veckans ord: kungöra

En gång besökte kungen institutionen, men han var så omgiven av livvakter, professorer och andra högdjur att jag bara såg ett kungöra.

My toaster is toast

My toaster, a Philips Toastissimo, has lately shown some reluctance at ejecting the toast when it is done, preferring to keep heating it until I notice the smell, or, once I became aware of the problem, watch the toasting process closely and give the handle a little push at the right moment. Now, a likely hypothesis is that there is a spring inside that has lost some of its spring. This should be easily fixable by either replacing the spring or adjusting its attachment, so I attacked the toaster with a screwdriver (after having disconnected it from the socket).
On the far end of the toaster the screws were normal Philips screws and the end plastic was easily removed, but there was nothing to adjust there. OK, so the business end then, but there the screwdriver just slipped on the screws and after I had peered at the heads for a while I realised that they had one-way heads that screw but don't unscrew. No user-serviceable parts inside, and we've made sure you won't even attempt to service them. So, much annoyed I have to toss the toaster in the electrical equipment recycling bin and then go out to find a new toaster—one which is user-serviceable, if I can find one.

MySpace proves its worth

Hansson de Wolfe United has a MySpace page!

Veckans ord: lösvikt

Om man förvarar täcken alltför hårt vikta går de med tiden sönder i vecken. Därför ska ett täcke i garderoben alltid vara lösvikt.

Happy at the New Year

After Christmas celebrations Honeybuns returned to more southern and less snowy climes and there was much rejoicing.

We went to see the gingerbread houses at the Museum of Architecure but eventually ended up in the exhibition on architecture in Barcelona. We noted that just as for modern art, fashionable architects can't just present a neat idea, but have to surround it with grandiose and pompous verbiage. (Possibly they think computer scientists insist on presenting simple ideas with lots of impenetrable jargon, but that's a completely different matter.)

The sub-exhibition on Antoni Gaudí and his work on Sagrada Familia was much centred around his geometrical inventions, both enabling simpler construction methods (so why has it taken so long to build the place then?) and allowing a lighter structure, both in terms of mass and photons.

This would have been an excellent opportunity for some interactive exhibits, letting the audience play around with generatrices and see for themselves how they form various surfaces as they are moved along given paths. I strongly suspect the general audience probably isn't conversant with terms like “hyperbolic paraboloid”. The exhibition catalogue did contain a bit more explanation, but then again, should you have to shell out another 250 SEK just to get the labels under the exhibits explained? So, a good math teaching opportunity wasted.

On New Years' Eve we dressed up in our finest and prepared a candle-lit dinner for two (garlic mushrooms on toast, saffron fusilli with herb-and-lemon sauce and wild strawberry cider), Honeybuns musingly noting that the pleasantness of a festive evening apparently is unrelated to its alcohol content.

Long shutter time and short self-timer makes for fuzzy pictures.

After dinner we changed out of our finery and bundled up in ski pants, scarves and thumb gloves to brave the elements at Skansen where Jan Malmsjö read Nyårsklockan as tradition requires. The fireworks were very beautiful and not too loud from where we were standing.

The huge crowd then moved back into the city, and we had to zigzag to avoid drunk revellers, smashed champagne bottles and thrown firecrackers. SL was running all available busses and trams to move people and even the underground trains out to the suburbs were running at rush-hour frequency to my great relief, especially considering the puke pools on the platform.

We were home again around 02:00 and finished off the night with saffron buns and aurora glögg. The latter was a pleasant surprise, the spices were just a subtle addition to a smooth blackcurrant flavour with a hint of bilberry.

When we woke up again, the sun shone in through the bedroom window.

Veckans ord: peglegsam

Jag tackar YouTube-användaren peglegsam för att ha påmint oss om detta fina gamla skånska okvädingsord. Ex: ”Där gaur du å e peglegsam, din klydderöv!”

Helt klart bör peglegsam användas oftare för att inte helt falla i glömska, låt oss alla nyttja det minst en gång i veckan!

Having a good time

Call out the Ents!

Without warning, the little copse of trees across the street is suddenly gone. This morning I saw a human moving on the plot, looking as if he might know what was going on. Ah, a parking lot for the planned new house up the hill… It's not as if they could have added another floor to the parking house just next to it (or simply filled it to capacity, it's usually half-empty), or let people park on the empty parking lot next to the shop, or let people use the excellent public communications and manage without a car at all. No, no, the Tree Killers have been at it again. I am very upset, there certainly aren't too many trees in this city, not even here at the outskirts.

If trees could scream and struggle a bit, maybe it wouldn't be so easy to just saw them down without a second thought.

Let it snow!

After a rainy week today is a bright and sunny day in Stockholm. The Only-begotten Daughter grumbles that it's not very Christmas-like, but such is the climate in southern Sweden. Honeybuns has travelled north, where things are otherwise:

Technology is beautiful

I got this Christmas card from my friends at the Center for Parallel Computers.

Word of the week: ad verb

I got to thinking about what verbs might be likely to turn up in advertisements, so I went through 60 non-classified ads in today's Dagens Nyheter and counted the ad verbs.
It turned out that 15% made do without any verbs at all, and in a fairly large proportion of the rest there would only be verbs in the fine print.
The most common verbs were vara (be) with 27 occurences, and ha (have) with 20, obviously to a large part due to them being auxiliary verbs.
The third most common (17) was finnas (exist), typically explaining varieties of items.
The next two (14 each) are gälla (be valid for) and få (get)—here we are looking at the fine print.
These are then followed (at 9 and 8) by ge (give) and köpa (buy), not surprising around Christmas.
A group with 6 instances each is göra (do), komma (come), kunna (be able to), and sälja (sell).
5 instances each for bli (become) and läsa (read)—the latter in exhortations to find out more on the companies' websites.
Then it sort of peters out into verbs with at most few instances each.

Veckans ord: julkrubba

Nu är det julbord överallt, och därmed ett otal tillfällen att få julkrubba.

Conservation efforts

Jean Piaget developed a model for children's intellectual development. One of the milestones is the understanding that a liquid doesn't change its volume when it's poured from one container to another of different shape. This is known as conservation. However, sometimes it's painfully obvious that this is an understanding on a more superficial and intellectual level, as when a friend poured the contents of a can into a glass with seemingly larger diameter yet the water level ending up much higher in the glass. We could figure out that the thickness of the walls of the glass was larger than those of the can, yet the effect was eerie.

Christmas season

Honeybuns and I had a most enjoyable last weekend. The Saturday we spent at the Butterfly House. There weren't very many butterflies about though, maybe even the tropical lepidopterans have decided to hibernate through the winter. The museum restaurant was a delightful surprise, the food was actually quite good and not too expensive, an unusual combination in most museum restaurants.

On Sunday we went to Skansen for the Christmas Market. To our joy we found that Skansen has made an excellent effort this year, the main entrance met us with light cascades down the hillside and a choir singing traditional Christmas songs, i e not the ones you'll hear every day in every supermarket, but old and yet less worn-out ones.



As we wandered around the city quarter and looked into shops and workshops we found that they all used period lighting, in other words it was quite dark in most places. It brought home very strongly what wintertime must have meant just a few generations away, Christmas being when you would celebrate and use the half a dozen of tallow candles made at the autumn slaughter. The high point was when we entered Älvrosgården and listened to three violinists playing folk music in almost complete darkness.

The market itself contained more booths than I remember ever having seen there before, selling waffles, sausages, slippers, knives, fish, and whatever other folkloristic Christmas items, all very pleasant in the winter night (i e early afternoon). When the market closed at around 16:00, we haggled ourselves to a bag of discount saffron buns and then stood by Solliden and looked out over the city, glittering in the darkness. I noted how experiences are intensified by sharing them, not least so when shared with my beloved Honeybuns.

We passed through the Skansen shop for some aurora-flavour glögg (I will let you know what aurora tastes like) and then proceeded to Gröna Lund and watched brave people riding roller-coasters in the chilly air while others skated beneath them. The Christmas market was tiny and not very exciting, so soon we caught the tram and continued to Kungsträdgården, which also had a Christmas market. We bought doughnuts and munched on them as we walked towards the Old Town, to see the Christmas market there. I consider it to have lost much of its charm since they discontinued the paper trumpets for children (on account of the complaining residents), but we still found some more stuff for the Christmas table. I would have sung ”Jul i Gamla Stan”, but I don't know the words and besides I think it's a bit tacky.

Tired and satisfied with our day, we went home and made rice pudding for dinner in order to continue with the Christmas theme.

Having a gay old time

Honeybuns and I recently visited the National Museum of Natural History, a favourite of both of ours. We started with an astronomy show in the Omnimax theatre, Cosmic Collisions. Rather sensationalistic, but some quite nice computer animations.

Our main target was the exhibition “Rainbow Animals” (yup, that's the original, “Swedish”, name of the exhibition) on homosexuality in non-human animals. They had a couple of (plastic) dolphin pairs in quite explicit positions, but generally the exhibits were just random stuffed animals and we had to contend ourselves with reading about their lascivious natures. They did not show any whelks, but I was much amused to find there is a “Red-faced lovebird”, they must constantly get interrupted at inopportune moments. All in all the exhibition was quite small, but all exhibits were carefully cross-referenced to the relevant peer-reviewed literature, so there is plenty of further reading, should one feel like delving deeper into the subject.



We continued to see the other exhibitions. I've often complained that modern museums are too loud, but now found a very elegant solution to the problem, sound hoods that keep sounds restricted to the listeners standing right beneath them.



In the mineralogy department we found another clever invention: the mineral samples were placed in shelves that could be pulled out, lamps inside lighting up when the shelves were pulled out, very space-efficient and an excellent way to display the rocks.



The museum restaurant on the other hand had gone from indifferent to bad with the latest change of ownership, snagging a chorizo from the hot dog stand outside seems a viable option—for the non-vegetarians at least.

Then, just before we had to leave, we found a most delightful little exhibition on biological diversity, well hidden in the corridor leading to the whale exhibition. Do not miss!

Death in the age of Facebook

The mobile on my nightstand played its chirpy little tune. Picking it up I automatically noted the time: 01:27. My older half-brother S had—unexpectedly and prematurely—died a few hours earlier, please forward the message to Sis and Mom. I decided I could probably wait till morning to call them. While I returned to sleep the search for the members of a scattered family in infrequent contact continued, using Eniro, Hitta and whatever other sites allowed suitable searches for incomplete ID information. S's partner M was travelling abroad and had to be reached. A friend of hers in another city was located who managed to get hold of M on Skype in the early morning.

In the morning I left voice mail messages to call me on my mother's and sister's numbers. As I came in to work I saw S still logged in to his Skype account, where he'd left it going for his final exercise round. More subdued phone calls during the day, there would be a viewing at the hospital the next day. I was unfamiliar with the term, but googling confirmed that it was an opportunity to see the body. When had this procedure been (re-)introduced?

The next morning grim-faced siblings and half-siblings met at the hospital chapel with S's children and M. Raw unconstrained grief from M, we others struggling to keep outward emotions in check in the prescribed Nordic manner, this sometimes necessitating rapid exits to the bathroom, outdoors or just fixed staring away, breathing deeply. (I turned on my clinical mind and observed.) A hospital-issue welfare officer hovered nearby, but soon withdrew as she felt her presence unnecessary.

Eventually we had to leave, making space for others to meet their dead, and all went to S and M's house to find solace in each other and to manage the situation by planning practical details. Work, always a sure way to keep oneself from thinking. Where should the ceremony be, how should it designed? Buddhist or Orthodox ritual? “But none of that God stuff.” Those who had their laptops with them brought up iPhoto and shared their pictures of S.

The next few days we made points of friending each other on Facebook, adding each other to our Skype contact lists, updating our telephone numbers and email addresses to better stay in touch.

Eventually came the funeral, on the time when it had been possible to book a chapel and officiants. A completely secular occasion in a chapel in a silent forest burial ground, restrained and sad; token memories offered by grieving friends and colleagues. For practical reasons the actual interment took place at a different burial ground, now with an Orthodox priest blessing the dead, rapidly reeling off the necessary many words in the cold air, comforting perhaps not so much through any presumed presence of God, but by the familiar ritual, ingrained since childhood, the bedrock of generations behind. We others, brought up in Western Lutheranism, may not have understood what was being said, but still recognised the fundamentals of ritual and the support it gave.

And perhaps it is a modern kind of votive candle that S still is logged in to Skype.

Veckans ord: skumplast

Winston Churchill lär ha föredragit sin champagne kall, torr och gratis, men även när han fick betala för sin skumpa förbrukade han ansenliga mängder per dag, eftersom han hade en svår skumplast.

Veckans ord: tågluffare

När de Enfödda Barnen var små var de väldigt förtjusta i att gnaga på sina fötter, riktiga tågluffare var de.

Word of the week: warplanes

Clearly a hyperspace bypass must consist of warplanes.

The benevolent pusher

The club was the main attraction at the Hobby Fair this year again with our traditional introduction to modelling for children. The kids get a model for cheap on the condition they sit with their parents and build it there, which they happily do. Many come back year after year to do build models at the fair. It's not clear if we are bringing them into the hobby—they certainly don't turn up at our meetings, but at least they have been exposed to the joy for a while. And we get to feel like drug-pushers. Sort of.

Veckans ord: penision

Män har i snitt högre lön än kvinnor. Som följd därav har de också högre inkomster när de slutat arbeta: penision.

Political meme

Via Thnidu:
Copy this sentence into your blog if you're in a non-same-sex marriage, and you don't want it "protected" by the bigots who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.

Strictly speaking I'm not married, but even if I were, I wouldn't feel threatened anyway. Even further I don't think the state has any reason to legislate about my relations with other consenting adults. Abolish all marriage laws!

Uh-oh

This isn't all that recent and other bloggers have already commented and drawn the same conclusions, but I'm still so shocked I have to add my own entry.


I've felt it to be a bit over the top when USAians accuse Republicans of being fascists, but finding a cartoon like this in a mainstream conservative newspaper, executed without the slightest hint of irony or sarcasm, drives the point home, so to speak. I feel like going over, picking up all my friends and bringing them to safety. Now, before it's too late.

Blind to the consequences

As I was walking through the city, I realised that a building I've passed quite often contains the head office of that pearl of Swedish social politics, the Swedish Social Insurance Agency. I had missed it before, as the sign on the building is fairly small and unostentatious and in fact what now had drawn my eye was something that literally shouldn't have—the line of Braille below the printed text.

Contemplating this I thought of many things. One thing was that probably the Braille was not intended to actually be read—after all, how many walk around stroking walls to find signs on the off chance that there is a bit of Braille there? Nonetheless, the symbolism is clear: “We're here for everyone.” (that can read Swedish at least).

The other thing was the Braille itself. Now, as I said, the sign itself is pretty inconspicuous, but it could well have been larger. The text is written in a simple sans-serif typeface, indicating simplicity, seriousness, matter-of-factness. For Braille, as far as I know, there aren't really different typefaces, and there is not all that much room for variation in size—each character should fit under a fingertip. I guess it would technically be possible to indicate style, corresponding to italic, boldface, etc, by having the bumps have different profiles—not just hemispheres, but pyramids and hemicubes. I'm not sure how finely graded differences are actually distinguishable, but then again, most sighted readers aren't consciously aware of the distinctions between Times New Roman and Bookman either. There are dynamic Braille displays that can vibrate the needles, presumably the rhythm could be varied for a different feel. Then again, I'm sure the Braille community have come with their own ways of indicating style and character, I wonder how Discworlds novels are rendered in Braille. The audiobooks read by Steven Briggs are of course excellent.

Spitless

The F11 Museum by what now is Skavsta airport had geared up for the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the arrival of the first Spitfires in Sweden. A visit by a Spitfire was promised, though it would be a Mk XVI whereas the Swedish S31 was the Mk XIX. This could of course not be missed, so we, a few friends, bundled into a car and rolled through a rainy Södermanland towards Nyköping.

As we arrived we found the cozy little museum and a sizable crowd of people. An Airbus from MyTravel was just coming in to land, but had to abort with a mighty engine roar, possibly because they failed to brake on the slippery runway. It was thus not a very great surprise that the promised Spitfire visit was cancelled on account of the weather.

A spot of rain does not disturb a planespotter.

Still, the well-filled museum hangar housed an S29C, an S32C, an S35E, and the front part of an SF37 and various other bits and pieces. I have always liked reconnaissance aircraft for all the odd bumps and lumps they end up with in order to fit the cameras, electronic equipment and additional fuel tanks. (The S31 however was a very clean aircraft for flying high and fast.) I spent considerable time crawling around underneath the aircraft photographing their landing gear, my special fetish.

Honeybuns tries out the Draken cockpit.

Other parts of the museum housed exhibits of uniforms, equipment and various bric-a-brac and several nicely made model aircraft. There was also a couple of trailers demonstrating the work place of an intelligence platoon, all 1970s vintage, but apparently the same equipment is still in use. The HP7221A plotters were a fond reunion—I first learned computer graphics on one.

Eventually we felt that we had seen enough for the day and returned to Stockholm, on the whole satisfied with the day. Spitfires, next summer!

As close as we got to a Spitfire, an S31 propeller.

I hate fags!

You see them everywhere on the streets, brazenly spreading their vile diseases. I don't ever want to see them yet I had to spend all morning today picking up butts.

In other news, the Christian Democrats will not manage to block the new gender-neutral marriage law, hooray!

Word of the week: graydient

From 0 to 255 in monochrome: a graydient.

Turning off the lights is a bright idea

Just got my electrickity bill. On actual measurement I had consumed much less than the electricity company had projected—and billed me for, so most of the cost was credited to me. Ha! Let's see if I can repeat the trick over the winter.

Veckans ord: tvivelaktiv

En skeptiker sitter inte bara och misstror i största allmänhet utan är tvivelaktiv och undersöker saken.

And then there were 28…

When I left elementary school, I lost contact with my class mates, mostly without any regrets.

I was invited to a class reunion several years ago, but I couldn't attend, as I would be talking at a conference abroad at the same time. Still, I called the organiser and sent my greetings and I also asked whether a certain girl would be attending. (She never was my girlfriend, I didn't even think of it as an option at the time.)
“Err, she…she is no more.” Oh. Without asking for the cause of death I still wasn't very surprised.

Yesterday, the morning paper carried the death notice of a then-friend of mine (who was her boyfriend), torn from wife and children at an early age.

The countdown has begun.

Veckans ord: bykyrka

Bristen på rena underkläder fick dottern att eftertryckligt bykyrka.

Button, button

August Strindberg coined the term knappologi (“buttonology”) for the purportedly scientific systematisation of trivial matters. Now, there really are people who are intensely interested in buttons, as I realised when I came across Neville Poulson's seven-volume work Buttons of the Indian army.

Looking a bit further brought up the web page of the British Button Society. I don't often agree with Strindberg and here, too, I am feeling very pleased to have found the buttonologists and that they are doing fine.

Films

Last week I managed to go the cinema twice in different constellations.

Porco Rosso could have been scripted by Richard Bach in its pæan to the joy and beauty of flying. The delicate drawing style of the Miyasaki studio is perfectly suited for the clean and elegant 1920s seaplanes and the characters' equally light and slim summer clothes, all set against the eternally sunlit blues of the Adriatic Sea and the Mediterranean sky. Yes, in a world like this even pigs have to fly. And I have to build more Macchi seaplanes.

Then WALL·E. Even though the rightful star was robbed of his role it is truly what I call a “holding-hands movie”—in several senses. We even find that by holding hands you can restore from backups you hadn't made. It is also a very Mac-friendly movie, EVE is clearly an iRobot (not the same as I, Robot) and apparently WALL·E runs some latter-day version of MacOS. That there are major plot inconsistencies is less of a problem. And of course the computer graphics are absolutely stunning, in particular when you don't even notice them unless you're knowledgeable enough to realise that every frame is the result of some really complex programming and extremely heavy computation.

For obvious reasons

Mission accomplished

With patient scouring of Tradera I have finally completed my collection of all issues of Pilot from 1974 to 1980—the top years of the magazine.

Leafing through the magazines, I reflect that they probably have done quite a lot to shape my character (causation unclear, but certainly strengthening any pre-existing MÖPish tendencies). At the time I thought Pilot was among the coolest reading you could find; now I have a somewhat more nuanced attitude towards the magazines, but they have nostalgic value and indeed still serve as inspiration for many modelling projects.

So what can we find in them? Well, for one thing, aviation is presented as almost exclusively military aviation, and indeed, even the proportion of stories about infantry soldiers is many times the proportion of stories about civilian pilots. Natacha would have been completely out of place. To be further specific, when we say “military”, we are talking about World War II, with a smattering of World War I. There might have been one or two stories from the Korean War, but absolutely none about the Vietnam War. With time this was leavened with such characters as Dan Cooper, a contemporary pilot in the Canadian Air Force, and the occasional serialisation of Buck Danny adventures. It was notable how much higher the quality of the latter was both with regards to the drawing of aircraft and in the plot construction than in the more mass-produced Battler Britton adventures that were the mainstay. Now, with 30 more years of studies behind me, I tend to cringe at the depiction of the aircraft in many of the comics as the artists often seemed to have worked from pictures with no understanding of the system behind markings, camouflage or combat tactics.

The comics often revolved around several common themes: Sacrificing yourself for your buddies, redemption of past transgressions (often through death), honouring one's opponents, curing of temporary cowardice, not judging people too hastily and in particular not underestimating the nerdy-looking guy. I guess there could be worse morals.

During the period covered by my collection the magazine also contained quite a bit of aviation history and modelling-related material. Relatively superficial as forced by the limited space, but still data, profiles and often even three-view plans that encouraged further exploration. For some years Pilot even ran an inofficial Swedish championship in modelling based on photographs readers sent in of their models. There did not seem to be any cooperation between Pilot and IPMS, possibly their target groups were not considered to overlap, IPMS being for adults rather than the mainly tween audience of Pilot.

And then of course, regular competitions in which I won stuff every now and then, my Fritz von Flaxen keyring still dangles from the lamp on my modelling table…

Well, there they are, and at the top of my “unbuilt” stack waits a major conversion project inspired by plans in issue 13/1977, expect further reports.

Ohne Titel

There was you and I
and the fishes.
We learned their names
in five languages.
And all their names were beautiful,
because there was
you and I.

Day of thunder, hour of power

Recently it was Perks time at work and we took off in the Friday afternoon to an undisclosed location that turned out to be an indoor gocart track where we were dressed in sweaty overalls and rather icky helmets and then took off around the track with the goal to complete as many laps as possible in one hour. It's rather sweaty stuff, this race driving, so we worked as tag teams, trading places every ten minutes.

My team ended up last, with the fewest laps. We were last already when I first got to drive and me pushing the pedal to the metal to make up for lost time just won me sojourns off-track, covered in the tyres that made up the crash barrier.

But anyway, here I am, doing the Steve McQueen thing:

Veckans ord: paternostervärk

När man bett radbandet runt hundra gånger med reumatiska fingrar torde man ha en avsevärd paternostervärk.