Ups and downs

Now then, the event for which we had come to Lincoln: The Royal Air Force Waddington International Airshow.

As I've mentioned before, I've longed to see an Avro Vulcan in the air and XH558 was one of the main attractions, if not the main attraction. During the spring there was some question whether the Vulcan To The Sky Trust would be able to afford the airshow circuit during the summer, but a major collection effort succeeded in securing the needed funds, so everything was set for a great show.

On the suggestion of the Tourist Information officers we didn't even attempt to order a cab to get to Waddington, but instead walked there. It took us two hours in the brilliant morning sunlight, but it really seemed as if we walked faster, or at least kept an even pace with, than the car queues that stretched as far as we could see.

When we got to Waddington village we got ourselves drinks for the rest of the way but hadn't even finished them before we found ourselves inside the airbase and then on the airfield itself. And then! I'm not the only one to state that the Brits really know how to put together an airshow, and Waddington is probably the largest of them all. It is a two-day event, but I'm not sure if we could have seen it all even if we had spent both days there. (Though another couple at the bed & breakfast had arrived several days early to see all the planes fly in and would remain a couple of more days to see them fly out again. That's devotion. Not least on the part of the wife, who clearly wasn't all that keen a plane spotter. On the other hand, as I've implied, there's plenty of other things to do in the area.)

My little Exilim is not very good at photographing planes in the air, so here are some pictures of pretty aircraft on the ground (and there were probably several hundred there to look at, so imagine me rushing about going “Ooh, look!” all day, yet seeing only a fraction of what was there):

A Gazelle from the Empire Test Pilots' School, which is partly run by QinetiQ, the privatised part of the former Defence Evaluation and Research Agency.

An Alpha Jet.

A Dominie from 55 (R) Squadron.

A privately-owned two-seater Hunter.

One of several Jet Provosts, this in Kuwait Air Force markings. A four-ship formation Jet Provosts gave a very nice performance later in the day.

But, it wouldn't be a British air show without some completely unrelated displays as well, so in the middle of everything was the local stationary engine society, displaying their carefully polished machines:

A Crossley PE1060. The Crossley Brothers were strict teetotallers, so they refused to sell their engines to breweries.

And next to that, rows upon rows of carefully polished vintage cars:

This is a car, I don't know anything about those. Oh, well, the one in the background is an Audi 100, I know because we had one when I was a kid.

Of course all the armed forces were there, recruiting. The RAF brought out all the fun you can do besides killing people, such as e g joining the RAF Bobsleigh team:

For optimum performance you need a hill. With ice.

Now of course, there was considerable activity in the air. The Polish Air Force display team Orlik did a very nice performance. They were then followed by the Red Arrows. When I first saw them at a Bromma air day ages ago, I first didn't get the point, they seemed to just fly round and round. Only after a while did I realise the extremely precise formation flying they did, reformating so smoothly you had to strain to see how they did it. Today, with only a few scattered clouds, they were able to do their full ‘high’ programme. Their speaker, “Red 10” kept up a constant patter, carefully introducing each pilot with humorous quips (“‘Boomer’ has flown in the Royal New Zealand Air Force and the Royal Australian Air Force, so he speaks both languages fluently. He is now struggling to learn English.”) and also stressing the combat experience of each.

Hopeless picture, I know, but, The Red Arrows!

Some time after lunch (Cornish pasty) I picked up that we were not going to see a Vulcan in the air. Briefly: Ex-military aircraft require a Permit to Fly. This has to be regularly renewed, and this entails demonstrating that the aircraft is in a certain defined good working order. The Permit to Fly for XH558 had expired the day before. This obviously would not have come as a surprise for the Vulcan To The Sky Trust, but what with one thing and the other, they had failed to fulfil the certification requirements and had instead just hoped that the Civil Aviation Authority would waive the requirements for that weekend, seeing as they had an airshow to do and all that. The CAA did not agree and thus the plane was grounded. To say that I and a significant part of the other roughly 100 000 attendees were disappointed is like saying it's a long walk to the Andromeda galaxy. I would have appreciated a bit more grovelling on the part of the VTTST spokesperson rather than the “Unfortunate, but we couldn't really help it.” attitude displayed. That they got their PtF renewed just a couple of days later further indicates some seriously bad planning. Boo, hiss!

Ah well, there was still plenty to see in the air and on the ground: More Hawks in the air, the aforementioned Jet Provost display, some quite interesting formation flying and simulated missile attacks by a group of Hawks and Falcons, helicopters cavorting, and then a very noisy display by a solo Eurofighter. I'd worn ear protectors all day, but when a plane like this turns on the afterburner, it's like it grips your stomach and shakes it, you have to tense up just to remain standing.

We made a quick tour of the various stands, I picked up some pre-ordered modelling supplies in the Hannants booth, and then I spent an hour in the Airfix tent.

Eventually the day wound down and we started to look for the exit. Food time! The first pub we found in Waddington was full and didn't look as if it served food either, but then we came to the Horse & Jockey, where we were welcomed and had a perfectly good dinner. On consideration, we didn't feel like walking the two hours back, but when we had finished dinner the stream of cars leaving seemed to have thinned out, so we decided to get a taxi. The pub staff recommended Discount Cabs, so I called them and they promised to have a car there in 15 minutes. 15.00 minutes later our cab turned up. We piled in and the driver sort of dove into a rabbit hole in the village, bypassing all queues, while lambasting Vulcan To The Sky in no uncertain terms and a very thick Lincolnshire accent and then deposited us by the door. And it was cheap.

Honeybuns had during the day become increasingly more agitated about the state of my skin. I for my part considered myself to be well protected by the tan I had gotten myself in Lappland, so wasn't too concerned, but it did feel like maybe it would be a good idea to apply some cream to my face and legs before going to bed.

Then. The next morning. My bright red face was oozing yellowish liquid and I'd covered the pillowcase in stains. My legs wouldn't bend properly and my skin felt too small for my body.

That day we would clearly only do shady activities…

Lindum Colonia

Lincoln has an interesting topology. Most of Lincolnshire is fairly flat, but here there is a fairly high hill. On top of this hill stands Lincoln Cathedral, a very tall building, which accordingly is visible very far away. The modern city centre lies down by the river Witham (downtown, as it were). You go between the two by way of High Street, which continues as Steep Hill.

The Riverside Cafe on the High Bridge over River Witham.

So, this Friday morning we got off the bus by the market square where we wandered around the stalls, to the musical accompaniment of a country & western singer (who actually was quite good), and Honeybuns bought herself an interesting cheese. We ascended Steep Hill, which, in addition to other interesting shops, contained a goodly number of used book shops, which obviously all had to be visited. As we were going to do some walking that day, we couldn't obviously buy all worthy books, but some sufficiently light-weight items found our favour.

This is just High Street, it gets steeper than this.

Eventually we were at the summit of the hill. Not by coincidence, this is where the Tourist Information Centre is (there is another one down at the city centre, but it is currently closed for renovation), so I might as well stick in a bit of tourist information here:
The general area of Lincoln has been inhabited for a long time, but the name and the first stone buildings date from the Romans. There are still a few remains, such as bits of the old city wall, left from Roman times. The next high period for the town came with the Normans, who started on the castle and the cathedral, both of which were greatly expanded in mediæval times; there are also a few Tudor era houses left. The first World War I tanks were constructed in Lincoln and during World War II Lincolnshire was “Bomber county”. All these various historial eras are carefully commemorated with signs, museums and the items themselves, of course, and there are a number of marked theme trails around town, so show off Roman, Norman, etc remains. Even though the town is so obviously prepared for tourists, there didn't seem to be particularly many around, which I provisionally put down to the English school term not being over yet. Swedish tourists were clearly not common here, I suspect they only leave Regent Street to go see Mamma Mia!.

Lincoln Castle in bronze.

Honeybuns descending into the interior of Cobb Hall Tower. Lots of dark nooks and crannies down there.

Anyway, we decided to start with Lincoln Castle. Inside the walls was a carefully tended garden, just made for picknicks. We had a long look at the Magna Carta, went through the prison exhibition and then climbed the walls and the towers. The sky was overcast, but from the Observatory Tower we felt as if we could have seen all the way to the North Sea had it been a clear day. Towards the west we could see another castle tower, which we couldn't fit to any feature on our maps, very strange.

A view southwards from the Observatory Tower of Lincoln Castle.

Finally hunger drove us out and we found a little vegetarian restaurant on Steep Hill, where some rather surly teenagers served us a quite good lunch.

The remains of the Bishop's Palace.

Then we walked a circuit around the cathedral, but decided to see the mediæval Bishop's palace instead. It is mostly a ruin these days, but an audio presentation did its best to bring its old splendour alive to us. I actually enjoyed this audio tour better than the one at the recent Titanic exhibition as this one only played fairly short clips and then waited for the user to start the next clip, thus allowing much better self-pacing.

A rather fancy water tower.

The museum closed, so we had to leave, and decided to set out to find the mysterious tower we had seen. Oh, it was a water tower. Apparently it didn't qualify for marking on any maps, just being public works, as it were. We found a pub for dinner and then descended the hill for the bus home.

Running late

X2000, the vomit express.

We found somewhere to house the cats and went for a longer trip, to England where my heart lies. The usual trip with the 12:21 from Stockholm to Copenhagen and then the night train to Cologne, from whence on to Brussels. Well, not so fast!
We were late into Copenhagen, but as SJ in their wisdom had insisted on purveying us with tickets with generous margins between trains, this was not a problem. However, the motion sickness which I had accrued on the X2000, was.
Eventually we boarded our sleeper, which was a Czech single-decker this time, and rolled through Denmark into the night. I didn't sleep very well (Honeybuns bravely slept in the upper berth, risking being tossed to the floor whenever the train lurched) and when I headed for the shower in the morning, not feeling particularly well at all, the conductor informed me that we were already running two hours late, so they were going to dump us in Dortmund, from where we could catch a faster train to Cologne.
We gathered our belongings and then scrambled to this other train, some platforms away.
Well on the train, I withdrew to the lavatory to yell at Ralph, after which I felt slightly better and then dozed a bit.

They are still remembered!

Our wide margins saved us again, so we had no problems catching our connection in Cologne. While we waited, Honeybuns explored the just-opened food stalls and eventually found me an unfilled croissant (you can't imagine the stuff the Colognials put in their croissants!) which I gingerly nibbled at, but my oculo-vestibulo-gastrointestinal system had calmed down by now.
Instead of the usual Thalys, we travelled with an ICE train. It seemed to me they must have straightened the tracks, because the journey was half an hour shorter and I didn't quite recognise the landscape we passed through, even though the stations were the same. This meant I missed my favourite sights on this leg.
In Brussels we spent a long time going in circles, trying to locate the Eurostar terminal. Finally we found the mysteriously elusive entrance and ended up in long queues for checkin, exit passport control, security control, and entry passport control (Britain not being a part of the Schengen area). Eurostar has a serious case of flight envy, but doesn't quite manage to pull it off: All luggage has to be tagged and “Dangerous items such as knives” are prohibited, so I slipped my Victorinox in my suitcase, expecting it to be placed in a locked hold after being X-rayed, but no, the suitcase was just given back to me, so there I got on the train, equipped with a deadly weapon—not only did I have a knife, but I could…err…use the screwdriver to take the train apart while rolling, yeah!

Eurostar at S:t Pancras.

The train accelerated through Flanders, briefly stopping in Lille and then, with no further ceremonies, dove into the Chunnel and just as fanfare-lessly popped up somewhere near Folkestone a short while after. After a surprisingly short trip we found ourselves at S:t Pancras.
We had a while before our next train so had a spot of food and then wandered around S:t Pancras and King's Cross, looking for ice cream until I found a Möwenpick freezer in a shop in the former station. Another item worthy of notice: The public lavatories at King's Cross will cost you 60p, but the ones at S:t Pancras across the street are free.

Two National Express-operated Driving Van Trailer Mk 4 at King's Cross.

Then we got on the next train, for Newark, and this is when the real travel started. While high-speed trains take you from A to B very efficiently, they tend to travel in trenches for noise-protection reasons. This means you don't actually see much of the landscape you travel through. Now we finally travelled on a normal train on an embankment and could enjoy the view of East Anglia, spotting churches, looking for cows and gazing at the horizon. At Newark North Gate we arrived a bit late, but still managed to get on our connecting railbus to Lincoln.

At around 16:00 we were in Lincoln, some 28 hours after leaving Stockholm.

Pulling our bags on a cart we stuck out like sore thumbs and we had hardly exited the station before the locals descended upon us, eager to tell us how to best get to the tourist information centre. On the other hand, the town was already closing down. We had time to get ourselves sandwiches and juice at the Coop, but by the time we had finished them all shops and restaurants had closed. (Later on British colleagues extolled the wild nightlife of Lincoln, to which we can just say “What!?”) We wandered around a bit, but decided we needed rest, so returned to the rail station and took a taxi to our bed & breakfast, which turned out to be just as friendly and comfortable as we had hoped for. Soon we slept.

One-stop exotism

In Vindeln they don't have enough eaters for several different restaurants, so you have to combine them into one.

Vroom vroom

I found an old friend in the craft shop in Åsele: The Corgi De Tomaso Mangusta, the first toy car I remember having and driving along roads made with masking tape on the nursery floor. I must have been able to read already then, as I remember having been fascinated with the strange and mysterious name.

Tags are not enough anymore

Falling off the waggon

Honeybuns' cats don't travel well, so since I was to be formally Introduced to the Honeymom, who lives up north, I got to fly for the first time in several years. Domestic. With the cats. Well, the cats actually ended up somewhere in a pressurised hold, but they still had to be excavated from inside the sofa and under the bed and stuffed into their travel basket and then brought to the airport. However, as we were travelling on Midsummer's Eve, the airport was all but empty and the staff had time to be friendly and helpful. The baggage dropper even emptied out a box of forms for me so that I could check in the Swiss army knife I only realised halfway through the security control I still had in my pocket.

The flight up on a SAS Boeing 737-683 was uneventful; the clouds disappeared somewhere over the Gulf of Bothnia and we arrived in Umeå under blue skies. We got out on the apron, but there was very little traffic to smell or look at apart from a very cool-looking ambulance helicopter.

We had a good week (of which more anon) and then flew down, cats and all, on another -683, finishing with a circuit over Stockholm, which was at its most beautiful. I was so seated that I could look down on Honeybuns' house as we passed it on final approach.

The large print giveth, the fine print taketh away

At the bookstore till I vainly waved my discount coupon:
20%
discount on everything in the shop!*
* Does not apply to student priced books, magazines, gift cards, the Reading Circle, music CDs, DVDs, and electronics.

On the whole, would it have been too difficult to say “20% off on all books”?

Not a bot

In high school we declared the computer room to be an independent country (mostly due to a contrived joke on my part, which we need not go further into) and as such we needed a national anthem. The then-current hit “Systems breaking down” fit the bill perfectly. It's been unavailable for long, but now has resurfaced on YouTube, and I just can't have too much 1980s synth pop on this blog.

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.

I count

Silent sunny summer Sunday. I thread new laces in my shoes and go out. I pour a bagful of transparent glass containers into the recycling bin and then double back a bit. I've often passed the school, but have never been to it. No worries, a sign points out “POLLING STATION THIS WAY”. It's no longer entirely pristine, this is not the first election it's been brought out for. A few party representatives handing out ballot papers by the door. Arbetarinitiativet, who on Earth are they? Anyway, I've already made up my mind, so I pick up a ballot paper in the stand on the inside and scan it for any unexpected names. I locate the polling room for my district, greet the election officials and disappear behind the green screen to stuff my envelope. Voting card, ID, and envelope handed to the official, I'm marked off and on the strike of noon my envelope is dropped in the big box. I walk back home in the cool sunshine, wondering how the next mandate period will turn out for the MEPs.

Elitism

A recent article in Dagens Nyheter discusses “elite classes” in elementary school, i e classes where the students get more advanced courses in maths, physics, history, or whatever. The news item itself is that there is not a whole lot of applications to these classes, but they also quote Marie Granlund, Social Democratic spokesperson for school issues, to the effect that elite classes will create A and B teams in school, something which is anathema to the Social Democrats (to which I, on and off, count myself). I instinctively reacted with annoyance to this, but better to sort out what's what, and see what will be a rational position to take.

To begin with, as the reporter asks, why is it OK to have special classes for practical training, such as sports, music, etc, but not for more “intellectual” subjects? This never gets answered by Granlund, who just reaffirms that advanced physics classes cause student segmentation (skiktning), whereas advanced sports classes do not. Now, I've heard the argument before from Social Democratic school politicians that demands for raised academic standards are a means to keep working class children down. There is a point to this, though often left unspoken: Children in better-off families tend to get considerably more support* from home with doing homework, simply having a tradition of reading and education being taken for granted. Accordingly, I suspect the unspoken assumption is that the A and B teams feared are not split according to the giftedness of the children, but according to the wallet size of their parents.† This, I agree, is a Bad Thing. Unfortunately, the ingrained reaction of the Social Democrats is to insist that No Child Can Be Left Behind—no matter your grades, you always get to move ahead to the next class, to high school, to university, in the bizarre hope that the under-achieving student will be so overwhelmed by gratitude at this kind deed that they immediately get their act together and not only diligently study in their ordinary classes but at the same time also do all the studying they did not do in lower grades. I'm quite positive this does not work.

Segregation is a Bad Thing, as having no experience and understanding of how other people live is likely to increase tensions in society. Mixing is not a guarantee for peace, love, and understanding, but perhaps raises the chances a bit at least. Schools are of course segregated based on where the children live, which correlates with socio-economic status, so a relative once noted that compulsory military service was the one place in Sweden were men from truly all walks of life got to meet each other. I suspect this is not entirely true, certainly I had a higher than random proportion of friends working as programmers at Navy HQ and quite a few top dogs in society have passed through the famous Interpreter School, but in principle the idea held. Now that just a few get to perform their military (or non-military, for that matter) service, segregation would seem to increase.

Then again, segregation can be good, for other reasons. As I've pointed out before, being intellectually gifted is not necessarily appreciated by other people, whereas being, say, even a half-decent musician is always a hit. (Haha. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, you get more babes with a guitar case than with a laptop case.) I myself finally found my true peers and life-long friends in Young Scientists, where thinking about non-integral differentials, doing chemical experiments not necessarily (though fairly often anyway) aimed at explosions, or writing Lisp programs were not reasons for pariah-hood. So, from my own personal background I would expect “elite classes” to have social, not just academic, advantages.

I presume this means I'm for “elite classes”, but are we then likely to instead create another social stratum, separated from the rest of the world, creating engineers and scientists without much feeling for the human state of existence? I suspect this is a stereotype promulgated by those who prefer the guitar case-carriers and not even seeing all the nerds around them, the contact surfaces are there.

Much more worrisome are the barriers to properly getting gifted children through school, regardless of their family background. I am at a bit of a loss here. A common demand is that teachers should “see all children” and adapt their teaching to the children's different demands. This is obvious bunk, there are only so many ways (=1 in most cases) that you have time for to explain a concept. When we have one teacher per child, then we can have full adaptivity, but the entire idea of a school presupposes that you teach children in bulk. Having extra staff helping with homework etc can be a step, but at some point teaching must start with the parents. And what do you do with them? I frankly haven't a clue and, of course, people are complicated. Yet we really need to improve schools. Not necessarily for the matter of national competitiveness, curing cancer, or anything like that, but because young bright people deserve to have a chance at learning stuff for their own enjoyment, growing as a person and all that. It's OK if they want to be auto mechanics because they find their joy in muffler belts and suspensions, but if they become auto mechanics because they don't know that there is an alternative, or because they don't dare became anything else, then potential joy is being tossed away.

---

* It could be argued that I and my siblings also got support from home, but I'd say it was pressure more than suppport, we were expected to do well in school and continue to higher education, so as to get rich and independent (well, we did, I guess), but our studies we had to manage on our own.

† Another possible assumption, not outspoken either, is that sports and music classes will give working class children a chance to get ahead and become sports pros and pop stars and thus rich. Equality accomplished!

Sheesh!

In the book I'm currently reading the author expounds on her tendency to become ill while travelling: “…and I ask you—I beg of you!—who gets sunburned in Stockholm?”

Well, I do. Quite regularly every summer, even though I try to stay out of the sun. Did she think we all live underground and never go out?

International brotherhood

You cheat!

I've spent the day playing with Denephew. I've never understood the principle of letting a weaker opponent win, so at one point he yelled: “You have to run slower, that's what adults do when they play with children!” Bah, he fits in narrower spaces than me*, so no mercy!

*) Here's another tip: If you play hide-and-seek and you know where the kid has hidden, you don't have to immediately retrieve them if you need a breather.

Word of the week: abs tract

My PE teacher considered a nice-looking sixpack to be all-important and had written an abs tract proclaiming the necessity of training one's abdomen.

Veckans ord: hagalen

Ute på landet kan man gå ner i hagen och betrakta hagalen.

Best mashup ever!

That the run on the Death Star in Star Wars: A New Hope is heavily based on the climactic bomb run in The Dambusters is well known, but never so well demonstrated as in this clip made by HenryvKeiper:

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.

---

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.

---

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.