…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.