Today, 67 years ago — I

Martin R, the archaeologuy, found a stash of old issues of Dagens Nyheter and gave them to me. I have been reading them and it is now exactly 67 years since these news were published:

• 17 Norwegians have been executed for sabotage actions. The Church of Norway (apparently in the hold of Nasjonal Samling) offers détente for non-collaborating vicars.
• Schlesische Zeitung regrets that the public opinion in Sweden now supports the Allies. The unnatural peace policy of Sweden clearly has distorted its priorities, but SZ hopes Sweden will come around to the right side and support the struggle against Communism. On the other hand, conservative Sydsvenska Dagbladet suggest that, while occupied peoples might in principle oppose Communism, they have first hand experience of Nazi concentration camps, deportations, torture and executions and are fighting the evil they know rather than possible evil they don’t know.
• Bulgarian Jews have been taken to four concentrations camps in the country, but the “worst elements” will be deported to special ghettos in Poland.
• A Red Army offensive has been stopped by the German Army, 14000 Soviet troops are claimed to have been killed. Henry Shapiro reports from the liberated Charkov which has burnt to the ground by the retreating German troops.
• Both Allies and Axis proclaim victories in North Africa. The continued Allied pressure on the North African front is a case for concern, says Dr Kirscher at Frankfurter Zeitung, but he is convinced that the Italians are willing to continue the war. [Italy capitulated five months later.]
• More US citizens are killed by accidents than by the war. Total war losses, including POWs, are 66399.
• Afternoon “tea dances” are prohibited in Stockholm. [Apparently this has been on the table for a while, as no background is given.] The youth of the city is expected to travel to surrounding municipalities for their Sunday entertainment. The signature Geman professes himself to be a ”swingpjatt” and verbally sketches the dancing youths with their funny nicknames. That they never consume anything stronger than lemonade is made clear.
• Dr Befrits runs a private maternity clinic and refuses to close it, even though so ordered by the National Board of Health. The association of practising physicians supports Dr Befrits.
• The Sunday (1943-02-28) was the warmest in a hundred years. The warm weather caused difficulties for the charity bandy match between Sweden and Finland in Helsinki and it ended 0–0. Back in Sweden Hammarby qualified for playing in Division 1.
• There is always money for gambling, so horse races at Solvalla brought in 400000 SEK, and that’s in 1943 money.
• Football was played in the UK, England beating Wales 5–3.
• Tons of dead herring have been scooped out of the sea on the west coast. A mine explosion is the likely culprit.
• All horse-owners have to report their horses and carriages (rubber wheels to be reported separately) to the authorities yearly, for the planning needs of the defence forces. The lack of rubber is also an important point in the main leader. Indigenous synthetic rubber is being developed, but Sweden is still dependent on imported German Buna rubber.
• New rationing cards for additional rations of fat to children and teenagers.
• Colonel Gyllenkrook has written a book on partisan warfare, guerilla warfare being well suited to the Swedish national character.
• Herbert Tingsten suggests the Nordic countries should eventuelly join in a union. Atos Virtanen [sic] has argued for the same in a lecture in Gothenburg. [Wirtanen was betrothed to Tove Jansson for a period and is the basis for the character of Snufkin.]
• Martin Allwood and others are elected to the board of the Peace University Foundation and plan for the future.
• Reader’s Digest has recently started publishing a Swedish edition, which is felt to be rather too American. In particular an article on miracle treatment of polio is compared to a debunking of said treatment by Swedish experts in the magazine Nu.
• John Wall exhibit “Technology in Miniature”. What might that be?
• Poppens närande Buljong praise vegetable soup instead of surrogate coffee.
• Konsum opens a new shop in Helenelund.
• March is Danish book month; Swedes are exhorted to buy Danish books.
• Namn och Nytt was a full two-page spread and at this time concerned with debating a proposed co-Nordic spelling reform. putt (pissed off) is revealed to have been only dialectally used in southern Sweden at this time. The Royal Academy of Sciences wants a prohibition against the import of calendars as it cuts into their income. As a result they cannot afford to publish scientific articles in Swedish scientific journals and they therefore have to be published abroad, which is a Bad Thing. [The mind boggles.]
På Stan on the other hand is just a single column, which today is about women’s magazines from different countries and their tips on how to repair and reuse clothes, and how to get the most out of available foodstuffs. Mazetti introduces a new egg surrogate.
• A number of new films open: In Which we Serve, The Reluctant Dragon, Le dernier des six, In This Our Life and Суворов.
• On the comics page we find Nancy, then still under the title “Fritzi Ritz”, collecting metal for the war effort, and King of the Royal Mounted, who is not visible in person in this strip, even though some nasty-looking bandits are.
• There is one radio channel, broadcasting from 07:20 to 22:15. A TAKA-572 wireless set cost 320 SEK.

Avatar

We have now seen Avatar. I can but agree with former reviews, the story is utterly trite (the protagonist starts with smaller challenges and keeps practicing until he’s ready to meet the Level 20 Boss) but computer generated actors have definitely come of age. I was shaking all over when the film ended.

Some random things that came to mind:

• Jacking into the avatar is visualised with a fly-through of a winding tunnel of lights. This was clearly the effect they spent the least effort on, did they use someone’s screensaver for that?
• But for the rest: The textures, the textures! And the shaders! Amazing levels of detail!
• A veteran marine comes up with the brilliant idea of a cavalry charge against heavy machine guns? They should have brought in some Ewoks to give them tactics training.
• Or logistics. If you are bringing together several thousand warriors with their steeds into a small area, how are you handling the supplies issue? What did the latrine trenches look like?
• While noble, the Na‘vi were savages, so of course they have to hunch over and lean forward to gingerly touch anything exceptional. And bare their teeth and hiss in anger.
• So while they live in harmony with Life, the Universe and Everything, they still have a (male) warrior class. (Chief’s Daughters are always tomboys, so they get to fly and fight too.)
• Sacred music sounds Western European all over the universe.
• Did anyone else feel the Hometree was reminiscent of The Holt in ElfQuest? (And of Lothlórien, and of Endor, and of Athshe. Hmm, a trope, it seems.)
• Jake Sully’s wasted legs were very convincing, were they also computer-generated?
• Michelle Rodriguez is hot.
• I was devastated to find that Sigourney Weaver smokes.
• No longer can a standard single column be used for credits, the full screen width has to be used to fit in all the names.

Veckans ord: påtårta

Vännen J tog backning på efterrätten: påtårta.

False memories?

Continuing the Uruguayan theme, this is «Stefanie» by Alfredo Zitarrosa. For some reason I associate this piece with Lasse Berghagen. Has he actually made a version of this at some point or am I just imagining things?

“Little bundle of wire”!?

Pepe Guerra’s song «Verde Esperanza» as rendered by Google Translate:

From here I go, I'm
I love you and sos
With your cold winters
And summer heat.

Your joy is my joy
Your pain is my pain
For I have given what I have
And I owe what I am.

For everything you gave me
I love you like how are you
Little bundle of wire
Popular wit.

Tremendous and with little knot
In the countryside or the city
Stitch of hope
Nudité to wait.

I stand among my
Until I voice
Singing to the lower
Where is my heart.

Where the cravings come together
For a better country
For this land of all
I'm staying and I will not.

In the glass of my eyes
Green grisea your color
The licks of your countrymen
The labor and sweat.

And the green hope
Your green heart
Continues to serve my song
My guitar and my song.

For the dream that left
Those who died Voice
For everything you gave me
For me what I am.

For everything you gave me
I love you just as you
Little bundle of wire
Popular wit.

Little bundle of wire
Popular wit
Small green hope
Fields alone.

Little bundle ...
For everything you gave me
I love you just as you are.

Little bundle ...
Stitch of hope
Nudité to wait.

I stand and sing
Until I voice
Till death wish
Or until I say no.

Hippo happy

250 K and the already strained public transport breaks down completely.

On the crowded train a teeny child is unhappy—hot, bored and with the sniffles. It cries dejectedly. Its mother thinks for a while, then pulls out her mobile and puts this on repeat. The child immediately stops crying and stares at the funny animals with a beatific smile for at least the twenty minutes I was with them on the train.

I'm pleased that at least someone got something good out of the day; myself I am thawing frostbite for the second time today.

Veckans ord: OS-teolog

Diskussioner om vilket operativsystem som är att föredra brukar liknas vid religiösa krig. Som OS-teolog ställer jag mig helhjärtat bakom Unix, OS X-sekten.

Winter

Upgrade tradeoffs

The Palm Zire I bought as a dissertation present for myself has been getting on a bit in years, so as a late Christmas present my friend J gave me a Palm Tungsten C that he’d had lying about without ever using.

Now I have transferred the data from the old machine to the new and am suffering from mixed feelings. The new machine is a lot faster, has a colour screen and lots more memory, but the old one is still working, weighs a lot less, and, in particular, has been riding in my pocket for almost six years. (It’s had several predecessors back to the first Palm I got in 1997, but this is the individual I’ve had the longest.) It feels a bit like taking an old and well-beloved dog out behind the shed. For the nonce, I have topped up its batteries and let it rest on the desk. (Where in another drawer lies the Sharp PC-1401 I bought in 1984.)

Högmål

It’s been two years since Honeybuns and I talked the night away at the anniversary celebrations of the Swedish Cooperative Centre.
A Valentine’s dinner at Gondolen seemed the right way to celebrate our anniversary. To our surprise they aren’t open on Sundays, so we went a day early.
Gondolen fulfilled all expectations: as soon as we arrived we were escorted to our table right in the gondola part itself. Despite the snowfall earlier in the day, we had a fabulous view of Saltsjön—though it was mostly wasted on us.
Service was efficient and intelligent, being able to adapt the menu to my food intolerances at a moment’s notice. And when it arrived, the food was absolutely fantastic.
We were very much satisfied.

Veckans ord: amfibieteater

Via den Enfödde Dottern:
Colosseum kunde fyllas med vatten för sjöstrider, det var alltså en amfibieteater.

How to handle dead animals

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

A threat?

Found by T-Gamla Stan this summer.

Concert

Just came home from the concert with Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt at Cirkus. A seemingly simple setup, the two men with their guitars on stage, but they played for almost two and a half hours, taking turns and and chatting between numbers, mostly about John Hiatt’s troubled life—Lovett kept carefully mum about any personal details. Low-key sit-down comedy, if you will. I wasn't entirely happy with the audio balance, both guitars tended to drown the singing. I was also rather annoyed with the incontinent audience that kept running out to the loos (or something) all through the show.

Then, about two-thirds in, Lovett performed a perfectly transparent version of North Dakota and as I slooshied, I knew such lovely pictures.

After the obligatory encore, the show was over and the crowd was ejected into the winter night to try to get back to the city centre, we finally got on the third bus to stop.

---

Update: Nils Hansson’s review.

More hails

A much more recent pattern matching language is Perl, so for the sake of comparison, here is the Hailstone program in Perl:

for ($i = @ARGV[0]; 
     print("$i\n"), $i > 1; 
     $i = $i % 2 ? $i * 3 + 1 : $i / 2) { };

(This is really a one-liner, but I've broken it over three lines to fit the text width.)

3D!

We’ve had a very cultural Sunday. We started by seeing the current exhibition at Galleri Hagström and commissioning some paintings. (It sounds very grand, eh? In other words we asked our friend Pia to paint some more goldfish just for us.)

We continued to the recently re-opened Museum of Medieval Stockholm, where we spent a couple of hours. It felt as if it perhaps was not quite finished yet, as there was a large number of display cases with various objects without any explanation whatsoever of what they were or where they had been found. On the other hand, the exhibits showing how archaeologists work in combining various scraps of information into a story were very well thought out. On one wall was displayed a large computer animation of the Old Town, as seen from the north, some time in the late Middle Ages, but I thought it was rather cheaply made and could have been much more impressive with just a bit more effort put into textures and bump mapping, so that the buildings wouldn’t look quite as cardboardy.

We strolled off for dinner at Pong buffé, which was much satisfactory—buffet tends to be a sloppy story, but they managed to keep the food looking fresh and appetizing and it also was very good, even though somewhat lacking in the vegetarian area, we will probably go for the à la carte next time.

After dinner, obviously a film. We went for the 3D version of Cloudy with a chance of meatballs. It turned out to be much impressive, suddenly circularly polarised stereographic goggles are cheap enough to hand out to cinema goers, as well as good quality enough that there is no visible ghosting in the images. In addition to this, the film was perfectly enjoyable and would have been so even without the 3D. And of course, it extolled the importance of nerds. The end credits felt at some remote inspired by Yellow Submarine.

Spirit Level

ABF had invited Richard Wilkinson, co-author of The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone to give a presentation in Stockholm and Honeybuns and I thought it would be an excellent outing. As always, we (I) got caught up in things so we arrived at the ABF house just five minutes before the lecture was to start. There was a long queue snaking outside the Z hall and when we got in, we got two of the remaining half-dozen seats, people coming after us having to line the walls.

Carl Tham introduced professor Wilkinson, who then made his presentation. The thesis of Spirit Level is that the larger the income inequalities in a country or region, the larger the problems with crime, bad health, lack of trust, academic performance, etc in that region, at least when measured for relatively affluent countries (as those are the ones who can produce the required statistics to begin with). At one end of the spectrum is the USA, with high disparity in income between the richest and poorest parts of the population, as well as high incidence of crime, teenage pregnancy, etc, and at the other end Japan and the Nordic countries, with a relatively low income spread and relatively low rates of societal problems.

At about this point I realised the young people sitting in the row in front of me were US students—who knows what had brought them there, a class assignment perhaps—and at least the woman whose notebook I could read over her shoulder was not amused by the “kissing of Sweden’s ass”. Most of the rest of the audience seemed to be appreciative of the presentation though.

There was a Q&A session after the presentation, the questions ranging from quite incisive ones to some that were that were completely out of the blue. Professor Wilkinson handled most of them well, even though I thought his argument for actual causation, rather than mere correlation between the cited factors was a bit on the hand-wavy side. The FAQ on the Equality Trust web site is slightly more strict, but I would like to go through their actual peer-reviewed papers to see what can be properly argued and what not.

The American students suddenly realised they probably should go on the attack and started urgently waving their hands, but Tham the moderator decreed the break was well overdue and finished the Q&A session.

We found the Swedish translation of Spirit Level, Jämlikhetsanden, being sold outside the lecture hall. We asked for the English original, but the guy hawking them said that they only had the Swedish version and the English one was “pretty hard to read”. We felt a bit insulted by the presumption of lacking language skills, but still bought the book as it was there and then got it signed. A panel discussion in Swedish had been announced for after the break, but we had an appointment at Chutney so had to leave.

Well there, I browsed the book, which certainly was not, at least in its Swedish guise, particularly hard fare, but rather a very popular, not to say polemical, and definitely political, presentation of the research of Wilkinson & Picket, as well as others they quited in turn. The literature references were, however, extensive, so should serve as a starting point for further exploration.

Veckans ord: piskfinnar

SM-Fetisistiryhmä, en klubb för piskfinnar.

More scary robots

Boston Dynamics, whom I've mentioned before, have created a pole-climbing robot:

Veckans ord: snöras

Tala inte om snöras i hängd mans hus.
Gammalt djungelordspråk

Retrocomputing

I had planned to snark about the French burka law proposal, but I've had a bad day and can't be arsed, so instead I console myself (ha ha) playing with an ancient programming language.

SNOBOL is one of those languages developed in the 1960s when not all languages had to look like a clone of C and GOTO was not yet considered harmful. SNOBOL is a pattern matching language, which you can use for rewriting strings, much like what you'd do with, say awk, but without the benefit of loop statements or proper functions—all these are instead achieved through labels, each statement optionally containing a GOTO.

There are modern implementations of SNOBOL, so I downloaded one. It compiled nicely and as a test I wrote my favourite test application, the Hailstone program, even though it makes no use of the pattern matching functions. Viz:

        I = INPUT
DO      OUTPUT = I
        EQ(I , 1)        :S(END)
        K = I / 2
        EQ(2 * K , I)    :S(EVEN) F(ODD)
EVEN    I = K            :(DO)
ODD     I = 3 * I + 1    :(DO)
END

As you see, we have labels in the left column, the code in the middle, and then the GOTOs in the rightmost column, preceded by :. S indicates a conditional jump if the matching succeeded, F if the match failed. The rest should be pretty obvious.

Word of the week: electrocity

For both moral and electric safety reasons I consider the electric chair to be an electrocity.

States of matter matter

I washed my quilt, a Mysa Gräs from IKEA, a very synthetic thing that crackles with electricity when pulled out of the cover. Wash at 60°, tumble dry. When I took it out of the dryer it felt strange to the touch—the polypropene surface had partially melted. A complete write-off.

Apparently immersion in liquid at 60° is not the same as being blown through by air at 60°.

Veckans ord: missförstånd

En klassiker: Miss Teen South Carolina uppvisar sitt missförstånd.

Discard this card

Sending out invitations for a conference, I went through the stack of business cards I’ve collected over the last twenty-odd years. There’s always a few that need to be pruned because email addresses are no longer valid or the persons have moved on to new lines of work. This year I was casting the net wide, looking for participants from all countries, and got to look at cards I don’t often consider, some of them old enough that they didn't have web addresses on them, some even so old they didn’t have email addresses on them.

I could see the cycles of IT booms and busts, some companies had hardly registered in computer history at all, some subsidiaries were brief footnotes in corporate histories from when the European market was thought to be larger than it ended up being, some did still exist, but my contacts were long gone. Web sites were nonexistent, or parked with domain name suppliers, or in some cases taken up by completely different companies who had quite independently, much later dreamt up what they thought was a witty and creative name. Then again, there were small companies who had weathered all upheavals, and still sat on email addresses with names reminiscent of dial-up connections and 2400 baud modems.

In the end I ended up with a small stack of cards whose historical value I briefly considered, but that I finally tossed in the recycling bag. Probably I will collect new cards at the conference, the little physical tokens still seem to be popular, even though I have long had electronic business cards to be Bluetoothed or IR-linked away.

Side-effect

An unexpected effect of the recent cold snap is that all valve aeration wrenches (for letting any air out of hot-water radiators) are sold out.
Long underwear? Hah! But I did get the last pair of woollen ladies’ tights in my size.

Saving water

The loo in Honebuns’ flat is “broken”—it only flushes as long as you hold the lever down. After getting used to it, I’ve decided it is actually a much better solution than automatic flushing: I get exactly the amount of water needed to flush the current contents of the bowl and my outlay in time is on the order of two or three seconds longer. I’m now peering at my own toilet seat, wondering if it could be modified to work the same.

Veckans ord: Stilleben

Det här är Randy Stilles högra ben:

Fractional post

In retrospect I shouldn't have been, but I was still a bit surprised to find that the Romans did not deal in integers only, but also used a form of fractions. In order to support Western Cultural Heritage there is a tool to help you convert terrorist Arabic fractions to Roman ones.

Veckans ord: fortdon

Racerbilar är fortdon.

Warm air

On the 25th Christmas celebrations were over and I was to join Honeybuns to see her Arctic relatives. When I left I noted that there was a lot of snow on my balcony, but temperatures had crept upwards and the snow threatened to melt.

Note the snow on the tracks: No trains continue north from here.

My firstclass ticket got me a comfortable seat with power and Internet connection to play with as the grey train bored northwards. This ended in Sundsvall, only halfway to my destination, where I had to change to a coach.

The temperature was probably around 260 K, but the double-decker coach arrived soon enough that I didn't have to freeze. Quite a few people were continuing northwards, so we were late in departure from the station. As I had a fairly tight change in Umeå, I asked the bus conductor, when he came by selling snacks, whether we would make it in time for the 18:15 connection to Vindeln. He looked a bit non-plussed and responded that I was sure to make it to the 22:00 connection, which was the only one running that day. What!? He took my ticket and went off to double-check. He returned a while later, having confirmed on both telephone and web that since it was a red day, no 18:15 service was running, and me having been issued a ticket for it wouldn't help the matter, sorry.

I texted to this effect to Honeybuns and soon had a response back that she and her dear mother would pick me up in Umeå. I briefly considered protesting that I could manage on my own, but didn't really look forward to arriving in the middle of the night and gratefully accepted the offer.

The afternoon was already quite dark, so I couldn't see much of the surrounding landscape and read a book instead.

The young woman who'd silently sat next to me since Sundsvall got off in Nordmaling and was replaced by a very large youngster who all but crowded me out of my seat and regaled me with a non-stop monologue relating his dangerous, awesomely skilled and/or illegal stunts in all kinds of motor vehicles as well as the exact number of screws, metal plates and other surgical repairs he had in his body at the time. I was thus doubly relieved to finally arrive in Umeå and see Honeybuns and her mother inside the bus station.

We were soon in the car, still warm after the ride down, and travelled another hour through the darkness to arrive in Vindeln to be met by a long-awaited dinner. Then Honeybuns and I went out into the winter night for a walk. I equipped myself with extra socks, ski pants over my jeans and thumb gloves in addition to my bulky jacket and hat. We went out, trying to find a bit of darkness to see the stars from, but even here civilisation insisted on lighting up the environment to keep anyone from feeling afraid of the dark. Or perhaps, keeping everyone in fear of the dark. After an hour or so my cheeks were frost-bitten and I had icicles in my beard so we returned indoors.

The next morning Honeybuns' father and brother turned up for the next stage, driving deep into Lappland. We drove through the light hours of the day through Christmas card landscapes and arrived in Sorsele at dusk and snowfall. We went out for an evening walk again, but even the quite moderate wind tore away the protective layer of warm air around our faces and let the cold bite at the exposed skin.

The screen of my mobile was unfamiliarly blank—my operator had no coverage here. Within a few days the battery was empty, the phone having cried itself hoarse. “Hallo? Anybody there? Hallo!? Can anybody hear me? Speak to me!”

When the wind abated it was quite pleasant to move around (still clothed in layers on layers) even though it still snowed and the temperature was still low.

There's the sun—don't blink or you might miss it.

Our last day the temperature had dropped overnight to 240 K. The car tyres deflated as the cooling air in them shrank, the pneumatic strut for the bonnet no longer supported its weight. The heating system soon warmed up the interior and having topped up the tyres we left coastwards, our little bubble of warm air speeding through the darkening landscape.

After a night in Vindeln I caught the morning coach to Umeå (having called the bus company and ascertained it did run). A gaggle of girls of the fjortis persuasion sat at the front, chattering away while I tried to read.

In Umeå I had a an hour's wait for my connection, which I spent munching on the plentiful food packet Honeybuns' mother had supplied me with. Apparently quite a few people were going to Sundsvall, a bus company employee went around asking those getting off at stops before Sundsvall to get on an extra bus from a different gate. I had removed my hat and gloves while indoors at the bus station and when my bus arrived I didn't bother putting them on, expecting to get on the bus quickly. This was not to be, the queue got on the bus only slowly, people buying tickets as they got on, fiddling with their luggage and in general being very slow about things. The luggage compartment turned out to have frozen, necessitating a bit of violence on behalf of the bus driver to get it open, so when I finally got on the bus I was very cold, yet the bus just stood for a while with the front door wide open.

Then, when we left, the heating did not work. The bus driver fiddled with knobs and buttons on the dash and eventually I could feel warm air slowly blowing from the overhead nozzles, but it stayed on top of the cold air below and never reached floor level and my feet, which remained frozen the entire trip. And not only they, a passenger came up to complain that the lavatory had frozen and would not flush. The bus driver stated he could not do anything about this and we'd just have to cross our legs and bear it. I think he was a bit stressed by all this, as he almost left a passenger behind in Härnösand and almost left with the luggage of a passenger who got off in Timrå, in both cases only stopped by the rest of us shouting at him.

Anyway, I forgave the driver when we arrived at Sundsvall central station well before my train would leave. Well enough in advance that they hadn't unlocked the doors yet, so I and the other passengers stood on the platform, nervously bouncing on our toes to keep warm, until we finally could get on the heated train, jack in to the Internet and roll southwards. I hopped off at Arlanda, in the tunnel station which is cold every time of the year, likewise now, and waited for Upptåget to take me the minutes-short hop to Upplands Väsby, where Honeybuns had flown ahead of me.

Then, everything was warm again.

The Mythos Lives

Mysteriously found in my mailbox: A Colder War.

Veckans ord: sambulans

Vid krig och katastrofer använder man fordon som kan frakta många skadade och sjuka på en gång: sambulanser.

Quest: A Long Ray's Journey into Light

There's nothing quite like ray tracing of glass spheres to scream out “Computer Graphics!” Unfortunately the YouTube version of this classic is rather fuzzy.



I did work on an Apollo one summer at Ericsson. I thoought it a bit weird at points, but it had a Logo implementation, so I played around with turtle graphics; a fairly natural way of doing graphics for me anyway as I at the time mostly worked on a pen plotter—graphics displays being very expensive and hard to come by.

…for the other ones

Whether you celebrate the return of the Sun to the Northern Hemisphere or not, peace and sublime moments of happiness to you all.

Because it's Christmas, or something

Found on Zooillogix, an elephant giving birth. Do not worry, it all ends well.

The right person in the right place

A square peg fits quite well in a round hole if the hole is large enough. I think this is true in the figurative sense as well.

Hairplanes

The talented Emma Persson makes airplane models of wool.

Veckans ord: enigt

Juhani Aho myntade uttrycket ”katajainen kansa” om finnarna. På svenska torde det bli ”ett enigt folk”.

Beyond the '80s

Fractals were all the rage when I was an undergrad, and I have the T-shirt to prove it, but they've not been front page news for a long time. Maybe they should be:

Veckans ord: minutläggare

När jag i min ungdom läste Airfix-katalogen undrade jag mycket över de fartyg som tjänstgjort som minutläggare. Senare har jag insett att det är de som placerar distansminuterna så att andra skepp kan navigera efter dem.

If the Japanese didn't exist, we'd have to invent them

The Algorithm March:

Turning on the filter

Due to the recent spate of spam, I'm turning on the CAPTCHA filter for a while. Sorry for any inconvenience.

What-ho, pip pip and all that

I found myself in the vicinity of The English Shop and decided to stock up on some supplies. The cashier greeted me in Swedish, but immediately switched to English when she espied the Spam and Marmite in my shopping basket. Now I just have to work on the accent…

Steaming about

This morning Honeybuns and I got on a train pulled by good old B 1136, travelling towards Nynäshamn. The heavy weather pushed down the coal smoke and often made it hard to see the landscape, but I eagerly peered at the surroundings, that in spite of being close to Stockholm, were unfamiliar to me. (So, we'd gone there by car quite often when I was a kid to see relatives, but that hadn't really left any impression.)

The railway station in Nynäshamn is in the harbour, where the boats for Gotland leave. At the time there was a Polferries boat in, the Gotland boat only coming later in the evening. It seems like the tracks used to go all the way to the harbour, allowing cargo to be transferred between ship and rail, but these days only commuter trains and the occasional museum train comes here.

There is a fairly large marina as well, catered to by tourist traps in little houses. These had been supplemented by stands for the Christmas market. We had lunch, which was decent, but rather expensive, confirming the tourist trap nature of the place. The market contained nothing remarkable, but I got myself a smoked trout and a jar of cloudberry glögg concentrate.

We made an excursion to the town centre, where there were also a couple of stands huddling in the drizzle—the children's merry-go-round did not feel at home in the winter weather. However, the local book store and haberdashery, respectively, yielded useful supplies.

As we returned to the harbour, the rain intensified, and we jumped on board S/S Blidösund. On board the ship was also a jazz orchestra and we ended up sitting right next to it. When we had left the harbour, we had a bit of rough sea until we returned into the shelter of islands and as soon as the deck was stable enough to stand on, the orchestra started to play. I can enjoy listening to trad jazz, but I have to admit all songs sound the same to me. I wonder if this is due to the orchestra actually improvising, and thus not really following any particular tune. Sort of a wall of sound, more than melody.

We had dinner on the boat. The two French ladies who were placed next to us, and who I tried to translate the menu for (well, what does “Blidösund hot dish” contain? We had to ask the waitress) took the opportunity to transfer to an empty table, leaving us to our « romantique dinneur ».

The ship trip took considerable longer than the train ride, but eventually we ended up at Skeppsbron and walked to the central station for the ordinary boring public transport home.

Misguided striving for perfection

When people say that something works “works like a machine” the implication is that this work is not only ceaseless but flawless. In particular this seems to appply to machine intelligence, intelligent robots and computers are, not only in fiction, assumed to have all information—and correct information only—available and then flawlessly proceed to the correct conclusion. Certainly often evil conclusions, but still the only possible conclusion.

Well, of course real software doesn't work that way. I have not worked with AI per se, but any interactive systems should be as “intelligent” as possible, where this in practice means that one studies users and figures out what they want done most of the time and then try to make the interface anticipate what the user wants in every given situation. In many cases this turns out not to be what the user wanted and bad user interfaces tend to do their anticipation in such a way as to annoy the user. Good user interfaces on the other hand are unobtrusive and smoothly let the user continue with whatever was actually intended, silently withdrawing whatever suggestion might have been proposed.

Machine translation has always been an important task for AI, and it seems the applications I have tried go for the ideal of the all-knowing computer. Thus if you submit a text for translation, you get the output all at once, unalterable, regardless of how bizarre it ends up. Shouldn't it be possible, in this day and age, to have an interactive translation application which presents alternative interpretations of the input and lets the user guide the translation? Certainly, even when I as a person translate text I end up having to make notes in the output, stating that a particular interpretation is dependent on a previous term having meant this and not that.

Veckans ord: partikel

« Sur une substance nouvelle radio-active, contenue dans la pechblende » skrev Marie och Pierre Curie tillsammans, det är en partikel.

No man is an island

The phone I got when I started my current employment has a recycled number, which apparently used to belong to a door salesman (not a door-to-door seller, but someone who sells doors) in the other end of the country. Not everybody in his extensive network had gotten the message that he no longer had this number, so I got calls and messages intended for him for quite some time.

This was an interesting phenomenon as only a certain subset of his acquaintances had failed to update their phonebooks and this subset of course shrank over time, as they called me and got informed. So, I would get sort of an attenuating sampling of his life as reflected in his messages, I could detect when his first daughter was born, when distant relatives remembered him for Christmas, and so on.

I haven't received such calls for a long time now, but suddenly this last week there have been several, apparently from people just tenuously related to him, but who still have been spurred into calling. I hope this is just a statistical fluke, rather than something serious having happened to him.

Political plots

Michael Shermer gave in the latest Scientific American a link to Yourmorals.org, a site with heaps of questionnaires intended to explore one's standing on morals.


This particular questionnaire builds on the idea that one can use five factors to explain people's political leanings. Apparently I don't quite match the typical (presumably US) “liberal”, which shouldn't be too surprising. Strange though, that my values decrease by exactly unity for each factor. I suspect the values may suffer from considerable quantization effects.

Another item of interest is that about six times as many “liberals” as “conservatives” have filled in the questionnaire, it suggests some major skewing in who finds out about surveys like this and/or who finds them interesting.

Summing up

So, we had a month of no shopping. How did it go?

Well, surprisingly well, actually. We have not starved. In fact, we've probably eaten better and healthier than usual, having had to cook proper meals for every dinner, rather than just grabbing something random from the shop on the way home. Still, I've lost about 4 kg—which I've meant to do for a long time anyway. This was a surprisingly easy way of achieving that. We've even entertained guests without problems.

We still have reasonable stores left and could probably go on for at least another week, but we'll do a shop rush anyway for sewing thread, model missiles, and other such items that hadn't been planned beforehand. Fresh fruit will also be nice.

Looking over my bank statement it seems I have saved a surprising amount of money. We will probably aim at better planned housekeeping for the future as well, but December will be a month of profligacy, we have outings planned for all weekends until Christmas.

OK, it's an ad

…but it's still a seriously weird example of what you can do with digital post-processing.

Finsmakare

Zeno berättar om sin släkts Tacksägelsefirande och noterar att lille B ännu inte talar rent, till omgivningens munterhet. Jag påmindes då om den Enfödde Sonen, som länge inte kunde uttala ”r”. Han var också mycket förtjust i pommes frites, så på hamburgerrestaurangen meddelade han glatt och mycket ljudligt:
 – JAG VILL HA FRITTAR!

Veckans ord: hovleverantör

Gelatin tillverkas av diverse slaktavfall – hudar, ben, klövar o dyl. Man får förmoda att Törsleff har en hovleverantör.

Professor Balthazar home page

Since I was just writing about Eastern European animation of my childhood, of course I must present the history of Professor Balthazar.

In Soviet Russia, films watch you!

In my childhood, it was acceptable to show Eastern European films on television, and I tended to prefer Czech and Yugoslav animation to productions from, say, Hanna-Barbera. So, now The Only-Begotten Son and I found Russian Video from Russia, with over 500 video clips of Russian and Soviet origin. We spent the evening watching Aleksandr Nevskij, but with my low bandwidth and slow computer it wasn't the most enjoyable way of watching film. If others have wider broadband, let me know how good the videos at Viddler look.

Living fossil

Films that take place in a given past period usually very carefully play contemporary music, so as to establish the time, but in reality tunes are of course played not just in the year they were published, but long after. So, just seeing the title of “Just Walkin' in the Rain” made me hum it. Obviously it must have been frequently played in my childhood, long after it was written in 1952.

A new project

I've just found Cooking for Engineers. I will have to try out the recipes. I wonder if I can make good clam chowder with oat milk.

Veckans ord: konkurs

En vektor har i verkligheten alltid en viss mätosäkerhet, den bildar som en kon runt det verkliga värdet, så färdas man i rymden får man ta ut en konkurs.

Sorry, didn't work

Honeybuns and I recently watched Coraline. When we got to the extras on the DVD, we found out the film had been made with stop-motion puppetry, which the producer thought gave a unique feel to it. I'm sorry, we had unhesitatingly taken it to be computer generated imagery. Good film though.

Problem symptoms

I have found it a persistent urban legend that Swedes would be particularly prone to suicide. In order to demonstrate that this is not the case I looked up the relevant WHO statistics. As you can see, Sweden is not particularly high on the list, but we knew that. However, what did stick out as a sore thumb was that the People's Republic of China is the only country in the world (for which there are statistics) where women have a higher suicide rate than men.

Googling around confirmed that I am not the only one to have noticed this. Explanations seem centered on Chinese women's subservient position and low chances for poor people to improve their lot, and somehow I can't help but make the connection between this and the Google ads that turn up in the margin…

Not Hogwarts

A public school in Britain where teenagers with strange talents get trained in esoteric subjects, where there are ghosts in the gigantic buildings that don't always stay the same when you turn your back. But where there are also armies of robots, virtual reality simulators and where a good set of lockpicks gets you further than an Alohamora.

This is Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell.

Word of the week: scientoloogie

When they come and ask you to do a personality test, it's time to load up a scientoloogie.

Finished model 2009-V

Wood Elf Lord, model from Games Workshop, scale approximately 1/60, donated by the Only-begotten Son. This is a dragon rider, therefore the strange sit. (Dragon forthcoming.) I'm actually mostly satisfied with this one, but next time I'll try to paint stars on the caparison.

Finished model 2009-III–IV

Two Wood Elf Dryads, model from Games Workshop, scale approximately 1/60, donated by the Only-begotten Son. Cast as one piece, but contain an impressive amount of detail, good practice for trying to create wood tones. Not that I succeeded particularly well. I realise I need to use a magnifying glass for painting at this scale.

Finished model 2009-I–II

Two Night Goblin Fanatics. Models from Games Workshop, scale approximately 1/60, donated by the Only-begotten Daughter. Those chains with the heavy balls, they're just made for breaking, I don't know how many times I've repaired them. On the other hand I'm quite proud of having been able to have the one stand, attached to the stand by just the toe. Works as long as you don't breathe too heavily in that direction.

You have already seen this…

…so watch it again, it just gets more beautiful for each time.



What I remember strongest from watching Cosmos is the extraordinarily beautiful photography, and now I am able to better appreciate the poetic strength of Sagan's text. I doubt we will ever reach the stars, but let this then be a memorial to us lucky people who lived in the time when we were, in fact, visiting other worlds.

Light coming on

Once upon a time I did the IQ test at tickle.com and got a reasonably good result. I then followed it up by doing the EQ test in which I bombed completely—I couldn't even understand the questions, or to be more precise, I couldn't understand how to answer the questions with the given alternatives. Typically a question would describe a person behaving in a certain manner, and the alternatives would require me to explain why. This was patently impossible from the given information, so I was forced to just select random responses.

I told Honeybuns about this and she explained to me that the point was to answer the questions in such a way as to interpret the behaviour of the posited person in as positive light as possible. The truth of the matter was irrelevant. Oh. No wonder engineers score badly on such tests, being trained to find out the truth rather than making up the most pleasing alternative.

I will now have to mull this over.

Veckans ord: elefantbete

Om man ska ut och meta sjöelefant måste man ha med sig elefantbete.

Environment news

The latest issue of Råd & Rön contains a number of evaluations of what is the environmentally most sound choices for various consumer products. Interesting news is that life cycle analysis indicates that cardboard packaging is way superior to either glass or metal. So crushed tomatoes in cardboard it will be in the future.

They also compare flying as compared to taking the train, but it seems the journalist wasn't even aware of the travel planner at DB, but complained mightily about how difficult it is to find tickets abroad. I've sent a letter to the editor, outlining my experiences with booking train tickets. (Basically, SJ International staff are Good.)

There is a discussion about whether ecological food is good from an environmental perspective—is it possible to feed the Earth's population on ecologically grown food? Not enough numbers to convince either way.

It would have been even more awesome with Tom Bombadil included

Fattigbloggen

Not satisfied with Buy Nothing Day, Honeybuns and I thought we'd try to spend all of November without spending anything. This will of course be impossible—rent, insurance, electricity, etc have to be paid, but we will try to live as frugally as possible within external constraints. So yesterday we stocked up on beans, rice, lentils and other non-perishables and now we're off into November to see how far we get.

Veckans ord: rappartist

Långt innan Papa Dee uppträdde rappartister på varieté med sina piskor.

Family gathering

All us remaining siblings went over for our father's funeral. Even though booking our trips independently, we all ended up on the same Silja ferry—in my case after my usual struggle with their website, this time because it doesn't work well with Safari 3, so I ended up having to do a (more expensive) phone booking. Getting on the boat did not entail any security check (yet I was for complicated reasons carrying no less than two Swiss army knives in my pockets this time around).

We would bump into each other on the concourse at various times, but had different dinner arrangements and didn't think of, or feel like, agreeing on a meeting later.

Helsinki next morning was chilly and grey. Honeybuns, the Only-begotten Son and I joined forces with my sister's family and walked from the harbour to our hotel right in the middle of the city. We were too early to check in yet, but had lunch and then changed clothes in the luggage room.

We continued to the funeral chapel where we met my mother and the other guests, exchanging subdued greetings and careful embraces. The coffin was waiting for us. A chapel official set out the Finnish flag to honour the fallen veteran, the funeral bells tolled, the organ went through various preludial exercises and then converged on a psalm, unfamiliar to us come from Sweden. The words and the melody had an uneasy relationship, but the chapel's singer carried the tune for us.

The minister rose and spoke of the life everlasting and then, in terms I recognised as my mother's, spoke of the good past life of my father and exhorted us to carry these bright memories with us.

We filed up to place flowers on the coffin, our better-practiced Finnish relatives carefully following protocol, reading out loud the condoleance cards on their wreaths.

Accompanied by more organ music the coffin moved out, pulled by invisible mechanisms, and we were left alone in the chapel to collect ourselves.

Directions given by my mother, we all walked to the nearby restaurant where a late luncheon had been laid out for us. The waitress was very discreet and professional and could handle any dietary oddities at a moment's notice. I note that these days basically all Finnish restaurants clearly indicate what dishes are vegetarian, gluten free, and/or lactose free. Minimal effort, but much simplifying the lives of many; time to take up this custom (requirement?) in Sweden as well.

My mother asked me to read to the assembled relatives the condoleance letters that had arrived. I made it through with my voice still mostly unbroken.

The various relatives exchanged the latest news, my sister's twins were cooed over and I promised to next summer visit Ostrobothnia, where I haven't been for some years, but still count as my roots. Eventually everybody said their farewells and our little group walked back towards the hotel. On the way we visited the family grave where a half-brother of mine, dead in childhood, rested, and where my father's urn would eventually be interred. The plot had been chosen by him after the wars, but now it seems unlikely that anyone else will be buried there, none of the family having any relation to Helsinki anymore.

We returned to the hotel and rested awhile, readjusting our minds to the present. I changed back from dark suit and tie to my usual jeans and sweater and felt more at ease.

The next morning the three of us set out to have a look at the city. These days central Helsinki is seemingly composed entirely of shopping gallerias. We tried to have a look in the cathedral, but it was closed for service just then.

Akateeminen kirjakauppa upholds proud traditions and is still a book store with a wide selection of books and newspapers, as opposed to its Stockholm namesake, which is increasingly more streamlined and gutted in an attempt to retain profit margins in competition with web book stores. Not so here, and we could well have stayed there the rest of the day browsing the shelves, but I satisfied myself with procuring a book on the Finnish Air Force that I had been lacking.

Eventually we picked up our bags at the hotel and strolled down to the harbour. Stockholm met us with drizzle when we returned.

Veckans ord: ståndpunk

Sex och rock'n'roll hör ihop och sällan mindre än i ståndpunken.

Veckans ord: knasli

Somliga bestämmelser är helt uppåt väggarna, de har uppenbarligen beretts av myndighetens knasli.

Coolth failure

Visiting my mother I had occasion to watch tv and it so happened that TV6 was running Johnny Mnemonic and I decided to watch. Commercial television, why hasn't it been outlawed yet? Commercial breaks chopping up the plot and I'm pretty sure they actually lost bits of the film, making it even more jarring. Even allowing for that, I was rather disappointed and even more so when I saw that William Gibson himself had written the screenplay, so no corporate script wrangler could be blamed for the results.

The main fault lies in the lack of cool. A major theme in Gibson's cyberpunk works is being cool, and Japanese vatgrown ninjas are the coolest of them all. The Yakuza are maximally inscrutable Orientals with infinite patience. In the original short story there is only one Yakuza assassin and that's because he's so utterly deadly on his own no more are needed—grenade launchers and assault guns are too crude and inelegant to be even contemplated. And Molly (in the film replaced by Jane with uncool shakes for copyright reasons!) shows her übercool by whipping the assassin's ass.

And that the data that Johnny is carrying happens to be the cure to all the world's woes? Please…

I briefly considered the point in having a person carry around data in their head, but to be sure, in many cases moving physical media around is faster than wire transfer and for stolen data it makes sense to hide the data inside the person. But the nosebleed effect of stuffing data in your head? It's not like the memory chip grows bigger with the data, you know…

Then of course, technology marches on and having information being faxed in 2021 made me laugh almost as much as the exhortation “Turn on your VCRs!”. The 320 GiB Johnny crams into his head were still upgraded a thousandfold from the “several hundred megabytes” he carried in the original story. And the virtual reality scenes? Too incoherent, but then Gibson never had a really coherent explanation of cyberspace anyway.

Look out, little snail!

There's an old math exercise with a snail crawling up a flagpost, which I've always thought was strange, but here was a snail on its way up a lamp post, on the next one two more. I wonder what they were looking for.

Not going gently into that good night

A few days after my visit my father passed away, finally overcome by heart failure and pneumonia.

My father and I never had a good relationship. Perhaps our innate temperaments were not all that different, but if nothing else, the differences between growing up in post-Civil war small-town Finland and 1970s suburban Sweden, betwen surviving new wars and living a laid-back academic life, ensured that we had few, if any, things in common. Possibly I would even strive to increase those differences to mark distance.

With time I came to better understand my father's motivations and the ideals he tried to live up to, but by then I could no longer communicate this to him, as he had descended into dementia. Perhaps it was even necessary for my understanding that I no longer had to keep my protective shields up, that my formidable father was reduced to a frail old man who I no longer had to be angry at but could pity and comfort as best I could.

Now, I am at peace and so is he.

Veckans ord: grisgryn

Fläskfärs = grisgryn.

Unsafe Swedes

I had business in Helsinki and Honeybuns accompanied me. Due to them being slightly cheaper we went with Viking Line this time.

To our surprise we were subjected to a security control on boarding the boat. Other passengers were also surprised, but the officials Orwellianly insisted they had had security controls for a long time. Our bags and jackets were X-rayed. A placard listed a number of items that were not allowed on board, including “sharp objects” (as we weren't metal detected my Victorinox was undisturbed in its pocket), “food obviously to be prepared onboard” (but cold food must be OK) and any alcohol. Yes really, the biggest alcohol purveyor on the Baltic Sea does not allow you to bring any alcohol of your own on board. This was enforced using a sink with sharp spikes where we could see a number of beer cans emptying. What their previous owners had to say about the matter we did not find out.

We had a pleasant journey over and watched the sunset from the top deck. A later attempt to go out and watch the stars was thwarted by the access stairs being closed off. Presumably the company does not want any drunk people stumbling about in the dark. (Wherever they might come from, since the consumption of both shore-bought and taxfree shop-bought alcohol is forbidden—the guy chugging from the 24-pack of beer must have received it straight from the heavens.)

When reboarding the ship after our Helsinki visit there was nothing in the way of a security control. Must be because it is impossible to buy booze in Helsinki on a Saturday. (snort)

On the way back the wind picked up and we got bounced around a bit, but we sailed through and arrived in a calm but cold Stockholm about ten minutes ahead of schedule.

I'm the king of the world!

Veckans ord: intänkter

De som bara kan ta till sig tankar som är tillräckligt inskränkta för att passa deras fördomar har små intänkter.

Veckans ord: kastmärke

Som spjutkastfunktionär bör man ha ett skarpt öga för att hitta den tävlandes kastmärke.

Sjung som en pirat!

Min katt har nio svansar,
nio svansar har min katt
och har den ej nio svansar
så är det ej min katt!

After years of writing scientific papers

Today I found myself writing “…increases the saliency of x.”, stared at it and realised it probably was not a well-suited expression for end-user documentation. I had to think for several minutes before coming up with “…makes x easier to see.”

Feng shui

My predecessor in my flat had his bed along the north wall of the bedroom and a huge wardrobe covering the opposite wall. I got rid of the wardrobe and placed the bed so that the morning sun would shine in my face. I hoped that I in the future might wake up to sunny summer mornings with my best girl by my side.

This is indeed what happened. Now mornings tend to be darker, but I still get to wake up with Honeybuns by my side and that is the best way I could imagine waking up.

Word of the week: diarrhy

When investigating Irritable Bowel Syndrome, it's a good idea to keep a diarrhy.

We hold these truths self-evident

No one should die because they cannot afford health care. No one should go broke because they get sick, and no one should be tied to a job because of a pre-existing condition.

If you agree, please post this to your blog.

Diamonds and chills

A less well-known not-quite-hit from my youth.

Veckans ord: skonummer

En skofetischist är ständigt på jakt efter ett skonummer.

Avoiding going native

Some years ago I listened to professor Hans Rosling talking on Sommar. He described how he figured out that the epidemic disease of konzo is caused by insufficiently processed cassava in the diet. Then, apparently to demonstrate the wisdom of indigenous populations, he mentioned that the local population know very well what causes konzo but poverty often requires balancing between not eating at all and eating potentially dangerous cassava. I was dumbstruck. Why couldn't the patients have mentioned that, as they were piling up in the hospital and the (presumably city-bred) medical staff were scratching their heads at the mysterious disease? Didn't the physicians think to ask, were the patients too intimidated by the experts to voice their own knowledge, or did they just not care, as long as they were taken care of?

I had a bit of the same feeling when I recently saw District 9. The aliens had been on Earth for almost 30 years, long enough for humans to have learnt their language, yet no-one in all that time had asked them why they were here. I first thought this was a major plot hole, but considering Rosling's experience, I wonder if it isn't rather an accurate and scathing assessment of human behaviour—we don't care about the motives of refugees that (literally!) descend upon us, we just do what we, for reasons completely our own, decide to be the appropriate thing to do.

CO2-minimal cooking

Last summer my friend Charger gave me a solar cooker. I was a bit intimidated by the package, but when I invited friends over for a summer cookout to celebrate my refurnished balcony, I decided I would finally break out the cooker and see how to construct the thing. It turned out to be quite simple—a single large piece of corrugated fibreboard covered with reflective foil on one side to be folded into a reflector and a largish, transparent plastic bag to wrap one's cooking vessel in order to keep air circulation from cooling it. I stirred in the ingredients for a veggie stew in my black castiron pot, wrapped it loosely in the bag and then set it in the sun for five hours. It didn't exactly become hot to the touch, but it certainly cooked the food, which was wolfed down by the guests, so it must have been good. (It contained cheese, so I couldn't eat it myself. I also consider it a good principle to let others taste my experimental cooking first.)



We did use the new grill as well. While considerably less energy-efficient also less weather-dependent, even if we had sun all day.



My balcony is probably too windy for optimal gardening, so the tomatoes and strawberries were still green, but the chilli was plundered on its one fruit to contribute to the stew.