Finished model 2025-III

Yet another palace: Skokloster in paper. The double curved turrets were utterly painful.

Finished model 2025-II

On a paper roll. This time the fortress of Vaxholm in its stand of 1706, model by Cardboard Cut-outs AB. Actually quite good fit, in spite of the many angles and levels.

Misheard lyrics

Another song that pops up in my head every now and then has the refrain ”Soft lights like in Chinatown”, which I think is quite evocative and romantic. However, I haven’t been able to find any reference to it on YouTube or elsewhere, but now, apparently because it is trending on TikTok for whatever reason, I found it, and the actual lyrics are the rather more nonsensical “It’s so fly-day fly-day Chinatown”.

Finished model 2025-I

Another cardboard kit: The Royal Palace in Stockholm. Presumably card scale. Halfway in I realised the building, in spite of appearances, is not exactly mirror symmetric, so had to do a quick tear-off, rotation, and regluing. The curved wings were again hopeless to get right. I’m thinking that perhaps I should print dowels with different radii to wrap the cardboard around. Possibly there is also a technique to make the paper keep the proper curvature. I will need to continue exploring this.

Fertile water

Earlier, I was impressed by the number of words you could make with the letters in “Christmas”, but now I found that “submarine” offers even more words. I’m still coming up with more, but these are the ones I’ve come up with so far:

a I am an as be in is me us are arm ban bar bin bum bun bus ear emu man mar men nab nib nub ram ran rem rib rim rub rue rum run sir sub sue sum sun use anus arse bane bans bare barn base beam bean bear berm bias bier bins bran brim bris bums burn ears emir emus main mane mare mean menu mine muse nabs name near nibs nubs numb rain rams ream rein ribs rime rims rise rubs rues ruin rune runs ruse same sane seam sear Serb sine sire snub sure abuse amuse bairn banes bares barns beams beans bears berms biers brain bream brims brine bruin burns emirs inure manes mains mares maser means mines minus names nares nears numbs nurse rains raise reams rebus reins rimes rinse ruins rumba runes serum smear snare urban urine animus brains bruins ermine inures manure marine murine number Sabine sarnie urbane ursine numbers seminar Serbian Sumerian

Some proper names: Ben Ian Amur Iran Mars Brian Burma Maine Marie Marne Sarin Sarum Serbia

And I’d also like to add NURBS if it is allowed.

Now, the question is, what should a word-finding word look like in order to offer the maximum possibilities? Surely someone has been working on this. I will have to search for this.

Early programming

Way back, the municipal library had Technology books (classification P) on a little mezzanine floor, coincidentally together with English-language fiction. There were lots of interesting books there, like catalogues of all rolling stock on Swedish railways, books on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and also, I found, on Computer Science. At the time computers were semi-mythical beasts and programming languages had exotic and magical names (often ending in L for Language), so of course I was curious. The first book on programming I read was Ekman & Fröberg’s Lärobok i Algol (at the time of writing it was not necessary to disambiguate which version of Algol was meant). I can’t say that I understood the contents deeply, not least since I had no way of trying out the exercises—indeed I only got around to trying Algol-programming at uni many years later, and then in the form of Simula 67, designed as a superset of Algol 60. Actually, the book which really taught me programming was Kristel Siro’s Vi lär oss ADB och BASIC, and by then it was possible to get occasional access to an ABC 80 running BASIC, so I could truly try out writing programs. Incidentally, Siro’s book contained the Hailstone program (though without naming it) as well as Conway’s Life as programming exercises. I didn’t really get the point of either at the time, but have used them as test programs ever since.

Much later, a colleague was cleaning out their bookshelf, including their copy of Lärobok i Algol. I nabbed it and have kept it in my bookshelf as a memento. Reading it now it is noticeable how horridly badly the example code was written, but everybody was still learning at the time.

There is now a portable GNU Simula compiler which I have installed on my office laptop. Of course I have implemented the usual Hailstone program in Algol/Simula as well. When Algol was created, the designers defined a publication version of the language, which was meant to look good in scientific journals, as opposed to the caps-only, limited-character set hardware language. So, this is the publication version:

begin
  integer n;
  print("Input number: ");
  for n := read while n > 1 do begin
    n := if n / 2 = Entier(n / 2) then n / 2 else n × 3 + 1;
    print(n);
  end
end

Incidents and accidents

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

Finished model 2024-II

For various reasons I was teaching from home today, and in the breaks I fiddled with the 1:64 Tatra T-87 model from VRKY I had received as a travel gift from the Royal Guard. It soon fell together before the end of the session.

Veckans ord: priorotera

När man arbetar med ett projekt kan flera deluppgifter vara viktigast, då får man priorotera mellan dem.

Finished model 2024-I

Yet another Games Workshop Wood Elf. Painted in Humbrol paints, as only they seem to work with the metal figures. I started with the intention of making it for a Winter theme, but the leaf pattern on the cloak suggested an autumnal design to me. While for this particular model it actually was possible to add a string to the bow without it snagging the rest of the accoutrements, the arrows in the quiver are shorter than the distance between bow grip and string, so the arrow I have added is outsize, but what can you do?

”Journalism”

Det finns en speciell journalistisk genre som går ut på att intervjua en person som är skicklig, eller åtminstone intresserad, inom något journalisten inte behärskar och som denne därför anser förtjänar att förlöjligas. I detta avsnitt av det saligen avsomnade Eldorado har Janne Ferm hittat en kvinnlig civilingenjör. Dubbelbonus!

Finished model 2023-III

A souvenir from a friend who visited St. Petersburg some years ago: The protected cruiser Aurora, known from the October revolution, as a snap-together carton model by Umbum. The scale seems to be 1:900-ish. I put this together in ten minutes or less – the sturdy carton is pre-cut and the fit of the pieces is almost good enough that the kit just falls together—but you must follow the instructions carefully. The printing is excellent, and results in a good-looking model with minimal effort.

Finished model 2023-II

I did use the photo-etch tool to bend the paper. It bent, but the results still look horrible. Then again, the design of the model, with those slits in the towers, did not help. The Liebfrauen-kirche of Munich.

Finished model 2023-I

This is originally a 3D model of the statue depicting Admiral Yi Sun-sin in Seoul, printed on an Ultimaker 2+ in some suitable resolution, and then brush painted in Vallejo colours. Yet another of those models that looks best at a distance, actually at some considerable distance.

Shameless

Because reasons, I was watching a radar plot of the airspace around Stockholm, when I noticed a small jet moving fast and high over the Baltic. Out of constant curiosity I googled it, and found that someone was commuting between Leer-Papenburg and Turku—out from Germany in the morning, back in the evening, a flight of less than two hours one way. Who could this be? The plane is registered to an unnamed private owner, but after a bit of discussion with a German colleague the connection became clear: Meyer Werft is located in Papenburg and they have since 2015 owned Meyer Turku, in Turku. Apparently the CEO of the latter, Tim Meyer, prefers to live in Germany and commute to his office in Finland every day. Meanwhile Stockholm public transport is struggling financially.

Intersectionality

The other day the Fame episode “Solo Song” popped up in my mind, for whatever reason. The story is that a blind teacher turns up at school and the moral is that he is not a pitiable cripple, but manages quite well on his own. In order to impress this on the students he spends the night before his first lesson training to toss a paper ball into a wastebasket across the classroom, a trick he executes to the amazement of the students in the morning. Now, to help him practice, he forces the school caretaker to stay up with him and bang the basket (and, presumably, clean away all the tossed papers afterwards). At the time, this was of course good and wholesome teaching, but now it struck me that one could see it as problematic that the White, higher-status, teacher forces the Black, lower-status, caretaker to work through the night—presumably for no overtime compensation. Being politically correct is a constant struggle.

Greenwashing

Ah, I don’t know. Single-use packaging for the type of soap which gets used once and then thrown away. The wrapper is made from fresh trees, rather than recycled pulp. It still claims to be intended for hotels committed to sustainability.

The patron saint

The reception traditions at the alma mater have most likely changed considerably since my undergrad days, but at the time there were certain rites and ceremonies that had to be performed for the recently admitted students to be accepted as full members of the school, the final being a party arranged by the new students for the rest of the section. Of course I ended up on the arranging committee. As the party would coincide with All Saints’ Day, we thought we should do something saint-themed, such as introducing the patron saint of programmers, whoever that might be. So I spent some time trying to get hold of a Catholic priest I had located in the phonebook (yes, it was all analog in those days). When I finally reached the priest, it turned out he belonged to the Liberal Catholic Church which had no truck with saints. Well, I had no idea! By then it was too late to start over with finding a Roman Catholic priest, so we had to drop the saints in favour of other ideas which I hope are safely forgotten by now.

Still, with the advent of the World Wide Web, it is now possible to search for all desired information, and one then finds that the inofficial patron saint of programmers is Isidore of Seville on account of him having compiled the first encyclopaedia, so here he is.

Finished model 2022–III

Another Wood Elf Wayfarer. Painted with Humbrol Enamels—they seem to be the only thing that sticks to the metal surface. Intended for the “Paint it black” theme at C4-Open, but was not considered worthy of judgement.

Eliza’s children

These last few years there’s been all this excitement about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and “algorithms”, but at the end of the day I am rather disappointed. It seems the current approach to AI is all about frequency analysis, feeding in billions and billions of pieces of data and working out the most common correct response to each possible input. This basically means the method will be simply be reproducing what is fed into it.

Back in the day, the idea was to develop learning systems with a world model that they could reason about, but that is hard. The Cyc project has been the most high-profile one and still does not seem to have much overt use. (I find it somehow ironic that a site dedicated to the best in AI uses CAPTCHA to avoid spam in their contact forms, but maybe it’s sufficient to weed out the most stupid scripts, and the smarter ones might be worth conversing with.)

The original conversing agent is ELIZA, still available at a text editor near you. As was observed at the time, people who should have known better were taken in by the seemingly intelligent responses, and the same seems to have happened to Blake Lemoine at Google who got tender emotions towards a piece of software. Now, I have not specifically tried the LaMDA system, but others that are built on similar principles and what has struck me with them is that they do not seem to have a very deep knowledge representation of the conversation itself, but exist in the here and now of the current utterance, much like a senile person might do, reproducing patterns, but not connecting the pieces together.

Bits from a recent conversation with a chat bot that pretends to be a person:
I have a dog and a cat
Simulated ones?
No, they live with me
I work from home, so I have plenty of time for them
[ … ]
Do you have any pets?
Yes, I have two cats and a dog
They keep me very busy. How about you?
Ah, are you making this up as you go? Earlier you said you have one cat and one dog.
I am not making it up
I do have a cat, but she lives at home with my parents
So how many cats in total?
There are four of them
They are all rescues
Exponentially increasing.

It’s an interesting bug that the last sentence in each utterance misses the full stop, but not other punctuation.