Emotions with Björn Afzelius

I should have posted this five years ago, but I only first heard it a few days ago. Still worthy of listening to.

Beautiful betrayals

When the Iron Curtain fell, there were great hopes and expectations on both sides and one of the buzz phrases of the day was “joint venture”, so at the computer graphics conference I attended in St Petersburg in 1993, there was a hall dedicated to various proposed joint ventures between Russian and Western companies, hopeful Western computer manufacturers showing off their latest hardware to Russian customers who couldn't afford to buy any of it. The hall was, as such things are wont to be, pretty noisy, but suddenly something like a sonic blowtorch cut through the noise and on one of the screens I saw things you people wouldn’t believe, but then it ended and I realised I had just caught the last few seconds of a computer animation with music, but of what, I did not know.

A couple of years later I attended a computer graphics seminar at a conference hotel in Linköping. The speaker was fast-forwarding through a VHS tape and I glimpsed this same animation, but it was not part of the presentation. However, I asked for, and received!, permission to return to the room and go through the tapes on my own after dinner.

So, there I sat, late at night in a dark conference room in Linköping, watching and listening to the L’Opéra imaginaire version of « Dôme épais le jasmin » from Lakmé, tears streaming down my face.

As soon as I could I bought the full opera recording with Sutherland, Vanzo, Bacquier, and Berbié, conducted by Bonynge. I immediately brought it to the lab to share all this beauty with my coworkers. They were mostly amused by my excitement, but one person, composer of electro-acoustic music, rushed out of his room, screaming: “Of all the noise you make here, this was the worst!” and slammed the lab door closed, so as to keep the rest of the institute secure from the noise pollution.

I myself was pleased to find that apart from the Flower Duet there were several other songs that lingered in my ears. I was however a bit put off by the orchestra crescendo at the death of Lakmé, I felt a solemn fadeout would have been more respectful.

I noted that the plot, with a Western officer seducing and then abandoning an Asian woman, was quite similar to that of Madama Butterfly. Only much later did I find out that both operas may have been based on stories by Pierre Loti—the English Wikipedia entry for Madama Butterfly asserts that it is based on his novel Madame Chrysanthème, whereas the French entry denies this. (The Italian does not mention Loti at all.)

The Internet is for porn…

…and that’s why the biggest search engine is called Go ogle.

Finished model 2016-I and II

Porco Rosso is the best aviation film I know and is set in a 1920s whose æsthetics, both in aircraft design and clothing, appeal to me. FineMolds make exquisite models, often based on films or games. It so happened that I by different persons was gifted 1:48 scale FineMolds models of both Porco Rosso and Fio Piccolo from their based-on-the film aircraft models. Originally the plan was to build Porco Rosso’s aircraft for the 1920s theme exhibition at the club's yearly competition, but as usual I didn’t get it finished in time. Instead, inspired by the club’s figure painting course, I painted the pair of figures and eventually entered them at VIII Atvirame Vilniaus stendinių modelių konkursas, placing 3rd in the “Plastic, figurines and busts” category.

Dreams

The couple embraced and threw themselves on the ground.
For the longest time it seemed they would miss.

Veckans ord: höstack

Denna kalla och regniga årstid utbrister man lätt i ett och annat höstack.

Hope and hops

It struck me that my relation to religion is much the same as to beer drinking: While I see that it clearly is important and enjoyed by many, not least as an excuse for meeting friends (but may get you into fights about which brand is best), possibly may have health benefits under certain circumstances, has been historically very influential, and arguably may even have enabled civilisation, I still don’t quite get why anybody would see it as enjoyable, and suspect it is probably not good for you in the long run, especially as your arguments become increasingly more unintelligible the more you have partaken of it.

R

Prompted by a student project, I started looking into R today. Well, this is what the usual Hailstone program looks like in R:

hailstone <- function(n)
  while (print(n) > 1) 
    n <- if (n %% 2 == 0) n / 2 else 3 * n + 1; 

I started writing it in a very C-like way, but the functional nature of the language made itself increasingly more apparent as I played around with the code.

Still going strong

During my first course in calculus, Ambjörn the TA was going through whatever it was and I innocently asked “Isn’t this, like, fractal?” He spun around: “Yes, exactly!”, spun back towards the blackboard and proceeded, chalk blazing, to explain how the current course segment was tied to fractals, their implications for geometry and how that in turn related to other branches of mathematics, ever faster and further into ever more exotic subjects while we students could just hold on to our desks for dear life in the storm blast of imparted knowledge. Forty-five minutes later he suddenly made a double-take, checked the time, and with an embarrassed cough noted: “I think we ran over the time a bit there, let’s take the break now.”

During the break Å accused me of setting Ambjörn into self-oscillation and suggested I shut up in the future, lest we never manage to cover what was actually coming on the exam.

Well, I did pass the calculus exams, eventually even the dreaded Theory exam, though that took me five attempts (in no way an exceptional number). Still, perhaps that was more due to diligently doing all exercises and repeatedly reading the books, rather than thanks to Ambjörn’s TA efforts, which, while always entertaining and mind-opening, tended to veer off from the official subject into Deep Maths.

Eventually I became a colleague of Ambjörn’s, whose wide-ranging interests could no longer be contained within either the Department of Mathematics or that of Physics and thus had moved into Computer Science (which at the limit contains all other sciences). Passing his room would often imply getting drawn into impromptu lectures on maths and their relation to everything else in (and occasionally outside) the universe. He even stored some of his parabolic rock-melting mirrors in our lab, though we irreverently ended up using them as towel racks.

Today, Ambjörn was officially retired, though, as is the custom in academia, that simply means the end of salary, but not necessarily the end of research. So, I returned to the Alma Mater for Ambjörn’s Last Lecture, which, true to form, ranged from how to explain what weekday it will be in a million days, over homotopies of snakes on a torus, to how human culture is an integral over time.

I regretted Honeybuns wasn’t there to get some kind of idea of where I come from, intellectually, but the OBCM was there and afterwards we had a nice chat about teaching and geometric modelling over a cuppa.

If this is the last time I hold you

A song that pops up in my head every now and then, but that I hadn’t been able to place. For some reason I thought it might come from a Fame episode, but googling around I eventually found it was actually from the final episode of Secret Army, which in addition to this has the most haunting opening titles of any TV programme I’ve seen (the images played in reverse for the end titles).

Växeln hallå

I would assume it would be easier to confuse the connections between Ipswich and Norwich, rather than Northwich, but I guess Naarich just doesn’t sound nice to sing. When I saw the title, I first assumed it was about someone travelling on train, but the song is instead about the modern social media of its day. Note also the very careful enunciation of the singer, which makes every word of the lyrics come across clearly in spite of distortion high enough to make grown men cry.

Clean lyrics

As noted earlier , well-known songs often have a far older original, so here is a famous Monty Python piece in its 1930s guise:

List of songs about Stockholm

Liza Minelli, in one of her shows, told of how she’d investigated what city had had the most songs written about it and, of course, found it was New York, giving her cause to sing “New York, New York”. Number two was apparently London, so she did a London-themed song as well. I was a bit patriotically incensed that she didn’t even mention the number of songs written about Stockholm. Fortunately others have addressed that issue.

Forgotten lyrics

All too often, and especially with lyrics in foreign languages, I don’t catch the exact lyrics and so I’ve long been humming on this rhythmic piece that goes something something breakfast in London. But, of course Wikipedia has a List of songs about London and halfway through that I found it: “Last train to London”.

Swashbuckling

Another song that’s stuck in my head: “Song of the Musketeers” from the 1935 version of The Three Musketeers.

The Only-Begotten Children

I’m not the only one to have Only-Begotten Children, but so does Prince Philip, as witnessed by the Reverend Hubert Rumtumtibumbum (starts at 5:00):

Version originale

The Flash animation “Shii’s song” with an up-pitched version of Jennifer Stigile’s recording of “Wind’s Nocturne” was an Internet phenomenon long before the term “viral video” was invented, but here is the original Japanese version.

More 1970s ballads

I’m sure the YouTube comments claim that they just don’t make music like this anymore. Well, why would they? It’s already been made.

Web-adapted

Now is the time for the JavaScript version of the Hailstone program:

<script>
  function hailstone(seed) {
    var output = "";
    for ( ; 
   output += seed, seed > 1 ; 
   seed = seed % 2 ? seed * 3 + 1 : seed / 2) { output += ", "; }
    return(output);
  }

  function submit(seed) {
    document.getElementById("output").textContent =
      hailstone(seed);
  }
</script>

<p>
  Seed: <input type="text" 
            id="seed" 
            onchange="submit(this.value)">
</p>
<p id="output"></p>

Put that into an HTML page and it generates the following box: (Try it, it actually works!)

Seed:

Finished model 2013-II

While I arrange modelling competitions, I don’t compete, mainly because I’m just not good enough, but when we were at Model Expo in Helsinki last year, one of the IPMS Finland guys pressed a Frog Fokker D21 in my hand as a parting gift. I could but take it as a challenge.

I presumed the idea was that I would build a Finnish Fokker (as FR-92 was one of the decal options), but that seemed too easy, and instead I decided I would make a Danish Fokker, inspired by the picture in [Munson 1969]: J-50 of 2. Eskadrille of Hærens Flyvertropper, based at Værløse. A historical note is that while the Fokker D.XXIs in both Dutch and Finnish service acquitted themselves well in the beginning of WWII, the Danish ones were never used in combat, for reasons that are fully covered in [Ancker 1997, 2001a].

The Frog model, while older than I, is not completely horrible. The shape is OK and it has separated control surfaces, which, when offset, would make for a nice effect, as I decided to build it in flying configuration (which otherwise would not affect the exterior, considering the fixed landing gear). But there are deficiencies: The cockpit is completely bare, there are no wing guns (not relevant for the Danish version, but definitely for the Finnish), the engine is such a pathetic effort that all around the building table burst out laughing when I showed it, and the rather prominent exhaust pipe is completely missing. All of this is of course amenable to scratch building, which I did (I didn’t bother with the engine, though) and in addition I made elevator actuators and the large landing light present on the Danish aircraft. The rather shapeless original pilot figure was replaced by a Matchbox pilot, sculpted and painted to look as much as possible as flying suits I found in [Ancker 1997] (photographs of Danish pilots in 1940 are really rare, not to say nonexistent, on the web). A length of thick soldering wire turned out to be perfect for making the exhaust. The hemispherical landing light lens was created by heat-smashing a bit of transparent sheet. (Or rather, heat-smashing several sheets until I got a decent shape.)

By this time it was just a week left before the competition was on (as getting my Tunnan done had had priority up to that point) and I had to start the painting process. Since I persist in using Humbrol colours, which take considerable time to dry, I set up a schedule where I would paint a layer in the evening, get up before dawn to paint the next layer, go to work, come home, paint another layer, sleep a few hours, etc. In the middle of it all I ran out of adhesive tack for masking, so had to run out and buy some, but my favourite Sense 60 g tack just didn’t exist anymore, all shops suddenly carrying Pritt Multi Tac instead. I had to buy this instead. To my horror I found the next morning it would actually lift the underlying paint. I’d never seen Humbrol do that, but apparently I was cutting it a bit too fine with the drying times. In all, the paint job is pretty horrid, you can even see a couple of obvious fingerprints in the photo below. I added the decals the same morning as we were leaving, using some leftover Danish national insignia, unfortunately somewhat undersize.

For the camouflage I went with [Eberspacher 1994] and its suggested colour scheme of Olivengrøn/Brun/Skyblå, which is not inconsistent with the high-contrast camouflage apparent in contemporary photographs, using Humbrol 131 Satin Green, 9 Gloss Tan, and H.G.3 Hellgrau 76 as matches. Acquaintances frowned at this and wondered if I’d purposely chosen the most garish combination.

So, it’s not a great model by any means and will never win anything, but I did get it done in time for the competition.

Literature

De danske militære flyverstyrkers udvikling 1910–1940, Bind I, Paul E. Ancker, 1997, Odense Universitetsforlag.
De danske militære flyverstyrkers udvikling 1940–1945, Bind II, Første halvbind, Paul E. Ancker, 2001, Odense Universitetsforlag.
“A Design of the Times—The Fokker D.XXI in Development and Service”, Srecko Bradic, in Military Aircraft Monthly International 9(7), July 2010, pp 32–41.
Fokker D.XXI—Dutch & Danish Service, Vol. 1, Warren Eberspacher, 1994, Phalanx Publishing.
Fokker D.XXI, Suomen Ilmavoimien Historia 3, 2. uusittu painos, Kalevi Keskinen, Kari Stenman & Klaus Niska, 1977, Tietoteos.
Fighters 1939–45—Attack and Training Aircraft, Kenneth Munson, 1969, Blandford Press.
Fokker D.21, Seria „Pod Lupą” 10, Przemyslaw Skulski, 1999, Ace Publication.