2002-10-11 14:33 (UTC+1)

Funferal: Things we talk about in Swedish classes

Perhaps you've never wondered about the details of the preservation of Lenin's body in a mausoleum in Red Square. Even if you have, though, Lenin's Embalmers will probably tell you more than you really needed to know.

As you'd imagine, there's a lot of deeply unpleasant political context to consider, as well as deeply unpleasant biological details. The author is the son of the original embalmer, and has continued the family business, so there's more than I wanted of a personal memoir of Soviet Russian family life as well.

But I've read it (courtesy of my sister now in Moskvagrad) so I don't see why you shouldn't have to.

2002-10-11 11:19 (UTC+1)

Grovin'

I dag �r jag mostly grovin' to the smoooooth and mellow stylings of Bo Kaspers Orkester, courtesy of Desbladet's Russian Scottish Bath correspondent. This is all the more welcome, since P3 Star was doing my fricking head in, to be honest. The number of times a day I need to hear Eminem's latest effort turns out to be zero, exhaustive scientific tests have established.

Ooh! This one's a Bossa Nova number. In Swedish. Excuse me a minute, got some urgent chillin' att g�ra.

2002-10-11 10:26

Mbork mbork mbork

Some aspects of pitch accent in Bantu languages, including a comparison with diverse flavours of Scandiwegian.

Children under 7 and Crown Princesses free!

Do you think they'd go for it?

2002-10-10 16:16 (UTC+1)

Out-of-whack Almanack

Like an overclocked CPU with a dodgy heat sink, I had a hard time in the summer. The autumnal crispness in the air now makes my brain work better, although even now this sun-trap of an office can be uncomfortable in the afternoons. I like this weather, I like its gentle insistence not to dawdle, to keep busy. I like the gradualness of the shortening of the days, the extended opportunity to change gear for winter.

Yesterday evening, not quite shivering in my unheated flat (I have heating, I just don't like to use it) I read some of Chomsky57, some logic, some Swedish, and still my head didn't explode. This morning, code kept exploding, but I was able to keep my cool long enough to fix it.

The academic year is my year - how could it be otherwise, after all this time? - and I find myself thinking of new beginnings, new opportunities, fresh starts on projects old and new.

Even Desbladet soi-m�me may be affected: although I'm not planning to stop, move, or (horrors!) redesign, I do want to shift over to Unicode so that I can use Japanese, Russian, Arabic or (especially) phonetic characters as the mood takes me, which in practice means writing transliterators. (Roman->Cyrillic is done, together with an elegant framework for implementing the rest of it, because I am nothing if not a geek.)

2002-10-10 09:36

Latin Logic

I was reading all about logic last night. I've revised my opinion a little: it's nice to see a treatment of the subject by people who actually like it. (After boot-camp, formal logic is normally used as a threat to make budding mathematicians eat up all their lemmas.)

It's full of misprints, though, not the least of which is in the table of contents which promises "Lambada Abstraction". Misleadingly, I was heart-broken to discover. As a person of the male persuasion (rhythmically disfunctional scruffy geek subclass) I know little of your Earth sequins, but I find this intriguing nonetheless: ballroom dancing and mathematical logic are both grotesquely over-formalised versions of initially reasonable activities, after all.

Perhaps somebody should seize the opportunity to figure out a routine, and produce one of those old-fashioned diagrams of where to place your (at most denumerable set of) feet.

Or perhaps not.

2002-10-09 13:10 (UTC+1)

Lyrical flow restriction.

Not only have I had code on my mind to an unusual extent, I've got Radio P3 Star on my headphones, when bandwidth permits. They only appear to have a handful of records and I like very few of them, but every once in a while somebody starts wittering on in Swedish. (I can't handle the speechier channels - I don't have the spare Brain Cycles for it.)

Which reminds me: I have my Swedish homework to write up. (You can't see it because it isn't very good.)

So, while I'm preoccupied, here's an Expressen article on the fairly hostile reviews of prinsess M�rtha-Louise's ny bok. (It does actually sound pretty dreadful to be honest - a New Agey account of her pre-nuptual pilgrimage to Trondheim.)

2002-10-09 11:21 (UTC+1)

A little penguin, Sir or Madam?

It needn't be a little penguin. It can be the biggest penguin you've ever seen. An electric penguin, twenty feet high, with long green tentacles that sting people, and you can stab it in the wings and the blood can go psssssshhhh in slow motion.
Monty Python, Scott of the Sahara

The penguiny motherload. They rate (British) zoos on penguin facilities, and my hometown zoo (also theirs) gets top marks. The zoo advertises itself with large posters of penguins swimming, and they do look remarkably like Lovecraftian creatures from beyond the stars. I'm very glad I'm not a herring.

2002-10-09 10:27

Affine romance

Affine transformations, that's what we want. And we want them now!

Sorry.

2002-10-08 16:10 (UTC+1)

#!�$%�

And then my computer crashed. I hate that.

2002-10-08 13:25 (UTC+1)

Go Stick Your Head in a Pig!

... it is easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words... their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.
     -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, on the products of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

I just spent an hour and a half furiously hacking code. When it all worked, it suddenly became clear just how little I had accomplished.

It is not moments like these that I live for, you may be sure.

2002-10-08 13:03 (UTC+1)

Coding Theory

Writing GUI code is just incredibly tiresome, even with a nice language and a good toolkit. The bells-and-whistles 3D toolkit I normally use is so heavily pessimised for 2D that it's easier to write my own stuff for that, but "easier" and "pleasant" are not the same thing at all.

2002-10-08 11:43 (UTC+1)

Journalism

Physica D or J. Comp. Phys.?

J. Comp. Phys. or Physica D?

Despite heavy pressure, I am still completely unable to care.

2002-10-08 09:46

Sm�rg�spost

The wretched Mail on Sunday is the source for a sneering story about Mette-Marit's wild past. The Mail and Express are the newspaper form of concentrated, pure evil - shun them.

There's a new translation of Proust, although I haven't finished (i.e., started) the old one, yet.

And the EU really is going to expand. I haven't thought through the implications of this, but I'm all for it. When do we get to gang up and invade Norway, huh, when?

2002-10-07 14:41

Tonguage

Via Klipspringer comes this page of Swedish tongue-twisters. (They have other languages, too.)

While they have many variations on the sj�sjuk sj�man theme (the more the merrier, I say) I don't remember ever seeing Sex vaxade laxar i en vaxad laxask before. Fun!

2002-10-07 13:03

Finland, Finland, Finland.

You're so sadly neglected and often ignored,
A poor second to Belgium when going abroad.
[ Monty Python's Finland]

Not content with a take-over by stealth of Canada [via Diana], those pesky Finnish persons are forcing me to reconsider my position on their language.

It's the morphophonology, you see. Thanks to Kimmo Koskenniemi, Finnish has become the poster child of two-level phonology. Computational models of morphophonology are very dear to my heart - yes, I know, but they are - and Finnish does sound like an ideal test-bed for such models.

It's notoriously hard to learn for Indo-European speakers, though, and for better or worse (i.e., worse) the Big Book Freeze has left me with Whitney's (now deservedly obsolete) Teach Yourself Finnish as my only learning resource. This is a book that ranks with Glendening's Icelandic book in the language pedagogy Hall of Shame. It's really a motivation-free depth-first reference grammar of the language (Chapter 3 - The Partitive Case. Yum yum.) and if I really do pursue this ridiculous project you can reasonably expect me to moan bitterly about it on a regular basis.

Won't that be fun?

2002-10-07 10:06 (UTC+1)

Ignominious

We may have lost out with the Knudlet, but how about a campaign to persuade her Mariness to adopt a more Danish name, on the occasion of becoming a proper princess? Guaranteed to win over the most reluctant potential mother-in-law!

The campaign for Kronprinsess Knudella starts here!