New Kent ep

Just got hold of the new ep from Kent, "The hjärta and smärta ep". Beautiful (and self bibliographical it seems) as always, especially the track Vi mot världen (We against the world). The lyrics go "Mina tankar är så klara nu, ni kan släppa den där bomben nu" which roughly means "My thoughts are so clear now, you can drop that bomb now.", sounds promising. It's a shame I don't have time to really listen to it until late tonight.

An adventure blog

My colleague Tommy at iDTV Lab is off to New Zealand for a month next Saturday. He and his team mates blog about their adventure here. Be sure to enjoy your stay down there!

First snow has arrived!

I had earmarked Sunday - today that is - for sitting by the computer. I planned on finally paying this blog some attention, and play Sims 2 and WoW. I still have some wild boars to take care of before my mission is done. But I woke up this morning by an sms chanting "Oh look it's snowing, oh look it's snowing". Indeed it is and that's great! This, and the fact that the temperature is -0.2 degrees celsius, means that I'll replace the blogging and game playing with changing the tyres of the car to winter ones and getting my car ready for winter.

Susanno?

In many of the Swedish blogs I read, one theme of discussion lately has been blind men and the always attentive women. The question why men don’t see that the trash needs to be taken out, or that the laundry needs to be done while the female part of the household drudges on as a martyr without any help has been pondered.

I’m not sure whether I should be affended, as the above description of the Man suits me perfectly. I rarely see and thus attend to the layers of dust on the shelves; neither do I realize that the flowers need watering until all that’s left in the pot are beige straws (happened last night to my pot of chives… I’ll try some first aid after writing this.). To prevent this, I figured I’d have my pda calendar notify me for instance every Sunday night that the green lives in our household could do with some attention. I wonder if that would help.

The answer of one female blogger to why men don’t see things as well as women do, is that way back, men hunted and women nested. Our ways of thinking are fundamentally different, strictly biologically. This is pretty much saying that I, since I’m obviously blind when it comes to householding matters, am not a woman but rather a femalish man. That does not match my own view.

I guess these bloggers write in a provocative or light, entertaining manner, and the only thing proven here is that I absolutely lack a sense of humor. But still, wondering why men as a group don’t see things that need to be done in a household (and thereby why women as a group do see them) is a bit single-tracked.

Research results on iTV

The press conference we had yesterday regarding our 77-pages long report on the first digital interactive tv-format in Finland, Enigma, caught gladly enough attention. Our results are cited in many papers and radio news broadcasts. I hope to get the time to translate the summary into English some time soon, as I believe the results could interest many. I noticed there's an ongoing discussion about the future of mobile iTV on the aoir-mailing list. I'll definitely write an article about the study of iTV and the results I got to the EuroITV conference in Athens next spring.

News

We were in the news last night, regarding the drama series NDA that was shot here in our tv-studio at MediaCity. The first episode aired last night on YLE, the public service broadcaster in Finland. The news clip is found here (in Finnish only). As a note, I'll mention that YLE is not airing any radio or tv-shows between 2 pm and midnight today. The staff is protesting against the plans on dismissing about 200 workers.

While I'm at it, I'll point you to a blog by the company DirectNIC. The blog's become known as "The survival of New Orleans blog", according to the author Michael Barnett, writing from New Orleans.

Nokia report on mobile tv released today

The results from the mobile TV pilots conducted in Helsinki this spring is out today. There's a press release at Nokia's website here.

Pilates and science

I just had a few delicious bruchetta sandwiches and mozzarella salad. Exercising really gets you hungry. A new class for the season started at my gym today, fitness pilates. Starting us off, the instructor gave us a word of warning: "This may come as a surpise, but the less you've exercised fitness pilates, the easier will it be." Thus, the more you work out, the harder will it be, which is not the case with regular work out. I think I can handle it though, as so is science. The less you know, the easier everything seems. The more you know, the more complicated the world and the structures in it seem and the questions you ask are more complex.

Reiki

I'm off to a Reiki session now. A colleague at work convinced me to join him and try out this controversal method of gaining energy. I must admit, I'm pretty curious to see how it will affect me, beyond the placebo effect...

Up date: When heading home after the session, I saw a woman, walking in the sidewalk, whose posture suggested fatigue and dejection. You could tell that she wasn't about to rank this one as one of her best days ever. Up til that moment, I had had a hard time defining my state, labelling what I had experienced, as I felt almost nothing during the Reiki. But then I realised that "light" was the best word to describe the condition. I felt light. Not healed, not cured, not energetic, not decompressed, just "light". I didn't feel spirited either, al though I had high spirits. That was probably a herd of endorfins dancing around in my cells and molecules due to the skin contact and the resting.

But what about the Reiki session itself? my colleagues ask. The word that comes to mind is the musical term "largo", which means that you play in a very slow tempo. Too slow for me.

3D tv that tickles your senses

Japan plans to take tv viewing to a whole new level.

7.2 earthquake struck Japan

An earthquake shook northeastern Japan earlier today, causing massive damage in the areas around Sendai city. A tidal wave warning has been given in Miyagi. The Blog From Another Dimension blogs about the quake.

Kvarken Archipelago stands a good chance of becoming a world natural heritage site

This weekend was the best one so far this summer. I spent the most of it at our cabine out in the archipelago and the weather was beautiful, even at night. We went chanterelle hunting (we found quite a lot actually, thanks to all the rain we've had recently.) and fishing and while sitting in the small boat, I realized that the archipelago and nature here truly is outstanding. As it's around me every day, I keep forgetting that. For instance, have a look at the rocks in the picture. They are very unique, but that's not something I think of a lot. And if I dedicate them thoughts, it's mostly concerning me not hitting them with my boat as they're quite numerous below water surface as well.

That's why I'm truly delighted to read in Vasabladet (article in Swedish here) that Kvarken stands a good chance of becoming a world natural heritage site. This past week, a Canadian expert by the name Jim Thorsell has been inspecting and reviewing the surroundings and his views are of great importance when it is decided if Kvarken will become a world heritage site or not. According to the article in Vasabladet, he was impressed by the new land emerging (the islands and parts of the Finnish coast are rising out of the sea at the rate of approximately eight millimetres per year), the clean air and water and the rich fauna. It sounds promising as I really hope Kvarken could be Finland's first world natural heritage site.

we're getting warmer

Finally, the sun is out, after days of pouring rain. According to a WWF analysis of the climate in Europe, the cities are getting warmer due to increased use of energy and climate changes. As an example, the average temperature in Europe rose by 0.95 celcius during the last century. Specifically for Helsinki, the mean daily summer temperature in 1970-1974 was 15.2 degrees celcius. In the years 2000-2004, it rose to 16.0 degrees.

If this worries you, I suggest you check this out.

Political blogs appeal to Americans

Interesting survey on what interests American blog readers. According to comScore, 43 % visit blogs about politics and news. Life style-blogs and tech blogs were also popular.
[via digi.today]

wiki on the visual aspects of social life

A wiki on visual sociology is born.

Metaphores

If there's something I loathe, it's vague wordings and great numbers. If I come across the like, I usually pose embarrassing questions like "But what does that mean?" or "What concrete consequences does it impose on my life?". If possible, I want it explained visually or as metaphores as I seem to think in an image mode. Some get uncomfortable when being asked to translate the abstract into the concrete, but I think it's essential.

Therefore, I absolutely love to read "A short history of nearly everything" by Bill Bryson as he exemplifies like there's no tomorrow. (I doubt he acually did all the calculations himself, but rather is he citing someone who's done it before him. But still). In the part where he discusses the vast universe, he states that astronoms today believe that there may be up til 140 billions of galaxies in the visible universe. It is pretty hard to imagine that figure. Therefore, Bryson illustrates it to the reader. If galaxies were deep frozen peas, there would be enough to fill a music hall, such as Royal Albert Hall in London. Spot on!

Bryson also illustrates the Avogrado's number that is 6,0221367 times 1023 (23 raised). This is also a figure, rather hard to fully grasp. Thus, Bryson lets us know that it equals the amount of soda cans it takes to cover the entire globe, the layer being 320 kilometers thick (i.e. hight). And it equals the amount of unpopped popcorn it takes to cover the US with a 15 kilometer thick layer.

See? It's much easier to grasp the width of the figures now!

Berners-Lee on blogs and the web

Here's an excerpt from the interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, aired last night on BBC 2 (Newsnight). Berners-Lee ponders what the web will be like when it turns 30 and he says that he hopes it will be "more stable, something that people don't talk about." I've noticed that it's starting to be that al ready. Many around me say "I read it in Aftonbladet" for instance, and very few mean that they actually read the paper version of the evening paper. Everyone means the net version and it's understood that this is the case. Berners-Lee continues: "My goal for the web in 30 years is to be the platform which has led to the building of something very new and special, which we can't imagine now."

Also worth mentioning here, Berners-Lee feels that blogging is close to his original idea of a read/write web and he states that "When you write a blog, you don't write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I'm very, very happy to see that now it's gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative medium.".

Thanks Masse for the link!

Vacation of music

What a great way to start off my first ever vacation with full salary: Iron Maiden's gig in Helsinki last Thursday, and finishing off with a 3 day rock festival in Åbo. About 22 000 people came to see Rammstein play last Friday, and it was well worth while, although their show was almost exactly the same as their concert in Helsinki last October. At the Maiden gig, Bruce Dickinson dedicated one song for the victims of the London bombing earlier that day and swaying lights where everywhere in the crowd.

Now back out in the heat (it's 27 degrees) and off to the concert, Hanoi Rocks, the Hives and Within Temptation are yet to come!

Ruisrock festival blog

Hufvudstadsbladet, which has the widest circulation of the newspapers in Swedish in Finland, has just launched what seems to be their first blog (though the blog lacks certain features like comments and the like but the author calls it a blog) and it's theme is... Ruisrock, a great rock festival in Åbo where I used to live. Super! I just got tickets to it and I'm counting the days to go there. I'll definitely keep up with this blog.

The Finnish dream

I must be getting old. Never before have I even considered listening to a radio talk show where two people sit and dissect the world for half an hour. Now, I’ve even looked it up, twice, at the internet (radio on demand).

I’ve been playing around with ideas about creativity and creative economy lately so I decided to browse around for interesting references. One of the radio talk shows I found starred Pekka Himanen (who obtained his PhD in Philosophy at the age of 20 from the University of Helsinki) who has been giving much appreciated speeches about the creative capital at conferences around the world lately (the radio interview in Finnish here).

Over lunch with the reporter, Himanen explained his theory on how Finland will keep up with the rest of the world. He said that just as the Americans have their own dream (the American dream which is about personal success, according to PH), the Finns should have their dream, i.e. the Finnish dream. This implies a society that is creative but caring. Like a creative welfare state in the midst of the information age. If a creative and caring society is what bodes for a boosting economy then Finland has every reason to smile. Welfare and caring is our middle name and industries like culture and information technology are strong here.

After a bit of googling, I found this account (in Finnish only) of the challenges of the information society that Himanen wrote for the future committee of the Finnish Parliament. I’ll read it as soon as possible, seems interesting.