Moveable Paper
I've always loved paper crafts, like making the Dot-bomb icosahedron and such, as well as pop-up cards and books. I somehow ran across The Flying Pig this week which has some really cool kits for animated paper projects and pop-up critters you can put into cards and letters to surprise someone. This art is known as kirigami and there is a good book on the subject titled, Kirigami: The Art of 3-dimensional Paper Cutting. Another book has a more practical approach for engineers who want to understand how pop-ups work, Elements Of Pop Up : A Pop Up Book For Aspiring Paper Engineers. However, some pop-ups take more than simple paper engineering to create :)
I wish people would send more cards instead of email for the holidays and maybe even ones of their own design. For some reason, I suspect that people think that making cards is for kids and not adults because adults are supposedly never in possession of enough free-time to do anything that might make them look like they have any free-time.
23 Oct 2003 at 12:54, Helsinki
The Fool's Errand Returns!
A couple of years ago I got all sentimental about Clarus the Dogcow when I finally started switching over to OS X which made me think of 2 games of mine I adored way back in '87. I was really excited to find Dark Castle but heartbroken to not find anything at all about The Fool's Errand. Tonight, Pudge mentioned that not only is the original Fool's Errand available for free and will run on OS X in classic mode, but Cliff Johnson himself is writing a sequel, The Fool and His Money. I don't think many websites have ever gotten my money on a pre-order so quickly. The release date, sadly, appears to have been postponed until April Fool's Day, but I can spend the Winter playing the old puzzles a few times over for fun. They don't seem to make such fun, smart and clever games anymore so I'm really excited to see TFE back in action.
For nostalgia's sake, there are pictures of the original packaging, a hint book and solutions. There is also the original instruction manual [pdf]. Whee! :)
Context isn't the problem with spam
Lately I've noticed a sharp increase of googleads on more and more personal web pages and blogs. I find this to be an insanely tacky way to make pocket change, not to mention it's just another form of spam. I suppose that the irony in this is lost on those who cry foul on email offering penis enlargement in their inbox but feel no guilt from putting 'contextual advertising' on their blogs and homepages to make money for themselves.
How does calling it 'contextual advertising' make it not spam? Granted, I've yet to see a googlead offer me Viagra or ask about my erectile dysfunction, but they often don't seem well targeted and the sole purpose of their being there is for them to make money from me/you. I don't begrudge people that, but maybe I expect a lot less shameless greed on personal web pages.
I doubt many personal blogs make that much cash in exchange for the ugly blot of commercial text. Yes, I could just install a filter to remove the ads, just as I filter my email, but there's the rub and the connection since the problem then becomes mine if I don't want to be constantly barraged everywhere I go on the net by marketing ploys. I really don't surf much anymore, I surf less as time goes on and I wonder if my getting tired of the internet being turned into one giant marketing circle jerk isn't largely responsible. Spam is spam whether it's in my inbox or on some personal web page of someone who writes a lot of rhetoric about how horrible spam is with a googlead commercial break sandwiched between the text.
Now many of these people running ads on their blogs are getting comment spam and still they don't see how comment spam is really no different from googlead spam except that the comment spammers aren't making them any money. "Oh, but it's not 'contextual'" they'll say, but that's a red herring. Spam is spam, whether it's 'contextual' or not.
There are a lot of people who write to us at CPAN and ask if we'd advertise their products or exchange links and the answer will always be no. Sure, we could put googleads and amazon associate links on CPAN, search.cpan and across 200+ mirrors, and we'd likely make a tidy sum of cash. Certainly a lot more than Jarkko's ORA book royalties which are enough to buy a fine meal at McD's twice a year, but why would we as we've held out as one of the last sites from the more academic days of the internet to resist filling the site with advertising. Can you imagine using search.cpan and getting googleads with your search results as well as the "Users who liked DBI also enjoyed clean underwear" on module pages? How would that not be spam? How would that not be usurious? Perhaps we should reconsider, hire a big managed box somewhere, and move back to St. Croix on the proceeds.
How are googleads not spam? If you need money that badly for your website either get a paypal account for donations or get a bloody job and lose the adverts. I realise that sometime soon they'll find a way to market to us in our sleep, but that doesn't mean we all have to welcome its every step forward.
Pikku Gay
A photocopy I found in the street last night while walking HB. The kids must have been putting them under car wipers which people cast onto the sidewalk before driving away. I laughed just as I laugh at Eminem. I wondered what the DDN meant as well as why were they papering the parked cars with these silly photos of themselves trying to look like tough gangsta rappahs but only succeeding in looking like a Nike ad gone wrong. Perhaps it's a new form of 'tagging' or a message like "We gonna get you, suckah!". The Pikku-G wannabe gang who are just introducing themselves before they steal your car or something. They lack all the gold chains and gold capped teeth, but I guess you gotta start somewhere.
Perhaps they are making fun of the Finnish version of Eminem, Pikku-G [ pronounced PEEK-koo GAY which is hilarious in itself ], who seems to have quite the teenage girl fan base. Can you imagine Finnish homies going around saying, "Hey, Gay, whaddup?!" No, I can't really either as the moment they landed in the US and tried that they'd get their ass kicked by some white boy rapper skinhead. :) I keep hoping that all of the break dancing, skateboarding, and gangsta cool is just some parody of bad American pop culture. Somehow, though, I have a sneaking suspicion that these teenage boys aren't joking. If, by some chance, DDN is reading this they should know that white boy rap is something we make fun of in the US. I apologise on behalf of the planet that Eminem gave you a different impression. Also, break dancing was dead when I was in university a long time ago and it deserved to die. :) Try something original, boys.
See 'n Scratch
The pumpkin says, "Pöö! Treat or Trick!"
Remember the old See 'n Say? Sounds that animals make really aren't on the usual vocabulary lists when learning a language. You figure out somehow that, in Finland, the dog says "Hau Hau" and the cat says "Mau Mau". Karkki Pussi, one of those tragically named businesses which means 'candy bag', has introduced me to the sounds things make at Halloween. Finland doesn't really celebrate Halloween but what candy store is going to pass up an opportunity to sell more candy? :)
What I don't quite understand is that if the banners and candy are printed with "Happy Halloween", then why are the ghosts and goblins and pumpkins speaking in Finnish? And why does the Finnish ghost say "Boo!" differently than the pumpkin? Is one of them from Savo?
The ghost says,"Huuuu! Wild Halloween[ie]!"
Not just fun, it's Funtastic!
Paul Mison showed me this picture he took somewhere on the London Underground which makes me wish that I, too, could visit Funtastic Finland....:)
I'm easily amused
Getting a company name right for use in an international setting is pretty challenging when you think about all the possible combinations of words that have unintended meanings in varioius cultures. In Helsinki, there are a number of company names that either sound funny [ scoopy-doo ] or are just tragically amusing, but Fuktor never fails to make me smile. It's a company whose expertise is water removal after a mishap with pipes, etc. Since "F" is not a letter native to Finnish, I figured it must be a Swedish name but, if google is right, it's a name of Scottish origin. Fuk = fuck and Tor = rocky crag or hill...Fuck hill in Scots? :) I wonder if they're related to the awfully tired FCUK people who think it a terribly clever joke because you are embarrassed to admit that whenever you see that word you always see fuck first before fcuk.
Fuktor can, apparently, also be a first name. Can you imagine the cruelty of having to answer to your mother yelling, "FUKTOR!", or having a nickname of "Fuk!" or kids calling you the "Fukinator" or "Fukface"? I've never met a Fuktor so likely they have all changed their legal names as soon as they possibly could. It's a terrific sounding word though and would make an excellent swearing word..."Oh, FUKTOR! I lost my wallet!" :)
No escaping from ourselves
It came as a shock to read Salon's article on Neil Postman and realise that he had died last Sunday. The NYT Obit was short, but not quite adequate in my opinion for a man whom history should remember fondly as one of those people whose voice should have been listened to rather than merely heard by those intoxicated by the techno kool-aid. I will miss Neil Postman as the voice begging the questions "Why?" and "What consequence?" in a world rushing forward lusting for the promise of IT much like Ponce de León seduced by the legendary fountain of youth. Postman wasn't a luddite, rather someone who thought a lot about what new problems would arise from IT.
The computer has excelled at one thing very well and that is being a terrific time sink. I remember a time when I had to find things to entertain myself with before having a computer always near and it makes me wonder how many more books I might have read, movies I might have seen, people I might have rang up and gone out with, walks I might have taken with HB or stuff I might have done in the world that doesn't disappear when the power grid goes down. Reading Informing Ourselves to Death, a speech Postman delivered in 1990, seems timeless in its prescience.
I believe you will have to concede that what ails us, what causes us the most misery and pain -- at both cultural and personal levels -- has nothing to do with the sort of information made accessible by computers. The computer and its information cannot answer any of the fundamental questions we need to address to make our lives more meaningful and humane. The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking. It cannot provide a means of understanding why we are here or why we fight each other or why decency eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most. The computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most needed to confront -- spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past and future. Does one blame the computer for this? Of course not. It is, after all, only a machine. But it is presented to us, with trumpets blaring, as at this conference, as a technological messiah.
Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better -- best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it. I said a moment ago that computers are not to blame for this. And that is true, at least in the sense that we do not blame an elephant for its huge appetite or a stone for being hard or a cloud for hiding the sun. That is their nature, and we expect nothing different from them. But the computer has a nature, as well. True, it is only a machine but a machine designed to manipulate and generate information. That is what computers do, and therefore they have an agenda and an unmistakable message.
The message is that through more and more information, more conveniently packaged, more swiftly delivered, we will find solutions to our problems. And so all the brilliant young men and women, believing this, create ingenious things for the computer to do, hoping that in this way, we will become wiser and more decent and more noble. And who can blame them? By becoming masters of this wondrous technology, they will acquire prestige and power and some will even become famous. In a world populated by people who believe that through more and more information, paradise is attainable, the computer scientist is king. But I maintain that all of this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent and energy. Imagine what might be accomplished if this talent and energy were turned to philosophy, to theology, to the arts, to imaginative literature or to education? Who knows what we could learn from such people -- perhaps why there are wars, and hunger, and homelessness and mental illness and anger.
As things stand now, the geniuses of computer technology will give us Star Wars, and tell us that is the answer to nuclear war. They will give us artificial intelligence, and tell us that this is the way to self-knowledge. They will give us instantaneous global communication, and tell us this is the way to mutual understanding. They will give us Virtual Reality and tell us this is the answer to spiritual poverty. But that is only the way of the technician, the fact-mongerer, the information junkie, and the technological idiot.
Here is what Henry David Thoreau told us: "All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end." Here is what Goethe told us: "One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it is possible, speak a few reasonable words." And here is what Socrates told us: "The unexamined life is not worth living." And here is what the prophet Micah told us: "What does the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?" And I can tell you -- if I had the time (although you all know it well enough) -- what Confucius, Isaiah, Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, Spinoza and Shakespeare told us. It is all the same: There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.
What part of "Baroque" didn't you understand?
I got a copy of Quicksilver while we were in London. I had to snag it off the stocking cart in Borders since Foyle's didn't seem to have any copies forthcoming anytime soon. It's big, so big in fact that I bought the paperback traveller copy that they often have in airports and, surprisingly, quite often in Akateeminen. I read the New York Times review, the Salon review and the review in Time Out London by a reviewer who seemed to have a clue about what the word Baroque means. There is also an online Quicksilver Wiki which Stephenson himself set-up if I understand correctly. I've started reading it and it's everything I expected it to be; a wandering adventure through the Baroque age with the ancestors of the Cryptonomicon's main characters. It is more stylised to the period and less Pynchonesque than Cryptonomicon.
So, the question is, why are so many geeks who have bought this book in the wake of the popularity of the Cryptonomicon griping about it's length, its complexity, its supposed lack of plot and obtuseness? Who ever said a story had to have a single well defined plot? Quicksilver reminds me a bit of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel in its style. It's fun trying to see just how many famous figures in our past he can cram into an entertaining history lesson cum novel. To be sure, this book isn't for everyone but it's refreshing to read something so retro and so different with a challenging vocabulary instead of the usual 8th grade selection of tired words. It's BAROQUE, GET IT?! :) Expect more of the same from the next two books in the trilogy, The Confusion [1 April 2004] and System of the World [1 September 2004]. I might balk at reading his books if he moves into the Rococo Cycle after this though. :)
Happy Seagulls
Finnish food is mostly to my liking since it's much like German food with more dairy, lots of fresh berries, rye bread and rudolph thrown in for cultural variety. However, the chopped egg or roe mixed with butter still make my lips curl when I watch people slather it onto stuff and eat it. I make an effort to try everything at least once but fish roe will never be on my shopping list. One thing very close to the Finnish palate is herring. I must admit that I wasn't very keen on the idea of trying this particular national dish but Jarkko got so excited at the Herring Festival being in town that I figured I'd go along. It has quite a long history [pdf] and is in its 261st year of offering herring to the locals. The herring is actually quite good once you stop thinking about it being herring although the texture takes a little getting used to. The mustard and the dill varieties are particularly good. There is also blood bread and lots of products containing tyrni, the Finnish buckthorn berry.
So the herring and I will have to take our relationship slowly and, perhaps, in a few years we'll be good friends. Until then, the seagulls sure are happy about the herring market :) Well, and Jarkko with a glimmer in his eye and a smile on his face as he considers making one more trip to the harbour for more herring before the festival is over.
LotR Costume Exhibit
When we were in London late last week and over the weekend for the CPAN meeting we had a chance to go see the LotR Costume Exhibit at the Science Museum which is rather amazing. Arwen's and Galadriel's gowns were simply beautiful as were the Nazgul crowns and the giant Sauron. The attention to detail is stunning since it is just impossible to see it in the movie even with some of the close shots. They wouldn't allow cameras inside the exhibit but they do have a few photos online which show only a very tiny portion of what is on display. The gift shop is really underwhelming complete with life-sized cardboard cut-outs of Legolas and Aragorn. However, the bookshop had a few nice titles including The Tolkien Quiz Book. If you are a Tolkien or costume geek then get to this exhibit before it leaves.
After we left the exhibit we went over to Harrod's food court where the first EU Krispy Kreme Doughnut shop was having it's grand opening. I don't even like doughnuts and I love KK's. I watched Joe Johnston eat one of them in St. Louis in such ecstatic pleasure I had to look away to give him and his doughnut some privacy. After that I vowed to try one sometime in a less public place :) There wasn't much of a line in Harrod's but they had fresh, hot, glazed doughnuts for us while we were waiting. I bought a dozen and some drinks for all of us and we walked over to Hyde Park to consume our crack laden confections al fresco. I hope they plan to bring them to Helsinki sometime as I think the cake doughnuts would be much loved even if the glazed would, judging by the kinds of bakery items Finns like, not be as popular.
Meat. Bread. Dog.
There comes a point in every person's study of a particular language where you know just enough to be dangerous and I think I have reached that point recently. Learning languages as an adult is a grueling adventure both in humiliation and almost juvenile glee when you manage to say something correctly or post a letter without a quizzical look from the postal clerk behind the desk. We pack into two years what children take 10 years to learn with a far more supple and receptive brain than our older, abused and jaded ones.
I used to think that I was reasonably good at languages having learned English and German at a young age, taken 8 years of Latin in all those joyless years of Catholic schooling and had an adult reading and writing level by the time I was in first grade. I managed to squeeze in 2 years of Russian in University since the masters program I was aiming for required 2 modern languages with a scientific emphasis, but I've forgotten much of that since then. Finnish, I thought, wouldn't be terribly difficult to learn since it would be so utterly foreign and new that I wouldn't mix it up with German as I have with other languages in the past. Wrong-o pal, this language is off the scale in terms of disappearing and reappearing letters and words as wide as this page with more vowels than consonants. You want comedy, just try looking up a word in the dictionary! Hours of laughs there, yessiree. [ I can hear the Finns snickering already :) ] The spoken and the written language are very different, but even read from a page, my eyes glaze over as I listen to the teacher read from our book while trying to grasp for any word or sound that is familiar and word-like. I can read the text but...what in the hell is she saying? Right. The Ents were a flight of wishful fantasy after Tolkien visited Finland.
This is not to say that I don't understand that English is a pain in the ass to learn after a certain age since the entire language is just a pastiche of idioms with few rules to comfort those poor sods who have to learn it the hard way, but 2,000 different forms for a verb? Even English is not so cruel. :) Not to mention, in the US, the import of Finnish films, books, TV programmes, etc. are vastly disproportionate to those of English. Hell, most Yankees don't even know where Finland is much less what currency or language they speak. So, instead of getting to watch all the movies and such to soak up the language at an early age like the Finns do, we aliens are left to learn Finnish with adult expectations but with corny kiddie dialogues in textbooks and videos.
I'm sure the Finnish for Foreigners teachers have a koffee klatsch every week where they swap amusing stories about their student's futile endeavours to crack the code and tormented self-immolation. Finnish is like a cipher with a one-time pad since no key ever works twice. You only thought that was accusative but it's really genitive! Or, well, we change all the letters around, remove a few, add some endings then only speak the first 2 syllables since surely the first few letters should be enough! :) Welcome to the cryptogram. However, this is where the Komedy comes in as you learn just enough to think you have a handle on things only to be reminded that you are still a stupid outlander, please come back in 20 years when you know a thing or two. Two situations when I was out walking HB recently did just that.
HB looks a bit like a dogcow, an urban bovine, so I've heard the jokes before from people saying, "MOO", etc. The other morning I was walking HB to the park and a little boy tagging rather hyperactively alongside his mother with a pram exclaimed, "LIHAVA!", and pointed to HB. In my pre-caffeineated daze I smiled and nodded. When I got around the corner I thought, hey, that jumped-up little kid just called my dog MEAT! I thought it strange since, as far as I knew, Finland doesn't have dogs on the menu and that kid looked pretty well fed to me. Then again, the family didn't have a dog with them so maybe they ate it for dinner the night before. When I got back home I mentioned to Jarkko that some cheeky little fat kid called HB meat, lihava. Jarkko proceeded to explain that while liha=meat, lihava=fat or meaty. Still, what was that kid on about calling my dog fat or meaty. I should think up something to say to him the next time I see him such as, "Hey!, He is awfully meaty isn't he? We're planning to have him for dinner next week!".
HB is old and he has embraced the role of grumpy old fart rather enthusiastically. Often he will decide that he has had quite enough walk and flop down on the sidewalk with a glare in my direction. We usually have a brief stand-off where I stand and glare back at him but, he weighs more than me and he usually wins. This also invites people to look in our direction and squint at me like some ASPCA fugitive on the lam. Two girls walked by during just such a meeting of the wills the other day and one said, "Onko se leipää?". I just smiled and nodded and thought to myself . o 0 { why did she just ask me if he was bread? }. I figured, considering the meat incident, that I would ask Jarkko what the deal with the bread was about. Well, we went through the usual verbal charade where I try to mimic what I hear along with some context and Jarkko tries to figure out what people have said and he came up with "lepää", an unfamiliar form of a word which means "resting" from the root "levätä". The difference to the untrained ear on the street in traffic is so small as to be insignificant. Komedy!
So, tomorrow we're off to English speaking space where I hope I don't explode with conversation after spending most of my time at home trying to avoid the eye-rolling, etc. at the hands of those who find foreigners who don't speak Finnish rather tedious and only venture out to get my humiliation in Finnish class. I'll be like a puppy set free in the park around other puppies. I also need to stop spelling words with 'k' instead of 'c' except for Amerikka which I consider to be an improvement upon the English spelling. :)
