A-Z Challenge 26: Zusammenfassung

It's the last day last day of the A-Z Challenge, and time for a summary. I thought I might do it in German. Zusammenfassung is German for summary. I learnt German (our 2nd foreign language) in school. When I was a student, and traveled around Europe every summer as a backpacker, I was a decent German speaker (but I never understood the Swiss). I haven't practiced German for many years, so I should probably stay with English (our 1st foreign language in school).

Slightly off the topic: Once upon a time, I spent 2 hours on the train between Mariazell and Sankt Pölten in Austria together with 3 Catholic nuns. We had an interesting discussion on various philosophical and theological questions, in German. My vocabulary was pretty good, but my grammar was somewhat shaky. I must admit that I found it slightly annoying when the nuns corrected my grammar all the time, repeating every sentence I said in correct and proper German. After all, I'm not the one to blame for the Tower of Babel. I should probably write a blogpost about my trip to Mariazell sometime.

Doing the A-Z challenge has been fun. I have written about topics that I wouldn't have done, if I wasn't forced to twist my brain to come up with an idea for every damn letter of the alphabet. Some posts were fairly good, some were bad, but now it's water under the bridge. Also, I have discovered new blogs, and read some cool posts written by other participants.

During the A-Z Challenge I've been posting a lot more (10 times more?) than I would normally do. Now I will probably take a blog-break for a couple of weeks, and then return to my natural frequency and my usual topics; life in Winterland, travel to various places, memories from the past, criticizing right-wing politics, and mocking the gods. My to-write list was only partly covered in the A-Z Challenge, and I will pick it up later.

Today is the last day of April. Tomorrow is the 1st of May, the International Workers Day, which is a national holiday (we live in a social democracy, which means we're half-communists. In the Soviet Union both 1st and 2nd of May were holidays). On Sunday at 4:30 PM the skiing resort is closing for the season. Tomorrow I'm off to the mountains together with the kids, for the last four days of skiing.

The last four days of zunny and zlushy zpring zkiing ... zzz  >:)

(I took the picture above a year ago, when I was watching the kids in the snow park at the 2013 ski season finale. We hope it will be as good this year.)

A-Z Challenge 25: YNWA

I have some Facebook friends who write weird status updates. Sometimes they write YNWA, and nothing more. I wondered for a while what does it mean? It seams like crazy to me to write YNWA, and nothing more, on a regular basis.

After a while it came to my mind that all these guys writing YNWA have one thing in common: They belong to the football (soccer) religion, and they worship the gods of Liverpool FC. YNWA simply means "You'll Never Walk Alone". This old song has been sung by the Liverpool FC supporters for more than 50 years, and have become like a hymn or anthem for the club. (Here is a YouTube video of the mixed choir of 45.000 voices on Anfield Road singing YNWA .)

This season Liverpool has been very good, and are currently lading the Premier League. Therefore, the Liverpool fans have written their cryptic praise quite often (but yesterday, when Liverpool lost 0-2 against Chealsea, their FB updates were more like WTF). Some of the hard-core Liverpool fans (including my brother) even tattoo YNWA or the club logo on their arms.

I don't have this religious relationship with football, and I'm not a Liverpool fan (I support Leeds United), so I don't write YNWA all over the place. But once, I went to Liverpool together with my brother to see a Premier League game, and I must admit it was a Hell of a lot of fun. I might even do it once again this fall.

(I took the picture above 3 years ago by the memorial of the Hillsborough disaster outside Anfield Road Stadium in Liverpool. In the FA Cup semifinal in 1989 at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, 96 Liverpool supporters were killed and more than 700 injured in a crush on the stand when  to many people were given entry.)

A-Z Challenge 24: Xenology (the Vatican way)

Religion is an interesting phenomenon, and sometimes it can be quite entertining too. Some years ago French literature's enfant terrible, Michel Houllebecq, said in an interview that  "Islam is the most stupid religion" (he was taken to court in Paris by a human rights group and several Islamic organizations, but Houellebecq, was found not guilty on the grounds of free speech). I’m not sure how he would rank the Catholic Church, but the Catholics do indeed stage some really entertaining shows, like the one we saw from Rome yesterday:

The late Popes John XXIII and John Paul II can now prepend Saint to their names. Yesterday, they were canonized by Pope Francis in the St Peter's Cathedral in the Vatican City (pontifex emeritus Benedict was there too, to watch the show).

Saint John and Saint John Paul will be added to the list of the 2000+ official saints that the Catholic Church already has. In addition there are thousands of unofficial saints, kind of local saints, not approved by the Pope, but more or less by acclamation in their neighborhood. That’s why the Catholics celebrate the All Saints Day (also known as All Hallows’ Day) on 1. November. The celebration starts on the night of 31. October, with All Saints’ Mass, and kids ringing the door bells asking for candy. The kids don’t know about the connection to the Catholic tradition, but who cares. Candy is candy, for Protestants, Catholics and Atheists.

I’m fine with the saint-fauna as a historical curiosity from the Medieval Times, and as a folklore tradition. Martin Luther didn’t like it. He thought the worshiping of saints was a violation of the 2nd and 3rd Commandments. It was one of the reasons why he started the reformation, but that’s different story.

What makes the saints ridiculous in the 21st century, is the formalized canonization process (from 1914, revised 1983) run by the Vatican bureaucracy. First there is the process called beatification , a detailed study which eventually leads to a written confirmation from the Vatican that the candidate-saint has performed at least one miracle, and has safely arrived in Heaven (in Internet-age this should be easy, if the candidate has updated his Facebook status). After the beatification (which has nothing to do with The Beatles), the candidate can prepend the title Blessed (Bl. for short) to his or her name.

But it takes more to become a saint. It must be documented that the wannabe-saint has performed a 2nd miracle after his death. This is the difficult part (because he wouldn’t brag about it on Facebook, of course). The written documentation of the miracle is carefully examined by the Vatican’s canonization office. For today’s canonization of the two popes, more than 2000 pages of documentation had been gathered. The Vatican takes their xenology seriously, just like they used to do with the stamp production.

I used to collect stamps when I was younger, and once I visited the Vatican's philatelist.shop, which was quite impressive at that time. Stamps used to be a big source of income for the Vatican, but I'm not sure if anyone collects stamps anymore

In some countries rhe religion known as Soccer in the USA, and as Football in the rest of the world, has become very popular. This religion has, among other merits, had great success attracting commercial sponsors.

The Catholic Church has always been good at acquiring earthly goods, and they have apparently learnt a couple of tricks from soccer. The event in Rome yesterday was sponsored by several major international companies, including Nestle and ENI (the Italian state oil company).  

Remember the 11th Commandment: “God is great; money is greater”. Amen >:)

(Do you remember Roberto Carlos’ free-kick goal for Brazil against France in 1997? It’s regarded as a miracle among soccer fans, and it’s documented on YouTube. Should be good for at least a beatification)

A-Z Challenge 23: Window or aisle

Window or aisle? That's the question, because nobody wants the center seat on the air plane.

You know that claustrofobic feeling of sitting in the center seat, squeezed between to big fat guys. The silent war for the armrest is going on all the time. When the food is served, you can hardly move the fork and knife in order to eat it.

So, window or aisle, that's the attractive options. What do you choose?

Many of my colleagues, and most business travelers, I think, go for the aisle seat. Then you can easily get to the toilet, and you get quickly out of the plane on arrival.

I always choose a window seat (it's in my profile at the travel agency). I want to sit in the window seat, because I like to see where we're going, in particular on international flights.

Just think about the awesome views you can get from the window seat; the ice bergs on the southern tip of Greenland, a huge flock of  reindeers on the Kola Peninsula, Manhattan and Central Park, the mighty Rocky Mountains, the dry mountains of Iran, and meandering rivers on the Russian plains >:)

(I have the habit of taking pictures from planes. The example above is over western Russia, on the way to Moscow.)

A-Z Challenge 22: Venom

For most people, I guess, venom does give any positive associations. It was the same with me, until I heard Venom, a heavy metal band from Newcastle. In 1982 Venom released the album “Black Metal”, which gave the name to a new subgenre extreme metal.

Venom initiated the first wave of black metal, and influenced the bands that developed the second wave of black metal (Mayhem, Darkthrone, Burzum, Gorgoroth, Satyricon, Emperor, Taake, Dimmu Borgir), in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The bands I mostly listen to came out of the second wave of black metal, but still it’s worth listening to the title track from Venom’s album “Black Metal”. The YouTube link is here

A-Z Challenge 21: Utopia

Some time ago, I was cleaning out my desk and shelves in our office up north. In a magazine box, I found an old note book, between math notes and calculations. The note book contained some poems and short stories and memoirs that I wrote between 1987 and 1990.

Nice surprise. I thought that book was lost and gone long time ago.

It was fun to read. I was astonished by some of the stuff I wrote. Maybe I will post some of the high-lights (if any) on my blog. I just need to get it typed and translated to English.

Here's one of the poems, which is easy to translate, since it's free form. According to my note book, it was written on the night-train from the south in April 1987:

Utopia
Those
who can write
write, and
those who cannot write
print books and
make jellymen and
grow tea and
tobacco
for those who write.
By the way,
I have quit
today

What the Hell does it mean? I'm not sure, but maybe I tried to quit the tobacco. If so; it failed. I'm still using it. I don't smoke, but I use this black stinking stuff that you put under the lip; snus (kind of moist snuff) >:)

(I struggled a little bit finding a good U-topic, and I'm a little bit short of time right now. Therefore, I had to re-post some old stuff. Sorry about that. Anyway, I don't think many have read it before. I'm not very interested in poetry, and stopped writing poems long time ago.)

A-Z Challenge 20: A touch of Tourette

My wife believes I have Tourette’s syndrome. Not much, just a slight touch of it, but enough to be noticed. Here are the symptoms I have, again according to my spouse:

I have tics, not much anymore, just some eye blinking, shrugging my right shoulder, bending and stretching my right arm. I know I do it, and I can suppress it, if I want, but then it comes back ten times more as soon as I am by myself.

The doctors never suggested Tourette's when I was a kid and had serious tics. They blamed the tics on the bike crash I had when I was five years old. Now, it doesn’t bother me at all, with one exception: I’m getting big dentist bills because my teeth are worn out from teeth grinding.

I’m swearing too much, in particular when I'm talking with the boys. Who cares, nobody's taking any harm from a little swearing. And I have no problems keeping my mouth shut if I’m in a church. I just swear more once I get out.  (Yes, I do visit churches from time to time; to see the architecture and the art.)

I’m sometimes saying crazy things. I guess my blog is a good example. I better do it here than in a dinner party, where I may happen to offend some poor sensitive God-fearing soul.

Anyway, I’m very happy with my syndrome, and I don’t bother to visit a doctor to get a diagnosis. (The doctor doesn’t bother me, so why should I bother her?)

I think Tourette's is a very nice syndrome, actually. It’s not nice if you got it really badly, but just a little, that’s fine.  And whenever I say or do something crazy, I just say:

“Oh, what the Hell, it’s just my fucking Tourette again.” >J

A-Z Challenge 19: Selfie

It’s interesting how new words come into our vocabulary, and sometimes become very popular in a short time. A selfie is a self portrait, usually taken with the digital camera on a smart phone, and usually posted instantly on the Internet, on Facebook or Instagram.

If you search for #selfie on Instagram, you get 103 million hits (I just did it). Today everybody knows what a selfie is, but who had heard this word just a few years ago?

Self portraits are not new.  Many of the greatest artists made one or more of them. Picasso, Dali, van Gogh, and Munch all painted self portraits. Making a self portrait with paint and pencil took so time (and some skills).

Making a self portrait with a digital camera is so fast and easy that nobody have the time to pronounce the full word anymore, and then we got the selfie.

Everybody are taking and posting selfies. My kids do it. Rihanna and Beyonce do it daily. Even Obama and the Prime Minister of Denmark do it (on inappropriate occasions).

I don’t post pictures of myself on the Internet, but I think I need a selfie, just to show that I’m following the trends of the time. Above is a picture I took on the chairlift a couple of days ago when I was skiing in the mountains. It shows the tips of my skis and my shadow. Does that count as a selfie?

A-Z Challenge 18: Refurbishing

Normally, my skiing season lasts from Early November to 1^st of May, and then my handyman season starts and goes to next skiing season. That’s what it’s like to live in a 100 year old house; you automatically get a hobby, a handyman-hobby.  There are always things to be fixed, repaired, and maintained.

The last year has been somewhat different, because the handyman season that started last spring never ended. We have been refurbishing, and in fact, it’s still going on.

We ripped out everything on the 1^st floor, the ceilings, the panels on the inner walls, and the wooden floor. We removed all the clay and ironwork-waste between the bars in the floor, tons of it. In the old days this was used to block the sound between different levels of the house. It’s a really dirty and nasty job, not the kind of things you want to do by hand. We hired a company with a huge vacuum cleaner on a truck to do this.

Then we built everything up from scratch, insulating and leveling the floors, walls and ceilings, putting in water-borne heating, replacing the kitchen. I didn’t do all of this myself, of course. We hired professional handworkers to do the difficult things. All the easy and time consuming things, we did ourselves, like the demolishing, and cutting and putting in the insulation.

But of course we didn’t give up the skiing season (little boy would never allow it), so this winter it’s been going in parallel, the skiing and the refurbishing. It’s OK. I enjoy doing both.

(I try to take some pictures at every step of the refurbishing process, just to document what has been done. )

A-Z Challenge 17: Quantum leap

You sometimes hear people talk about quantum leaps as a metaphor: “We have made a quantum leap”. If you study physics, you learn about quantum leaps in the lectures on quantum mechanics, of course. That’s where the metaphor comes from. In the physics lectures, you also learn that a quantum leap is incredibly small. Usually, it’s an integer times Planck’s constant, which is order 10 to the power minus 34 (in units of Js, Joule seconds). That is, 0.000…01, with 34 zeros after the decimal point and before the digit 1. Correspondingly, the Planck length is order 10 to power the minus 35 meters. That's the scale of the quantum leaps.

The Planck length does not have a clear physical meaning, but Planck's constant does. Multiplied by frequency, it's the typical separation between the energy levels of a quantized system (e.g. a harmonic oscillator), and hence the magnitude of a quantum leap.

So whenever I hear a car or computer manufacturer claiming that they have made a technological quantum leap, I think this is not an improvement worth paying for, if you see what I mean.

A-Z Challenge 16: Porn - some pictures from my private collection

Internet is made for porn. There’s tons of it out there. There is the traditional stuff that used to be in the colorful magazines we hided when we were kids.  But also new creative varieties of porn have entered cyberspace. Here are some examples that I’m aware of:

Skyporn: Pictures of awesome sunsets, and other scenic horizons.

Cloudporn: Pictures of cloud patterns against the blue sky.

Foodporn. Pictures of people making food, eating food, or just zooming on delicate dishes.

Rockporn. It's not about music. It's pictures of various types of rocks; sedimentary, metamorphic as well as bedrock. Popular among geologists.

Skiporn: Pictures and, more popular, movies of freeskiers in terrain parks and in the backcountry. There’s even a ski movie from Poor Boyz Productions titled Skiporn. The trailer is on YouTube.

Surfporn: As skiporn, but showing wave surfing rather than skiing.

(Above are some pictures from my private porn collection; rockporn from Arches National Park, Utah, skyporn from my hometown, and cloudporn shot from an Aeroflot plane over the western part of Russia)

A-Z Challenge 15: Out of office

I'm out of office. I didn't even bother to put up an out-of-office reply on my work mail, because everybody else are out of office too. Gone skiing. It's the Easter holidays, the most important holidays for Christianity, the crucifixion and resurrection. And it's the most important skiing vacation in Winterland. I'm in the mountains skiing for 10 days, and having a good time. I can't spend such a nice day inside writing blog posts >:)

  (Cross-country today. Picture taken a few hours ago.)

A-Z Challenge 14: Nothing

A-Z Challenge 13: Mandelbrot set

Here’s some cool stuff for the math nerds, and a question to the art nerds. It’s about the Mandelbrot set. This is a mathematical object which was discovered more or less by chance, by the Polish mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. What is cool about the Mandelbrot set, is that it makes some incredible pictures, using a very simple formula.

This is how you compute the Mandelbrot set: Take a number, square it, and add a constant. Repeat the procedure several times. This is the formula:

z(n+1) = z(n)*z(n) + c.

Depending on the choice of the constant c, the iterated number z(n) may stay finite, or it may grow to infinity.
There’s one more thing: Both z(n) and c have to be complex numbers, with a real part (x) and an imaginary part (y). It can be shown that if z(n+1) stays finite, it don’t get larger than 2 in magnitude. This makes the Mandelbrot set easy to compute. Just iterate the formula above (say) 50 times for all values of c (start with z(1)=c), and count how many iterations (n) are needed to make z(n+1) larger than 2. Then make a plot of the number of iterations n. Very simple. I computed the pictures below in 10-15 seconds with Matlab on my lap-top.

If you zoom on the Mandelbrot set, you will discover incredible patterns, and sometimes small Mandelbrot-set look-alikes hidden inside the full set. (To do the actual zoom, you need to re-compute inside a smaller subset of the image, to get higher resolution). The cool parts are along the rim of the Mandelbrot set.

And then comes my question to the art nerds: Is the Mandelbrot set art? It looks like art, but is it art, being created by a simple mathematical formula? What do you think?

There are fancy ways to compute the Mandelbrot set fast, and with high resolution. The code that I wrote in Matlab is not the fastest, but very simple. Here it is (lines starting with % are comments):

%-------------------------------------- 
% Plot the Mandelbrot set 
%-------------------------------------- 

%--- Set max iterations and grid size: 
nmax = 50; 
nx = 601; ny = 481; 

%--- Select a subset of the complex plane: 
xRange = [-2, 1]; yRange = [-1.2,1.2]; 
%xRange = [-1.20,-1.0]; yRange = [-0.38,-0.22]; 
%xRange = [-1.043,-1.033]; yRange = [-0.292,-0.284]; 

%--- Gridding: 
dx = diff(xRange)/(nx-1); 
dy = diff(yRange)/(ny-1); 
x = xRange(1):dx:xRange(2); 
y = yRange(1):dy:yRange(2); 

%--- Mandelbrot loop: 
for j=1:ny 
    for i=1:nx 
       c = complex(x(i),y(j)); 
       z1 = c; 
       r2 = c*conj(c); 
       n = 1; 
       while (r2<4 && n<nmax) 
          z2 = z1*z1+c; 
          r2 = z2*conj(z2);
          z1 = z2; 
          n = n+1; 
       end 
       narr(i,j) = n; 
    end 
end 

%--- Plot result: 
figure; imagesc(x,y,narr'); 
colorbar; caxis([1, nmax]); 
axis xy; axis equal;

%-----------------------------------------
% THE END
%-----------------------------------------

(The pictures where computed with the Matlab code above. the codes runs in Octave too, if you don't want to pay for a Matlab license. The white frame in the 1st picture shows the area zoomed in the 2nd picture and so on. I'm just an amateur in this branch of mathematics, known as fractals. Check out this link for a real-time zoomable Mandelbrot viewer made by the pros. )

A-Z Challenge 12: Lions and other beasts

Corruption is no good. In fact, corruption is really bad. It’s a major reasons why many development countries seem to be stuck in deep shit forever. Big companies pay government and state officials to get contracts, thereby undermining the commercial market. People pay the tax collector to delete their tax bill, rather than paying tax.

Corruption got Sochi the 2014 winter Olympics, and got Qatar the 2022 Soccer World Cup.

It doesn’t happen in our country. We’re almost on top of the transparency ranking. We have no corruption problems. That’s what we think.

But we have Lions and other beasts; I mean Lions Club, Rotary International, Freemasons and stuff like that. That’s where the bonding and networking take place. That’s where different businesses come together. That’s where business men meet politicians and public officials from the city administration. It’s about exchange of favors and benefits, the camaraderie that get people into important positions in society (political or economic).

There’s no cash in brown envelopes passing from one hand to another. We’re slightly more sophisticated. It’s our way of corruption, and it’s even legal.

A-Z Challenge 11: Kevin Keegan (and Billy Bremner)

Does anyone remember Kevin Keegan? He was the superstar of Liverpool FC in th 1970s, and the hero of all the kids who supported Liverpool. My brother was a Liverpool supporter, and my best friend too. I was not. My favorite team was (and still is) Leeds United.

No matter what team we supported, all the kids collected football cards. We bought them in the local shop, packages of 4 football cards and a chewing gum.

Once I had my lucky day. I opened a new package of cards, and got Kevin Keegan. This card was worth a pile of cards with ordinary players. In change for my Kevin Keegan card, I got virtually the entire Leeds United team, including Peter Lorimer, Alan Clarke, Norman Hunter, and not the least, Billy Bremner, the read-headed Scot who ruled the midfield for Super-Leeds >:)

 
(Billy Bremner died from a heart attack in 1997, at the age of 55. He has been honored with a statue outside Elland Road stadium in Leeds. I took the picture a couple of years ago when I was in Leeds to watch Leeds vs. Cardiff in the Championship League)

A-Z Challenge 10: Jerusalem (and Hollywood)

Jerusalem gave us the Abrahamic religions; Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The true God came to a church or synagogue or mosque near you.

Jerusalem is where Jesus was crucified and resurrected on the third day, and where Mohammed ascended. 

Hollywood gave us superheroes, men (and some women) with supernatural powers. Hollywood is where Superman, Batman, and Spiderman were brought to life, and came to theatre near you.

Hollywood is the Jerusalem of superheroes.

Jerusalem is the Hollywood of the Gods.

Hollywood is still a rather peaceful place. The fans of Superman, Batman and Spiderman don’t kill each other.

A-Z Challenge 09: I don't ...

I don’t want to own anyone.

I don’t want to be owned by anyone.

I don’t want to boss.

I don’t want to be bossed.

I don’t keep my desk clean at work (sorry, boss).

I don’t like to follow the rules.

I don’t drink wine and don’t drink liquor (but I sometimes drink dark beer).

I don’t post pictures of my face on the Internet (Dorian and I have a reason why).

I don’t post dick-pics either (not sure if Dorian does).

I don’t mind following some rules, if I can make them myself.

(Since I don’t post face-pics of myself nor my family and friends on the Internet, little boy made this avatar for me on his PS3. He claims it looks similar. I'm not sure. At least the black clothes and glasses are right, but my eyes are green ...)

A-Z Challenge 08: Helmholtz, Hilbert and Hörmander

Last summer, older boy and his buddies took our old Toyota and drove down to the French Alps, to ski on a glacier for three weeks. On the way back home, the transmission broke down on the autobahn somewhere in the former East Germany. Because the car was old, it took some time to get a new transmission and replace it.

So the boys took a plane back to the north. Two weeks later, my wife and I went down to Germany, to pick up the car and drive it back home.

Driving for hours and hours on the autobahn is boring. To entertain ourselves, I lectured my wife on the life and achievements of great mathematicians who lived and worked in the various cities we passed by:

Gustav Helmholtz (1821-1894) was a mathematician and physicist. He made important contributions to wave theory (Helmholtz equation) and thermodynamics (Helmholtz free energy), and had his last professor chair at the University of Berlin.

David Hilbert (1862-1943) worked most of his life in the University of Göttingen. He is famous for his contributions to axiomatic geometry and functional analysis (Hilbert space).

Lars Hörmander (1931-2012) was a professor at the University of Lund. He made important contributions to the theory of pseudo-differential operators, and is famous for his four-volume book on linear partial differential operators.

It might be that my wife found my lectures somewhat nerdy and tedious. At least, she wasn’t able to keep track of the details. Last night I went to a bar downtown to drink a beer with a math professor from the University Lund.

“Lund, that’s where Hilbert worked,” my wife said.

“No, Hilbert was in Göttingen, ” I replied. “Hörmander was in Lund.”

After all, my wife is just a chemical engineer. They make useful contributions to society too, but they just can’t keep track of the mathematics and the mathematicians >:)

A-Z Challenge 07: Green card

Many years ago, when I was a graduate student, we (wife, older boy and I) lived in Colorado for about a year. When our neighbors (from Venezuela) heard that we were moving back to Europe, they asked me:

“Didn’t you get a Green Card?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I didn’t apply for one.”

It was hard for my neighbor to understand, and I tried to explain:

We really liked living in Colorado, and enjoyed it a lot. We got to know some awesome people, we hiked some fantastic national parks, and we skied some great slopes. But one year was enough; perfect.

We didn’t like the American system. The rich are too rich, and the poor are too poor. It’s sometimes better (with Clinton and Obama), and sometimes worse (with Reagan and 2xBush). We don’t fit into a political fauna where the only options are right-wing and ultra-right-wing. I'm too liberal, and too radical. It's not my style.

We wanted to go back to Winterland, where we belong >:)

(Colorado is awesome. Picture taken in October some years ago along I-70 right outside Denver.)

A-Z Challenge 06: Freeskiing

I've been out traveling for 3 days. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time to read nor write much on my blog. My posts for day 4 and 5 were prewritten, and just posted on the right day.

I've up in the mountains with my two boys for a freeskiing competition.  So it's a perfect match that the letter for to day is F.

You might have seen it freeskiing in the recent olympics. Slopestyle (on twin-tip skis) was on the olympic program for the first time in Sochi. It's all about jumping big jumps, and making flips and tricks in the air.

Freeskiing (or newschool freestyle) is one of the fastest growing sports, in particular among teenage boys. My sons are both totally brainwashed by this sport. For them it's the meaning of life. It gives them plenty of physical challenges and adrenaline kicks. They both have 100+ days on skis every winter.

The saddest time of the year is when spring comes and the snow extincts.

(The picture above was taken by a professional photographer this weekend. It shows older boy flying high in the big jump competition. If you wanna see what the live action looks like, check out this video, showing older boy and one of his buddies in the Austrian Alps two weeks ago.)

A-Z Challenge 05: Education

Years ago, when I was a young physics student, I tried to avoid anything that smelled of industry and commercial application of science. I wanted to do pure science for science’s sake.

Now I’m working for BigOil.

The story goes like this: I wrote my master thesis on the theory of elementary particles, a weird but interesting mix of quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of relativity (this mix is called quantum field theory). When I had received my master degree, I got a job offer within geophysics, and petroleum exploration.

I discussed this issue with an old professor I got to know. Should I accept the job offer, or go for a PhD in quantum field theory? This is what the old professor said:

“It doesn’t really matter which wave equation you solve, but for some you get better paid.”

It’s probably the best advice I ever got. And I’ve got education for a life.

A-Z Challenge 04: Disneyland (and Mekka)

I went to Disneyland with older boy when he was 5. I went to Euro-Disney with little boy about the same age. It’s the pilgrim trips we do with our kids.

Disneyland is Mecca for the kids.

Mecca is Disneyland for the Muslims.

But we can draw Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse without risking our lives.

(The picture above is from my archives, taken in EuroDisney some years ago. Drawings of Mohammed, by a Danish artist, can be seen here. Some of them are very good. On the 20. May 2010 was the “International everybody draw Muhammed day”. I support the initiative. Rationalism will win over stupidity in the end.) 

A-Z Challenge 03: Commodore 64

It’s quite amazing how technology has developed in our lifetime. In particular, I think about computers. In the office, we have Linux clusters of thousands of computers performing parallel computers. The smart phones in our pockets have more memory and compute power than the Cray super-computer I used for number crunching when I started my professional career in the early 1990s.

Does anyone remember Commodore 64? It was my first computer. I bought it in 1982, when I was in highschool. I worked an entire summer to earn up the $500 I needed to buy it.

Commodore 64 was a gray box with the electronics inside and the keyboard on top. The memory was 64 kiloByte, and the storage was a cassette recorder. I used the TV as display, connecting the computer with co-ax cable. We had only one TV in our family, so I had to wait till my father had seen the late news 11pm before I could use the computer. I guess that’s when I became a night owl (which I still am).

The early software was published in computer magazines, as code listings, and you had to type it in yourself (just imagine typing in the source code for Windows 7).

Commodore 64 wasn’t much of a computer, but it was good enough to learn the fundamentals of computer programming. I could do my math homework, and make some very simple computer games. I always thought playing computer games was boring. When I had made a game, I quickly got tired of it, and made a new one.  

(The picture is from Wikipedia. Unfortunately, I sold my Commodore 64 when I got my first IBM PC. For those who want to play and pretend, there are Commodore 64 emulators on the Internet.)

A-Z Challenge 02: Black

Black is my color of choice. I only wear black clothes, and I listen to black metal.

My soul is black as coal, because Dorian and I gave our souls to the Devil (you should have seen my picture, but I don't dare to post it on the Internet)

I even have a black tooth brush. I don’t know which color Dorian’s toothbrush has.

(I took the picture a couple of years ago on a black metal concert at town square. The stage shows of the black-metal bands can be somewhat far out, but the music is awesome. This is probably the coolest black-metal song ever: Freezing moon by Mayhem, from YouTube, the original recording with Dead on vocals. He died in 1991, at the age of 22.)

A-Z Challenge 01: Aftermath

For the first time, I decided to sign up for the A-Z Challenge. Blogging every day is a lot more than I normally do. Also, the Easter holidays are in April this year. Then I will be 10 days in the mountains skiing, with poor internet connections (there’s a couple of places with free WiFi). Therefore, I might need to write ahead from time to time. In an emergency situation I might even re-post a couple of old stories and rants. Don’t tell anyone.

I considered choosing a theme (travel? literature? religion? pizza? heavy metal? ), but decided not to. I will probably do it the way I normally do on this blog. It will be memories, thoughts and rants about whatever comes to my mind. The A-Z Challenge is a nice chance to write about topics that hadn’t come to my mind if I wasn’t challenged to cover the whole English alphabet (our alphabet has another 3 letters).

I might do some experimental writing, and I might write some provocative stuff. Anyway, I write broken English. Sorry about that. It’s just the way it is. This will be my aftermath.

Aftermath is also the name of the heavy-metal shop in my home town. That’s the place where I buy my CDs. I support small and independent local shops, and the long-haired guys behind the counter have great knowledge about heavy metal. They don’t take credit cards. Cash only.

After math is the stuff I do after solving a challenging math problem; go skiing, or drink a dark beer  >:)