Underbed things

Suppose you’re in a random room, and look under the bed. I’ve done your cogitation for you, and offer this little list for determining by that what you find there just who lives in the said room.

You find: and the room belongs to

• A bent coin: A stressed person, or someone with odd notions about luck. Back out of the room, slowly, and then run. Stressed ones do inadvisable things, and luck people might want a lock of your hair and a piece of your colon — just for luck. (This is speculation.)
• Some dust, some dust-shrouded shapes, some faint sounds: The owner’s breeding chihuahuas under his bed. (There are three other alternatives, but they are too terrible to be mentioned. This is not speculation.)
• Some dust, some flecks of blood: The owner’s either having a period or some other dark secret. It would be best if you left without saying a word. (This might be speculation.)
• A giant trembling ball of dust: The owner is going through the extreme stages of caffeine withdrawal. That ball’s him. (This is a blatant lie.)
• A coin that is stuck to the floor: A student, and, furthermore, a male student.
• A coin that is stuck to the floor, and, distressingly, hairy: A male student of biology, or a sixth-year (or more) male student of any field.
• A fifty-cent coin: A wealthy student. (Quick, take the coin! If you’re looking under beds and thinking of coins, you need every single one you find.)
• A five-euro bill: An honest working man, maybe? Or maybe it’s a trap — run!
• A twenty-euro bill: Either a banker or an extra-careless guy — get quickly from under the bed before it collapses on you. (In the banker’s case that would be a security feature.)
• There’s nothing under the bed, but the floor has been licked clean: Ah, someone on a diet… make him happy and leave a few chocolate sprinkles.

I wildly guess this is enough to cover around 85.44% of all beds. The rest are so choked with dust, old toys and body parts that there’s no actual space under them anymore.

Did this help you?

* * *

A minor item concerning the previous post on the Eurovision Song Contest 2008: Finland’s heavy metal group Teräsbetoni went to the final. Hooray!

Come Saturday, I’ll either dance and cheer, or, if they don’t win then, mutter that ’tis the fate of heavy-metallers always: to be misunderstood.

Eurovision: Teräsbetoni for Finland

Well, today (Tuesday) is the day for the first semi-finals of the bloated monstrosity that is the Eurovision Song Contest.

Today we’ll see whether Finland’s Teräsbetoni, the half-naked heavy metal boys, can charm enough European televoters to advance to Saturday’s final.

If they advance, and maybe even win, I’ll say I knew it all the time: you can’t lose with heavy metal.

If they drop or in some other way lose, I’ll say I knew it all along, for metal is the music of outsiders, and not something the masses have ever understood.

Nah, here’s the video for Teräsbetoni’s piece, Missä miehet ratsastaa or Where Men Ride. One of my favorite bands, one of their best songs. Enjoy.

And yes, this is the actual, official video for the song. Remember: If you can’t laught at your own self, everyone else will. Besides, in the giant boob-fest that Eurovision is, Teräsbetoni can not, just can not, be over-the-top, nor corny.

(You can see the lyrics, and my attempt at translating them, in this earlier post.)

Edit: Well, I apparent am beglassed for a reason. Yle, the overmighty Finnish broadcasting corporation, has the lyrics in Finnish, English and French. Don’t bother yourself with my crummy attempt.

A Guide to Finland: History 2 (Lalli)

Another chapter for A Guide to Finland; see the right side of the main page or the table of contents.

* * *

So in the 12th century, under the pretext of spreading Christianity, Swedes crossed the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland in several waves and grabbed a hold of Finland’s coasts, and of anything of commercial value that could be pried loose. Finns called these ‘crusades’ something else entirely, but since they were heathen barbarians, no-one was interested.

After a long time and one episode that allegedly involved a bishop, a farmer and an axe, and ended very badly for the bishop, Christianity took root.

I might as well detail that mythic episode, just to entertain you. Since this is all just legends invented long years after the alleged events, and since there are many, many different legends, I’ve cooked up an amalgam version that I myself like.

The tale tells that with the Swedes came a bishop, called Henry, or Henrik in Finnish and Swedish. He was born in England, and around the year 1150 CE he became the first bishop of Finland.

This bishop-post included going around in Finland, spreading Christianity and obedience to the Christian Swedish king — named, however, not Christian but Eric — and thus one wintry day bishop Henrik, riding alone, came to the house of a wealthy Finnish farmer called Lalli.

Lalli was away, but his cold and haughty wife was there, and against all common courtesy she did not give the bishop food, nor hay for his horse. (I suppose this was just one of those inexplicable character defects, or then an overly tight case of parsimony.)

After some arguing the bishop, being basically a decent man but in some hurry, took by force the supplies he needed and left a generous amount of money for the food and hay, and then left.

Soon after Lalli came back, and found her wife quite beside herself. She told him how the bishop, a cold and haughty man, had ridden to the hall, screaming and threatening, and taken food, taken hay for his horse, and then left without pay or recompense, cursing the house and the terrified wife.

(This represents the traditional Finnish view of the way women behave; we’re honestly considerably less sexist nowadays. If you hear otherwise, it’s just akkain juttuja, or “female tales”.)

Lalli, quite naturally, was enraged by this lie, and grabbed his skis and his axe, and pursued the bishop. On the ice of the lake Köyliö, he overtook him, and with the blunt, heavy axe killed him.

Since these old tales don’t end the way you’d expect them to, poor Lalli, who took the mitre and the ring of Henrik as recompense, was cursed: he placed the mitre on his own head, and his hair and scalp fell off; he put the ring on his own finger, and when he took it off, the flesh sloughed off his hand.

The moral of the tale is unknown to me: probably it is something along the lines of, Don’t kill bishops. That seems like a decent Christian moral, right?

A fun fact is that in a recent tv show called Suuret suomalaiset or “The Greatest Finns”, seeking for the greatest 100 persons of all Finnish history, Lalli, the cursed, violent bishop-killer and the husband of a malicious liar, was ranked #14.

You don’t want to know the people below the fourteenth place.

The alleged episode of Henrik and Lalli wasn’t a very good beginning, but things went much better, later on. The Swedish language took root at the coasts of Finland, and further inland castles were built, partly to protect Finns from various Russian robbers from the east. After all, once you’ve stopped robbing your neighbors and taken them under your wing, it’d be outright rude to let others rob them.

Besides, what would your tax collectors collect then?

A Guide to Finland: History 1 (Pagans)

The history portion of my little Guide to Finland keeps swelling (mostly with bad jokes and not with actual facts), so the planned first history chapter (from the dawn of ages to 1809) is now divided into three parts of readable length.

This, the first of the three, concerns the good old pagan Finns in the bad old times before the 12th century, and is meant to follow Origins.

* * *

Finns — a mixed bag of bloods east and west, with a common language — have lived in Finland for a long time, probably since the latest ice age ended some ten thousand years ago.

Finns were content living in the woods, around their ten thousand lakes, growing wheat, distilling teeth-dissolving alcohol, getting drunk on it (or getting seriously skewed by snorting powdered fly agaric, but that’s another tale entirely) and singing about their pagan gods, for a long, long time.

Drinking, one should add, is still very popular in Finland. There really isn’t much else to do during the winters, since singing about pagan gods is somehow unfashionable nowadays. (Except for heavy metal bands.)

Ah well, back to the history. The pagan history of Finland — the worship of the old gods, like Ukko the greatest of gods, the god of thunder, ylijumala or high-god (think Yahweh plus Thor), and his consort Akka — coincidentally, these names mean, in modern Finnish, something like “old chap” and “old crone”. Oh, so mighty are fallen the proud gods of yesterday!

Then there was Tapio, the slightly less great god, the god of forests and hunts, and Mielikki the slightly less malevolent than the previous divinities goddess of flowers and fowls.

There were guardian spirits and ghosts and doppelgängers; spirits for trees and forests, streams and stones; there were sacred groves and leering totem poles; there were feasts on bear-flesh, and the skulls of the said beasts nailed high on trees to appease the spirit of the great bear, the holiest of animals.

There were shamans who, after a generous helping of various alcoholic, medicinal and holy substances, flopped around and screamed, and then told long, ramblings lays of Tuonela, the dark land of Tuoni, the lord of death, beyond a cold river where hungry iron pikes swim, where the dead sleep, like, dreaming.

If the shaman was too zonked on mushrooms and booze, there would always be others willing to abuse a stringed instrument and sing a tale or two, too: how everything was made from the egg of a bird, broken because the fool of a fowl had laid it on the knee of a woman resting in a great lake. (Questioning the origin of the said fowl and lady wasn’t apparently common; since there was no CG in those days, everyone had a well-developed knack for the suspension of disbelief.)

And of course there was Väinämöinen, the arch-shaman, the great singer and knower and ladies’ man, with piercing eyes, a wrinkled brow and a ridiculously immense white beard, the hero who foiled the screeching iron birds of malevolent neighbours and sang at rude youngsters until the fetid swamp waters gobbled them up, who built traditional string instruments (kantele) from the jawbones of giant fishes, who bargained with sleeping giants for wisdom, and who — oh, the tragedy — had just left, and wasn’t expected to come back any time soon.

To put it shorter, all the good, half-drunken religiosity that existed before anyone had heard of penances and cruxifictions: lots of permanently half-drunken and half-spooked savages, singing and drinking and being merry.

Thus ages passed in Finland, long uncounted and changeless years, and similar half-poetic expressions, until neighbors came a-knocking.

For — you see — Finns were, even in the beginning, cursed with the most obnoxious neighbors possible: Swedes and other Vikings in the west, and Russians in the east. Now, neither are bad people, but in the dawn of history both were loot-hungry barbarians-turned-civilized, and thus permitted to savage other barbarians just as much as they wished, oh my.

And, for Finland, the “dawn of history” comes a bit later than in other lands. Imagine the 12th century, the fag end of the Middle Ages, in the dark and cold of Northern Europe. In the west, a kingdom called Sweden has come into being, as the last Vikings hung up their horned helmets and began calling their neighbors earls and dukes. In the east, there were great churning proto-Russian kingdoms.

And in between there was a woody no-man’s-land called Finland, because, obviously, uncivilized barbarians don’t count.

Quote for today 7

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.

(Robert Anson Heinlein, in Time Enough for Love, 1973)

I fully agree, and you — even if you aren’t a mathematician — would be wise to agree as well, since this is one of those invariant truths of the universe. (I’m not kidding.) (Well, not much anyway.)

And Time Enough for Love — well, I guess I’ll have to find that piece of Heinlein too. I’m just hoping it will be something awesome like Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and not dreck like The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and The Number of the Beast.

And I guess I should give Stranger in a Strange Land another try, too, just to see if it would do anything for me on the second read, and —

It’s a bit daunting to know there exists this immense mountain of pages you’ve taken only a dozen bites from, finding most of them intoxicating, but one puzzling and two outright toxic.

Different fields, different yields

Biology is associated with notables like Richard Dawkins and Bad Religion’s Greg Graffin. Physics lures in rock stars like Brian Cox and Queen’s Brian May. And what about mathematics, my field?

We got Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski.

Oh, [redacted].

Of religions and future things

Just three scenes that popped into my head when I tried to imagine the intersection of religions and future things.

Standard godlessness warnings apply.

* * *

SCENE #1 : PAST RECALL

Two youngsters were devising, like young people often do, tales to amuse themselves. The current tale was a piece of historical fiction, a genre that youngsters shouldn’t attempt, not without at least some knowledge beyond the garbled things everyone knows.

“— okay, so you’ll write from the point of view of that French guy, that Hitler —”

“He was an American! I’m sure!”

“You’re mixing things. Stalin Hitler was a Franceman. I’m certain. And I’ll write the other guy —”

“You know, we really should look at a historical dictionary.”

“Wuss. I remember this stuff. I’ll write Patricia Robertson the Warrior Pope. And let’s make this realistic this time; a good team of wandering samurai and knights for both; none of those stupid duels.”

“I still say we can’t do this without a look at the books.”

“Books! Books! Who cares about the details of long-ago dead and gone things! I’ll write the Warrior Pope of the Allegiance of the Pledge, beholden to the sign of her god Sainta Klaus burning on the Cross, and you’ll do the France guy, okay?”

* * *

SCENE #2 : A MAJOR NAME

“What do you call this program of yours?” the general said.

The architect smiled a little smile, and said: “As usually, I took the name from old legends. Guess.”

The general harrumphed. “I don’t do extinct lies. Zeus?”

“No. Not even close. Think, dear soldier, think! What does my dear program do?”

“Hmrr. It observes the damage done to the probe, then goes dormant until a retrieval team —”

“Don’t be so cold!”

“— comes to collect the data that your program, if it works, has squirreled away in a loss-resistant form.”

“So it is made to die in a particularly nasty way, and then to rise again, right?”

“Ah. Now I get it. Zombi! Your little toy is named Zombi, right?”

“Well, close enough. Behold Jesus Mark 1.0!”

* * *

SCENE #3 : RELIEF

The Great Parliament, five million eyes and minds mostly concentrated on the happenings at the lone podium, pondered its alternatives.

Yet another digital representative took its place at the podium. It — a smiling young man — looked around, coughed, and then spoke.

“There is a solution to this troublesome problem of ours. A sure solution, though it requires great humility, and great dedication.”

The Parliament’s incessant murmurs ceased; every eye and ear turned to observe the young man, so full of courage and certainty. An unknown genius? Or a novel new thinker?

“We must only pray, pray that God will forgive us”, he whispered.

For a moment all was silent.

Then, from a distant corner of this telegathering, a sound began. It blossomed, grew, intensified, until the whole parliament was shaking with it. It drowned out the young man’s cries, and the arbitrator’s calls for order and the next proposition — the amazed, amused sound of millions of bright minds laughing at this unexpected comic relief; laughing because once the suspension of disbelief has been cracked, it can’t ever be repaired.

Iain M. Banks interview

CNN has a wonderful interview with Iain M. Banks — that is, science fiction writer Iain M. Banks, not his nefarious alter ego, mainstream-writer Iain (no M.) Banks.

Go on, read it. It’s a huge-immense lot less vacuous than you’d expect from a major news outlet interviewing a SF writer.

And now I’ll shuffle off to add Matter, Banks’s newest, to my to-buy list. Banks is, slowly, surely and sweetly, becoming one of those wide-eyed adoration writers of mine. He even has Culture, which pretty well is what I think of when thinking of utopia.

Long loans

My university has a big library, a big-huge library.

Then it has a smaller departmental library, unnaturally and grotesquely shared by mathematics and physics.

Then there is a handbook-library of mathematics for the faculty, a half-hidden broom closet that also houses a water tap (for the coffeemaker, of course) and a noisy scanner.

This third, the tiny library, hasn’t a clerk or an orderly, so lending is done by an honor system: when you take a book, you leave behind a slip that tells who took it and when. There are no other rules.

Upon flipping through the slips I just noticed that Professor Lastname has three books on a loan, two of them since 1988. (To help the reader, I note this means a loan of twenty years.)

An exclamation of mingled horror and surprise might be appropriate at this point!

Another faculty-member, a Dr. Pseudonym, has a book loaned in 1987, and Professor Unknown has loaned a double handful of books in the mid-nineties. By comparing the loan lengths and the seniority of the loan-takers, I deduce that most loans aren’t coming back until the person in question retires.

Even though I am but a callow grad student (between MSc and a licentiate, aiming for a doctorate), maybe… maybe I should loan a book now, just to get the clock started. This might be one of those ineffable metrics of respect.

Or maybe it would be easier to do enough blackboard work to become a respectable chalkdust albino.

Bicycling advice

I have ridden a bicycle in a city, daily, for six years; I’ve been ran over only once, and the car took more damage than I did. These are the few things I’ve learned; read, ye callow novice, and learn.

* * *

1. The three things most likely to break: tires, spokes and pedals. Tires deflate or explode (true story); spokes snap, sometimes when a yahoo jogs your locked bike; and pedals fall off. Luckily, these are relatively harmless incidents, with the exception of the last, which can cause a significant reduction in the potential amount of your future offspring.
2. Sooner or later, everything — every single part of the bicycle, including the frame — will break, fracture or explode. Don’t be surprised.
3. About one half of all motorists are nearsighted danger magnets; the rest are nice and courteous. About one half of the nice and courteous ones are only trying to get you on their line of drive.
4. Cars park in the darndest places. If you can’t see where you are speeding, you shouldn’t speed there.
5. Be prepared for dodging glass shards on the road, especially after a known student-party night. Also, puddles of vomit can be slippery.
6. You don’t need to know how to fix anything as long as you know where the bike shop is and when it’s open. Also, always be nice to the shop guy; you don’t want to consider his odd parting comments when rolling down a slope at 60 km/h on a disintegrating bicycle.
7. Always think whether you’d rather pay a bit for professional work, or rather spend the whole evening sweating, screaming and bleeding trying to do the work yourself. (Emphasis on the word “trying”.) Things get complicated if your first reaction on seeing your bike is “Oh, you! The engine and device of all my pain, frustration and tears!”
8. Scout in advance, before the bike breaks down, whether the local bus will let you take a bicycle in. If not, prepare for a lot of lugging and cursing. Don’t try to disguise the bike as your elderly, uncommunicative grandmother; the bus drivers might be dull, but they aren’t dumb.
9. Never bicycle beyond the distance you’re willing to carry your cycle if it breaks, because if you do, it will.
10. One lock is enough. It will stop casual bike-takers, and there’s nothing that would stop the serious ones. If you have to leave your bike in an open, alien place for some time, hide it in the crowd — leave it into a place where there are lots of other bikes, some prettier than yours.
11. And, oh, thieves go after nice, clean, new bikes. I don’t quite suggest urinating and defecating on your bike, but a bit of a bit more low-key security dirt might be effective. And it’s a good excuse to not wash your set of wheels.
12. Think of the greatest yo-yo, the most dumb yahoo, you can. Then learn to think of every single car driver as that yahoo having a self-destructive world-hating day.
13. Oh, and it doesn’t stop with car drivers, either. Expect everyone to be a suicidal sadomasochist with heavy anger management issues. (When passing cars waiting for a green light, don’t wave. And, for the love of Thor, don’t smile.)
14. You can’t outbike an angry motorist.
15. When a car and a bike collide, the car wins. You can’t enjoy a legal settlement if your head’s smeared all over the asphalt, so don’t try anything fancy.
16. A quick formula for your commute: The number of side roads and driveways that can spout a car or another bike without any visual clue whatsoever: 1 per kilometer. Most of these are just after long, steep downhills. (This number can be minimized to 0.77 if you are good in bike parkour.)
17. Danger zones when something goes all banana-shaped: knees, palms and elbows. Head, not so much.
18. You can bicycle all year round (even in Finland) if you live in a city, but it’s not necessarily funny. Well, it will be for those watching it. In the countryside — well, it’s possible if you have winter skis instead of winter tires.
19. Winter cycling tip #1: Get winter tires. It will be slippery enough even with them. Don’t hurry with getting them off; there’s always one last morning patch of bonebreaker ice.
20. Winter cycling tip #2: If you hit a patch of ice, even winter tires won’t help you. Don’t brake, don’t try to steer; just roll on, quit pedaling, and hope you either stop or get over the patch. Otherwise you’ll fall over.
21. Winter tip #3: Loose snow will have ice under it.
22. Winter tip #4: If the level of newly fallen snow is below the bike’s axles, you can drive through it. Just give in to your anger, and channel it into the pedals until they scream and turn, white-hot and trembling.
23. Winter tip #5: The only seasons worse than winter are spring and autumn.
24. Practical advice: A bike bell is a very useful thing. If you don’t have a special weird-shaped handlebar, it can prevent your shopping bags from falling off, or chafing against the wheel.

    (Incidentally, cycling around with a plastic bag full of groceries chafing against the wheel isn’t a good idea. First there’s a faint smell of burning plastic, then a wetness in your shoes, and then you notice the cardboard can of tomato juice has been filed open. Then you spend the rest of the day riding a bike that looks like you’ve ran over a whole kennel.)

25. Another practical tip: The handlebar plastic (rubber, whatever) grips can come off. If your handlebars look longer, that’s about to happen. It’s good to be a bit paranoid about this, but not too much.
26. I can tell you, from harrowing personal experience, that the single most scary bicycle breakdown is when the handlebars come apart from the rest of the bicycle. If that had happened to me in high speed, I would be writing this Stephen Hawking-style.
27. About half of all pedestrians are either drunk, heavily medicated or just unable to walk straight. The safe distance when passing a pedestrian is 500 meters; closer than that, and they quite often lunge under you without any warning.
28. If you use your bell to warn a pedestrian, you’re a noisy lout. If you don’t, you’re a psychopathic idiot. If you yell, you’re an inconsiderate drunken boor. If you try to use your telepathic abilities to signal the pedestrian, he’ll just throw himself under your wheels and tell the police the Rectumian aliens told him to do it.
29. A quick formula: 0.542 roadworks per kilometer of commute per year. If you get less, prepare for spontaneously opening five-foot chasms across the road, and for wild bear attacks.

* * *

And, to cap this advice, a longer version of my credentials for giving you bicycling advice. I live in a medium-size Finnish city, and I commute a distance of five plus five kilometers every single day, summer, winter and all. I’ve done this for six years, and I’ve been hit by a car only once (careless driver), and I haven’t gotten a single ticket.

Mostly because I detour whenever I see a parked police vehicle.

I also haven’t driven over a single pedestrian, despite their often quite inventive lunges and leaps.

I’ve experienced pedals falling off, spokes snapping, chains breaking or falling off (once thrice for three consecutive days, then breaking), handlebar-covers coming off, many other incidents I can’t just now recall, and once a handlebar snapping right off the bike frame when riding.

Despite these accidents, I’m a careful, actually near-paranoid driver, and I get my bike checked regularly. I’m just a heavy user of a good ol’ bike that’s had near all its pieces except the frame replaced, some dozens of times, since my good ol’ father bought the said vehicle some thirty years ago, a few years before I was born, to do a daily hole-university-hole run similar to mine.

And don’t let me discourage you: Bicycling is an easy way to get all the excitement and injuries you need, and more!

(Inspired by this blunt list of advice.)

* * *

Edit: One final item of advice. My city has plenty of sidewalks that are allowed for cyclists. Yours might have those as well. Use them. If you have to make small detours, or occasional swerves into pedestrian-only sidewalks, do those detours. That’s my advice, since I’m not a maniac enough to get onto the actual car-ridden streets to be bumped, hooted and smeared into the asphalt by various motor morons covered by their tons of too fast and too hard metal. (The situation might be different in a more crowded city, but hey, this is Finland.)