Friday night, is physics and Python night

It's Friday night, you don't have anything to do. Well, you could of course work. But after working hard for more than a week and not even having a weekend last weekend you don't want to do that. Besides, your studies and your employer must let you have some fun.

What I did was dig up Python, some upper secondary school physics and my Fundamentals of Physics (as I am a CS student I have only taken one course in physics at university level) and started to hack some code. Planetary orbits and gravity, I thought, could look rather nice when simulated. So a few hours later I have constructed a small program that simulates the effects of gravity.


What you see is a "sun", well, it's really just a much bigger astral body (just like a sun) and some smaller planets moving in orbits around it. The lines represent gravity vectors, speed vectors, acceleration vectors and so on. They are just there to help me debug the whole thing.

It has been a rather nice Friday night in my opinion. Perhaps I should hack a little more on the concept, who knows. Now I will get some sleep and tomorrow it's all school work and work again.

Is God dead?

Idling in the web I read the following about a Norwegian trying to prove that God doesn't exist.

-"Our project is nothing less than proving that God doesn't exist. In each program I will commit a deadly sin in a new country. ... If God doesn't react by the end of the series he is declared dead."

Well, I wouldn't care if God was dead. But this Norwegian clearly know nothing about how to prove that God doesn't exist. Any believer might just as well say "He chose not to act". In order to falsify the existance of God you need God to be falsifiable. Otherwise it's like beating someone capable of changing the rules of the game while playing.

An example of this. Say that I have constructed a device that can detect with 100% accuracy if God is within a 25m radius. I start the device and it says that God is not within 25m. I claim that this is a proof that God doesn't exist. How ever, any believer might simply say "You can't detect God if he doesn't want to be detected." or "He wasn't there at the time, since he doesn't want to proved, he wants to be believed.". Thus, any godly being can't be proven to not exist. Any attempts at doing this are futile and therefore should be ignored. It's better to spend our time at tasks that may lead to results that benefit us, rather than to chase ghosts.

Article in SvD (In Swedish)

Misuse of statistics?

DN has published an article by Pressens Mediaservice, some news agency (I haven't looked into it very much). The article is about the failure of Radiohead's latest CD release which was available for free, on line. You could chose to pay if you wanted to. The article deems this as a failure, since 62 percent chose not to pay.

Now, 62 percent is a lot, but it's not even close to what we would need to know in order to deem it a failure. How many downloaded it? How much did they earn? How much do they usually earn? How much does an old-fashioned way of distributing a CD cost? Perhaps knowing this and probably even more, we will have knowledge enough to judge whether it was a success or not. As it is now, the company who carried out the analysis (Comscore, and if they judged it a failure based on only these numbers it's time to give a free and mandatory course in statistics to each and every employee) or a journalist at Pressens Mediaservice have taken misuse of statistics to a whole new level. Statistics is a powerful tool, but one is not to take only so much that it provides a point of view that you want to present or that you feel comfortable with. Stay true to the data, at all costs, data never lies, people do.


Link to the article in DN (Swedish).

Visions of the future

This morning I began pondering upon how we envision the future. Given a rather vague description in a text will most certainly result in an envisioned picture of your imagination that is very real indeed. You will "see" much more than the author originally intended and this of course is a good thing. The text and story should be more likely to suit your taste.

Now, through this argument rises an interesting question. How different would that inner picture be? It would be very interesting to give the text below to several subjects. Shall we say five families and that the experiment is carried out at the age of twenty for five generations? This of course will risk the older family members to pass on their visions, so perhaps a choice at random among the population currently 20 years of age is more appropriate? But then instead we risk not to have a similar social context instead, which could affect the result. Considering both options above, I'd say that determining several social attributes and then choosing randomly within several combinations at each experiment. The same combination for each experiment, so there would be several lines of pictures. This is likely to yield better results than the first two options.

Now to the text, I imagine something like. "When he got home from work later that day, the stars were already visible. As he reached the doorstep, he stood still for a moment and looked up at the serene sky." How different could that image be? Perhaps this is the very reason that some books never feel old, unlike films which age very quickly. Does our imagination aid us when reading, turning the authors hints about a world into our very own creation?

Learn Swedish online?

For some reason, a bunch of people in Japan want to learn Swedish. ^^ It's a bit charming actually, but are there any language resources out there? I set out on a small quest to find some.

Since I work and study at the Computer Science department at KTH, the first thing I thought of was Lexin, Stava and Granska.

Lexin is a Swedish to many-languages dictionary, it's a good tool both for us Swedes who sometimes need to check our spelling twice, or when translating Swedish. Give it a try, it's the best Swedish dictionary that is available for free.

Lexin also offers a set of images, marked with the Swedish names for the things in the picture. Like the ones you get in elementary school books. The text is in Swedish, but try out the 33 image sets.

Stava is a spelling tool and also some grammar checking is done. I think one of the creators hinted me that it did beat Microsoft Word's Swedish grammar checking in a scientific test. So although it looks simple, it's far superior to anything I have found on the web. The only drawback is that it is in Swedish, but it's fairly easy to make out which buttons to press and how it suggests change of spelling.

Granska is a grammar checking tool, it's fairly new compared to the previous two tools. And to be honest, I only know that it has proven to be very good at detecting a grammatic mistake called "särskrivning" in Swedish. For example, unlike English, Swedish is very liberal when it comes to forming new words by using two words and turning them into a single word. "Get" goat, "Ryggsäck" rucksack and "Tillverkare" maker can be turned into "Getryggsäckstillverkare" Goat rucksack maker. This is a perfectly legal word, although rather strange. The language group at the CS department is responsible for this and it aims to aid non-native speakers of Swedish.

I think this is all the CS department has to offer at the moment. So I set out onto the world wild web for more resources.

Stockholm School of Economics has a good 40 page introduction to Swedish. It's free and basic.

Leif Stensson has made a quick guide to Swedish grammar, although not finished it gives some insight into Swedish grammar.

FSI has a rather large collection of audio files for practising pronunciation, I checked out the first one and it was quite al right. This is in fact the only good audio resources I did find.

Transparent Language has a Swedish Proficiency Test on line, it's not very extensive but might give you a hint. It's not easy though, so study for a while before looking at it.

I hope you get some help using these links, and good luck on your Swedish studies. Att lära sig Svenska är en utmaning, men en utmaning som i slutänden troligen ger dig en hel del glädje.

Unix Party pin?

Yesterday I watched the movie Contact, based on a novel by Carl Sagan. I found it rather interesting, but that's not why I am making this post. On one of the computer monitors at the antenna array in New Mexico, there is a pin. Saying "Unix Party". I am not American, but I think it resembles to a political party pin, used during US elections. I have done some research about it, but I haven't found anything. Does anyone know anything about this? I would be happy to know more about this little novelty.

I took a photo of the screen. It's a bit blurry, but you can clearly make out "Unix Party".

Respecting and understanding differences

Lars Vilks has recently become rather famous. I have never cared much for his art, it's a bit too strange for my taste. How ever, lately, conservative Muslims have reacted with anger to his latest work. Apparently, Vilks thought that it would be a good piece of art to make a statue of the prophet Muhammed. Swedish law allows you to publish, make, etc. all sorts of things. We call it freedom of speech, basically you are allowed to do most things if the intent is not to offend. Vilks intent can be discussed, but most likely he is trying to get some attention along with creating a debate on whether or not you can mock anything. To be honest, the statue is rather silly and deserve little attention.

Personally, I think you have the right to make fun of anything. As long as the sole intent is not to offend or humiliate a living person or group of individuals. In a democratic society you can make blows and take blows. Making something holy and making it taboo is not the way of an open society. If I was Vilks I'd make a piece of art mocking most religions. That way, I'd think it was more fair. And perhaps there would be some debate among believers (concerning why some burn flags and others ignore it as a silly piece of art) instead of focusing on a single religion.

As I mentioned earlier, it really deserves little attention. The right thing to do is to protest peacefully at the publisher and criticise those who you do not agree with. An excellent example is the protest in Örebro, they were aimed at the paper and Vilks. I don't agree with them on whether or not it should be published, but it was nicely done and they showed their point of view.

As with all things, there is also the wrong thing to do. For example, if you would go and burn flags. You are no longer criticising Vilks and the paper that published his works. You are instead blaming a group of people, who most of them don't give a damn about Vilks, of being the source of your discontent. Doing so is no longer a protest, but an attack on an open society. You could also proceed to threatening the artist and thus placing you and your beliefs above Swedish law, thereby eliminating all doubts that you are not a citizen who believes in freedom of speech (apart from your own freedom to do and say what ever you like of course). Why not burn a doll of a man who had nothing to do with the whole thing, apart from being the same nationality as the artist.

Why can't fanatics act rationally? Why are they so blinded that they can't see how they should show their point of view (without being considered to be mental cases that are better off locked away from society)? Well, I guess that's what makes them fanatics.