Observations on my way home

When walking home this Friday I noticed something peculiar. Usually when a pedestrian enter a store he moves in an arch, much like my sketch to the right. He also maintains roughly the same speed as before entering the arch until he reaches the door to the store where he slows down slightly, opens the door and enters the store.

But one store is different, here, people enter the store in a radically different way. They maintain normal walking speed and keep their eyes fixed straight forward, unlike when entering other stores where they always look around observing other stores and pedestrians. Then, when they have passed the point when at other stores they would begin their approach in an arch, they suddenly turn at a sharp angle and increase their speed substantially. They maintain this increased speed pushing the door open with force and does not appear to slow down until inside.

The reason might be, that the store is the most well known adult video store in Stockholm.

Swedish Anti-Piracy Commercial

Now and then Swedish anti-piracy agencies and the Swedish movie and music industry makes a commercial in order to tell us, the people of Sweden, how morally wrong piracy is. If you just cut the crap and don't argue whether piracy is wrong in the first place, the latest movie, and all other movies they have ever made, has a pattern. Let's describe the latest one.

A person walks up to a public toilet and pays the fee of roughly 5 SEK (about 1 USD). Just as he enters the booth, another person forces his way into the booth with him. He is then forced to pee along with a stranger although he paid for the booth himself and the stranger does various embarrassing things and is not the least embarrassed about "stealing" his spot.

Something like this is usually the theme, previously we have seen people borrowing movies from rental shops without paying.

Now, what is the problem with this? It portrays the person conducting piracy as someone who is stealing from a customer or a store. Is this really the case? I certainly don't think so, a person conducting piracy don't steal anything. They certainly do some economic damage, but they don't steal. By portraying them as simple thieves, the industry leaves an open goal, their opponents laugh at them and most Swedes just think that they are silly. They look stupid, and won't get paid.

What should the industry show instead? You don't have to be a genius to come up with an honest and probably better commercial. So, here you are STIM, APB, SF and so on, here's my suggestion, all for free. Instead of portraying the person who you so clearly, don't want to continue copying your material, as a thief, which he is not and will never associate himself with and therefore will continue copying your material and you have run down your many million SEK commercial down the drain. Why not show him what he actually does, show him how a movie is made, show him how money spent on a movie get people paid for their hard job, show him the set of actors and so on, showing numbers and faces. Don't go all silly and show sentimental letters, just facts, "When you condone piracy, all these people get nothing and to you, they give you the very best of their efforts". This will work, this is honest, this is what piracy is all about and how you might actually win. Stop acting like idiots with a multi-million SEK budget who are unable to send a message but able to make great movies, albums, etc. It ain't that hard, all you need is the ability to reason.

Glögg review 2: Tillmans Glögg av Svarta Vinbär

I have had the luck of finding a really strange bottle of glögg. Tillman, which is a small rather local brand, makes glögg using black currants instead of red wine. It's also completely alcohol free, let's see how good it gets.


The smell is stronger than usual, it reminds me of some glögg sweets that I stumbled upon last summer in a small candy shop. It doesn't smell like glögg usually does, but it still is rather pleasing. I suspect the smell is because of the black currants, because after the initial aroma of spices it's something like a strong cup of black currant tea.

The taste is a little less punchy than one would expect from a sip of glögg, there is a lot of taste from the berries and it's not even remotely as sweet as one would fear. But, you miss the wine, the taste just won't last as long and be as deep as wine. But it is not a bad substitute for red wine, unlike most mixes of grape juice and other juices that makes glögg taste terrible you do enjoy drinking the strange mixture of black currants and glögg seasoning. I would certainly recommend it, perhaps not for a big party, but certainly as a pleasant and refreshing Christmas beverage for yourself or in the company of a friend or two.

Tillmans Glögg av Svarta Vinbär
3/5
Price: ~40SEK per bottle of 750ml

Glögg review 1: Blossa lättglögg

As you have seen in my profile, I like glögg. Glögg is rather typical for northern europe and is served hot with raisins and almond during the winter season. It's most of all associated with Christmas, but some (like me) enjoy it from mid November to mid January. Glögg is made from wine, traditionally red but nowadays also white. It's seasoned, which gives it a unique sweet and rich taste. Do note that during my test sessions, I do not add almond, raisins or eat ginger snaps. It's only the glögg and nothing else that I will test.

Since a lot of people never hear of this excellent beverage I thought that I'd make a set of reviews of different kinds of glögg with low-alcohol content. There are plenty of brands and flavours to chose from when it comes to high-alcohol content, but for low-alcohol there are about eight kinds to chose from. But I will try to find more.

First out is the true classic "Blossa lättglögg". When you think of glögg, this is the brand that first springs to mind. It's sweet and has a rather spicy taste. You can clearly make out the traces red wine somewhere amidst all the other tastes.


Currently, this is my personal favourite. But it's rather plain, most Swedes ought to be used to this taste, so it's really nothing special about it. You just see it as what defines glögg. Therefore, I can't give it five out of five. Since, you can't stop thinking that perhaps there is another glögg out there, one that is richer, leaner and will taste even better with your ginger snaps. I therefore give it four out of five, it's good, really good. But still, there is nothing special about it.

Blossa lättglögg
4/5
Price: ~25SEK per bottle of 750ml

Those who want to know more about glögg should take a look at the Wikipedia article.

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).