Early in grad school, I picked up the habit of skimming Phys. Rev. Lett. and arXiv/quant-ph for interesting-looking papers and writing two-sentence summaries of their big ideas. I'm thinking of taking the resulting paper-summaries file, or at least its stream of future ( Read more... )

Faintly disreputable automotive repair workshops often have, hanging from a back wall somewhere, a calendar full of sports cars modestly clothed in near-naked women. Behind the service desk of the Midtjylland public transit authority there is a poster of a big, square-cornered blue intercity bus very inadequately dressed in two bikini-clad Danes ( Read more... )

From a lunchtime comversation about a pseudo-telescope at an ongoing exhibition of large sculptures: “Our telescope is so awesome that light bends to get into it ( Read more... )

The next time some opportunistic bigoted demaguogue tries to play off the stereotypes in your subconscious, look up Captain Mbaye Diagne. That would be the devout Senegalese Muslim military officer, presumably francophone, who violated his UN orders and pulled somewhere between dozens and hundreds of people alive out of the hell of Rwanda in 1994 ( Read more... )

Last night I, along with much of the population of Åbyhøj, attended a Sankt Hans festival. Considering that Denmark is a Lutheran country and that the festival is held on or about the solstice, it's a safe bet that Hans' association with the event is strictly nominal. I wasn't much surprised that no one could tell me who he was. In fact, asking ( Read more... )

Broadly speaking, I find that “steampunk” can refer to two different cultural streams. One, with roots in the work of Jules Vernes, extrapolates and amplifies industrial-era technology, exploring what might have happened if clever nineteenth-century inventor-engineers had had access to better metallurgy, higher-density power sources and precision ( Read more... )

The humps on a camel, which I had somehow always imagined as rigid, are in fact wobbly. They wiggle about quite dramatically when the camel shakes itself. I find this peculiarly uncomfortable.

A combined tribute to a friend's bad mood/day and to the Danish system of vowels:

grump
Grump
Grumpy grump
Grimpy grempy græmpy grampy grαmpy
Grympy grømpy grömpy grɔ̈mpy
Grumpy grompy gråmpy grɔmpy
GROMP.

Given the cost of labour around here, it's worth investing quite a lot in worker productivity. Two notable examples:

• Cashier stations at grocery stores are thoughtfully pipelined and parallelised so that one (fast, expensive) cashier doesn't waste all his or her time waiting for (slow, cheap) customers to pack their bags or fumble with change.
• The ( Read more... )

After the MIT/Athena bubble, Danish computing infrastructure seems awfully Windows-centric, but every now and then I get a nice surprise. DR just overhauled their live streaming page to offer plain mp3-over-http feeds as well as the asx files for Windows Media Player they offered previously. Intriguingly, they don't brand this as a “Linux- ( Read more... )