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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Magnus Itland's LiveJournal:
| Saturday, May 17th, 2008 | |
| 12:35 pm | It's snowing flower petals Not exactly the snowy weather predicted yesterday. Then again it wasn't me who predicted it. Anyway! Flower petals on the wind, like in romantic anime. Could this be the year I get my own robot catgirl? Current Mood:  amused |
| Friday, May 16th, 2008 | |
| 5:29 pm | Tomorrow is May 17! It is Norway's national day, in celebration of our constitution. It is celebrated intensely here in Norway, with large and festive demonstrations and binge drinking. So I had to shop for the whole weekend today. It should be OK though. The shops have started selling grill potato salad for the season too, oh happy day. After days of total summer weather, tomorrow is predicted to be icy cold and drenched in rain at best, snow some places. It wouldn't surprise me. But as of less than a day before, there is no sign of any of that. It is not the hottest day this week, but you could still be naked outdoors if not for the neighbors. |
| Monday, May 12th, 2008 | |
| 2:27 pm | Peak Oil & the death of the Net? Energy skeptics believe that the end of the Internet is near. The production of today's microchips (not to mention the planned models) is so energy intensive, it will not be possible to keep up after Peak Oil. Personal computers will be available only to the rich, and soon not at all. A generation from now, the most advanced technology will be low-acid paper, which can store information for hundreds of years if stored dry. Of course, these same people assume resource wars, breakdown of governement, and unchecked population growth until mass starvation or large-scale war kills off most people. Neither of these things are even remotely necessary, and assuming them without debate reflects the underlying assumption of fringe groups both to the right and left: That all people except them are untermenschen who need to be ruled or killed. Even so, Peak Oil is upon us. The next major target for crude oil is $200 a barrel, within a year or two. Of course, a goodly part of this is the devaluation of the dollar, but that is cold comfort for the 300 million Americans. So will this cause people to overthrow the government and burn the cities? Or will they install thermostats and power-saving light bulbs, drive their SUV less and put solar panels on the roof? OK, probably not solar panels. Because in northern Europe, we have had double the gas prices of America for years, and very little has changed. There are less SUVs, but solar panels are still only used for isolated cabins. In the latest issue of The Economist, worldwide gains in energy efficiency was estimated at 1.5% p.a., and in the USA 2%. That is to say that with unchanged energy use, the economy could grow by 2% in the USA and 1.5% worldwide, each year. (The difference is probably due to much of the world still industrializing, while the USA is now ever more post-industrial.) Computing and telecommunication is a part of this, and has far more potential. For instance, even though teleconferencing is now a mature and well known technology, business travel by air is still growing rather than dwindling. This is because energy is still so cheap as to be negligible. Somehow I don't see business class travelers looting the airports because their flights have become too expensive. I think there is a lot of room to change behavior within the current paradigm of democracy and market economy. In the long run, there may come a time when making more efficient processors takes more energy at the factory than you save at the offices. At that point, I suppose we shall have to choose between looting & burning or switching to Linux. Current Mood:  hungry |
| Sunday, May 11th, 2008 | |
| 11:04 pm | Dreams I slept in the evening and dreamed that I lived in Japan, where I rented rooms in two neighboring buildings. I could not really afford both and agonized over which one to keep. The little old landlady in one of them offered to reduce the rent if I would occasionally carry her out to the taxi when she was going out. While still in a Japanese dream, I was shown that whether time moves or not depends on one's state of mind. I trained on freezing frames of time. This was about perception, not some kind of superpower: If I stopped time, it stopped for me as well. Current Mood:  awake |
| Friday, May 9th, 2008 | |
| 7:44 pm | Untouched by human hands! Google has started to offer translation from English to Norwegian. The translation has some really strange errors yet. Luckily it offers the reader a chance to supply his or her own translation, which I suppose will influence future translations if many enough people make the same changes. At this time, it has potential as entertainment. I guess it really is better than nothing for the grandparent generation who did not learn English in school (because they went to school during the German occupation, perhaps). I intend to do my part to improve it, by translating some of my own writing. ^_^ Current Mood: amused |
| Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 | |
| 9:23 pm | I am easily amused This mail from WIE magazine was the first time I saw Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens referred to as The Four Horsemen. In related news (also from WIE), 94% of American professors consider themselves more competent than their colleagues. Current Mood:  sleepy |
| 8:36 pm | Business trip again In an hour and a half, I will have to leave for another 23-hour trip to Drammen. I shall, if all goes according to plan, wait a couple hours in Kristiansand, then try to sleep on the train, then sit through a day of meetings (where I will probably be more asleep than awake for the last few hours) and then take the train back home. I consider it marginally preferable to a bad stomach flu, but worse than a common cold. Unfortunately a common cold would not be enough to keep me home. Only things worse than business trips could do that. Oh the irony. Current Mood:  cranky |
| 7:42 pm | Lawnmowing season has begun in the subarctic I sincerely hope the doctors weren't kidding me about how strong my heart is and stuff, because even standing on my feet was exercise after trying to propel my manual lawnmower through the short but desperately tenacious grass. I don't remember it being that hard last year. I wonder if I need to get the blades sharpened. It is as if they are just cutting the grass with some kind of karate rather than like a knife. If I lose speed (due to moss, which there is too much of) I get stuck. Not having sharpened this thing in two years is also kind of suspicious, is it not? Back on the farm we would never let anything go without maintenance for two years. Current Mood:  tired |
| Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 | |
| 5:55 pm | Reflections on employability One of the most remarkable (and remarked-upon) events of this generation has been the "Chinese miracle" (following other East Asian miracles, but on a much larger scale) in which hundreds of millions of people have been lifted from abject poverty into some semblance of middle-class life. Depending on where you set the cutoff, you will get different numbers, but I think it is safe to say that we are talking about a group of humanity larger than the whole population of the United States, or even the European Union. The thing is, however, that they started from an almost unimaginably low level. Most lived on tiny farms that barely gave enough rice for the families that lived there, and a little for taxes. Sometimes there was not enough for both people and taxes, and the people starved. In such a situation, you can readily improve your living by sewing shirts with a manual sewing machine, if someone organizes the sale of the shirts for you. But this won't work once you reach the kind of society we have here. In Norway, we have more jobs than people; but the jobs require not sewing machines, but things like clear thinking in C++, or an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Hyborean Age, or the ability to tell medication from placebo by a quick look at the latin names of the ingredients. |
| Monday, May 5th, 2008 | |
| 5:08 pm | More on food prices Who benefits from soaring commodity prices? (The Economist) You'd think, with everyone paying more for food all over the world, all that money would have to go somewhere. Well, it was not the farmers, it seems. Rather the cost goes on to natural resources and energy (which still to a large extent means oil, but anything that can make electricity rides the rising tide). Also various minerals are rapidly growing more expensive. I consider this good news. There are a lot of alternative energy sources that have simply not been viable without huge subsidies. If oil prices remain high for several years, we should see an explosion of solar, wind and wave power. Not to mention nuclear power, which takes a long time to set up but is quite reliable once running. Using oil to produce fertilizer is bordering on blashpemy. It is not like that animals will go back into the oil wells and die again. Oil is a finite resource and there are uses of it that will be hard to replace. Making fertilizer is not one of them. Any electricity does the trick. In the long run, we have to separate the food prices that stem from energy cost from those that stem from limited arable land. This is trickier to get around, but there is a lot of land that is "marginal". If people could afford to pay more for food, this land would be cultivated. The problem is not that food prices are too high. The problem is that the poor are too poor. The only long-term solution to this is for them to do something useful that they will get paid for. These days, this requires more than getting up in the morning and wanting to work. It is a rather huge project to make a person employable. But I don't need to tell that to you guys. Current Mood: hungry |
| Sunday, May 4th, 2008 | |
| 12:01 am | Awesome personal " Nice to meet you, I am British male, gray-blue eyes, broun hair, look like Brandon in 90210, seeking penpal to talk on different topocs. Im English teacher and have my own school." (As reported by a Norwegian student in Japan.) |
| Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 | |
| 12:19 pm | "Malthus fence" I passed a construction site today as I took a walk. It was fenced and the fences were clearly labeled "malthusgjerdet", directly translated "the malthus fence". This amused me greatly. I had this subconscious expectation that a Malthus Fence was a physical or symbolic barrier between areas of stable population and areas of unchecked breeding. The last refuge of the competent, so to speak. Seeing it on a construction site was kinda surreal. "One day we will tear up the Malthus Fence, and claim all the treasures of Nova Roma for ourselves and our children!" "SKAAAAAAL!" Current Mood: amused |
| 9:26 am | Tax A recent poll by Synovate on behalf of the Norwegian Taxpayer Union shows that seven out of ten Norwegians don't mind paying their taxes and think they get plenty back from them. Current Mood: amused |
| Friday, May 2nd, 2008 | |
| 4:06 pm | Irony of fate Bernanke's bind (The Economist) This article more than implies that the interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve play a role in pushing up commodity prices, especially for Americans but indirectly for the whole world. |
| 9:19 am | Real and imaginary crises Media thrive on disaster, and this is also true for the financial news. While some see a liberal mainstream media conspiracy to support the socialist presidential candidate, I think it boils down to getting out the big headlines for fun and profit. The truth is that the crisis has hardly begun. Yes, there was a sudden and dramatic breakdown in a part of the finance sector after the collapse of the subprime bubble. But this was quickly and efficiently contained by the central banks. If you look at the stock market, it is still hovering eerily close to all-time high. It doesn't look like investors are dumping their shares in panic. There have been more amplitude than usual, but the overall trend is at worst a gentle slide. And house prices have not tumbled. Yes, locally they have. There are entire neighborhoods more or less getting shut down. But they are few and get a lot of publicity while young people looking for their first home still face the reality of artificially high prices. There is far more to go. And that is the thing. There is far more to go. America in particular has built up a huge imbalance, financing consumption rather than investment with borrowed money. This will necessarily come home to roost, one way or another. I have predicted hard times ahead since the 1990es. Of course, people who predict the end of the world will sooner or later be right, but this is not quite it. Rather the recession of 2001 should have continued and deepened for a while, giving a Japan-like sideways slide for perhaps a decade. This did not happen. Instead, a rebound on borrowed money. Which is why I have become more pessimistic the longer the good times went on. But it has barely even begun. Being back to the level of September 2007 is not exactly reason for impeachment, I think. If there is wailing and gnashing of teeth before there is even an official recession (two sequential quarters of GDP contraction), what will it sound like when the tide goes out? |
| 1:43 am | Ecological / organic farming I just read an interesting little article in Norwegian on the topic of ecological food (which I believe is usually called organic food in English, or at least in American). This is food that is grown without synthetic fertilizer and without pest or weed poison. Instead, natural fertilizers are used, weeds are pulled manually or mechanically, and pests are deterred by planting certain types of plants together that repel pests, as well as using hybrid strains of cultivated and wild sorts that are naturally resistant to pests and diseases. Most customers of these products are probably vegans, but there is also some ecological milk production, at least there is here in Scandinavia. The article questioned the morality of farming methods that give less than 60% of the crops you could have gotten from the same area, in a time where food is getting scarce. ( I disagree... ) Current Mood: sleepy |
| Thursday, May 1st, 2008 | |
| 9:22 pm | Holy-day Today we have a day off from work. It is a holy day both for Christians (who celebrate Jesus's return to space) and Marxists (who celebrate the 8-hour workday). Most of the remaining Christians gather to the churches, whereas I suppose the Marxists gather at The People's House (no seriously, that's a literal translation of what the Marxist temples are called here). It is too bad they these events should fall on the same day, as either would be enough to warrant a day off. But I shall just have to try to enjoy it twice as much. |
| Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 | |
| 6:19 pm | Food. Don't come home without it. I felt like getting a couple banana yogurt anyway. So while I was at the shop, I picked up a few packets of dried pasta, and a couple boxes of canned vegetables. Stuff that can stand a few years without spoiling. It was more like because I could carry that much anyway. It's not like I'm stocking up for a food shortage, you know. There won't be any of that up here in Norway. Well, not for any foreseeable reason at least. Asteroid hits, Iceland exploding, that kind of stuff could be a problem. But not just the usual stupidity. I mean, so what if some countries decide to stop exporting food to keep it for their own citizens? Norway is exporting a lot of fish, which we could keep as well if they want to play it that way. And there is a lot of terrain that can be used to produce food if people really needed to. But food has been so cheap for so long that we have had to pay farmers as if they were state employees to make them stay on their farms. Paying a little more for the food is only healthy. My countrymen are starting to get a little chubby as it is. But anyway, I just happen to like pasta. And vegetables. Current Mood: full |
| Monday, April 28th, 2008 | |
| 6:41 pm | Remember your lunch? Memories of your last meal can help you stay thin - New Scientist (mostly subscriber content). "Suzanne Higgs and colleagues at the University of Birmingham, UK, asked a group of women students to take part in a biscuit taste test, having previously given them a set lunch. Before the test began, Higgs encouraged half of the women to write a detailed description of their lunch, while the rest were asked to recall their journey to the campus. After the taste test, which had been designed to hide the true nature of the study from participants, each woman was invited to eat their fill of the remaining biscuits. The women who had recalled their lunch ate fewer biscuits than those who recalled their journey, Higgs found." It is widely assumed that thinking of food can cause people to eat more. But it seems that thinking of food you already ate can cause people to eat LESS. I happened to know one guy who had a brain damage that caused him to forget most of his life. He filled the blank with steadily new imaginary exploits, though. But more to the case, he also forgot his meals soon after he had eaten them, and would then proceed to eat again. And again. And again. It is pretty amazing. Until then, I thought there were sensors in the stomach that measured whether you were full or not. But evidently these play only a minor role, while the brain plays a major role. In any case, I present you with this valuable piece of knowledge because I care. ^_^ Live long and prosper! Current Mood: hungry |
| Saturday, April 26th, 2008 | |
| 9:41 am | The clouds are back... after almost a week of near summer weather here on the south coast of Norway. It was a bit early, to tell it as I see it. But hopefully we won't go back to snow again. Trees and bushes are alreaedy putting on their green. |