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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Magnus Itland's LiveJournal:
| Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 | |
| 10:34 pm | A canary in the mine Norsk Hydro Profit Drops 87% on Power, Metal Prices (Bloomberg). At first glance it seems strange that aluminium prices are going down. Indeed, the article is rather vague on this. Evidently the demand is only weakened in America and Europe, where Hydro has its traditional markets. Increased demands in the developing world seems set to keep raw material costs rising. I am not sure how long that will last, but any economic sea change that causes the price of ore to fall will probably collapse the price of the finished product even more. It shall be interesting to see if China, India and their local partners will really continue to grow at a brisk speed if America falls into recession. They may have enough internal demand to keep up production, but do they have the financial strength to do so? These nations have primitive capital markets by our standards. There isn't much wealth among the populace (pensions funds, for instance, which are gigantic in the US, are barely noticeable in the developing world for obvious reasons). |
| 9:24 am | This calls for a feminine icon "Scandinavia: Where women are women and men are too" (From the front page of What Is Enlightenment magazine.) No wonder I sometimes feel like a lesbian in a man's body... Current Mood:  amused |
| Friday, July 18th, 2008 | |
| 12:13 am | There is a reason I hang out with raccoons online. Erasmus: "I wonder what happens when you run off to Vegas to find yourself." Van: "You might find yourself, but it stays in Vegas after you leave." Current Mood: amused |
| Thursday, July 17th, 2008 | |
| 5:51 pm | New LiveJournal strikes again So LJ sent me an e-mail linking to a crash course in how to get what you want by acting contrite. I'm so sorry I suddenly unbuttoned your blouse, but I promise I won't need to do that anymore once I have pulled down your pants. Actually in our more platonic relationship with LJ, it was We apologize for eliminating new Basic accounts, they will be back as soon as we have changed Basic accounts to include advertising. Good news: We still get to keep the underpants, as in basic users not seeing ads on their friends' journals and communities they watch. For now. Kind of makes me wonder how Google can PAY Bloggers to place unobtrusive ads wherever they want on their journal. Mind you, I have spoken up in favor of Internet advertising since 1998, at which time I had only dial-up access, which was so slow that ads made me wait for the actual content, and furthermore I paid by the minute for that dial-up so ads actually was a visible expense on my household budget. I supported advertising then and I support it now: Making the gullible people pay for the cynical people is a principle I'd like to extend to all areas of life. (I also, not by coincidence, support state-run lotteries.) It is the goddamned hypocricy I hate. (And there are few things more God-damned than hypocricy.) If I am not allowed to be a hypocrite, neither should anyone else!! Current Mood:  aggravated |
| Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 | |
| 9:53 pm | Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu (1) This is a weird anime, but not in the usual way. The art is not experimental, there are no aliens or robots, it probably falls in the "slice of life" category so far. But the plot is pretty rare. The male protagonist is a supposedly normal high school boy. He lives with his older sister and her drinking buddy, a hot young female teacher. (The teacher is there only for comic relief, though.) They harass Yuuto to the point where he loses faith in women in general. The female protagonist is the school's supergirl. Rich, beautiful, smart, musical, and unapproachable in her politeness, she is the dream of every boy in the school. She is also secretly an otaku, but knows that her reputation would be ruined if anyone found out. And then Yuuto finds out. Being moderately well informed about anime and manga himself, he doesn't find anything strange about her interest - after all, his best friend is an otaku too. After this, the two become friends. A very unmatched pair. The story is comedic in places, but I would not call it a comedy. It is not outright ecchi, although there are situations that could probably arouse young people who concentrated on them. It may not be something you would watch with your grandmother, but a parent would probably be OK with it. The plot is original enough to keep me curious. I will watch the second episode too if I get the chance. It is kind of rare to see a series that is unlike any I have seen before. |
| 6:30 pm | Who made me the Zeitgeist anyway? Oil Falls $8 as Bernanke Says Risks to U.S. Growth Have Risen (Bloomberg) - Needless to say I had the previous entry planned out from the morning. I don't mind people reading my mind however as long as it is for a good purpose. |
| 12:48 am | Yay The bathtub drain seems to work as intended, for the first time since I moved in here. (It used to be, if I actually filled it up somewhat with water, the water would exit the bathtub but part of it would come up from a drain in the floor nearby to flood the floor.) |
| Saturday, July 12th, 2008 | |
| 6:54 pm | Obviosity A flower cannot be predicted from the dirt it grows in. |
| Friday, July 11th, 2008 | |
| 3:10 pm | Non-business: FOOD diaries! How Food Diaries Work (Time) I haven't done this myself, but evidently it helps people who struggle with keeping their weight down without having any medical disorder. I wonder if it is not related to the way people eat less if they are facing a mirror while they eat. (By all means try this at home.) I think of it as a way of increasing consciousness. Hard to go wrong with that. More about that later, Light willing. Current Mood:  hungryCurrent Music: CMX - Baikonur |
| 11:38 am | "Market gravity" In Praise of Oil Speculation (BusinessWeek) explains fairly well why speculators are good for us, but I'll add a little to make it even easier to understand. ( Read more... ) Current Mood: lunch |
| Thursday, July 10th, 2008 | |
| 12:13 am | "Minä olen unohtanut miltä tuntuu rakastaa." From the Finnish song I wrote about earlier, Baikonur by CMX. Admittedly it is the only line in the song I really comprehend, and even then just barely, since it is in Finnish and Finnish is a completely different type of language, less related to ours than Sanskrit and ancient Greek. On the plus side, the Finns live right across Sweden from us so it's not like we never meet them. Anyway, it says: "I have forgotten how it feels to love." And yeah, I have pretty much forgotten that, from not thinking about it for a long time. I would probably not have thought about it now either if not that guy had been singing about forgetting about it. ( Read more... ) |
| Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 | |
| 10:11 pm | CMX: Baikonur No, that's not Icelandic for bacon. Well, it would be amusing if it were. Baikonur is a space launch site in Kazakhstan. But in this context, it is a song by the Finnish band CMX. This song is awesome, for the reason that I like it. I heard it on Last.FM, and before it was finished I had added it to my Loved Tracks. Since then it has grown on me, so I began to wait for it to come again. (I have amassed rather a number of loved tracks, by my standards. It would take hours to get through them all.) Unfortunately it is not easy to buy Finnish music if you don't live in Finland. And unlike many other well-known songs, it doesn't seem to be on YouTube or Imeem. So Last.FM is for now the only way I can hear it. Anyway I think it would be worth buying if I could. But even the "buy" button on Last.FM only takes me to a bunch of other CMX tracks. The Finns are awesome at making melancholy songs. Incidentally, the Finns are supposedly direct descendants of the Cro-Magnon, the first of our species to replace the Neanderthals in Europe. This makes a lot of sense, they probably retreated up there when the weather became unbearably hot further south. It is easy to imagine the men gathering in some deep underground cave filled with paintings of bison and horses and phalluses in the flickering light of a single tar-drenched torch, solemnly singing: "minä olen unohtanut miltä tuntuu rakastaa" like they truly mean it. |
| 11:43 am | ... http://www.lively.com/ Google lets you make your own virtual world. (As usual only for IE and Firefox.) Wor(l)ds fail me. Current Mood: lunch |
| Monday, July 7th, 2008 | |
| 9:24 pm | Tetsuwan Birdy Decode, ep 1 A.k.a "Birdy the Mighty". >< I did not see the first anime adaptation, but anyway, rarely has an anime title been so misleading. There is no hint of our feathered friends in here. "Birdy" is an alien shape-changing super police, whose battle form for some reason looks like a sporty North European woman. The male protagonist is the usual guy, bland in body and soul, clueless about girls, and drawn rather similar to real Japanese high school boys, at least more so than the rest of the cast. You know the type. Usually this is a hallmark of harem anime, but there is little sign of that. You see, the male protagonist dies in the second half of the first episode. Luckily his consciousness is saved (presumably by some technology indistinguishable from magic) but his body is beyond rescue. So he gets to share the body of the smexy alien policewoman. (After all, she did kill him, even if it was by mistake.) So yeah, they kinda start living together, but in her body. That's taking it even further than UFO Princess Valkyrie (or was that UFO Valkyrie Princess?). I certainly look forward to seeing where this will go. Then again I have a soft spot for boys who turn into magical princesses. (I suppose we should all be glad that it is a soft spot.) The difference in style and tempo could not be much greater compared to Natsu no Sora. I still think this reflect the gender of the target audience. The opening song is pleasant but not memorable, which means the anime will probably turn out the same. Current Mood:  geeky |
| Sunday, July 6th, 2008 | |
| 10:58 pm | Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto: Natsu no Sora Watched the first episode. It is rather slow, but then again it is primarily made for young girls. They may be less inclined toward the flying start? Very little seems to happen in the first episode, and yet something is accomplished. Perhaps this will be the way all through the series? The art is peculiar. The background is almost exclusively photography, whereas the characters are drawn, and they are drawn rather cartoonish at that. It takes some getting used to. The background music is rural and seems to be Celtic inspired. I don't remember for sure if it was like that in the first series, but it is OK, and the opening and ending songs are nice. Not memorable, but nice. The magic system is the same as in the original Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto - Someday's Dreamers. It is supposedly set in the same world, which is almost identical to ours despite the existence of some mages. (They perform useful, government-sanctioned work. No medieval castles or fireball wars here.) Still, it is not really all that similar to the first series. I might not have recognized the first episode if they had called it something entirely different. Oh, and the anime is utterly family-friendly. Current Mood:  sleepy |
| 1:45 pm | "Humans are obviously unique. But it's suprisingly hard to say why" says the front page of New Scientist 24. May 2008. Yes, it must be very hard if you're a fundie materialist, because the thing that makes humans unique is our ability to send our mind away from the material plane to visit lower and higher worlds. This superpower is what we call "imagination", but unfortunately it has a bit of an undeserved bad rep. But without it we would not just be deprived of porn and soap operas and The Sims, we would also lack religion, matemathics and other forms of science that require us to first guess the unknown before we can use it to understand the known. By "lower worlds" I mean the worlds we create, such as daydreams or computer games. By "higher worlds" I mean the worlds that create us, such as matemathics and perennial religion. The lower worlds are easy to change but woefully temporary. The higher worlds are longer lasting than the daily world, but painfully hard and unyielding. Because higher and lower worlds are both accessed by imagination, it is not always obvious which is which. Take great art, for instance. Some of the Cro-Magnon cave paintings still radiate a strange beauty/power after more than 10 000 years, especially to those who see them firsthand or who have an artistic disposition themselves. On a shorter time scale, Bach and Beethoven are long gone from this world, but the beauty they brought here remains. Verticalists will say that these works are a form of "revelation", which is (broadly speaking) content from a higher world being channeled into ours (or even further, into worlds we create, thus lifting them up to or beyond our own). The concept is borrowed from religion, so your vocabulary may vary. In any case, this is what makes humans unique. There are birds able to make tools, different from but on a similar scale of complexity as the handaxes our ancestors used 100 000 years ago. But to the best of our knowledge, no animal can follow us into the higher and lower worlds, through the doorways of imagination. |
| Friday, July 4th, 2008 | |
| 2:12 pm | Oh yeah while I remember it, happy Independence Day to the citizens of the (reasonably) United States of America! Please continue being independent this year too! |
| 12:30 pm | I am easily amused... One of the municipalities I am helping in the summer vacation is called Sauherad, which means "sheep municipality". To the best of my knowledge it can mean nothing else in Norwegian or any of the nearby languages. I bet it is a thankful job being politician there. EDIT: Or how about Nissedal, which means "gnome valley". It must be interesting for the people from there when they try to tell random strangers where they live. Current Mood: workingCurrent Music: A Flock of Seagulls - Space Age Love Song |
| Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 | |
| 6:38 pm | The US Presidential election has started ... sort of Thanks to the amazing power of Google Translate, you can now read this story about the US election taking place in Norway. It is remarkable not only for its content, but because the word rendered by Google Translate as "Hell" is actually Kvinesdal, a place name here on the south coast of Norway with an extreme country & western culture. I am not giving any feedback to Google to report this error. I also cordially invite you to look around the page and enjoy the fruits of the planet's leading machine intelligence. While this means my miso soup cooking catgirl robot is still far away, it does wonders for my employment prospects. |
| 6:18 pm | More than cucumber, strangely enough Watermelon Has Viagra-Like Effect, Say Scientists (Discovery News). |