The Weird Als of Finland

Grok Headline matches for The Weird Als of Finland

Weird - really really weird - to see
Belle de Jour in a top ten of most
powerful people in UK New Media.
Slightly crack-fueled dreaming for that
particular journo tonight, I fear

Weird - really really weird - to see
Belle de Jour in a top ten of most
powerful people in UK New Media.
Slightly crack-fueled dreaming for that
particular journo tonight, I fear 07/13/2004 08:23 AM
at least according to the woefully misinformed

media.guardian.co.uk/top100_2004/index/0,14656,1247481,0 0.html
track this site | 4 links

Wireless Finland

Wireless Finland 03/06/2004 01:55 AM

The Helsingin Sanomat ran an article in the paper earlier this week about the growing number of wireless access points in Helsinki and around Finland. The article included a nice map noting the locations which I scanned in and offer here in a small ~60k jpg and a large ~240k jpg. It seems that most of the current hot spots are catering to the business traveller judging from the number of hotels and business centers listed. There are a few cafes and a movie theatre or two listed though and my hope is that it finds sufficient interest to keep spreading. I've had wireless at home for years now and find it luxurious to sit on the couch with my laptop even now. I'd really like to see WiFi in public libraries in addition to more coffee shops since students would benefit a lot from being able to use their own computer while doing research or homework.

There are two companies offering WiFi; Sonera and DNA. DNA seems to be geared more towards the local geeks and ala carte folks while Sonera is mainly in the hotel and business traveller market. Sonera Homerun doesn't appear to have a pricing structure on the net. The DNA WLAN service has three different price plans which range from €5 per month with a per minute fee to €90 for those with a serious porn habit and large downloads.

Until mobile phones get much more sophisticated displays, surfing the net or reading email with them more than occasionally isn't as attractive as having a small laptop and WiFi in convenient spots around town. WiFi really means WIreless FInland. :)

Dan Gillmor in Finland

Dan Gillmor in Finland 03/14/2005 06:21 PM
For anyone who's been following the late journalism-debate, the Man Himself, i.e. Dan Gillmor is coming to Finland. Please join him in an open session at Korjaamo, Helsinki, Tuesday, 12 April at 18:00. I'll certainly try to be there.

Ja sama suomeksi: Dan Gillmor, toimittaja-bloggaaja, joka on puhunut pitkään kansalaisjournalismin puolesta, on tulossa puhumaan avoimeen keskustelutilaisuuteen Helsingissä, Korjaamolla, tiistaina 12. huhtikuuta kello 18.00. Tervetuloa!

(Via Jyri.)

Through Finland in Packets

Through Finland in Packets 06/17/2005 04:27 PM

« Crime scene jesus. »

Ever since the Washington Post started doing their 'Finland Journal' blog I've been thinking about saying something, but wanted to wait until they had finished the series and until I had enough time to think about what I wanted to say without sounding like one of the many wackjobs, both Finnish and American, whose comments ranged from explaining how to pronounce SOW-na to ranting about the Swedish Fascist oppression in Finland to bickering about nothing. Mostly I just found the commentary deeply depressing as monoculture was praised as the reason for all the good things in Finland and the reason for all the bad things in the US a bit more often than I found comfortable. I come from one of the most fucked up nations on the planet, but I'm awfully glad for the variety of people there since it is the greatest asset the US has in terms of creativity and innovation. Being a threat to this vaunted Finnish monoculture is not a fun place to be at times. Some expats just complain, some never do and the rest of us try to get on with life as best as we can and occasionally, cautiously, commiserate over beer and try to focus on the positive things as much as possible. One of the reasons I like my 'cookery' is that it's fun to explore the differences in cuisine, I'm reasonably good at it, it's something positive, and nobody hates the person who brings tasty treats for afternoon coffee. :)

There has been a lot of criticism among the foreigners, and even a Phinn, here about the series since visiting somewhere as a journalist on an official junket likely sponsored by the state vs. living here are two very different experiences and given the inevitable superficiality of the WP coverage, a lot of us were disappointed. One of the reasons that Finland is supposedly the "country that Americans know least about" is that aside from the usual Santa, sauna and sisu stories, very little else gets written in English about this country. I've taken to collecting books on travel to Finland, some more than 100 years old, and I could match the topics nearly 1:1 with the old travelogues to the Finland Journal coverage. In fact, I think I liked the bitchy and less fawning Mrs. Tweedie's Through Finland in Carts from 1898 much better as, in spite of her unsavoury British imperialism, she was a far more snarky and entertaining writer. But, again, same shit, different century. Surely, even the Finns must bore of this though the clichés are what keep the tourists coming. It's like the hackneyed 'pahk ya cah in Havahd Yahd' and Paul Revere legends of Boston. The Boston strangler, townies and Southie don't get a lot of press since they aren't exactly attractive to locals much less to tourists.

For the expats, there's precisely dick to prepare them for what awaits them making a life here. Trying to explain how Finland differs for residents as opposed to tourists to the newly arrived is a chore since you either sound bitter or are constantly doubting your own experience of everything in a miasma of cultural relativism and personal baggage. A lot of us come to live here because we have a spouse/SO, a spouse/SO who very likely does not have an objective view or an understanding of the difference between being Finnish and being not Finnish in Finland. I was in quite a sulk for a few weeks after I met an Aus-Fin couple who had moved here and, after two months, the Australian was escaping in defeat after being told repeatedly in interviews that her education credentials were worthless in Finland, the downside of an educational system regarded, and which regards itself, so highly. Her boyfriend seemed completely surprised by this and felt badly for not being a better judge of his own country. With the dearth of realistic information for those wanting to move here, many have no other choice than to trust their Finnish loved one which may or may not prove to be the best option. This seems to happen more often than not as expats don't often stay for more than a few years before giving up and heading back home, with or without the spouse/SO. I don't know if immigration actually keeps track of those who leave and why, but it would be interesting to see the average length of stay for expats as I expect it is generally very short. How many of the foreigners work for Nokia would also be an interesting statistic.

The question this raises is why do people leave? Finland is, in many ways, a lovely country, but why do expats frequently only stay for a short while? It's an important question, one few seem curious about or willing to discuss. The most frequent rebuttals to any criticism or merely mentioning that life here can be a challenge is that it's "the same everywhere" or that we can always just pack up and go home. Ironically, I would expect this sort of chiding from red state Americans. I think that this might be at the heart of much of our nebulous reasons for struggle here; that Finland is a young country, even by American standards, and with a long history of fighting off invading outsiders, Finland has developed a very, very strong streak of nationalism. What's wrong with nationalism? Well, after 9/11, I saw neighbours wanting to beat the shit out of the grocers down the street who had been there for over 20 years because suddenly they were those dark towel heads, "them", who flew into the WTC instead of the two brothers who had been selling them their groceries for decades. Nationalism separates as much as it binds and mostly it just makes people blind and monumentally stupid.

One of the first memorable experiences was while walking HB down Bulevardi about a week after arriving here and running into a smiling little old lady who wanted to pet him and started chatting me up. As soon as I started to say something the smile fell off her face which was replaced by a scowl full of scorn whereupon she screeched something, waved me off and stalked away in a huff. I was like, what the fuck just happened? This would be repeated quite a few times and, in spite of being able to rationalise the behaviour, first impressions tend to be difficult to change. I remain rather shy about being busted as a foreigner and still have a very difficult time daring to say anything to strangers. In the dog park, I'll stand around understanding everything the other dog owners are saying but don't join the conversation which has, on occasion, marked me as a foreigner just as much as saying something would have. :)

Generally, it's the small things, the day to day things, the very difficult to define things, that make life as an outsider here a daily struggle. Learning the language is the single largest hurdle in bridging the gap and becoming less of an alien, but after two years I'm still cautious, still shy, still neurotic about speaking it to the point of avoiding situations where I might have to say something to someone because I'm scared of being busted as an outsider. We all have little defensive tactics like this, depending on our individual hang-ups and struggles. One of my friends visited home a while back and she remarked in an email that she was in awe of how suddenly aware she was of how the little daily things in Finland make life so much more work than back in the realm of the friendly familiarity of home.

Some things, however, aren't so vague, but these are the things we don't talk about or quietly discuss amongst ourselves because they're either too depressing to dwell upon or tend to be met with vituperative attacks. There are things endemic to being an expat, a foreigner in a strange land, that often make you wonder if it's you, if you're not trying hard enough or if it's the culture that is responsible for the discontent and many things often do have simple explanations, if not simple solutions. I have lived elsewhere and, given the culture and the language barrier, Finland is a very challenging place to find a happy niche whether or not any Finns want to hear or acknowledge that. It's not a destination for the easily discouraged or the impatient.

Recently, I had the pleasure of talking to a couple with two adorable basset hounds who had just returned to Finland after 7 years abroad who remarked at how "international" Helsinki seemed nowadays. There are many words I'd use to describe Helsinki, most of them nice even, but international wouldn't be one of them. Being part of the EU while rejecting or reluctantly accepting some of the things that come with being part of the EU, like foreigners, doesn't make a place international any more than dining out at a Nepalese restaurant makes you a world traveller. This doesn't mean Finland should aspire to the problems of the Netherlands, but acknowledging the problems that exist here for foreigners might be something to consider since people do generally tend to stay in places that they feel welcome in and Finland, either intentionally or not, often gives outsiders the impression that we are either not welcome or just merely tolerated. If Finland doesn't want foreigners, it should really just pull out of the EU and close the borders.

So, I suppose the point of my rambling is that there are at least a few of us around who like it here and are trying with sincerity to learn the language, fit in and get along like everyone else but there are so many conflicting messages between what we read in the paper or hear from our spouses and what we actually experience at times that it makes it difficult to reconcile the disparity and still keep on trying. It's a struggle. It's like bloody musical chairs watching all the expats leave one by one.

W3C Offices Expand to Finland

W3C Offices Expand to Finland 09/06/2002 04:44 AM
6 September 2002: W3C is pleased to announce the opening of the W3C Finnish Office in Tampere, Finland, hosted by the Digital Media Institute of the Tampere University of Technology. Tarja Systä is Office Manager, and Ossi Nykänen is coordinator. The opening ceremony takes place 11 October in Tampere. Read about W3C Offices. (News archive)

Finland no comprende computers

Finland no comprende computers 06/06/2005 12:11 AM
Schizo-J anne asks why Finland is lagging behind in WLAN deployments. There are roughly three free WiFi hotspots in Helsinki, a major difference to our neighbour Tallinn, which has open WiFi almost everywhere in the city center. Well, the Finnish cities of Oulu, Turku, and Lahti have already started lacing themselves with WLAN networks, and the Lappeenranta University of Technology WLAN network is to my understanding also spreading into the city, so the situation is not really that bad.

But Janne is right to ask this. Finland is not really very innovative in this area at the moment, partly because it's not seen as very important. A lot of Finland's technological and financial innovation is currently poured towards the 3G (aka WCDMA, aka UMTS) development and deployment. While technologically it offers a similar solution to WLAN, and Finns are doing pretty well in mobile phone usage (though nowhere near the top), there is one key difference that people tend to ignore when talking about these things.

Freedom to innovate.

In order for you to develop a fancy new 3G app, you need to talk to and appease operators, cell phone manufacturers, and all sorts of different companies that are in the so-called "value chain". Everybody wants their small piece of it, and you end up thinking about things like "brand dilution" and "quality of service" and "code signing". All this creates quite a lot of energy, and it does not guarantee that you will create a good app - it just means that you are really good at presenting your case, and it does make sense to a lot of people. Even if you wanted to just build a simple SMS-based service, you would need quite a lot of investment of at least time, if not capital, to interface with the network: you need the PC with a bunch of cell phones attached. Or buy a platform from an operator.

Open WLAN, however, means that you can start to innovate at very, very low costs. Web space is cheap, PHP can be done by anyone, and startup costs are minimal. All you need is the idea, and the tools and the knowledge are mostly there already. Granted, you can also run a browser-based application on a 3G phone, no problem, but this always is at cost to the user: the browser-based UI is not optimal for a small device. And developing an optimized GUI for a mobile device is difficult and sometimes nerve-wrecking.

You can split the space in two ways: you can concentrate on innovating vertically : building entire solutions from the low bits to the end application. Or you can innovate horizontally - build platforms which allow other people to innovate and build upon.

3G or WLAN.

It's just like "Nokia or Linux".

I'm not saying Nokia wasn't a success, obviously it was (and is). But I do believe that in the future, it's more probable to see a new Linux-like success story than a Nokia-like success story coming from Finland. Which is why supporting platforms for free innovation would be so important.

Finland OKs 3G Network Sharing

Finland OKs 3G Network Sharing 04/16/2004 06:11 AM
Unstrung.com Apr 16 2004 10:21AM GMT

Part 3G Networks In Finland

Part 3G Networks In Finland 04/19/2004 07:03 AM
3G Apr 19 2004 11:08AM GMT

From Finland, the land of the original

From Finland, the land of the original 12/26/2003 07:54 PM
Rare Exports, Inc. They deliver the extremely rare original Finnish product to nearly 150 countries every Christmas, exclusively. It's a big download (the small version is 35.5 MB) but that's nothing compared to the patience these hunters must have to catch their prey. [NSFW, via MonkeyFilter.]

Explosion in Finland: 7 Dead

Explosion in Finland: 7 Dead 10/15/2002 07:15 AM
Explosion in Finland: 7 Dead From Yahoo News via Google News: A bomb ripped through a one of Finland's largest shopping malls, killing seven people, injuring 59 others and stunning a nation unaccustomed to violence. Government officials didn't rule ... [ More ] Good lord. What's going on in the world. Snipers in the U.S. and a bomber in Finland ....

Commercial bl0gs entering Finland

Commercial bl0gs entering Finland 04/08/2005 06:39 PM
My my, what an interesting week this has been: First, Blogilista goes commercial, and now Pirkka-magazine has launched a number of commercial blogs. The Finnish blogosphere reacts with violent distrust and confusion.

I see no problem. These are clearly blogs, simply because th e only meaningful definition for the world blog is based on form, not content. They're not lying about their affiliation. They publish polished content. In fact, I find it wonderful that a media publisher dares to go and try and embrace the new media. They even publish Atom feeds for all blogs! Way!

However, entering the blogosphere may be more difficult than just dumping Movabletype on your magazine web site: people will look at these blogs. They will discuss. They will find crap on them (if there's any). They will write about it. And it's difficult to ignore them, if you want to keep your credibility. Other bloggers will call your bullshit - and very likely, someone in that bunch is at least equal in writing skills and more knowledgeable on the subject than you. And they know it.

Now the question is how much integrity Pirkka wants to have: do they just want to publish news articles in a blog format - or do they really want to go full out and really try to embrace the dialogue that comes with the format?

You see, whatever else blogs may be, they work best as a personal media. You need to let people write with their own voice, not just copying material from others - even if you have all the rights to do so. It's the power and bane of the format; a personal touch creates reader loyalty, but it also means that you have to get involved in your writing - "laittaa itsensä likoon", as the Finns say. And that is not easy.

Welcome to the crowd! I'm happy you're here, anyway. People will grumble, but there's always room for one more in the jacuzzi.

(A quick hint to Pirkka writers: Read http://www.corporateblogging .info/, and Scoble's Corporat e Blogging Manifesto. Understand. Internalize. And stop posting articles from one person under the name of another... That simply takes away credibility from the author.)

(And a quick other hint to people who complain about these being on blogilista.fi: get a clue. Really. Would you stop using a phone book simply because it contains company phone numbers, or stop using Google because it's *gasp* a profit-making company? That's exactly what Blogilista.fi is - an index of blogs, nothing more. It ain't your personal blogospheric community where people live happily and go to the woods to get undressed and hug each other in a blogoslavic überbliss. If you don't like the direction they're taking, learn to use RSS and site feeds, and make your own personal bloglist.

Blogging in Finland is finally growing up. The hype around blogging will cease in a year or two, and hopefully we then can better understand what the media is and what one can do with it. And then we can get back to the really important thing: writing. Writing about your dog, or your political views, or celebrity divorces, or company products, or food, or your sex life, or whatever pleases you. Some bloggers will gain prestige; some bloggers will become influential; some bloggers will make many people laugh; some bloggers will make many people weep. Some will be completely ignored. Most will just for

...

Larry Lessig to speak in Finland

Larry Lessig to speak in Finland 05/21/2004 06:54 AM
(Via Jyri). Toimitus suosittelee, ja kiroilee kun ei itse pääse paikalle.

KUTSU

Avoin luento ja keskustelutilaisuus
Professor Lawrence Lessig Helsingissä
"The Future of Copyright, Culture and Creativity"
Maanantaina 24.5. klo 17.30
Kulttuuritehdas Korjaamo, Töölönkatu 51 b

Tervetuloa avoimeen keskustelutilaisuuteen Professori Lawrence Lessigin kanssa Helsingissä maantantaina 24.5. klo 17.30 Korjaamolla, Töölönkatu 51b. Professori Lessig on yksi maailman tunnetuimpia ajattelijoita, kirjoittajia ja luennoitsijoita digitaalisen kulttuurin, median ja tekijänoikeuksien kehityksestä. Nyt suomalaisella yleisöllä on ainutlaatuinen mahdollisuus kuulla ja haastaa kansainvälistä vaikuttajaa. Teemana on "The Future of Copyright, Culture and Creativity."

Tilaisuuden järjestää Aula. Aula on avoin verkosto, joka tukee ajatusten vaihtoa poikki rajojen.

Tätä kutsua voi lähettää sähköisesti eteenpäin kaikille kiinnostuneille.

* * *

INVITATION

You are invited to an open discussion with Professor Lawrence Lessig on Monday 24.5. at 17.30 at Korjaamo, Töölönkatu 51 b in Helsinki. Professor Lessig will speak on "The Future of Copyright, Culture and Creativity" followed by a discussion with the audience. The event will be held in English and is free and open to the public.

The event is organized by Aula. Aula is an open network that promotes the exchange of ideas across boundaries.

Please forward this invitation to anyone you feel would be interested in attending.

About the speaker

Lawrence Lessig (http://www.lessig.org/) is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Lessig was also a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and a Professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.

More recently, Professor Lessig represented web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Lessig was named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries, for arguing "against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online."

Lessig teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, law and high technology, Internet regulation, comparative constitutional law, and the law of cyberspace. His book, Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace, was published by Basic Books, and The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, is available from Random House. His most recent book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, is now available online at http://www.free-culture.cc and from Penguin Press.

Professor Lessig chairs the Creative Commons project (http://creativecommons.org/faq). Professor Lessig is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a board member of the Center for the Public Domain, and a Commission Member of the Penn National Commission on Society, Culture and Community at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Lessig earned a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.

Nokia phone explodes in Finland

Nokia phone explodes in Finland 11/06/2003 11:14 AM
Counterfeit battery to blame

Educators Flocking to Finland, Land of
Literate Children

Educators Flocking to Finland, Land of
Literate Children 04/09/2004 08:02 PM
If one trait sets Finland apart from many other countries, it is the quality and social standing of its teachers.

Finland telecoms: Nokia unveils handheld
internet tablet

Finland telecoms: Nokia unveils handheld
internet tablet 06/24/2005 03:06 PM
Ebusinessforum.com - Fri Jun 24, 12:15 pm GMT

Weird

Weird 11/02/2003 04:18 PM

Reading about it being 71 degrees for the NYC Marathon, I was about to go running today (I did the LA marathon in 1997 and was hoping to do one next year) but was surprised to find the rain just turned to snow and is piling up on the roof and streets. New York? 70 and partly sunny. Oregon? snowing.

That Was Weird...

That Was Weird... 07/17/2004 04:40 PM
I just posted a new item, and suddenly there were 22 comments under it -- all from another posting from more than a week ago. I deleted them, but this is just bizarre.

Weird Presents Anyone?

Weird Presents Anyone? 12/25/2003 04:20 PM

Weird Cats

Weird Cats 05/20/2004 01:13 AM
Feline medical curiosities. Polydactyly, conjoined-kitty-fu, "freaks of face," cleft palates, and plain old huge. (Not safe for after lunch).

Weird science

Weird science 12/31/2004 04:43 PM
It didn't take long for politicized debate to get roiling over the nature of the tsunami disaster -- some of it rather murky. Steven Milloy of the Cato Institute and Junk Science.com is now blasting environmentalists for "shameless exploitation" as they "surf the tsunami tragedy" in order to bring attention to the problem of global warming. Milloy wants to give the impression that he's navigating through truer waters, but clearly he's looking to ride the wave in a direction of his own:

Weird Swing Bug

Weird Swing Bug 06/22/2004 11:54 PM
We ran into a weird issue with Swing today at work. The small class below reproduces this. 1 import javax.swing.*; 2 import javax.swing.event.TreeModelEvent; 3 import javax.swing.event.TreeModelListener; 4 import javax.swing.tree.DefaultMutableTreeNode; 5 import javax.swing.tree.DefaultTreeModel; 6 7 public class Blah extends JFrame implements TreeModelListener { 8 9 private JTree tree; 10 11 public Blah() { 12 setSize(150, 150); 13 setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE); 14 DefaultMutableTreeNode root... (294 words)

News of the Weird... NOT!

News of the Weird... NOT! 01/02/2005 09:23 PM
Though not the web institution of Jim Romenesko's Obscure Store or as overexposed as Dave Barry's Blog, Chuck Shepherd's NEWS of the WEIRD is a fairly good source for news stories that are... well... WEIRD. And Chuck's the only one who has collected a list of stories that "now occur with such frequency" that they are NO LONGER WEIRD. Quite a resource for judging how our society has changed in the last umpteen years.

In semi-related news, Barry is semi-retiring his weekly column, but we still have AutoDave, the automated Dave Barry column generator. Still, I suspect he did it just to upstage Dan Gillmor's farewell column, as he gives up the old-media columnar life in favor of "Grassroots Journalism".
To Dave Berry, 'Grassroots Journalism' is writing about the brown patch in your lawn directly over the septic tank.

weird referer

weird referer 01/07/2004 04:31 PM

Recently (but I just noticed it today) I started getting HTTP referers that are a variation of the following: "XXXX:+++++++++++++++++++++++" (the number of plus signs varies). A google search with appropriate terms quickly turned up discussions like this one that suggest that the referer is someone using an anonymizer or internet security product of some kind. Without that information it smells like an attempt at an exploit of some kind... but of what kind (and if so, I've never heard of it)?

Anyone knows about this? Has anyone else seen it? I'm curious. :)

Weird-o SMS behaviour

Weird-o SMS behaviour 02/05/2005 09:13 PM
Outi sent me yesterday a sweet text message about mice. True to the nature of these beasts, that SMS started multiplying: for some reason, T-Mobile (yes, I'm in Germany) has decided to deliver that message to me eleven times within the past 24 hours. Even though it has been sent only once.

It seems that every SMS sent from Finland is replaced by this same SMS message - so if you've tried to contact me, I have only seen a message about a mouse from Outi. Sorry. You gotta try and resend, if you had anything to say (or just email me).

Weirdosity++.

Found, one weird buoy

Found, one weird buoy 01/05/2005 06:31 AM
David Pescovitz: This giant buoy washed ashore in Cocoa Beach, Florida and nobody has any clue where it came from or who it belongs to. From Florida Today:

"There's no identifying marks on it, so I don't know where it came from," said Jeff Galliher, petty officer with the U.S. Coast Guard at Port Canaveral. "It's just a buoy base with a tower coming out of it."

Link (via Fark)

Weird and wonderful - the year's top ten

Weird and wonderful - the year's top ten 01/06/2005 09:48 PM
Manchester Online Jan 7 2005 1:48AM GMT

six apart people have weird names

six apart people have weird names 08/18/2004 02:47 AM
makes me feel right at home

Weird color problem

Weird color problem 01/05/2005 10:26 PM
Mark Frauenfelder: (Click thumbnail for enlargement.) Anyone know why the body copy shows in gold in IE on OS X? It seems fine on Safari and Firefox. Please email me if you know the answer. (Also, thanks to everyone for your great design suggestions. As you can see, I've incorporated quite a few of them.)

Weird Fields winners

Weird Fields winners 04/04/2005 01:18 PM
David Pescovitz: Undergrad Dan Yuan's image here was first runner-up in MIT's annual Weird Fields contest where students generate psychedelic visualizations of vector fields. (Last year's winner here.) The patterns in Yuan's visualization remind me of the background of a Tim Biskup painting.

To help students understand electromagnetic force fields, Professor of Physics John Belcher and colleagues at the MIT Center for Educational Computer Initiatives developed a computer applet into which students put the mathematical expressions that describe a given field. "It then pops out a visual representation of what the field looks like," he said.

Link

UPDATE: As the MIT press release and BB reader Tom Zeller point out, the Weird Fields visualizations bear a striking resemblance to sections of Gustav Klimt paintings. Link

Weird 'net problem

Weird 'net problem 11/26/2002 07:26 PM
My Internet connection went down for a little while, and when it came back up, all outgoing SMTP and WWW...

Weird Science & Bad Photoshopping

Weird Science & Bad Photoshopping 01/16/2004 11:02 AM
Top 10 impossible inventions that allegedly work. Includes such conspiracy-nut favorites as a system for sending power wirelessly, an anti-gravity device, the cloudbuster and an electronic telepathy device. [Snagged from Disinformat ion.]

Message from Weird Al Yankovic

Message from Weird Al Yankovic 04/14/2004 03:48 PM
Comedian/musician "Weird Al" Yankovic lost both his mother and father this weekend in an accident involving carbon monoxide poisoning. He's posted a message on his website expressing thanks to fans for their kindness and support in his time of need, and he corrects errors in media coverage on the tragedy. Condolences, and much admiration and respect to Al and his family. Link

Weird sticker on my DSL modem

Weird sticker on my DSL modem 07/12/2004 07:15 PM
I just got my Yahoo! DSL self-install kit in the mail, and the modem has a red sticker on it that reads:

"ATTENTION To maximize connection speed, leave this modem on for 10 days after DSL installation is complete. Please Note: You can use your DSL service during this time. It is not necessary to leave your computer on, only the modem."

Why do I have to leave the modem on for 10 days? Is something inside it fermenting? Email me if you know.

Weird Financial News

Weird Financial News 01/16/2004 11:05 AM
Did you know West Virginia was auctioned off?

Top Tip: W2K weird popups and blocks!

Top Tip: W2K weird popups and blocks! 02/17/2004 01:15 PM
I just reinstalled W2K and it all seems to be working just dandy, but I get about 100 of these pop ups per day saying 'WARNING: This message confirms your computer is vulnerable to attacks' and 'see www.MessageHackShield.com to fix this' or some site like that (there are several different ones as well as several different sized popups).

Weird science for the dedicated gearhead

Weird science for the dedicated gearhead 09/24/2004 01:29 PM
National Post Sep 24 2004 4:49PM GMT

2003 weird news highlights

2003 weird news highlights 01/03/2004 05:56 AM
wacked-out .. wacky

story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&ncid=757&e=1&u=/n m/20040101/od_nm/odd_dc
track this site | 3 links

Weird books for tinkerers and mad
scientists

Weird books for tinkerers and mad
scientists 04/20/2004 12:34 PM
I came across an ad for Lindsay's Technical Books in Popular Science. The ad reads like a classified that would have been in the back of the magazine fifty years ago: "Secrets! Melt Metal! Machine Shop! Hydrogen! Old Time Radio! Tesla! Chemistry! Incredible plans, lost secrets, forgotten how-to, and strange books!" It looks like these folks have a lot of fun in their basement labs and backyard foundries. Link

weird News.com roundup on bl0gs

weird News.com roundup on bl0gs 08/10/2004 03:39 PM
i kind of don't understand what they're doing here
Grok Description matches for The Weird Als of Finland
GrokA matches for The Weird Als of Finland

The Weird Als of Finland

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