The straight line

The Finnish racist Mikko Ellilä has been ordered to pay a fine and remove some of his blog postings from the Internet, this one in particular. The court found that Ellilä had intentionally denigrated people of African descent. I would say that the court is right about that, but I hadn’t realised this was illegal. Time to face facts: freedom of speech doesn’t exist in Finland. Not like it does, say, in the US.

edit: here’s the court transcript. I think Ellilä defends himself pretty well. The prosecutor is shocking: he hardly refers to law at all, but instead gets into a debate with Ellilä about the truth value of the claims in the blog post. His strategy is to pompously point out the unpleasantness of Ellilä’s ideas, trusting this to be enough to bring about a conviction – and it was.

another edit: it appears that Ellilä doesn’t self-identify as a racist but as an individualist. Duly noted.

Here’s a translating nut to crack: monitoimitila. What does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything. What is it? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s anything. Is it something like this? Or this? This, perhaps? Maybe more along these lines. They’re all monitoimitila, all different and none of them are like the thing in the thing I’m translating. Or I assume so – I don’t actually know what the thing is.

edit: I’ve decided it’s “multipurpose area” which probably isn’t anything either. Now, what the fuck is a ravintolakokonaisuus?

Rhymes in poetry one doesn’t like seem silly whereas rhymes in poetry one likes don’t. Is my theory. And I’m gonna test it! By giving the rhymes without the poetry. The theory states that it’s difficult to tell which rhymes are stupid and which aren’t. Okay. You can do this in two ways: just guess which ones are “real” poets and which are trashy pop, or actually try to map the rhymes to the rhymers.

Rhymes:

1) ash / abash / clash / man / can

2) year / here / too / renew / age / page / join / coin

3) away / day / disappear / hear / night / right / fast / last

4) way / lay / say / ring / sing

5) knew / chew / doubt / out / cried / subside / losing / amusing

6) seen / been / hold / told / skies / eyes

7) run / sun / weep / sleep / deep

8) more / shore / still / hill / tree / me / farm / harm / gave / grave

9) me / free / shoe / through / rule / pool / drool

10) true / you / know / below / pay / away

Sources:

a) Keats
b) Byron
c) Britney Spears (lyric presumably written by someone else)
d) The Eagles
e) A. E. Housman
f) Leonard Cohen
g) D. H. Lawrence
h) Led Zeppelin
i) Paul Anka
j) Philip Larkin

Now that I look at these the task seems quite impossible unless you can actually recognise some of the poems/songs. The correct answers may be found here (so as not to spoil anyone reading the comments). Maybe I’ll do a Finnish one later.

Some guy running for senate in Idaho has changed his name to Pro-Life because he wants that phrase to appear on the ballot. Huh.

I’ve been hankering for a [dvd-]viewing marathon of some kind over Easter, but nobody’s called me and I can’t stoop so low as to call anyone so I’ve just been moping around the place drinking beer in my underwear. If this makes someone feel guilty, good. Although I’m almost certain it won’t. (I dropped New York for this?!)

If you’ve bought some other mämmi than Kymppimämmi for Easter, you should be ashamed of yourself. It’s people like you that keep lesser mämmis like Saarioinen and Oululainen from dying out. My local shop doesn’t have any defrosted Kymppimämmi – oh no, they’re stocking the abomination to God that is Saarioinen. I just don’t understand some people.

Fullerenes are one of the more shocking things in chemistry. They are extremely stable structures (spheres, spheroids, tubes, sheets) made out of carbon, an element that’s otherwise so complexly reactive that it’s the basis of organic chemistry which seems to constitute half of all of chemistry. Sixty carbon atoms can be organised into a tiny spherical fullerene shell of great tensile strength (relative to size) that can contain other things. The fullerene is practically non-reactive so it doesn’t react with what’s inside, and what’s inside doesn’t get out because the fullerene is wrapped around it. But that’s a pretty unusual situation – typically they’re just inert blobs that can be found wherever organic material gets burnt.

But fullerenes weren’t the crazy thing I wanted to write about. You know how radiocarbon dating works, right? The carbon floating around in the atmosphere is partly unstable carbon-14 because cosmic rays keep making it, so we can date dead things by looking at their carbon isotope distributions (which started diverging from atmospheric carbon when the thing died because it stopped exchanging carbon with its environment but the carbon-14 kept on decaying into stabler isotopes). And you’ve probably read about how you can drill through thick ice to find very old air trapped in little bubbles and analyze the gas distribution inside to figure things about what the Earth used to be like. This is like a combination of those things and fullerenes.

It’s speculated that the mass extinctions that separate the Permian period from the Triassic period were due to some cataclysmic event, like a big rock from space hitting the planet. When something like that happens there’s a lot of pressure and high temperatures at the place of impact, so lots of unusual things happen. Like atmospheric molecules minding their own business getting rammed into other things at high energies. One particular thing that can happen is a noble gas (which are naturally found in low densities in the air) getting trapped inside a fullerene ball. This is obviously a pretty stable combination – noble gases don’t react much with anything and fullerene doesn’t react much with anything. So at an old impact site you can find fullerene with some helium and argon trapped inside it. And as it happens, like with carbon, the isotope distribution of old, trapped noble gases will be different from the atmospheric stuff. So we can date the gas! The people who wrote this paper did just that, and found supporting evidence for the space-rock theory.

You gotta love how things come together in science. It works, bitches!

I’ve been reading King Harold’s Saga, a fascinating history contained in Heimskringla (“Orb of the World”), recorded by Snorri Sturluson. The paperback of King Harold’s Saga I have has a brief biography of Sturluson like it would of any modern author, with one cool difference:

Snorri Sturluson was born in 1179 and brought up at Oddi, the home of an aristocratic and cultured family in the south of Iceland (1181-1201). He then lived as a wealthy landowner, politician and lawyer, and was Lawspeaker of the Althing from 1215-18 and 1222-31. He visited Norway twice, 1218-20 (when he also went to Sweden) and 1237-9. In 1241 Snorri Sturluson was killed by his enemies.

I can’t think of a better way to end my life than to be killed by my enemies, but unfortunately my enemies are not very likely to kill me. They are weak! Maybe I could find better ones if I sweep on with thrashing oar and make my only goal the western shore.

…is that “the people” don’t get it, like it or care about it. I’ll complain more about this later, but now I just wanted to quote the following tantalising nugget the BBC offered on yesterday’s pi day:

While there are many infinitely long numbers in maths, pi is the only one in which an infinitely simple idea – the circle – unfolds into an infinitely complex value. This paradox drives many people to distraction.

When you combine infinite simplicity and infinite complexity you get infinite stupidity. And of course to round off the article there has to be a “the world is mystical and unfathomable even to scientists so no need to feel bad about being stupid” moment supported by the existence of irrational numbers:

In this age of high-tech precision instruments, where we assure ourselves that perfection is attainable, pi is an ever-present, sometimes grating reminder that there are puzzles that can be solved and there are mysteries that, perhaps, can not.

Damn those irrational numbers, getting in the way of our secular conspiracy to understand the world! If it weren’t for them, we could measure everything! EVERYTHING, I tell you!