March and april can be very frustrating in Sweden for someone who has not grown up there. Spring is just kind of there, but not really; the snow is melted but everything still takes another few weeks to shake off winter. It doesn't look like in the picture until june.

So this is what it looks like when I run my picture through Pikazo, an app that can re-create an image in the style of another. In this case, the "style" is our living room carpet from India and I especially like the red Terminator-eye.

I just made a big overhaul of this site. Although there is a new theme in place as well, the biggest changes are under the hood: no more Wordpress, but static html-files generated with Pelican.

In addition, the webserver Caddy is no longer only responsible for SSL and HTTPS while proxying to Nginx, but now serves the site directly.

New URLs are without dates, but old ones should still work fine. If you happen to see anything broken, feel free to drop me an email.

Vaknar half fem. Pigg. Dessutom har hjärnan börjat spökskriva i halvsömnen ändå. Det är deadlinedags och några dokument ska bli klara på jobbet. Dusch, frukost i lugn och ro, fösta kopparna kaffe. Ut ur dörren - tjälet har släppt och det finns lukter igen i skogen där vi bor! Innan kl. sex är trafiken visst bättre än vanligt - inte dumt! Först på jobbet, trodde jag. En kollega reser sig ur soffan och undrar vad tusan jag gör där så dags. Ska hen säga! Sätta på kaffe, skriva frenetiskt. Lunchhungrig kl 9, det blir bara en banan. Mer kaffe. Korridoren fylls med mer o mer aktivtet. Jag med mer kaffe, och äntligen lunch så småningom. Diskutera neuronala nät och AlphaGos vinst vid lunchbordet, utan att egentligen ha någon som helst koll på machine learning, eller spelet Go. Tillbaka till skrivbordet och slåss med Word, så gott som för första gången någonsinn är jag tvungen till detta. Mer Kaffe? Ja visst! Klockan fyra får det vara nog, det klarnar upp och ser ljuvligt ut ute. Jag åker hem, tar på mig tajta byxorna och springer en vända till urskogen. Skriva en timme till. Kaffet byts mot folköl. Matlagningsdags, det blir en stor lasagne som till fyra femtedelar blir lunchlådor. Musik på hög volym och chatta med kollegor om Cornetto-trilogin. Det blir nog ingen sen kväll.
Intensiva dagar kan vara roliga och stimulerande, men visst är jag tacksam att de är rätt sällsynta ändå.

I was wondering the other week why plastic-eating bacteria havn't evolved yet. After all, bacteria are supposed to be very quick at adaptation and an energy-rich resource lying around, floating in the oceans and being a pollution problem should be a golden opportunity.

Obviously I am missing something here because of my ignorance in biology. But people seem to be working on it: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6278/1162.1

Everyone knows a light-year is a measure of distance. But that a "radar mile" measures time, 12.36 microseconds, is new to me.

I built this last year from around 5500 Lego pieces. It's a model of the furture European Extremely Large Telescope, to be erected n Chile during the coming decade. The model design was made by Dutch astronomer Frans Snik and you can read more about it and download the instructions and parts list here.

If you want to marvel at it up close, it is on display at the Astronomy Department of Uppsala University. They have one in Göttingen as well and I guess there are several more around.

Radio Paradise is an internet radio station, run solely through the voluntary support from listeners. It is such a good station, with hand-picked playlists from a great variety of genres and no ads, that I have been listening regularly for over a decade and sent them money several times.

Now, the same as a few years ago, the royalty organizations want to change the deal on how much money they get and it threatens to make small stations such as Radio Paradise impossible. Read all about it in the open letter from Radio Paradise to David Byrne.

“Radio Schweden”, die deutsche Redaktion der schwedischen öffentlich-rechtlichen Radioanstalt SR, wird abgeschafft. Sehr schade, aber auch irgendwie verständlich.

Vielleicht ist ja an der Zeit, meine Bloggerei über schwedische Nachrichten wieder aufzunehmen. Oder gibt es anderswo eine Alternative, die ich nicht kenne?

There is another Star Wars film from the 70s! The Star Wars Holiday Special https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryOhDO8ZU-0