Last night I finally finished building my Lego Science Tower. The set is not official but originates from a crowd-funding effort by Bricklink. The sealed box had been sitting in my office for two years until I recently brought it home to have some fun with it.

You can see Newton's apple in the tree and Mendel's garden in front of the tower. The telescope on the top rotates and tilts by turning the knobs. Inside there is Pawlov's dog, Schrödinger's cat, a library and a chemistry lab, among other things. Overall a lovely design with ingenious attention to detail!

A ceiling detail in Strängnäs cathedral.

Winter is not completely over yet – we had 5cm of snow just the other day and it took two days to melt – but the preparations for the next one have already started.

The mill in which the desk.

Seen in an old mill nearby.

I was recently reminded of thispersondoesnotexist.com which is a site that displays a new computer-generated face every time you reload it. There are still some artefacts that give away the artificial origin (I chose two examples with few glitches for the picture above) but I think it is fair to say that these faces look convincingly real.

This means that they trigger the same reactions in our minds that pictures of real people do. I found myself reloading the page for at least ten minutes, becoming more and more mesmerized, reacting to facial expressions, sometimes falsely recognizing someone I know, and generally unable to convince the automatic parts of the brain that these are not people.

Do I have a point? Should we become even more sceptical of media than we already are? I don't know. But being a somewhat aware of the way we cannot help but react to faces, real or not, cannot be such a bad thing, a kind of meta awareness that hopefully contributes to resilience against manipulation.

I took the drone our for a spin this chilly early spring morning. The picture shows the nearby lake, Fibysjön, just a few hundred meters through the forest from our place.

Around it you can see some areas where the trees have recently been taken down. In fact, I see several huge trucks passing by every day, loaded to the brim with logs. The harvesters that do the logging are impressive machines and so efficient that they can process up to a hundred trees per hour.

There is an ongoing debate, heated at times, between the environmental movement, forest owners and industry, about how to strike the balance between logging and preservation. The more I read about it, the less of a strong opinion I find myself to maintain in that regard. I intend to write up the arguments soon, but as a teaser, if you can read Swedish, here is a twitter thread with some basic stats about forests and forestry.

Spring is late at 60°N, compared to central Europe where I grew up. March and April feel like a waiting period every year and can be quite grey and ugly. While lush greens are still some weeks away, the first dots of colour have now appeared in our garden.

(Photo by Farzin Izaddoust Dar, CC BY-SA 4.0)

This is the winner of this year's photo contest Wiki Loves Monuments , and deservedly so! A great picture well worth clicking to enlarge. The other contestants are worth checking out, too, but the official link above shows them only in small format. This one is better.