The color of PI

Last Saturday I had the fortune to visit the new home of the Department of Informatics @ University of Oslo, as my oldest son was attending a programming course organized by Forskerfabrikken.

Forskerfabrikken is a private initiative to remedy the deficiencies in science education in the public schooling system in Norway. Both my kids have benefited from this initiative, and eventually my oldest accepted to attend a programming course together with a classmate. He considers both myself and his mother to be nerds as we are trained in programming, but with the course he is at least getting a taste of this tool that has the potential of changing the way kids think, if only they get the chance.

So what about this picture. Well, it's me in the foreground and a piece of art by Beret Aksnes in the background. This decorative element shows PI with each digit represented by one of ten colors.

A very successful combination of art and science in my mind.

And I got to see the inside of this new building. It is scheduled to be handed over to the university after the summer, 13 years after I left my job as associate professor there. When we moved into the then new, neighboring building in 1988 it quickly turned out to be crowded. Apparently it takes close to forever to build public building in Norway. But now it is there - I have had a sneak preview - and I am happy on the department's behalf.

This evening I went to see Baby Universe - a puppet odyssey at Chateau Neuf.

The show is part of the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the University of Oslo. As a past employee I jumped on the offer for free tickets, and brought my family there for this extraordinary experience.

Seeing the life sized dolls being operated by people trying to blend into the background was fascinating. And the way they managed the changing scale of the baby universe relative to the other celestial bodies - very well done.

The performance was introduced by Stepen Hawking dressed as a puppet (or was it the other way around?), and the puppet moon looked like Rowan Atkinson to me.

Above ground air-raid shelter

Have you ever thought? In these modern times, when it is more or less accepted that an air-raid shelter is a likely target and likely death trap, you can still come accross German air-raid shelters built on the surface.
I took the picture in Ludwigshafen last week, as the car I was riding in passed this so called Winkelturm. Read more about this in Wikipedia.

I think this particular one may be somebody's home, and if you look closely you can see that it has its own Christmas tree.

Home made cowberry chocolates

Well, Christmas is coming closer and its time I make some gifts. Last year I had some success with home made chocolates with cowberry filling. So I do the same over again this year. The picture shows my mould and a finished product. The mould is a Plastis ice cube tray from Ikea. I line the sides with melted chocolate, mix cowberry with sugar with a immersion blender and put some in the cavity, and cover it over with more chocolate.

I keep making mistakes, because I don't remember last year's mistakes, but hopefully I remember them next year. Anyway, I am happy about the result, and I plan to make a "Ikea style kit" for assembling a bowl with chocolates. Stay tuned!

Marketing with ø

In Scandinavia we have som extra characters in the alphabet, namely æ, ø and å. Sø whåt dø thæy håvæ tø dø with mårkæting? Well, on a recent trip to Spain I stumbled upon Nørdic Mist, a Tonic Water from Coca Cola.



It surprised me to see the ø used in a brand name. So is association with Scandinavia a positive thing? As far as I understand, they never tried to launch this product where the ø is used, although we could do with competition in the tonic water segment. I find Schweppes tonic water too expensive (the price drops significantly if I go to Sweden), so I end up using products from my local Roma Mineralvannfabrikk.

But what about marketing on a larger scale. Well, I'm not a marketeer, but I remember back when I worked for the HPC company Scali (before they were acquired by Platform Computing, the fact that we were a Norwegian company was obscured.

The strange thing is that a later startup involving some of the same key people uses extensive imagery from Norway on their web-page. They may not be shy any more, but they haven't gone all thæ wåy in mixing in thæ speciål lætters.

Tagging in Iceland

A couple of weeks ago I was in Iceland to run another RFID project. The contect was the same as this project. This time we had more tools available, like handheld RFID scanners with embedded software to compose XML for upload to the project EPCIS.


In the previous project we attached the RFID tags directly to the fish boxes, but this time we tried a different approach. The fish was stored on ice in big tubs. These were stored in a cold store, and they were wet. So instead of trying to get a piece of surface that we could fasten the tag, we attached them to handles in the corners of the tubs with the help of some extra paper tags. So here you see me, dressed up according to the rules of the processing company, giving a tub of Sebastes marinus identity.


These paper tags proved to be very convenient. As the project progressed we could take them off, make notes and so on. Of course, had the use of RFID been integrated into the production, then everything would be automatic. But this was a pilot in a type of chain that is not among the first movers. So we had to do a lot of manual operations, and then we could make notes on the tags that helped us fill in the holes in the traceability model later on.

To cover the different roles of traced items we employed both SGTIN and GRAI type RFID tags. The finished products, that were airlifted to markets in mainland Europe, were equipped with SGTINs, while the tubs with fish and similar vessels that were being used in the productions, were equipped with GRAIs. This way the proper XML can decommission the tags, so that they can be reused later without being related traceability-wise to earlier uses.

Lutefisk is upon us

Before I travelled to Iceland for the last week in October my wife served me lutefisk for dinner. As you can see from the picture I have helped myself to potatoes, mustard, mashed peas and bacon, in addition to the fish. It is simply so good. I may be disgusted by all the Christmas decorations appearing at the same time, but lutefisk is simply too good to be missed.

To our surprise even the kids liked it. Maybe we have gotten better at preparing fish meals, or maybe it has something to do with them growing up. Anyway, serving them fish based meals seem to have changed from a duty to a pleasure. Lets hope it stays that way.