Author Archives: Stefan Geens

Terrorism 101 at Skavsta

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Previous RyanAir rants here, here and here.Written Saturday, between Skavsta and Brussels:

Everytime I pass through Skavsta Airport, it has doubled in size. With RyanAir‘s help, it now needs to accomodate many more passengers, and the result is a modest and pleasant work in progress, made from sober prefab hangars furnished with pine-wood furniture. It does the job of budget airport admirably.

Today, however, my progress through it happened far too efficiently. Unlike on previous occasions I’ve flown from Skavsta, neither RyanAir nor Swedish customs have any clue who is onboard the plane I am flying on now. I don’t know if this is a new and approved policy, but it amounts to a stunning security risk. I have just spent 20 minutes thinking up ways of exploiting it, and came up with two scenarios all by myself. And I’m very unimaginative when it comes to terrorism.

But first, here is how the boarding process worked today: I arrived at the check-in counter and gave the RyanAir employee my Belgian identity card, a reservation number and a piece of luggage. In return, I was handed a “boarding pass” — a laminated card with a sequential number on it, presumably with my name correlated to the number in her records — and a luggage ticket.

The security check involved showing the laminated card to a guard, placing the usual items in the x-ray machine, and pacing through the metal detector. Then, when it was time to board, I handed the card to a RyanAir employee and walked to the plane.

What’s wrong with this picture? First, there was no customs check, unlike on previous occasions. Swedish customs officials thus have no idea if anyone on this plane is on Interpol’s most-wanted list, perhaps travelling on a forged ID. Second, RyanAir has no clue if its passenger manifest is accurate: At boarding time, RyanAir personnel did not ask for my identity card to correlate it with the name I assume is attached to the number on my boarding pass.

This means, in effect, that after checking in, I could have given that laminated card to anyone, and that person could now be on the plane instead of me. Can you imagine this happening in the US? Does it take a local 9/11 to make Sweden take terrorism seriously? Could it be, I shudder to think, that there was no customs check today because it is the Easter holiday?

How to exploit this? Scenario number 1: Take some members of a terrorist group known to Interpol, have them travel to the airport with an equal number of new recruits with unblemished records, get the recruits to check in without a fuss, hand the boarding passes to the professionals, let them wear a discrete amount of semtex explosives on their person as they walk through the x-ray machine, and perhaps one of the new breed of porcelain guns. Stand at the front of the line for boarding, so you get the front-row seats nearest the cockpit. When you get near the nuclear reactors 30km north of Copenhagen, capital of a US ally in the war in Iraq, blow open the cockpit door, kill the pilots, and aim for the cooling towers. They’re easy to spot on a beautiful day like today on the Skavsta-Brussels route.

Scenario number 2: A variation on a theme that has already had proven results. Terrorist boyfriend with naive girlfriend and her baby plan a holiday. The kid gets to sit on the mother’s lap, just barely, so they only need two boarding passes. At the last minute, the boyfriend “forgets” something essential back home, but don’t worry, tickets are so cheap he will follow her and their luggage on the next flight. Since RyanAir tickets are not refundable, might as well use the second boarding pass for an extra seat for the baby; the flights are always full these days, and they don’t check the identity of passengers anyways. Boyfriend goes home, girlfriend blows up somewhere over Europe.

Am I exaggerating? Are these merely the rantings of somebody who had balcony views of 9/11? Could this never happen in Europe? Other European airports employ customs officials. Other airlines print names on boarding passes. Somebody here is saving money at the expense of security.

Written today, Between Brussels and Dublin:

Contrast the above with the state of affairs in Brussels: RyanAir gives me a printed, numbered boarding pass with my name written on it by the check-in attendant. A customs officer peers suspiciously at both my national ID card and boarding pass before I am let into the departure lounge. And when it is time to board, a RyanAir employee actively seeks out and compares the name on the boarding card with my ID card before I am allowed on the tarmac — no token efforts here. This is what I am used to. Skavsta is a security disaster waiting to happen.

Battlefield Baroque

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I’ve been using the latest version of Microsoft Office for Windows a few weeks now at work. Save your money and stick to whatever previous version of Office you have.

We (and by we I mean you who ordered this software for me) should have seen the warning signs in the last upgrade: Office is entering its Baroque period, or is it Rococo already? I now count four (4) [IV] {oooo} icons in the menu bars of Outlook that use a magnifying glass. Only one of them actually lets you search through your mail. The others will either: scan your messages for viruses, toggle message content preview, or show you a print preview. Can you guess which is which?

icon1.gif icon2.gif icon3.gif icon4.gif

Sorry, no answers from me, I already forgot which is which and I can’t be bothered to look it up. Elsewhere — for example when you are writing an email or using Word — the search function is represented by binoculars, something which I use all the time when reading a book or newspaper closely.

The only tangible change to my daily MS genuflections is the layout of the main window in Outlook. You can now have the windows split horizontally, instead of vertically, which makes sense on screens that are wider rather than taller.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is continuing its attempts to turn email into something other than standard plain text messages. I spent the first 15 minutes of my time with the new Outlook turning off receipt requests (it’s rude, OK?), HTML rendering and RTF style defaults. And, bizarrely, the email window pane now looks like a print preview screen:

screen.gif

I’ve noticed from screenshots that the upcoming new Mac version of Office has the same shaded border too. Why should I want to think of my email as a printed document? It’s a waste of screen space and yet one more mixed metaphor to battle.

Talking of battles, earlier this week I spent a few hours playing Battlefield Vietnam, the month-old successor to Battlefield 1942, at a gaming cafe here in Stockholm for research purposesI kid you not. You’ll read about it in a month or so.. It is a magnificent game for networked team play. One odd sensation came from an unexpected feature of the game: Sometimes you play as Vietcong, and take potshots at Americans as they try to implement US foreign policy.

I’ve played my fair share of multiplayer WWII 3D shootem-ups, in which being a German soldier is fairly run-of-the-mill; somebody’s got to be the Indian. Simulate conflicts that are closer to the present day, however, and a gamer’s ironic detachment is no longer readily buttressed by historical distance. Still, at the rate these games are coming to market, I do not think I will be waiting 30 years before I get the opportunity to play Capture the Flag as a Sunni on a Falluja map.

Nuclear known unknowns

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Some things I learned this week: Almost half of Sweden’s electricity is produced by its 11 nuclear power plants. Polls show Swedes to be quite positive towards nuclear power, and they have been ever since a 1980 referendum that placed a moratorium on building new plants. Despite Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, decommissioning well-maintained Swedish plants before the end their operating life has been broadly opposed on environmental grounds, because the required energy would then have to be produced either by burning more fossil fuels or by damming more rivers.

Earlier this week, Folkpartiet became the first serious political party to propose overturning the 1980 referendum [Swedish], and to allow the building of new reactors, should demand warrant it. The grounds are two-fold:

1: If nuclear energy is safe, then why not increase its use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions even furtherSweden’s carbon dioxide emmissions in 2000 are some 40% below 1970 levels because of the use of nuclear power.?

2: (And this is clever) Jan Björklund, vice chair (or something) of FP, maintains that since the referendum was held in 1980, everybody aged 42 and under today — more than half of the Swedish population — was not able to vote in it, and so perhaps its mandate has expiredNote to self: Use this argument next time Kim mentions the Second Amendment..

The second reason strikes me as rather silly: At best, it might argue for a new referendum, but it does not constitute a moral argument for the wholesale abandonment of the policies chosen by the last referendum.

What about the first reason? If nuclear energy is as safe as in 1980 then this in itself is not a reason to overturn the moratorium. But if it is now safer…

Last month, surely by coincidence, Swedish research commissioned by the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB) led to two important pieces of news regarding the long-term safety of nuclear waste, though neither item was paid much attention to in the mainstream press (though perhaps FP did).

The first piece of news illustrates nicely the Rumsfeldian epistemological universe“As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”: We used to think we knew all about the properties of plutonium oxide, one of the most important radioactive compounds in nuclear waste, although this “knowledge” was unfounded: in Rumsfeldian parlance, it was an unknown unknown &mdash we didn’t know we didn’t know. Four years ago, it was discovered that PuO2 could oxidize in the presence of water to form what appeared to be a stable compound with unknown properties: We now had a known unknown on our hands — we knew that risk assessments for nuclear waste storage were, well, at risk.

Finally, last month, research by the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) showed that the oxidized compound is not that stable after all, and not as easy to create as originally thought. The original risk assessments have been confirmed, except that now, arguably, we have a known known, which is a better place to be than not knowing we didn’t know this 5 years ago.

Second, KTH is piloting a study on some emerging technologies that may make it possible to greatly reduce the length of time waste stays radioactive, while at the same time generating energy from the process. It sounds very clever.

On the whole, I think it is reasonable to argue, nuclear technology has become safer over the last two decades. Against this, however, we now need to place a new risk: mass terrorism. It would have lacked symbolism, but had the planes hijacked on 9/11 aimed for nuclear power plants instead of buildings, we might have had four Chernobyl-sized no-go zones on the east coast of the US todayA post-9/11 report commissioned by the US nuclear energy lobby says otherwise, but read between the lines: Several paragraphs explain why crashes were modelled with 767s, not the larger 747s: Because there are far more 767s around, apparently. Note to terrorists: Use 747s. As a general rule, too, I would discount any report that has the following line in it: “Clearly an impact of this magnitude would do great damage to a plant’s ability to generate electricity.”.

The main pragmatic lesson I learned from 9/11 is that the future will become more decentralized, not less. Laying all your eggs in one basket creates high value targets, and nuclear power plants are nothing if not that. You could also bomb a dam, of course, but even that is a brief and repairable tragedy. Nuclear power plants are basically “dirty” bombs without detonators. Terrorists are detonators in search of bombs. Nuclear power, unfortunately, does not have a future in this kind of world.

Fredagsfyra v 14 – 04

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It turns out I am named after the founder of the Serbian nation, Grand Zupan Stefan Nemanja. He atoned by becoming a monk and calling himself Simeon. They made him a saint for that.
 
simeon_icon.jpegFrågor kommer från här.

1. Finns det någon historia bakom varför du heter som du heter?

Min far har alltid sagt att mitt namn kommer från en Serbisk kung. När jag föddes var han (min far, inte kungen) professor i ett Amerikanskt universitet in Schweiz för unga rika amerikanerna som inte ville dö i risfälten av Vietnam, och min far tog dem (amerikanerna, inte risfälten) på studieresor till Jugoslavien. Han lärde sig mycket Serbisk historia när min mor var gravid med mig.

Idag letade jag efter den här kungen. Det var Stefan Nemanja (1113-1200), vems titel var “Grand Zupan”, och han var grundläggare av serbiskt riket.

2. Om du skulle vara tvungen att ändra namn (ex. pga att Säpo är efter dig) vad skulle det då bli?

Stefan Nemanja ändrade sitt namn till Simeon när hon pensionerade sig och blev munk i 1196. Han byggde många kloster, inklusive Studenica, och efter han dog, blev han helgonförklarad. Så, kanske, skulle jag också bli Simeon.

3. Vilket är det finaste namn du vet?

Just nu är det “Grand Zupan.”

4. När du kollar ditt namn via den här filosofin, stämmer något?

Nej, tack.

1. Vilka bloggare är du mest avundsjuk på?

Erik Stattin av mymarkup. Jag hade ingen aning att han också skrev myAzzman. Men jag förstår inte varför han fortsätter idag? Första April är slut.

2. Vilka bloggare svärmar du för?

Eurotrash. Självklart. Hon är så… plump.

3. Vilken bloggare skulle du vilja vara?

Kronertrash. Finns inte. Ännu.

4. Om vad angick senaste inlägg du bestämde att inte publicera? Var det för personligt eller för dåligt skrivit eller ointressant? Eller har du aldrig censurerat din skrift?

En till inlägg om FolkPartiet. Något om orsaken varför supporten för FP minskar, enligt DNs opinionsundersökning. Min analys var att ett liberalt parti som blir mindre liberal ska inte attrahera röstare från SD, men istället ska bara förlora liberala röstare. Men Jag orkade inte skriva den om det skulle ha varit fyra inlägg i rad om Svensk politik.

Top ten things I hate about Stockholm, III

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The third in an occasional series.
 
Ten: Predatory seating
Nine: Culinary relativismEight: Preëmptive planning.

In New York, planning a typical night’s entertainment went something like this: “Matthew, how about a game of Scrabble in St. Dymphnas tonight?” “Okay.” If it wasn’t Matthew, it’d be Itay, or Zach, or a combination of the three.

I could handle that. My event horizon rarely extended 24 hours into the future. It didn’t need to — there’d always be something popping up, and people’s schedules were as fluid as mine. I was free to pursue the simple life of task-based socializing: Find something to do and then find somebody to do it with.

Do not try this in Stockholm. In Stockholm, planning goes something like this:

“Let’s go for dinner.”

“Okay, how about two weeks from Friday?”

“[WTF???] How about two weeks from when hell freezes over?”

“I can’t, it’s West Wing on TV.”

“How about the Wednesday after pigs fly?”

“Å, but I’ll have to see if we can get a babysitter.”

“Å, I’ll pencil you in then.“Å,” pronounced “har” as the pirates do but with the h and r silent, is a passive yes in Swedish. As in, “I have no objections to the proposed course of events, do you?” You’d be surprised how much conversation is superfluous once you have the letter å at your disposal. The reason is that, unknown to most linguists, Swedish is actually a tonal language. “Å!” is an entire passive-aggressive tirade reduced to a letter. “Å?” is the Swedish equivalent of “WhatEVER.” And you thought Swedes just didn’t say much.”

The reason tonight is not feasible is because Stockholmers have all preëmptively booked each other weeks in advance. And the only reason why is because everybody else is planning preëmptively. It’s the temportal equivalent to the predatory seating problem, identified previously. There is no shortage of things to do in Stockholm, nor people to do them with, but try to be spontaneous and you will be doing so at home with the remote control, and the Finnish channel as your nemesis.

What Stockholm needs to adopt, en masse, is a just-in-time approach to managing social obligations. As things stand, there is a non-negligible risk your date gets run over by a bus in the interval between planning and consummation. The solution is obvious, Stockholm: For better living, reduce your time-to-meatmarket.

Winning is for losers

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This site gets a larger than fair share of dissenting comments. I admit I seek them out, on occasion, but were it not for the reliably acid-tongued retorts from dear friends, you’d be wading through inspirational hell, and who wants to read that? Snide repartée is infinitely more entertaining than constructive commentary, especially when destructive commentary is called for. This blog — and MemeFirst — came about primarily to replace barroom banter with those friends no longer living within drunk driving distance. One thing we learned, early on, is that all-round general agreement is the enemy of good conversation.

And yet, the uninitiated tend to think these foils represent personal fallings-out; my parents send me worried emails every time Felix and I engage in a snit. It is true that banter is an acquired taste; and it takes a while to learn. The beginning banterer must avoid turning into a cured Leonard Zelig, lest he end up in fisticuffs with psychiatrists over the weather. Some cultures seem predisposed towards banter. It helps, for example, if you are British, or have been in close quarters with them over prolonged periods of time. As for Swedes, on the other hand, getting a mean word out of them requires resorting to the threat of physical violence.

Or so we now know. The Swedish blogosphere used to be a suppportive, back-patting exercise, where you spoke well of a post or not at all. This civil state of affairs was thrown into disarray a month ago when Azzman, at Wookiepunch, started being rude about Swedish bloggers. He called the Swedish blogosphere a bunch of muppets [Swedish]. He thought some bloggers’ posts were utter crap. For good measure, he suggested the muppets be put out of their misery and shotThe problem with wookiepunches — and Harrison Ford must know this from the way in which his gun proved useful in a duel with a sword-wielding baddie in Raiders of the Lost Ark — is that they are no match for lightsabers. An armless wookie is a sorry sight indeed. And unable to scratch itself. And probably smells even worse than usual..

The response, at first, was to decry this ghastly glorification of violence. “I’ve seen too many people die,” one blogger replied earnestly. But Azzman would not be deterred, so it was decided to ignore him: “You do not exist. You are an illusion.” The problem with that tactic was that Azzman’s self-ascribed aim — to become as unpopular as possible — was backfiring gloriously; everybody kept right on reading him for the next much anticipated put-down.

Now a month later, the shock has worn off, Azzman has been incorporated into the mainstream, but, if I may say so, there are fewer “cheese sandwich for lunch” posts in Swedish, wearing bulls’ eyes. Snark has arrived in Sweden, and Sweden is a better place for it.

Meanwhile, over in New York, mother Eurotrash is leading her ugly ducklings down ever-longer comment strings packed with snideness and wit. She seems to have blasted her way through the hundred-mark per post, and she coaches her charges well, though with varying degrees of success. Today, for example, between comments #50 and #150, we get Tourette’s Symphony in F—-Major. Commenting as outsider art. Who’d have thought?

So what is the point of this post? Simply this: In the great Tomatina war that is blogging, nobody should expect to emerge with their pride intact. The sooner everybody realizes this, the better, for humbled bloggers make for better bloggers. Or at least more shameless ones, which is the same thing in my book.

Fredagsfyran

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Basically, I have always disdained blog gimmicks like the Friday Five. In Sweden, this meme translates to the Friday Four, because Swedes are Lutherans. Still, I’ve begun to feel a strange, lemminglike compulsion to participate, so I’ve devised a way to preserve my hard-won reputation for high irony by making sure everybody knows I am participating just to practice my Swedish. Eller hur?Officiellt hatar jag fredagsfyran, eftersom det är självklart en förevändning för att kunna vara exhibitionistisk, på samma sätt som hur man spelade “Sanning eller konsekvens” som barn — du är “tvungen” att berätta om något du vanligen är för “blyg” för att prata om, även om i hemlighet du fantiserar att ditt privatliv är intressant. Så barnsligt! Kanske är det även varför du bloggar — du är flärdfull och ynklig.

Officiellt.

Inofficiellt tycker jag mycket om att läsa människors fredagsfyror. Inofficiellt, fantiserar jag om att delta, eftersom det verkar vara jätteroligt att blir lite mer exhibitionistisk, fast om jag deltog, skulle det betyder att jag är flärdfull och ynklig.

Det är naturligvisst självklart att jag aldrig är flärdfull och ynklig och exhibitionistisk, så jag har hittat en mycket bättre orsak varför jag ska bli fredagsfyrare. Jag ska göra det bara för att öva min svenska. Bara därför, förstås?

Först ska jag svåra den här veckans frågor, men sedan kommer jag att föreslår några frågor för nästa vecka; frågor som jag vet ni alla vill svåra.

1. Vilken var den senaste “goda gärningen” du utförde?

Igår skrev jag en email tillbaka till en Australisk professor i journalistik som hade frågat mig hur den svenska pressen hade berättat om Anna Lindhs mördare, den som sedan inte blev hennes mördare. Jag var inte tvungen att svåra, men kanske var jag smickrad att hon hade mailat mig, så nu att jag funderar på det är det mindre en god gärning än en lyckad exercis i smicker. Egentligen flörtade jag liten med henne. Är det daligt?

2. Vilken var den senaste, moraliskt sett, tveksamma handlingen du utförde?

När jag var 18 år gammal stal jag pengar från kassan där var jag jobbade — jag var barman på någon nattklubb i Sydney. Jag hade övertygad mig att det var mina drickspengar, men egentligen var det inte sant. Jag skriver det här bara därför att jag inte tänker att min chef mellanstans har lärt sig svenska. Det var den sista gång jag var omoraliskt. Dessutom, jag ljuger aldrig.

3. Gör man “goda” handlingar av godhet eller för att man själv mår bra utav det?

Jag gör “goda” handlingar varje gång att det är mer effektivt för samhållet att jag gör dem, även om det inte är jag som har belöning. Till exempel, varje gång jag betalar moms. Goda handlingar är bara abstrakta själviska handlingar.

4. Vad gör du om du hittar 10 000 i använda sedlar?

Är det en kruggfråga? Först skulle jag söka lite mer på omgivning ifall att det finns mer pengar, eftersom 10 000 kr. faktiskt inte är så mycket. Till exempel, det är inte tillräckligt för att köpa en ny Apple G5, så kanske skulle jag istället köpa en biljett till NYC för att köpa en iPod Mini.

Får jag nu föreslå de här frågorna för nästa vecka?

1. Vilka bloggare är du mest avundsjuk på?

2. Vilka bloggare svärmar du för?

3. Vilken bloggare skulle du vilja vara?

4. Om vad angick senaste inlägg du bestämde att inte publicera? Var det för personligt eller för daligt skrivit eller ointressant? Eller har du aldrig censurerat din skrift?

Jag känner mig som skolbarn igen…

Dogs of War

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To paraphrase David Denby, David Denby has lost it. The New Yorker’s movie critic now notorious for doing really idiotic things and then writing about them in excruciating detail didn’t like Lars von Trier’s Dogville, calling it, without irony, “avant-gardism for idiots”Slate reviews the reviews of Dogville.. But the movie isn’t just bad, according to Denby, it’s immoral:

The movie is, of course, an attack on America—its innocence, its conformity, its savagery—though von Trier is interested not in the life of this country (he’s never been here) but in the ways he can exploit European disdain for it.

The “of course” in the above sentence settles it, then. I was going to argue for raising the bar a bit before calling something an attack on America, maybe even as high as, I don’t know, a medium sized office tower and a commuter turboprop, but “of course,” all you need these days is a social critique denuded of any possible specificity (just look at the set), minimalist to the point of being illustrated literature, making claims about the nature of free will and moral responsibility that apply universally, including the US. The fact that American society can suffer from innocence, conformity and savagery like the rest of us is clearly an attack on American exceptionalism, unless, “of course,” it’s David Denby berating Americans for taking their children to see Mel Gibson’s savage The Passion of the Christ a few weeks earlier. Because, you see, David Denby is an American, and obviously Lars von Trier is not. Want to see something scary? Take a look at the demographic divergences in IMDB voting patterns for Passion. Check out that under-18 female vote (8.8!), but especially the discrepancy between US and non-US voters (8.0 vs. 6.7) — it must be one of the widest ever. (I certainly didn’t find a movie that generated a more disparate reaction.)

Dogville, in the end, is an abstract, aesthetic indictment of old-testament justice, while The Passion gut-wrenchingly preaches the new testament’s “turning the other torso.” When Denby’s done with them, however, it’s “attack on America” versus “tacky America,” and choosing the lesser of those two evils is child’s play. Of course.

Top ten things I hate about Stockholm, II

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The second in an occasional series.
 
Ten: Predatory seating.Nine: Culinary relativism.

I am a food racist. There, I’ve said it. I’m not proud about it or anything. It turns out I’ve been one for years, but I did not know it until my second day in Stockholm, when Elise dragged me to the mall in Kista to kit me out with deep-winter clothes. In September. After a few hours sweating it out in burqaesque parkas, I needed to replenish my salt levels, so Elise proposed sushi.

I love sushi. The only reason we in the west cook our food is because our disgusting medieval ancestors knew that cooking kills the maggots in sty-bound farm animals. I had a rare and precious opportunity to play in sties as a child in the Ardennes, and I can tell you there is nothing in there you’d want to eat raw. Or even medium-rare. Hence my longstanding reverence for the Japanese/Korean tradition of cleanliness that was the necessary prerequisite for the coming about of sushi.

When we arrived at the Kista sushi bar I was floored by something I’d never seen before. Standing behind the bar was a white guy. Actually, he was whiter than that: he was Serb, I think, and huge. I had never seen a white guy make sushi before. I soon wished that were still the case: He would pick lazily at suspiciously pre-filleted strips of fish which he then mashed onto a gob of rice in the palm of a hand the size of Montenegro. The result invariably exploded on the way from my plate to my mouth. The rolls, too, looked and tasted like stuffed hosepipe. As the Serb glared behind her, Elise turned to me and asked, chirpily, “What do you think?” “Mmm, delicious,” I gagged.

In the subsequent year and a half, I’ve seen way too many white people make sushi over here. They, and their customers, all seem to think that it involves splaying bits of dead fish on rice. I don’t even know how to begin to disabuse people of that crude notionLuckily, there are a few good sushi places in Stockholm, manned by Japanese and Koreans, and at least one that could hold its own in New York..

This is not tolerance of gastronomic diversity on the part of Swedes, this is an unacceptable level of culinary relativism, and my stomach and I just won’t stand for it. Imagine the Japanese opening a curry restaurant; Indians running a tapas bar, with bullfighting on the television; the Spanish making Borscht; Russian babushkas catering Vietnamese food; and the Vietnamese having a big wok of mama’s secret ragu sauce simmering on the stove. Unfortunately, in Stockholm, such imagery is not always just in the mind.