Author Archives: Stefan Geens

How to spend 48 hours in Stockholm (abridged)

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Rhian Salmon paid Stockholm a visit this week in a futile quest to use up the vacation allowance she accrued during her 18 months on Halley, Antarctica. She and fellow Antarctician Liz had just gone on “holiday” by mistake: Crossing the Baltic in a 21-foot sloop without engine or GPS in one of that sea’s rainier weeks in living memory. They seemed to have enjoyed it, perhaps by channeling Shackleton, but were eager to hit Stockholm town.

bas_stockholm.jpgLiz on the left, Rhian on the right.

There is definitely a circuit for showing Stockholm to visitors with time constraints. We went to Pelikan the first night, where I ran into my friend James the expat ER doctor, who was entertaining family friends in exactly the same manner. Pelikan has three things going for it: It serves great honest Swedish food, the locale is an old-school classic, and it shuns pretence. Ironically, in Stockholm, this can also mean there is room.

Over raw herring appetizers and Skåne snaps, Rhian told some flattering news: Beaver Me First, that masterpiece of a short film which Matthew and I had made back in 2002, turns out to have had a public showing in addition to the première — on Antarctica, no less, in front of 16 Halley base winterers. They had been enthusiastic, apparently — as would be anyone if the alternative is watching The Thing for the twelfth time, but why parse compliments overly?

The next night, nearer to home at Lokal, we discovered why it is unlikely the Kungsholmare cocktail will ever take off. The bartender couldn’t/wouldn’t make it for us, as it included vodka and pear cider, both of which are alcoholic, and this apparently presented a problem. He had fewer qualms selling us the ingredients separately, so we ordered pear cider with a dash of lime cordial and a shot of vodka on the side. It made for a rather expensive drink, however. Best to try this at home, then.

The post about two bizarre phenomena

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While doing some research for an article I am writing, I came across a phenomenon I had never heard about before, despite a lifetime’s interest in all things astronomical. Apparently, astronauts in orbit regularly experience light flashesThis link leads to a long but worthwhile article about these light flashes., most likely caused by cosmic rays decaying in a nuclear reaction as these rays enter the eyeball. In effect, astronaut eyes become human particle detectors. Or that, at least, is currently the leading theory.Another possibility is that the cosmic rays are interacting directly with the part of the brain responsible for vision.

This phenomenon was predicted as early as 1952, and was first experienced by the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon. Ever since, astronauts have reported seeing light flashes while in orbit. Now that a manned Mars mission is on the planning horizon, finding the precise cause of these flashes has become a priority. Currently, the longest period of time that humans have ventured outside the protective sheath of the Earth’s magnetosphere was the 10 days it took to get to the moon and back. A mission to Mars would put humans at the mercy of the vagaries of our Sun for around 3 years, before Mars can offer its protective shieldWe know this thanks to Swedish research..

Space Shuttle and International Space Station (ISS) orbits lie well within the magnetosphere, but even these regularly cross this post’s second bizarre phenomenon, the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA). The SAA is a region over Brazil, Argentina and the South Atlantic where the magnetosphere is abnormally weak. This weakness is due to the fact that the center of the Earth’s magnetic field is not really aligned with the center of the Earth. The upshot is that cosmic rays tend to reach spacecraft in greater numbers as they fly over the SAA — not surprisingly, the number of light flashes experienced by astronauts increases over this region.

There is a Swedish angle to all this. Sweden’s only prospective astronaut, Christer Fuglesang, is involved in several projects that are trying to get to the bottom of these light flashes. Several particle detectors have been built that wrap around an astronaut’s head, so that if and when s/he sees a light flash, the particle detector tries to capture the precise path of the particle. One such detector has been on Mir since 2002. Another will travel to the International Space Station soon, quite possibly with Fuglesang on his maiden flight aboard STS-116 in 2006 — if Space Shuttle flights resume, that is.

Size matters?

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In Critical Mass, Philip Ball indirectly addresses a criticism that Timbro et al. often make about one characteristic of the Swedish economy — its lack of new large companies. Sweden’s start-ups do not grow into behemoths like Microsoft and Google. They never join the ranks of the AstraZenecas and Ericssons, Sweden’s mature large companies. As an example of this criticism, Johan Norberg quotes Johnny Munkhammar: “None of Sweden’s 50 largest companies was started after 1970.”

I have never understood why this observation was meant to constitute a criticism per se: Either the Swedish economy in aggregate is less productive as a result of this phenomenon or it is not. Before you can state that the lack of large new companies is somehow an indictment of the Swedish model you should really first argue that there is a link between the high taxes/regulations and an inability of small companies to grow large,Another argument might be that large companies in Sweden enjoy too few constraints on their behaviour, allowing them to successfully crowd out upstarts, but I do not expect Timbro to front an appeal for less laissez faire.
 
Or, yet another possibility, perhaps Swedish large companies are so innovative that they pre-empt the need for smaller upstarts to replace them. and then argue that smaller companies are less productive, which in turn causes lower overall productivity in the economy.

The only problem is that Sweden has one of the most productive economies in the world, despite the high taxes and this relative lack of large new companies. Perhaps then it is time to look for a link between the lack of churn in business size in Sweden and the country’s admirable productivity.

Philip Ball offers a hint on page 219 of his book. He points in the direction of the work of Paul Ormerod, a British economist who created a model [PDF] linking the severity of the fluctuations in an economy’s business cycle with the distribution of company sizes. His model is able to explain why economies composed of a few large companies tend to experience deeper recessions,“The model therefore suggests that the business cycle arises because of, first, the different scales on which individual firms produce and, second, the interactions between these firms. It is the concentration of output amongst a relatively small group of firms which gives rise to the business cycle.” while economies composed of predominantly smaller businesses — such as Sweden’s — experience shallower recessions. Ball’s adjoiner:

This is a sober message in the light of the tendency for small companies to get swallowed up by a handful of big ones: in such an economy, we must expect deeper, more severe recessions. In this sense at least, a “healthy” market is a diverse one.

Which raises another interesting point. Perhaps it is harder for Swedish companies to grow not because taxes are higher, but because these companies tend to merge less often, for whatever reason. There are plenty of examples of mergers, ostensibly driven by promised synergies and economies of scale, which in fact were the product of megalomanic CEOs (witness AOL Time Warner) and which performed poorly afterwards. These tend to balance out the success stories — the Googles and the Microsofts. Large companies clearly are not automatically more productive than smaller ones — at least not anymore. Perhaps the internet now provides smaller companies with access to the same economies of scale that previously were only available to larger companies. Or else smaller companies prove to be more nimble in times of accelerating technological change. Or perhaps smaller companies benefit from the rule of 150Also see Blink on this matter..

Whatever the reason, Timbro needs to do a bit more work if it wants to convince me — reciting the mantra won’t do it. I’m not saying they’re wrong, outright — this post is far too tentative for that — but I am saying that it’s rather easy to think of plausible rebuttals, and then to find support for these among economists.

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Go ogle Earth

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At the moment it’s all content and no formI would have loved to make things spiffier, but what with the travels there is barely enough time to keep up-to-date on the content right now. Bad timing on Google’s part, obviously., but I’d like to introduce my new blog: Ogle Earth, “A microblog about the wonderful things being done with Google Earth.”

Flightblogging (properly)

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I was eager to play early adopter and try SAS’s inflight wireless web connection on my flight to New York, and have now done so, only to find an email from a friend saying she was fine after a “tragic attack on London.” This led me to all the news sites, and then to trying to contact my sister in London, hoping for reassuring news.

You can’t use mobile phones on planes yet, but you can sure use Skype if you are connected via SAS’s wifi service$30 for the entire flight (and electric plugs are only for those in Business) or else $10 for an hour + 25c per minute thereafter (my choice).. I tried to Skype out to people’s phones in London but either they were not answering or the phone lines were overburdened (as they were with 9/11). I Skyped dad on the phone to ask about my sister, but he couldn’t hear me over the aircraft noise. Makeshift solution: I instant-messaged a friend (okay, it was Matthew) and asked him to call and report back. It turns out everyone is fine.

Moral of the story: Use a headset if you want to talk to Skype from an airplane (unless you have no qualms about shouting like a hijacker). However, if all you want to do is check if someone is alive, you just need to wait for them to pick up the phone. You can hear them fine.

In other news: SAS, like other airlines, has a little screen in the seat in front that can be made to show a world map with a position of the plane. Post-Google Earth, it is beginning to look decidedly less impressive. It occurred to me that, given internet access on planes, a GPS device and Google Earth on my laptop, you could construct a home-grown replacement that is far more impressive. The only hack you’d need would be somehow manage to link a GPS device’s live position to Google Earth. Can’t be too hard. (In fact, Google should team up with ATi or NVidia to market this to airlines.)

Finally, my row of 8 seats has 5 iPods on it. If that rate is multiplied by 40 rows, there should be around 200 iPods on this flight. Crazy, no?

Google Earth

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Google Earth is going to fundamentally redefine how we use the internet. That’s obvious to me after a few days of slack-jawed intensive use. Luckily, my work PC could handle the the graphical demands without protestA Mac version is in the works.. Luckily, Felix alerted me of its release in time so I could download a copy before — and this must be a first — Google was inundated and had to stop further downloads for now.Update 2005-07-04: Google Earth downloads are again available.

I’m being this enthusiastic because I found Google Earth to be a groundbreaking application on at least two mutually reinforcing fronts: As a viscerally beautiful experience, and as a revolution in how we will instinctively “place” information in our mind’s eye. The former is the eyecandy that will lead everyone to the latter, I think.

I love maps, and always have. I love nothing more than to be dropped off in a new city with a map and the day ahead of me. The love affair came early — my preschooler self demanded endless guided tours from parents through the household’s (to me, then) human-sized atlas. And it wasn’t just Earth: maps of the Moon, Mars and the night sky, diagrams of the solar system and the galaxy all seeded what grew to be a need for knowing, for lack of a less presumptuous phrase, my place in the universe.

When I lived in Australia as a teenager, I tried imagining exactly where my relatives in Europe stood as I spoke to them on the phone. If I looked straight down and a little to the North and West of me, near the edge of that Persian carpet, there they’d be, 12,000 km away on the other side of molten magma, feet pointing my way.

I’d also readily imagine myself gazing at Earth from space when trying to figure out how the seasons came about, or why sunsets are always quick and punctual at the equator. TV programs did this too, of course, but computers in the 80s and 90s were not nearly ready to do my bidding live in 3D.

Now there is Google Earth. Sure, I have the screensaver that lets you play Superman with Earth, but Google’s offering is just stunningly better. Where to begin? A quick list: In some places in Sweden, the level of detail is such that you can see the shadows of individual people as you zoom in… You can add translucent roadmap overlays that shimmer into existence as you come in closer… You can turn height information into fully fledged 3D mountains… You can then look up at the horizon and fly through this landscapehoover.jpg
The Hoover dam in 3D. Click for more.…

So where have I been recently? I revisited some 3D terrains I know well, like the Lake District in the UK, where the vantage points are remarkably accurate. I flew through the Hunza valley in Northern Pakistan. I found our old swimming pool in Sydney. I checked out Terra del Fuego and flew over the stunning West coast of Greenland. I also took to aiming for Earth from afar at random and then zooming in all the way — once I ended up near a tabletop mountain in the Southern Venezuelan Amazon basin that has a most beautiful hidden valley.Sorry not to be able to supply coordinates, which I now feel I should, but I don’t have access to Google Earth here at home where I blog.

That’s the eyecandy part of this impressive application. But Google’s cleverness lies in really just letting all this be a kind of backdrop, a lure to where the real revolution is going to happen. Here it is: Anyone can publish a layer for Google Earth linking places on the internet to places on Earth. The application comes preloaded with a sampling of such layers, such as volcanoes or recent earthquakes, or links to sites for coordinate confluences. But the possibilities are far broader than I can currently grasp. One blogger is tracing the Tour the France. Flickr photos that are “geotagged” with coordinates can already be made to appear automatically. I myself am mostly done converting a link-list of Swedish universities into such a layer — turning that information into a far far more compelling experience for foreign students considering studying in Sweden.

Where will all this lead? It seems evident to me that a physical location is less arbitrary than a URL, as most everything in cyberspace refers back to something in physical space, be it a news story’s dateline, a travel diary, an institution’s website, or a restaurant review. Blogs too are written from somewhere, with location often defining content. So why not turn blogrolls into a Google Earth layer? Why not have The BBC turn its datelines into pointers on Google Earth and update that layer in sync with its website? Why not turn my address book into a layer?

Google is hoping for that, I’m sure. Google Earth comes with a built-in browser (the Google browser!) to facilitate precisely this kind of interchange: On the top half of the screen, the Earth browser; on the bottom, if you want, the web browser. I imagine that soon, surfing from geotagged website to geotagged website will be accompanied with a moving zooming live Earth; a visit to www.who.org leads to a view of Geneva, for example, where my address book markers show me that my friend Eurof, who lives there, is currently online with Skype. I also notice there is an exhibit of pre-Columbian art on around the corner from him, courtesy of a marker sponsored by the Tribune de Genève, so I ask him if he’s been and if it’s worth the trouble.

Then, when I’m done procrastinating, I go back to the WHO site and click on the story about an outbreak of Marburg in the Uige province of Angola, and the Earth view automatically moves there. Perhaps I will be able to switch on an overlay of gridded population densities, or child mortality (provided by the WHO?), letting me further understand the context of the news. Perhaps somebody will have taken pictures from the region on a recent trip, and geotagged them. Maybe one of the doctors there is blogging it, and her blog shows up in the view. Perhaps Wikipedia will have geotagged its article on Uige by then.

The web is getting to be ridiculously good.

Berlin IV: Holocaust Memorial

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Behind the memorial, the Reichstag’s new dome, the chariot atop the Brandenburg Gate, and a crane helping rebuild Berlin. A bit laden with symbolism, true.memorial.jpg

The Holocaust Memorial is Berlin’s newest landmark — a month and a half old — and it is still finding its place in the city. The concept itself is simple: 2,711 stone slabs of varying heights and irregular tilts are arranged in a rectangular pattern a stone’s throw from the Brandenburg Gate. Between them runs a grid of narrow paths, and if you venture into the middle of this field of slabs, they easily swallow you up. On a bright sunny day, as on my visit, the slabs offer you shadeshade.jpg. On a rainy day there is little shelter from the rain.

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The monument is not overbearing, nor does it bait for solemnity or histrionics, and schoolchildren readily take to playing hide and seek amid it. Walk along the gridded paths, and you are sometimes surprised by another visitor suddenly appearing from the left or right. There is a lot of random bumping into people — you think you might be alone, but suddenly you are not. And no matter how deep you venture amid the tallest of the slabs, every intersection has four clear straight ways out — 2,711 is a prime number, and also the number of pages in the Babylonian Talmud. A coincidence? Apparenty, yes. symbolic, perhaps, of the moral compass that the Nazis never managed to extinguish, even as they murdered millions of Jews.

The slabs on the edges of the terrain are lower, and you can sit on them, and people do. But when I was there, a few people — teenagers mostly — were standing on them, hopping from slab to slab towards the middle, which is easy enough to do (though you risk a nasty injury if you misstep). I happen to know what the concrete slabs represent — Jewish burial tombs — and so I felt it would not be appropriate for me to join them, even if the vantage point looked like it might be excellent for taking pictures. Some of the slabs already have small stones placed on their edges, which is a sign of respect for the dead in Jewish cemeteries.

It turns out that the debate around what is appropriate behaviour towards this memorial is something the architect, Peter Eisenman, would like to foster. A lack of stated rules means that people themselves need to decide individually how (or if) they show respect. And that is a good thing, I think, as it turns the memorial into something that forces an individual response.

Berlin II: Tempelhof

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Berlin Templehof airport is an instant favorite. The main building supports a huge arching overhang that swallows planes whole. The architecture is monumental, imposing, and employed in the service of nazism would have done an admirable job. Later, for a while, it became the symbol of the cold war. Its days are numbered now — it sees few flights, and looks set to be decommissioned soon.THF.jpg