lördag, oktober 13, 2012

Oslo - Utøya

One autumn afternoon when the weather was sunny and bright in Oslo, I had couple of hours at hand so I decided to visit Utøya, where a mass shooting massacre in the summer of 2011 claimed 69 lives, 33 of whom were under the age of 18. The bus dropped me off at a wrong location on the E16 road, 7 km away from my destination, so I basically found my way along the Tyrifjorden shore with the aid of Google Maps. After the deadliest attack in Norway since World War II, the government has closed off Utøya, no ferry was in operation so I didn't manage to see the island Utøya up close once I got to Utøykaia at last on the mainland's side. From what I've seen, the camping site couldn't look more ordinary, everything appeared so typical here at first sight, but when trying to imagine vicariously the sheer horrors that had taken place just 600 meters on the other side of the water, sorry, I found it next to impossible to strike a mental connection on the spot. To think about the genuine ordinary being turned into the genuine monstrous sent shivers down my spine. I didn't stay long at the pier. Walking back on the same route, I saw the sunset that day was fast approaching. No sooner did I return to the bus stop on the highway than the sky dimmed and the Norwegian fjord seemed shrouded in an impending abyss of shadows. When the bus finally arrived and I hopped on, outside it became noticeably darker and darker. By the time the bus reached Oslo, it was the befallen night that came to greet me.


onsdag, september 19, 2012

Albani-Friedhof, Göttingen

Greatest mathematician since antiquity - Carl Friedrich Gauss (born 1777 – died 1855) Personal motto "pauca sed matura" ("few, but ripe")


måndag, juli 23, 2012

White Night

Full Moon
instagram.com/p/MRl6JoqQgF

Edith Södergran - Nocturne (1916)

Silverskira månskenskväll,
nattens blåa bölja,
glittervågor utan tal
på varandra följa.
Skuggor falla över vägen,
strandens buskar gråta sakta,
svarta jättar strandens silver vakta.
Tystnad djup i sommarens mitt,
sömn och dröm, —
månen glider över havet
vit och öm.


söndag, juli 01, 2012

Leap Second, 2012

Wait a second... do you know tonight is one extra second longer than usual? The adjustment occurred at 23:59:60 (Coordinated Universal Time) on June 30, 2012 in order to keep the UTC time-of-day close to the mean solar time (clock time). Which means, locally in Sweden, on the page time.is/Stockholm, for instance, after 01:59:59 but before 02:00:00 early Sunday morning on July 1, 2012, you could have witnessed the showing of 01:59:60 due to insertion of the so-called "Leap Second". For the record, here's a web screenshot of such an occurrence:


måndag, juni 18, 2012

Raoul Wallenberg

Year 2012 would mark the centenary anniversary of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg (b. 1912). This is the memorial to him and other "Righteous Among the Nations" http://bit.ly/nBBfIK in the rear courtyard of Budapest Great Synagogue for their efforts to rescue Hungarian Jews during World War II. Dohány utcai zsinagóga, part of the Jewish Ghetto in 1944, is said to be "the largest synagogue in Europe and the fifth largest in the world" now.

söndag, juni 17, 2012

Richard Taruskin, English-speaking world's leading scholarly authority on Stravinsky and indeed Russian music at large, author of The Oxford History of Western Music, delivered a fascinating 3 1/2 hour-long lecture on Thursday evening at Confidencen. Answer to the question he posed: "Words or Music: Who's Really on Top?" perhaps lies just in the very theme of O/Modernt 2012: "Monteverdi / Music is the servant of the words". Got to give props to the festival's organizers for bringing forth this terrific idea and thanks a million for the choice of featured music. How inspiring!


lördag, maj 19, 2012

Väderlekskammaren, Stockholms gamla observatorium

Seen on the wall in the Weather House, above a portrait of Anders Celsius, who proposed the Celsius temperature scale in 1742: a temperature loop that shows the mean temperatures during the warmest (July) and coldest (February) month for each year, since 1756, when Pehr Wargentin first made the measurements of temperature and precipitation at the observatory, throughout history without any interruption. The work still carries on even in 2012! This is probably the only place in the world where weather observations were continuously made and documented for over 250 years.



Also a view of the adjacent room (Gamla meridianrummet), where national meridian 0° in Sweden once stood before superseded by Greenwich Mean Time system:


söndag, januari 01, 2012

Printemps

Si l'obsession était une saison, elle devrait être l'hiver. Mais déjà, dans les froides ténèbres d'hiver j'ai soupiré pour toi, le printemps. Car il faut du temps pour dire adieu à mon âme passée, la rejetant derrière moi. Toi je te crois. Tout au long du jour.

www.photobucket.com/arbor