Calcuttagutta

For noen år siden leste jeg at kong Abdullah av Saudi-Arabia hadde sett seg lei på at de ikke hadde noen skikkelig gode universiteter i landet. Han kom frem til at det som måtte til var å trekke til seg de gode forskerne fra utlandet, og dermed hostet man opp bøttevis med penger, og bygde King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, et moderne universitet med en gigantisk bøtte penger og noe mer avslappede regler enn i resten av landet. De tillater for eksempel at kvinner og menn jobber sammen, og undervisningen foregår på engelsk.

Det er faktisk mindre enn ett år siden universitetet åpnet, den 5. september 2009, så det er kanskje litt tidlig å si noe om hvordan det har gått, men det som er helt klart er at dette virker som en god idé. Ikke bare virker det som en god idé for Saudi-Arabia, som sikkert vil ha godt av modernisering, men det virker også som en god idé å grunnlegge gode universiteter.

Så, tenkte jeg, Saudi-Arabia kan gjøre slike ting som dette fordi de har latterlig mye penger, men det har jo Norge også, så hvorfor kan ikke vi gjøre det samme? Sett av noen hundre milliarder, og bygg et universitet sånn passe usentralt på østlandet et sted. Pass på å føre opp alle byggene i stein, så vi er sikre på at de holder noen hundre år, bygg en liten by rundt, betal doktorgradstudentene middels godt, og professorene meget godt, del ut tweed-jakker og piper ved ansettelse, og vips kan vi også ha et sjarmerende eliteuniversitet i en sjarmerende universitetsby.

-Tor Nordam

I was actually supposed to write a really good article today. Short, informative, probably a litte witty, and very good indeed. Unfortunately, I forgot what I was supposed to write about, so it will have to wait until I can remember. In the meantime...

Today, I went running with a friend from the university. He passed his viva yesterday, so he is almost officially a doctor, and naturally, there were celebrations yesterday, and, perhaps not so naturally, he felt that going for a run today would be perfect. I agreed, as I thought I might be able to keep up if he were in a reduced state. I used to run a lot when I was younger, 8 kilometers about two or three times a week or so the last few years I was living at home, but then I pretty much stopped after I went to university, so I'm not in as good shape as I used to be.

The thing is, I don't like running on roads. And at home, I didn't have to, because just a few hundred meters from my parent's house, the forest begins, and in the forest, there are nice paths for running. And more than likely, there are similar things in Trondheim, where I live now, but I haven't actually gotten around to looking for them. I've only lived there for eight years, mind.

In any case, when I came to Edinburgh last fall, it turned out ...

Stephen Fry is delightful. In part because Stephen Fry's writing is delightful. An autobiography on Stephen Fry should therefore be ... precisely. And it is. In a weird, sometimes slightly disturbing way.

This book deals with his experiences at school, his criminal tendencies, his sexual awakening and his first love. It starts on the train to boarding school and culminates in prison (which is apparently oddly like boarding school in a number of ways) and then the entrance to Cambridge.

Autobiographies have a habit of becoming either self-glorifying grand narratives inexorably driving the author towards his major achievements, or staid sequences of events of the "and then I did this", however sprinkled with juicy anecdotes and opinions about how everyone else went wrong. Stephen Fry, being delightful, manages to avoid both clichés.

He laughs at linearity and digresses to his heart's content, skipping backwards and forwards with glee. The first time he did it he did not signal it, and it left me confused for a moment; but as the confusion passed I realised how much I love this way of doing autobiography: he holds in his mind at the same time the memory of himself as a boy and the world around him as it was then, and the knowledge of how it all develops. He does not force the one to submit to the other, in a sort of bleak determinism or an equally problematic nostalgia. Instead he is constantly commenting on the construction of the image ...

I've got a deadline on Tuesday. Unlike Douglas Adams I do not love the whooshing sound they make as they fly past. My affliction, procrastination, keeps me reading exciting books on the (vaguely related) history of Spiritualism, however, well into the time when I should have had the chapter half-way (at least) written up and ready for revision.

And so I am stuck here, with about a third of it left to write out and some revision still to do on the remaining, not to mention the tying it all neatly together in the introduction, aided by nothing but strong coffee and willpower (you ask me why I have no will power in daily life? This is why. It is all spent in a couple of evenings).

Now, usually I keep track of my word count in order to prove to myself that I am making progress. It is all an illusion, of course, in that a thousand ill conceived and irrelevant words count as exactly the same amount as a thousand brilliant, witty and insightful words. But any harbour in heavy winds.

That is why it feels very frustrating when my word counts, after countless revisions and rewritings and elaborations over a long day look like this:

9364 (yesterday's final word count)
9621 (oh, yes!)
9801 (I am brilliant!)
9841 (hmm, slowing)
9889 (slowing?)
10083 (no! rocking! so much! a myriad, yeah!)
10002 (oops)
9869 (I've spent three hours! how can it be less?)
9910 (sloowly)
9988 (sloowly)
9985 (dammit.)

It started out so well.

(I needed to spread the pain a little.)

Her om dagen var jeg på et lite introkurs i parallellprogrammering rettet mot superdatamaskiner. Det varte bare et par timer, og jeg går dessverre glipp av de to neste kursene, som går litt mer i detalj på OpenMP og MPI, og dessuten et tredje kurs om avansert bruk av Njord, men det var interessant likevel. Mannen som holdt kurset presenterte to lover som gjerne trekkes fra i sammenheng med parallellprogrammering, nemling Amdahls lov, og Gustafsons lov.

Amdahls lov, oppkalt etter norsk-amerikaneren Gene Amdahl, sier noe om hvor stor hastighetsøkning du kan få på programmet ditt ved å parallellisere det. Hvis vi sier at P er den andelen av programmet som lar seg parallellisere, mens resten av programmet, som da blir 1-P, ikke lar seg parallellisere, kan du i beste fall få en hastihetsøkning på


der N er antall kjerner du kjører på. Så hvis for eksempel 10% av programmet ditt ikke lar seg parallellisere, vil du aldri kunne få en hastighetøkning på mer enn en faktor 10, uansett hvor stor datamaskin du har. Amdahls lov fremstår i grunnen som sunn fornuft hvis man tenker litt over det, og sant å si synes jeg kanskje det var litt billig for å få en lov oppkalt etter seg, men noe må man jo kalle den, og det var ikke akkurat som om jeg kom opp med det først.

Gustafsons lov, oppkalt etter John Gustafson, tar et litt annet utgangspunkt. Den antar at etterhvert som tilgjengelig datakraft øker vil forskere ikke bruke ...

You may have guessed that this author is Irish. What you mightn't know is that he spent some years teaching Literature and Creative writing in Texas and New York. The result? An Irish accent with Texan drawl. Pretty neat.

Colm Tóibín is a man who writes beautifully. I've only read one of his books - The Master, which is about Henry James - but I want very much to read more. I should have bought that copy of Brooklyn when I saw it in my bookshop. Then this event would have been even more brilliant.

The man is funny. He's witty. He's sharp. He's also very clever, and seems like he has a lot of heart. Plus, he tells us he's got a pile of neuroses, and would like to have an integrated personality but can't choose which one. Apparently, this means he was destined to be a writer. It shows.

Tóibín read three passages from his latest novel Brooklyn, which is about a young Irish girl who moves to the USA because she can't get a job in her home village. Tóibín describes this as the "secret" history of Ireland, the bit that no one talks about. He says this is because almost every family in Ireland had someone move to America for work, and it's almost shameful (for the Irish) that they couldn't find jobs at home. And he points out that the opposite is true of Irish Americans: they ...

Nå er det et år til kommunevalg, og da kan det kanskje være greit å starte allerede med å se hva som beveger seg av politikere i min lokale sfære, tenkte jeg. Hva fant jeg? Noe å skrive hjem om.

«Men, vil vi hjelpe Arbeiderpartiet med å bytte ut norsk kultur med «flerkultur»? Aldri! Vil vi bidra til kultursviket? Ikke om noen satt opp plakaten «skutt blir den som ...»! Vil vi noen gang føle oss «flerkulturelle»? Aldri i verden!»

Dette er ordene til to makthavere nokså langt ut på høyresida, nærmere bestemt fra Anders Langes parti. 25. august publiserte Kent Andersen og Christian Tybring-Gjedde en kronikk hvor de ytrer sin frykt for at «norsk kultur» undergraves av den sittende regjeringen. I familiær Frp-stil tar de to til orde for bevaringen, eller snarere konserveringen, av det de kaller den norske kulturen.

Først kan vi vel spørre oss hvem disse to meningsytrerne er. Kent Andersen er styremedlem i Oslo Frp, og Christian Tybring-Gjedde er, foruten stortingsrepresentant, leder av Oslo Frp, medlem av finanskomitéen, og tidligere omtalt som «LOs marerittmann». La oss gi teksten et ansikt. På mange måter kan de godt sammenlignes med en 70-30 splitt mellom Farlige Fiffus og Gullbrand Gråstein. Scenen er satt, personene introdusert. La galskapen begynne.

Mange har allerede snappet opp denne saken, og vist enten sin udelte støtte eller totale avsky. Klassekampen harselerte over bruken av 20 000 cowboyer som eksempel på kulturinvasjon, mens VG gjør det ekvivalente til å helle napalm på det proverbielle bålet ved ...

Not the chappy from Mitchell and Webb but the author of great books such as Cloud Atlas, number9dream, and the new one: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

Again, this was question and answer format, and almost exclusively about the new book (which was released on 13 May of this year).

David Mitchell apparently loves Edinburgh. And babies. He interrupted himself a few times (including during a reading from his book) to talk with a small child in the audience. Well, I say with. It was definitely more a case of "at" since the child in question was a bored baby. Edinburgh he described as a "human internet", mostly because he couldn't remember the name of an author of non-fiction who was a great source of information for his new book. A member of the audience shouted it out to him.

Anyway. I digress slightly.

This is a bit more difficult to write about because a lot of what he discussed was history. It's interesting history, but because I only took it down in note form a lot is missing. You'd be better to read the book or research Dejima. ;)

So. About The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. The book is set in the 18th century, when the Dutch were the only Europeans allowed in Edo-era Japan. Even then, however, they were only allowed on the tiny mercantile island of Dejima (near Nagasaki). The story centres around a young clerk (the Jacob in question) and ...

I have a Press Pass. I am officially a SF/F Editor. Slightly rocking.

So. On Monday last I rocked on up to my first ever event as a fully paid up member of the Literary World (the pass was free). Naturally, I startd off amazingly well: I went to what I thought was the Press Pod, and made myself comfortable while I waited for the queue to form. A rather imperious woman looked down her nose at me and said, "If you're press, please go to the Press Pod". Ah, well done, Rebekah. You're in the authors' tent. Whoops.

Duly chastened, I slunk around the corner to the correct round tent (yurt?), grabbed a newspaper, and buried my head in it for a few minutes. Nice lady then showed me to the HUGE queue for Iain Banks' talk, and all was well with the world once more.

8 o'clock arrived and we were hustled into the main theatre and handed a dram of Highland Park whisky. I knew this was a good event to choose.

And then the man himself appeared. He's slightly scruffy, as you'd expect, and a little older than I thought he would be. He also has an amazing Scottish accent, and a penchant for dropping the F-bomb. I thought the old lady sitting next to me would be shocked and appalled, but then I remembered that I was in Scotland, and Fuck is practically formal language.

All sorts of topics ...

Paul Anton gjorde meg oppmerksom på en post på slashdot, i forbindelse med at det i dag er 15 år siden Windows 95 ble sluppet. Diskusjonen går naturligvis heftig for seg, mellom de som mener Windows 95 markerte begynnelsen på forfallet for Microsoft, de som mener det begynte allerede med Windows 3.1, og de som mener det begynte senere. En av forsvarerne av Windows 95 uttaler følgende:

In 1997, I ran my Windows 95 box with a year of Uptime without needing to reboot it, and it worked a lot better than I expected for an "OS" that wants to reboot itself every time you change the most minor system setting.

Høres litt drøyt ut, spør du meg. Jeg er nok heller enig med neste kommentar, som sier

A year? I don't recall mine going that long without needing a reinstall.

Og, sannelig, en eller annen som har gjort hjemmeleksene sine sørger for å få fakta på bordet:

Sorry, I call bullshit. A known issue [microsoft.com], fixed only in 1999, would prevent Windows 95 and 98 from going over 49.7 days of uptime (2^32 milliseconds). Much hilarity ensued back in the day since "how could anyone have noticed / run into this" :-)

Fantastisk.

-Tor Nordam