This is primarily for my mother, to make her get her stuff together and join this, and I warn you: it will hold little to no interest for non-knitters. You know who you are.

From the beginning, I have been very sceptical of the whole web 2.0 experience. I have shunned Facebook, skirted around Twitter (except the occasional stalking moments now and again), never joined Bebo, Orkut or Hi5 and generally felt very good about staying as far from social networking sites as I could. But, perhaps to compensate, I have been steadily drawn to what I suppose are similar concepts that have a clear focus: Flickr (for photos), LastFM (for music), LibraryThing (for books), and finally Ravelry (for knitting).

That is not to say that I make the most of their networking possibilities (I am hopelessly shy around strangers, even on the internet); what they do provide, though, is an endless source of new and steadily more focused input on things that interest me in particular. But I was going to discuss Ravelry.



I heard about it ages ago, when NRK had a news piece on someone doing their master's or a doctorate on online knitting circles. It showed reworkings of the Marius sweater pattern into a geeky Space Invaders theme, and I realised fairly quickly that it would be a bad idea for me to look too closely at this before I finished my PhD. I did register, however, and found at least one very cute ...

Jeg har gått og irritert meg i det siste (man bør jo ha en hobby), og en av de tingene jeg har irritert meg over er de spekulative overskriftene på nettsidene til våre nyhetsformidlere. Jeg er ikke sikker på om dette har økt i frekvens eller om det bare er enda en av disse tingene som blir mer irriterende når man begynner å legge merke til dem; men jeg har i alle fall kommet over urovekkende mange av dem i det siste. Tor har jo tidligere nevnt Dresden i ruiner, som tar deg til en bildeserie fra krigen, men jeg har inntrykk av at det har økt i frekvens ettersom enkelte (kanskje spesielt NRK) har gått bort fra forklarende tekst under overskriftene. Man har derfor gjerne kun overskrift og bilde å gå på når man skal vurdere om noe er verd å lese.

Den første jeg la merke til i går var NRKs



Jeg stoppet opp fordi jeg syntes det var en merkelig formulering. Jeg har aldri tenkt på metonymi som noe man er ``utsatt for'', og det å i det hele tatt ha det blant nyheter slo meg som virkelig merkverdig. Jeg begynte derfor å tenke (irritasjoner begynner gjerne på den måten) på hvilke grunner man kunne ha for denne formuleringen. Det jeg kom frem til er at man satser på at en stor andel av leserne ikke vet hva metonymi er, og at de derfor vil anta at det er noe skrekkelig noe siden det har blitt gjort ...

Serbia has announced that they now think they have Ratko Mladic in custody. The fact that they need DNA to be sure in itself illustrates the long period in which he has been at large. He was indicted already in 1995, that is 15 years ago.

It was the year after the Olympic Games at Lillehammer; Bill Clinton had just barely got into stride in his first turn as president; John Major was prime minister in Britain; Jacques Chirac became president in France and started testing nukes in the Pacific; it was the year of the Oklahoma bombing; Christopher Reeve got thrown from a horse and was paralysed; OJ Simpson was found not guilty.

And of course it is the year of the Srebrenica massacre, which is one of the major crimes Mladic presided over.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia wants him transferred to the Hague to face charges of

the direct involvement in the genocide committed after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995;

the killing of close to 8,000 men and boys following the fall of this enclave;

the terror inflicted upon civilians during the 1992-1995 siege of Sarajevo;

the widespread campaign of persecutions, deportation, torture and murders during 1992 in large parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, including infamous detention camps like Omarska, Keraterm, Manjača and Trnopolje in northwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina.


I hope he does not have a heart attack before he is made to face them.

click here

I held off reading this book for ages. Mainly because someone described it as a book about growing up in the South. While accurate, this is not all it is, and it is not the best selling point when describing a book to me: the bildungsroman has never been my favourite genre, and the American South not my favourite region. I also tend to be more drawn to European classics than the American ones (I do not know why; I am sure there is a sensible explanation that does not make me look like a bigot).

I do, however, feel drawn to the Truman Capote/F. Scott Fitzgerald New York scene of American writing, and it was via this avenue that I finally discovered Nelle Harper Lee for myself. She was a childhood friend of Capote, and I had heard that one of the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird was based on him. Naturally, I had to read it. Thus my discovery of one of the truly great books of the world.

It reminded me of all that is lovely about the American South; equally importantly, it dealt with the difficult questions of the region without becoming tiresome. I quickly lost sight of my original reason for reading it (the Capote character), although the semi-autobiographical side to the book kept my interest up in the beginning.

Words like "compelling" have lost much of their meaning through over-use, which is sad because it suits the book perfectly. It is also ...

Da Tor foreslo at jeg skulle skrive en artikkel om min digitale arbeidsplass lo jeg egentlig litt inni meg idet jeg for mitt indre blikk så hvordan jeg tråler gjennom gamle journaler på NLS. Min arbeidsplass virker ikke primært high-tech og digital. Men det er ikke hele sannheten.

Som Tor bruker jeg LaTeX til å skrive dokumenter. Det er ikke så imponerende som det høres ut som. Tor tar seg av all hacking som måtte trenges, og det går egentlig bare ut på at jeg istedet for å trykke på italics-knappen i Word skriver \emph{hva jeg nå vil ha i kursiv}, og andre lignende knep. Siden jeg aldri kommer til å trenge å skrive en ligning er behovene mine ganske enkle. Jeg tror aldri jeg vil gå tilbake til Word. Det hender jeg blir tvunget til å bruke Word-ekvivalenter (for mine fag baserer seg fortsatt i stor grad rundt denslags), og hver gang holder jeg på å få krupp. Takke meg til programmer som bare gjør som de får beskjed om.

Dere vil kanskje legge merke til at pdf-delen av min screenshot er veldig annerledes enn Tors. At min faktisk ser ut som et Word-dokument? Det stemmer. Det er fordi jeg tvang Tor til å skaffe meg noe i retning av MLA-stil. Det er tragisk, for det ser mye mindre pent ut; men det er enklere å gi tilbakemeldinger på. Det beste av to verdener, med andre ord: MLA fra den Word-orienterte humanoira-verdenen; save og print fra LaTeX. Jeg ...

I have grown increasingly exasperated over the last couple of days, following news pieces like this one, in which it is suggested that because the IMF boss/presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss-Kahn is accused of rape, the French media has committed a faux pas in not reporting on the sex lives of their politicians.

French privacy laws are among the strictest in the world, and the French have long prided themselves on not prying into what politicians get up to in the bedroom - unlike the British and the Americans.

Until now, most French people would have found it distasteful for journalists to report on politicians' extra-marital affairs.

For now, relatively few French commentators have been asking whether that will change in the wake of the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the man nicknamed the Great Seducer.

But the French media have been reporting comment in American and British newspapers on whether Mr Strauss-Kahn's behaviour might have been different if France didn't have a convention that politicians' sex lives are off-limits.

It seems thoroughly absurd to me. I have no opinion on the guilt question, but I find it absurd to put reporting on extra-marital affairs in the same box as rape. One is a serious crime; the other, while bad behaviour, isn't. One is a public matter which should lead to prosecution and reporting; the other is for his wife and her lawyers to deal with. Now, sexual harassment of and assault on female journalists (which I have seen ...

For de av dere som ikke leser Doonesbury eller xkcd og derfor kanskje ikke er klare over alt som foregår ute i den store verden: Det viser seg at Henførelsen eller Henrykkelsen (hva det nå heter på norsk) kommer 21. mai.

Hva er egentlig dette?
Jeg har nevnt det i en tidligere artikkel, men siden man ikke kan regne med at alle har god hukommelse eller klikker på linker:

Enkelte kristne tror at før Apokalypsen virkelig setter inn vil alle rett-troende kristne rykkes bort fra jorden, slik at de slipper unna alle de forferdelige tingene som kommer til å ramme alle andre opp mot Dommedag.

Det har gått sport i å gjette på når dette måtte skje. Alle så langt har tatt feil (med mindre jeg har gått glipp av noe), men det hindrer ikke Harold Camping i å erklære at lørdag er dagen. Det vil komme et kjempejordskjelv som vil begynne ved den internasjonale datolinjen (noe jeg må si er litt kjedelig: Hvorfor skulle en guddom bry seg om hvor vi setter opp datolinjen? Er det fordi det må skje den 21. i alle land? Det ville være mer spenstig å starte det hele i Jerusalem eller Babylon eller Gomorrah eller noe slikt), og mens vi ikke-frelste så skal lide i fem måneder (for apoklaypsen kommer ikke på ordentlig før 21. oktober), vil herr Camping og vennene hans sitte ved Guds venstre hånd og etter alt å dømme sippe drinker med paraplyer i.

Her kan man finne mer informasjon ...

As Tor's article will show, the Norwegian fascination with the 17th of May is no longer a geographically isolated affair. To be fair, it hasn't been for a while. I know I celebrated my second (I suppose) 17th of May on some Greek island, and there are pictures of me sporting a flag and a rosette. And I assume some Americans have been celebrating it more or less as long as we have.

But as we now have conclusive proof of the proliferation (Calcuttagutta being the arbiter of knowledge, facts and the Truth about the world), I thought I'd clear up one important fact for our foreign friends (FFs): the 17th of May is not our independence day.

Nor is it, of course, a day connected to the patron saint of our country (unlike, say, St. Patrick's Day or St. Andrew's Day). No saints are involved (see, when we took on the Reformation, we did it properly).

It is our Constitution day. Others may not make such a fuss about the day their constitutions were signed, but they did not face the prospect of becoming Swedish.

We used to belong to Denmark (from the 1380s onward -- about 500 years). Having managed to remain neutral through the major part of the conflict the Danish king got a little carried away when Britain tried to bully him, however, and joined Napoleon's side against ... the rest.* Well, the key actors were (if my memory serves me right ...

Today's news is full to the brim of the royal wedding (unhappily sans Fred Astaire). I must admit I have gotten a little fed up with the matter, but not as much as I had expected. I remember the feeling of horror when the news first broke, as I envisaged months and months of sugar-coated wedding news obscuring anything important happening in the world. Now, it may be that I read the right kind of papers (or that my internal censor has been very effective), but that hasn't really been a problem.

As Private Eye illustrates, the news has been as much critical as sugary. Both are problematic, of course. Ideally I would like to argue that it has little relevance, and so it is a little silly to spend so much time discussing every little detail. I do recognise, however, that the main point of having a monarchy is to be able to obsess about minor details and feel the nation come together in the feeling of having some stake in what happens. I get the impression British people have positive and negative opinions on the wedding -- but in much the same way as they would with regard to a family wedding. That, and they like the excuse to hold a street party and put up bunting.

I will also admit to a part of me that finds the whole thing fascinating. Royalty always has that effect. Mainly when they are long dead and you can have ...