This and That + Interna

I recently learned there's no W in the Swedish language. How eird is that? More generally, living in a country where I don't understand the language has taught me how tiny the actual information content of spoken language is. Like, there's the woman behind me who waves my glove around "Blablablablabla," she says. What I hear is "Did you lose your glove?" Then there's the women at the register looking at my bakery bag. "Blablablablabla," she says. "How many rolls are that?" Is what I hear. I always buy eight, because that's the only number I know how to pronounce. And then there's the guy in the mall "Blablablabla Systembolaget," upon which I point towards the liquor store.

Yes, I learned one or the other word in the past two months, one of which is "Systembolaget," the only place one can buy alcoholic beverages in Sweden and basically the equivalent to Ontario's LCBO. One difference though is that in Sweden the wines are not ordered by country, but by price. More eirdness.

That I've found the closest liquor store however, I should point out, is not the reason for my blogging being a little sparse lately. The actual reason is that I'm sitting on a huge pile of application documents for our postdoc positions. Thank you for your interest in Nordita! This isn't the first time I'm doing this, but reading hundreds of letters of recommendation is invariably as humiliating as debilitating. And sometimes amusing. Here's some gems from letters I came across "he is much better than he looks," "we have shared a common nightmare," and "he spends endless hours on delving about various aspects with a tireless face," which sounds to me like an advertisement for Botox.

Anyway, some other things that I've come across lately is this nice selection of high speed photos of fluids, my mother sends this video for everybody who is Windows-Vista-damaged, and this graph gave me a good laugh. Besides this, I just uploaded a paper, so check the arXiv tomorrow.