Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• The international war over exit signs – The classic American emergency exit sign has bold red letters spelling out E-X-I-T. The rest of the world thinks this is nuts, and mostly use some version of the ISO standard, a green pictogram showing a man running through a door.
• Can better signs help pedestrians understand London? – London is putting up signs to help pedestrians find their way, and to reduce Tube congestion.
• Charles Stross: CMAP #5: Why books are the length they are – Why are novels generally the length that they are? It looks obvious at first — novels are the length they are because, well, they're novels — but in truth, the length of a novel varies depending on the prevailing publishing industry distribution model when it's written.
• Scott and Scurvy – How a known cure for scurvy was lost.
• The Economist: Gendercide – The worldwide war on baby girls – Technology, declining fertility and ancient prejudice are combining to unbalance societies

Spring is in the air. Well, it is still –10°C outside, and there is still half a metre of snow in the garden… but the sun is up well before me, and the birds are chirping and twittering much more actively.

Other creatures are, apparently, also getting that spring feeling. Here’s the sight that met us behind our house yesterday morning, where the snow had lain more or less untouched the previous night:

Hare tracks everywhere! Must be that March madness coming on.

I’ve never actually seen the hares visit our garden – just their tracks and some droppings underneath the bird feeder. (I guess they won’t say no to some seeds when they’re desperate.) Eric’s spotted them lurking in the lilac hedge at times.

The bird feeder has also attracted the interest of a couple of roe deer. (Look at how deep that snow is around the doe’s leg! I expect we’ll be reminiscing about the Great Winter of ’09 for many years to come.)

As with the hares, they’ll take peanuts and sunflower seeds when that’s the only thing on offer. We have very deliberately not put out any more suitable feed for them: we don’t want them to think that this neighbourhood is a good place for them to hang out. They should really stay in the nature reserves well away from here. Here they risk getting run over, and of course they are rather unpopular with most homeowners since they tend to eat parts of the garden that people would rather keep. Tulips, I’m told, are a favourite food in spring.

We haven’t planted any tulips, but I am hoping to see a lot of snowdrops, crocuses, scillas and daffodils.

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• Charles Stross: CMAP #4: Territories, Translations, and Foreign Rights – If you're an author and you rely on your North American rights, you'll be on the bread line. To actually earn a living, you really need to exploit other territorial and language rights.
• Charles Stross: CMAP #3: What Authors sell to Publishers – The rights of authors, and how they are managed, parceled out, sold and compensated for.
• Charles Stross: CMAP #2: How Books Are Made – It is a common misconception that "the only two people that matter are the author and the reader (one puts creativity in, the other money: the rest add cost)". To be direct: a manuscript is not a book. The author's job is to write the manuscript. The publisher's job is to turn a series of manuscripts originating from different suppliers into consistently produced books, mass-produce them, and sell them into distribution channels.
• Charles Stross: Common Misconceptions About Publishing: #1 – Publishing is a recondite, bizarre, and downright strange industry which is utterly unlike anything a rational person would design to achieve the same purpose (which I will loosely define for now as "put authors books into the hands of readers while making a profit, to the satisfaction of all concerned").
• TED Talks: Daniel Kahneman – The riddle of experience vs. memory – About how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. When choosing a vacation, if you knew in advance that at the end you'd be given an amnesic drug and all your photos would be deleted, would you choose a different kind of vacation?

Snow, of course, does not just land in the streets, on the train tracks and in our garden. A lot of it lands on roofs. There it gathers, perhaps melts a bit when the weather gets warmer, slides towards the edge of the roof and forms overhangs and icicles. Pretty, but also pretty dangerous.

Every winter a bunch of people get hurt (and occasionally killed) and vehicles get seriously damaged by falling snow and ice. As a pedestrian you can’t do much: since the chunks of snow and ice will be sliding off the roof, they won’t fall along the wall but may well land several metres away from the building.

Luckily there are laws that oblige the owners of buildings to make sure snow and ice which could fall down are removed as soon as possible. In the meantime, if there is risk of stuff falling down, they’re obliged to put up warning signs and, if necessary, rope off the sidewalk.

Today, all day today, there were workmen clearing snow from the roof of the building where I work. (The workmen were still at it when I went home in the afternoon.) As I got there in the morning, about 20 metres of sidewalk was closed off and chunks of ice and snow were flying down. There’s a spotter on the ground who makes sure that people don’t wander into the cordoned-off area, and shouts to the folks on the roof when to stop and start. On taller buildings I’ve heard them use whistles.

Some time in the morning they shifted to the other, courtyard side of the building: the one right behind my back. The amounts of snow and ice coming down there was unbelievable. Every now and again everyone on that side of the office would jump, as some icy lump hit our window, or some particularly large chunk hit the roof of the courtyard hard enough to make the floor tremble and our monitors shake. The largest ones I saw were about the size of a human torso. Luckily those were mostly snow rather than ice – I don’t think the tin roof would have survived it.

If you’re interested, Svenska Dagbladet has photos of the roof-cleaning process.

This is a slim book of just over a dozen short stories, all with the same theme: a satirical take on when religion becomes dogma, with Orthodox Judaism as the starting point. Some stories deal with the idiocy of religious practices, when taken literally and seriously. One shows two hamsters trying to understand why the gifts of food from their Joe are not as bountiful as they used to be, and attempting to regain Joe’s favour by applying themselves even more diligently on the exercise wheel. A few show what reality might look like from God’s point of view, if the world worked the way religious creed tells us.

The stories are funny and well-written. The thematic focus of the book gave it a strength it wouldn’t have otherwise, but at the same time I found it slightly repetitive. I enjoyed reading this, but wouldn’t have wanted any more of the same.

Adlibris, Amazon US, Amazon UK.

From –25°C to above freezing in 4 days. Amazing.

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• The Economist: Printing body parts – A machine that prints organs is coming to market. Simple tissues to begin with, but larger organs should be possible, too.
• NY Times: When It Comes to Salt, No Rights or Wrongs. Yet. – New US dietary guidelines due this spring may lower the recommended level of salt. Is this going to be a repeat of the low-fat debacle, where the advice actually led to worse diets?
• Wired: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web – Google's basic algorithm is being tweaked continuously, teaching it about names, synonyms, context etc. There are so many changes to test that on most Google queries, you’re actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously.
• Fortsatt kaos i tågtrafiken – SJs tåg kan på en dag dra på sig uppemot 30 ton is, som måste tinas innan tåget kan tas in på verkstad för service. Avisning kan ta 4 till 8 timmar.
• SJ skyller på regeringen – Tågnätet är överlastat och det satsas för lite på underhåll. Tågen byggs och testas i Mellaneuropa där det visserligen kan bli kallt men inte så här fuktigt.
• The Story of P(ee) – In which phosphorus, a substance present in every living cell, is being used up and flushed away. The world’s supply of phosphate rock, the dominant source of phosphorus for fertilizer, is being rapidly — and wastefully — drawn down. By most estimates, the best deposits will be gone in 50 to 100 years.

Phew, I’m glad the electrical weirdness manifested on Saturday and not today! The temperature outside our bedroom window this morning was –25°C.

The public transport company of Stockholm was advertising a reduced train schedule on their home page, plus a total cancellation of service on the above-ground sections of the metro (subway) lines, and advising people to stay at home if possible. Luckily it is very easy for me to work from home, so I followed their advice. (The prospect of standing outdoors, waiting for a train for who knows how long, in –25°C was not the least bit appealing.) My colleague Oscar, who lives in a relatively central part of Stockholm, finally got to the office just past 11, after about 2 hours of travel time.

During the day the temperature went up to around –13°C, so going out in the afternoon was not so bad at all. And there wasn’t much wind, which helped matters a lot.

Indoors, pretty steady at 17°C. An extra fleece on top of the other one, and I heated my orange juice this morning. (Sounds weird, perhaps, but tastes really nice.)

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• Lingonkoefficienten – Måndagen 8 mars framträder Four Tops och Temptations på Cirkus i Stockholm. Båda grupperna har bara en originalmedlem kvar. Hur mycket lingon måste det finnas i burken för att den ska få kallas lingonsylt?
• Why the Maya used a 260-day calendar – The Maya actually used three different calendars. The Tzolk’in ran on a 260-day cycle, and the Haab’ used a 365-day cycle. Then there was the Long Count, which counted days since a mythical beginning of time and also included the other two.
• The Economist: Economics focus: Diversity training – Some developing economies are rich but crude, while others are poor but sophisticated
• The Atlantic: Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (February 1982) – The history of the De Beers diamond cartel and their PR campaign to make diamonds an essential part of every engagement.
• Temporal User Interfaces – Humans mostly use two dimensions to organize and identify things: Space and Time. People are pretty good at thinking in the dimension of time. We can take advantage of this ability when designing human interfaces.

Well we got snow all right. Here’s what our stairs looked like when Eric had shoveled the top one, this morning at 8.30:

And here’s the state of affairs less than 9 hours later, at 5pm:

And (as warned) there were disruptions to civic services. Train delays, of course – no surprise. Rather more surprisingly there was something weird going on with our electricity supply. At some point during the afternoon we lost power to a quarter of the house. It was early enough that I had no lights on, and I didn’t notice that my Mac had switched to battery power. After a while I thought it was getting unusually cold here, got up to check the temperature (thinking that perhaps I was just coming down with a cold) and indeed it was barely over 15°C. All the heaters in the room were off, and I quickly realized that we had no power in the room.

A fuse, I thought, and spent almost an hour hunting the culprit. The wiring in this house is a mishmash, installed at different times through its history. As proof, consider the situation I had: living room all without power; some outlets in the kitchen OK, some not; ceiling lamps in the kitchen without power; ceiling lamp in hallway without power; wall outlet in hallway OK.

We have three fuse boxes, one up in the house and two side by side in the basement. The ones in the basement are at least labelled; the one up here was a total mystery – I wasn’t even sure if it was still in use. Anyway all the fuses in all boxes looked perfectly OK to me. Nevertheless I took three trips to the basement, replacing various fuses which I thought might be relevant, based on the scanty labelling. No luck.

During this time the temperature had gone from 15.3 to 14.7 and I realized that it will soon be seriously unpleasantly cold in here. I took a break from my investigations and focused on damage control instead. The good thing about electrical heaters is that you can plug them into any outlet you want, as long as you have enough extension cord. So I spread a network of extension cables from the kitchen to the living room, and got two of the three heaters hooked up, as well as some lamps.

Back to investigating. Now I went through all those unlabelled fuses up here (I think there were nine in total). Still no luck. Surely the juice in the living room couldn’t be affected by fuses labelled “heater (basement)” or “wall outlets and lighting, bathroom”! I couldn’t face more running back and forth between the house and the basement. It really was a task for two people and phones: one to fiddle with the fuses and one to check what happens in the house. But Eric and Ingrid were out at Junibacken. At this point I gave up, spent a little more time installing more extension cords to let me have a desk lamp in the kitchen, and started cooking dinner.

Eric and Ingrid got home, and Eric spent some more time investigating. Still no success. Then, just as dinner was almost done, the house went all black for a moment. The next moment the power came back – including in the previously dark part of the house. And we’re both thinking – wait a moment, what just happened here? Are we supplied by two separate power lines? But we only have one meter… Or is the old half of the house somehow more sensitive to small voltage fluctuations? No idea. Whatever it is, I don’t like it. I don’t like mysteries in my electricity supply.