A recommendation came today at work that we should work from home from now on, to help reduce the spread of covid-19.

A recommendation, not an order, but it’s one I definitely agree with. Especially after reading this article about what a big difference earlier social distancing can make to slow down the virus’s spread.

I don’t enjoy working from home. I feel isolated and shut in.

I’m going to miss the physical act of getting to work. My commute is not the best part of my day but it’s good for me. In the morning it’s a good way to gradually come fully alert and ready to work. In the afternoon it’s a good way to wind down and let go of work tasks.

My desk at home is not set up for long work sessions. It’s more of a storage area for “to do” items – paperwork, magazines to read, books to blog about – than a place for work.

I only have the small 11-inch laptop monitor to work on – nothing like my three-monitor setup at the office. Working on a small monitor makes me less productive but also has a weird kind of effect on my brain – after staring at a small rectangle for eight hours, by the end of the day I feel weird in the head. It’s like I get a kind of mental tunnel vision.

I’m going to have to think about how to make this work, if this is the new reality for the foreseeable future.

The office today was nearly empty. So were the streets. I guess people are staying at home.

In the gym, people were wiping down their barbells with soapy water. But nobody was worried about door handles, which have been touched by a hundred times more hands than those bars! It’s like wearing those face masks that all the news sources tell you don’t help. But it makes people feel less anxious.

Meanwhile, the Stockholm region has announced that they will stop testing people for the coronavirus, with the exception of hospitalized cases – the argument being that resources are better spent caring for sick people than testing those who might be sick. And that just a day or two after reassuring statements about how we have all the resources we need. The trade-off is reasonable, but it does not feel reasonable at all that we reached the point of having to make that trade-off so soon. So we won’t have any meaningful statistics about the spread of the virus from now on. Not impressed.

Crocus buds are out (but I haven’t seen any of them open since there hasn’t been any sun) and daffodil shoots are a third of the way there – and then we get this. Sleet and slush.

Board game nights at tretton37 are on again, after a long hiatus. We ended up being only three today, but Small World adjusts so well to different numbers of players that we still had great game.

The news are all full of covid-19.

The number of cases in Stockholm is at a few hundred and increasing, but people are generally not too worried. The Melodifestivalen final still took place last Friday, with tens of thousands of people, and so did the Women in Tech conference with a few thousand.

But it’s getting closer. Now we can start playing “six degrees of covid-19 separation”. I’m currently at two: a colleague’s relative has been diagnosed.

The general advice for avoiding infection sounds simple. Wash your hands frequently. Avoid touching your face. Keep at a distance from people who are coughing or sneezing.

This has made hyper-aware of just how often I touch my face. I do it all the time! My nose itches, my lips are dry, there’s something in the corner of my eye…

Out with the car, in with the bike!

I was going to start cycling to work last week, but various complications (doctor’s visits etc) made it unworkable. Today I cycled to work for the first time this season.

It’s light like in spring, and it’s warm like in spring. But it doesn’t feel like spring. The world is still asphalt-coloured. The grass is still dead, and the trees aren’t budding yet. Not enough to be visible from a distance, at least.

Everyone in this household is now cooking or baking regularly. Alone among us, Adrian had no apron that fit him.

Store-bought aprons aren’t quite one size fits all, but nearly: there are two sizes on the market instead of one. Kids’ aprons are sized for kids aged 4 to 6 or thereabouts, and the ones we had are now way too small for Adrian. Adult-sized ones are still way too large.

What does one do? Make one, of course!

I like easy sewing projects like this. No worrying about fit, just have fun. And it takes no more than a few hours to get done.

Adrian made the design, I made it happen.

He had a very clear idea of what his apron should look like, with colourful appliques of fruit and vegetables (and an egg) and cooking utensils. Most of them he chose, I think, because they look cool – he doesn’t even really eat avocados – but the cucumber got pride of place because it is his favourite vegetable.

We later replaced the orange with a carrot, because it’s hard to make an orange not look like an orange-coloured ball, and had to skip most of the utensils because we couldn’t fit them into the space we had. We switched from pink to blue because we couldn’t find a sturdy fabric in the kind of dusky pink he had in mind. But the final result is pretty close to the original design.

Functionally, the apron has three tweaks that I wish all my aprons had as well.
One: no pocket. I’ve never used any of the pockets on my aprons – all they do is get in the way and get dirty.
Two: ties of generous length. Both Adrian and I like taking the ties all the way around the waist and tying the knot in the front.
Three: neck strap adjustable using snaps instead of rings. Non-adjustable neck straps suck; I’ve ended up tying ugly hard knots in some to make them fit. And D-rings always end up slipping. Watching Master Chef on TV, I noticed that they had snaps instead. Of course that’s the way to go!

Tekniska museet has an exhibition about robots that we’ve been talking about for months now. This is the last but one weekend so today Adrian and I went and saw it.

The theme was specifically humanoid and human-like robots – “making machines human”. The story starts back in the renaissance: on the one hand, new inventions such as mechanical clocks and ever more elaborate clockworks; on the other hand, a growing understanding of human bodies and anatomy. Those came together in impressive automata that then gradually inspired more and more human-like machines.

There were plenty of robots, robot parts and images of robots to be seen. Fictional robots, from Metropolis and R.U.R. through to the Terminator 800. The gradual evolution of robot anatomy, with wooden finger joints and rope ligaments and little motorized muscles. Locomotion, sensors, etc.

Many could have been even more interesting with more in-depth information. I can see that this is a robot arm with these and these parts, and the sign tells me it’s from 1970-whatever, made in some lab in some country. What was really new and cool about it? What could it do? What could it not do? How do more modern robots differ from it? What interesting results did it give rise to? What other experiments did it inspire?

Also unfortunately the robots that you could interact with were very basic. One seemed interesting because it could actually sense its environment and detect nearby people as well as their movement – but it was behind a pane of glass that seemed to interfere with most of its sensors.

There were plenty of other activities at the museum and we stayed for hours. Construction toys; an indoor playground where the kids could let off some steam; various exhibitions. There was an entire exhibition about computer games through time, which had the same problem as the robots exhibition – not enough information.

The exhibit that both Adrian and I enjoyed most was about eye tracking technology. Two monitors that you could draw on by looking where you wanted to put the “paint” – and a large monitor that superimposed the two individual pictures. As a nice touch, the virtual on-screen brushstrokes were very pretty, with interesting shapes and colour gradations, much nicer than the usual single-colour blobs. And drawing was pretty hard. You need to look ahead to where you want the line to go, but my eyes were often drawn back to where the line currently ended. With a lot of staring, I managed to draw some basic shapes. Using eye tracking for real must take a lot of practice.

I spent today at the Women in Tech conference since I got a free ticket.

I liked some parts of it, but on the whole I found it a bit too fluffy and not techy enough. Some talks were inspirational – women entrepreneurs talking about their companies and how they use technology to make the world better. (Some of these almost veered into advertising.) Some were sorta-kinda informational but too vague to actually be useful – there was a session about something something AI and humans, and two days later I can’t remember a single point of what was said there. There were several panel debates, mostly too short to reach any kind of interesting results.

I can think of one potential audience that would benefit from this event: female technology students on their way out into the working world, who need inspiring examples to follow.

Women In Tech is not the only network aiming to encourage more women to study technology and work in the IT industry. Various such networks and organizations occasionally invite me to join. But I never do.

Fundamentally it’s because I don’t identify as a “female developer” or a “woman in tech”. It is not how I think of myself. I am a developer, among other developers. I very, very rarely notice the fact that I am one of only three female developers in our fifty-person Stockholm office, and all the others are men.

I’ve never felt or been told that I as a woman “should not” be interested in STEM subjects, “should not” work in technology. Never felt that I am less welcome, less listened to, less respected than men in the same business.

But I guess I’ve been lucky. Both my parents are scientists and it’s always been almost self-evident that I would follow in that direction. (I wonder how they would have reacted if I had chosen to study something fluffy and less employable like, say, sociology, or art history. Or not gone down the academic path at all and become a hairdresser.) I’ve always been encouraged at school, and I’ve always worked at incredibly meritocratic firms.

Another ballet triple bill. We had great seats, middle of the front row. Unfortunately Eric was ill and didn’t get well in time so I went on my own.

Jiři Kylián, Wings of Wax. I’m pretty ure I’ve seen something by Kylian before but I can’t find a mention of him on my blog so I can’t remember what it might have been. Wings of Wax was set to lovely music by Bach and Glass and Cage and (a new one for me) Heinrich Biber. The choreography was soft, simple, light and lyrical, and closely tied to the music. It reminded me a bit of Balanchine’s Agon in how the dancers’ movements seemed like an embodiment of the music, but softer. Lovely.

Ohad Naharin, Minus 16. This piece was in turn made up of several smaller pieces, and the connections between them were not very clear to me. The first and by far most memorable of the pieces has a name of its own, since it is built around a song: “Echad Mi Yodea”. It starts with twenty dancers sitting on chairs in a semicircle at the front of the scene. The song – and the dance – consists of repetitions of the same verse, with new phrases added to the front of the verse with every repetition. The dancers throw their bodies around, and throw their clothes and shoes off. I liked the dancing but I really loved the music – intense, powerful and energetic.

Other parts of Minus 16 were less interesting. Some were simply unmemorable. Others were crowd-pleasers, such as inviting people from the audience to the scene, or just “letting go” dance party style and seemingly dancing without any choreography. It makes the audience laugh and clap their hands, yes, but it’s not what I came for.

Mats Ek’s Woman with Water is actually inserted in between parts of Minus 16. (That’s how disjointed Naharin’s piece was.) Very Mats Ek. He makes the world and the human body look alien. The dancer’s back is hunched as if she didn’t quite fit inside the world; she moves around a table as if she was completely unfamiliar with tables.

All three photos by the Royal Opera.