Only slightly bent

We woke up this morning to find the sun rising from behind a soft, white fog. Practically overnight, the winter had turned from a dreary, grey slush to a winter wonderland. What a difference some snow makes.

Taking in the view, watching the sunrise and the clearing of the fog took the better part of the morning. We were lucky that a) it was sunny at all and b) that it happened on Sunday; on normal days, I’d be at work by the time the sun even showed signs of rising at this time of the year.

The surroundings and our “backyard park” looked so beautiful we just had to go for a walk. I tend to whine about winter probably more than anyone cares to hear, but there is a flip side of the coin: winter is not, in fact, always so terrible. Today was one of those good winter days. Some other good things about winter include:

• When we’ve got snow and everything is white, walks in the nature and downtown as well tends to be quite romantic
• Hot chocolate never tastes better than when coming in from a day of playing with snow
• When the weather is really cold, you can stay inside and do all that stuff at home you always wanted to without feeling quilty that you’re missing a great day outside

Unfortunately, the winter beauty isn’t forecasted to last quite yet – rain and temperatures of +5C tomorrow will likely put an end to it. Not to despair, though – the coldest month isn’t until February, so this scenery is bound to return for longer periods of time.

In the evening, we dropped by at our neighborhood mall, Sello.They too had added some wintry touches in the form of nice lights all around. We also discovered a phenomenon that is unlikely to take place anywhere outside Finland – only here can you have a (successful) ice-cream stand opening in the middle of the winter!

After the two most basic things (stove, oven), my most essential kitchen appliance is a blender – it’s way more important than, for example, a microwave oven. And about 10 years ago, I bought a Krups blender: a predecessor of the current F577 model but practically identical to it. It’s the single greatest kitchen appliance I’ve ever had in terms of function, looks and durability. The thick glass jar alone makes all the plastic-things look like toys (which they are, really).

But 10 years. For any electrical appliance that’s an eternity. I will be very impressed and quite surprised if our washing machine or fridge or kitchen scale or vacuum cleaner lasts 10 years – these days it seems that a one-year warranty only guarantees that the appliance in question will self-destruct approximately 370 days from the day of purchase. But no, the blender just keeps on going.

And it’s not because it sits idle either – it has been and continues to be used practically every day. It has churned out countless smoothies, strawberry margaritas and other delicious things over the years and it’s still as good as new. By quick conservative calculations, it has cracked and crushed over one thousand kilograms of ice during its lifetime. Way to go, little thing.

In many cases the factual situation and what people think the situation is differ dramatically. This doesn’t sound like an issue per se, but it becomes a major problem when one realizes that most of our actions are based on what we think the situation is as opposed to what the reality is. Managing the subjective feelings of any given situation is therefore critical.

This works on all levels – many individuals don’t like to walk outside alone when it’s dark or very late in the night because it feels unsafe. It may or may not be any less safe than at other times of the day, but that doesn’t matter at all. It’s the feeling that controls the behaviour, not the factual situation. On a larger scale, if a panic strikes a dense crowd for one reason or another, it’s very likely that the situation will turn ugly – completely irrespective of the whether they were in any real danger in the first place. Like a few months back when a thousand Iraqi died because of a rumor.

It’s a curious dilemma – on one hand, the deep-rooted prejudice to one thing or another of a single human being is a very difficult thing to change. However, generalizing only a little, opinions of the general public are heavily influenced by mass media and their portrayal of things. Security and safety is the perfect example – on many fronts, the mass media is keen to hype up all kind of insecurity and one could even say they instigate fear, distrust and doubt. The reason being, of course, that catastrophies and crisis sell well. On the other hand, some governments are adamant on maintaining a treacherous balance of (illusion of) safety and atmosphere of vigilance and suspicion. Sadly, these approaches may have nothing to do with the actual security / safety situation.

The illusion of safety is what many of the airline “safety” policies are based on. It’s a rare occurance when somebody actually admits this, so I was pleasantly surprised to find this story on Schneier’s blog – and disappointed although not surprised at the reaction the Australian minister’s comments caused. Admitting the truth does not underime airline security, quite the opposite – in the ideal world, it would allow us to focus the discussion and measures of airline security to the ones that actually have significant effects. But has that been discussed? Perhaps, but I doubt it. Instead, what seems to be on top of the agenda is calling for her resignation – for telling the truth?

Sure, shoot the messenger…

Last weekend, we took a leisurely sunset walk – soon after lunch. That’s the problem with the Finnish winter: on the rare occasions that we’ve got clear skies, the sunset is an event taking place before 4pm in the afternoon. Not only does it cause the working population to miss sunshine entirely during the weekdays, but it also messes with your mind: by 6pm you’re ready to go to bed since your brain is telling you that “it must be really late since it’s been dark for hours now”. Not exactly a conducive state of mind for reading, writing, exercise or really any activity other than eating chocolate and sleeping.

Anyhow, fighting the urge to lie down and hibernate for a few months like our lizard I’m so envious of, we headed downtown. There we discovered that Aleksanterinkatu has gotten it’s “Christmas lights” again. I like the lights, they make the street look quite nice. I do, however, wish they would come up with something more original one of these years, but I guess there’s something reassuringly comforting in seeing the same lights year in and year out.

The mood, weather and atmosphere of more than one kind is starting to resemble wintertime in Finland. All we are missing is the snow – as much as I hate the concept of it being so cold that snow can survive, it would make everything look much lighter and prettier. There’s no point in suffering through the cold and dark winters if you don’t even get any snow, so come on, let’s have some!

I think it’s fair to say that when it comes to mundane things, people are lazy. Of course some people, including myself, prefer to call it optimization instead of laziness. I find one materialization of this optimization in myself whenever I travel by bus towards downtown. To get to the bus stop, I have to cross the road; the bus stop is directly across the road. Only there is no pedestrian crosswalk right there – it has been cruelly placed almost 30 meters to the side, thus generating over 60 meters of excess walking just to get to the bus stop. With a total distance to the bus stop of less than 200 meters, this amounts to significant excess walking.

So nine times out of ten I wait for a safe interval to cross the busy four-lane road. I justify this, among other things, by the fact that the crosswalk does not have traffic lights and thus the drivers couldn’t care less about it. So even if you tried to use it, you wouldn’t get anywhere – or maybe you would have the satisfaction of knowing you had the legal right to be where you were when the car ran over you. Plus if some rare kind soul would stop to let you cross, the car on the other lane would inevitably ignore the law and run over you at full speed. (Seriously, these things happen way too often in Finland)

This concept of optimization is also very visible in all parks and placement of pathways. That is, people rarely use the ready-made pathways if there’s a more convenient route available. It amazes me that park and urban planners haven’t taken this into consideration more. It must be the environmental architects who think that the pathways should be put where the look nicest, not where they’d actually be used. Ever see naturally formed paths forming straight lines and exact 90-degree turns? Me neither.

But surprisingly, it turns out that paths naturally formed in open spaces aren’t usually optimized for the shortest route. From Philip Ball’s book Critical Mass, I found out that Dirk Helbing and Péter Molnár have been studying pedestrian dynamics (like these articles on a social force model and an active walker model) and it’s really fascinating stuff. Example from Ball’s book on their model: if given an open space with no pre-existing paths, the first people take a direct route to their destination. But soon direct routes evolve into a compromise between directness and the tendency to follow existing paths – and the model ends up forming patterns that quite accurately portray what happens in the real world.

So it turns out even laziness – oh, excuse me, optimization – has a social angle.

Food. We all need it to survive. However, it’s evident that people have vastly differing attitudes when it comes to eating. For some, it’s just sustenance, almost an annoyance that has to be done. The metric of a good meal for some people might be as simple as speed and convenience or the price/mass-ratio.

As for me, I’ve always had more of a love relationship to food. When I eat, I’m usually looking for much more than just calories to chunk down. I want it to look good, be made of diverse good-quality ingredients and I want it to taste great. Usually that criteria alone is enough to make for a healthy meal, too. Every meal could be an adventure; either a familiar one that one has enjoyed many times before, or a new exciting one, a journey into new tastes and scents. Of course, in the real world not all meals can be adventures (of the good kind anyway), but I still believe lunch and dinner should be among the highlights of the day – and that asking for good food shouldn’t be asking for too much.

This attitude towards food was behind so actively looking for alternatives to our office canteen, hence the post on lunch restaurants a couple days back. You see, the food at the office canteen can usually be summed up as bland and of not-really-great quality. The experience of eating there rarely stirs up any great positive emotions.

This rant is not meant to imply that the staff at the workplace canteen are somehow deliberately cooking deficient food. I’m sure they’re doing the best they can, trying to stay within tight budgets while looking to please all of the diverse clientele – obviously an impossible task. What’s more, I suppose it’s just my loss that most people in Finland seem to enjoy food that has, to my senses, no taste whatsoever.