Birds of a Feather

Hearing thousands of Torshavn inhabitants cheer for Iceland in the football match against France last Sunday was a special experience. They gathered to watch the game on a big screen just beside our hotel. Despite the loss they left the harbour in an orderly fashion proud and happy for their neighbours' achievements.

When Iceland hit a financial rock bottom a couple of years ago, the Faroe Islands was the first nation/institution to offer a loan. A drop in the ocean perhaps, but still a small foundation for Iceland to build upon at that time. The loan has since then been repaid.

From Faroe Islands 2016

The nations in the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean have much in common. The roots in the old Scandinavian/Norse culture and language. The myths like the tragic ones about the Selkies. Being occupied by the UK and the US during the WW2 and at the same time helping them out by smuggling fish, resulting in a great loss of men to storms and U-boats. The reluctance to join the EU due to a perceived (and probably real) threat to their fishing industry.

From Faroe Islands 2016

Despite being part of Denmark, both the Faroe Islands and Greenland are not members of the EU. In fact, I learned from our excellent guide that Greenland was a member but left after a referendum. Thus, there has already been a Grexit.

These coastal areas also share a number of birds such as the almost unbearable cute Atlantic Puffin, the sleek national symbol the Eurasian Oystercatcher, the chubby Fulmar and the Black-legged Kittiwake with its three toes.

From Faroe Islands 2016

Hats

I'm not sure I look good in hats, but I like them anyhow. I bought one out of necessity (well, it is very pretty too) when I first visited Australia and realised that you really need a hat there to shield you from the sunshine. It's made of straw and my friend Kerry made the decorations when she was the owner of the Eumundi Country Garden shop. I'm sure you can buy similar ones at the Eumundi Markets.

The next hat was made in Australia although bought in Stockholm when I was living there. This Helen Kaminski hat is warm and soft and made of wool. A really neat thing about it is that you can fold it and put it in the arm of your coat, making sure it doesn't get lost.

I bought a third hat from the hatter Maria Leijonberg in Gothenburg when she still had the shop "Prickig Katt" (The Spotted Cat). Not to everyone's taste, but I think it's a nice, grey spring hat that goes really well with my coats.

A couple of years ago, my Mother and I visited Visingsö. I acquired a blue summer hat there made of thin denim that I decorated with small satin rose buds. Now I wear it all summer, since my hairdresser tells me to stay out of the sun unless I want my white hair to turn yellow.

During a lifetime, we wear different hats. We play different roles, sometimes almost simultaneously. Occasionally we deliberately put on a hat in order to change perspectives. In innovation and entrepreneurship this has been formalised into a very useful exercise: The Six Thinking Hats.

If you are designated the White Hat, you focus on demanding the facts. The Yellow Hat expresses optimism and probes for value and benefit. The devil's advocate is found under The Black Hat whereas wearing the Red Hat requires you to express emotions and feelings. When you wear the Green Hat you focus on possibilities and new ideas and the Blue Hat is responsible for managing the whole thinking process.

I'd like to try this exercise sometime, since I think it makes lots of sense. It makes visible the different modes you need to apply in innovation and business development processes, and also makes you appreciate other's perspectives and traits.

Although strictly speaking not involving a real hat, the Cap Table is another useful exercise when it comes to start-ups. The purpose is to keep track of who owns what including shareholders, option holders, convertible notes and option pools.

I have caps too.

Black Hole Escape

A couple of weeks ago I finally saw the movie "The Theory of Everything". Seeing it with my mother gave it an extra dimension, since she worked with people almost unable to move at all and also helped researchers at KTH develop synthetic speech, similar to that Stephen Hawking has been using.

Already during his work on his PhD thesis Hawking became interested in black holes and their role in the creation of the universe. That's why his words on depression and the black hole metaphor we are all familiar with seems so beautiful and true to me:

“The message of this lecture is that black holes ain't as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought.
Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don't give up – there's a way out.”

From my blog post Somewhere Out There from Christmas 2014

Maybe it is also the case that depression has a role in creating life as we know it.

"It's also important not to become angry, no matter how difficult life may seem because you can lose all hope if you can't laugh at yourself and life in general." From The Daily Mail

Tree of Life

It's no wonder trees have a prominent place in human myths, especially the tree of life. In the Norse mythology, the tree is called Yggdrasil, and is an enormous ash with big roots drinking water from three wells.

From Amsterdam 2016

In 1872, Charles Darwin used the expression Tree of Life as a metaphor for the phylogenetic tree of common descent in the evolutionary sense. Since then, the tree has been drawn in various ways and is still being revised, now based on genetics. The modern tree does not speak of kingdoms but of supergroups who's names you've never heard of: Opisthokonts, Excavates, Amoebozoa, SAR (Stramenopiles, Alveolates and Rhizaria), and Archaeplastids. Guess which one you belong to!

There are several open source initiative targeting species taxonomy issues. For example, The Tree of Life Web Project is a collaborative effort of biologists and nature enthusiasts from around the world who provide information about biodiversity, the characteristics of different groups of organisms, and their evolutionary history.

From Mölnlycke Winter 2016

The Open Tree of Life is funded by the National Science Foundation. It aims to construct a comprehensive, dynamic and digitally-available tree of life by synthesizing published phylogenetic trees along with taxonomic data.

David Attenborough has partnered with BBC and the Wellcome Trust in an interactive version of the Tree of Life. Here you can find a video with him talking about Charles Darwin and the tree of life.

From Brännö 2016

In 2015, National Geographic put out a Tree of Life assignment in their Your Shot department. The task was "to photograph what the Tree of Life means to you, to your community, to your culture, to your world". The instructions were as follows:

• "Become silent in order to listen. 
• Slow down. 
• Visit the same tree on different days, in different light, among various activities, and during different hours.
• Get close, climb, sit below or on top, and move far away. 
• Let your perspective change by moving yourself and not the zoom of your lens.

Remember: It's inevitable that something that has been around as long as trees will teach us. This assignment is about looking, becoming silent, listening, learning, and teaching. That which reflects us also reflects our world. Let your trees be a mirror for your world."

For me and my Mum, ashes are weeds and we kill them off as much as we can in our little wood at Ekkullen. However, big ones like the one at the cemetery nearby are beautiful. Their leafs are always late and they are the first to go in the fall. Makes you want to join the Dendrologists.

From Photo Competition 2015

The Meat Grinder

Long time ago (or at least before WWII) Amsterdam was often referred to as the ‘Jerusalem of the North.’ Some people call it the ‘Venice of the North’. I call it the Meat Grinder. This is what my late Father used to call the traffic model where you put cars, busses, trams, bikes and people on foot at the same level.

From Amsterdam 2016

For a tourist, the traffic situation in Amsterdam is lethal, or at least if feels like it. Bikes everywhere and stopping for nothing. Not people, not cars, not red lights. They don't use helmets. They put small children in boxes without belts on the bike. I even saw a man with a very small baby in a sling on his chest biking.

It comes as a complete surprise to me to learn that approximately 70% of primary schools offer a practical cycling examination when the pupilts are 11-12 years old. Traffic education lessons continue after the pupils transfer into secondary education. Either this is a completely new regulation, or massive amnesia sets in during puberty.

It's easy to believe that bikes have always dominated Amsterdam. Although it was very popular at the beginning of the 20th century, cars became more and more popular and the situation for bikes became very unsafe. The movement "Stop de Kindermoord" grew stronger and together with the oil crisis in the beginning of the 1970s, the local government started to plan more for bikes.

From Amsterdam 2016

Apparently, the number of people using bikes has more than doubled between 1990 and 2014. Currently, 60% of all journeys in Amsterdam historical city centre are by bike. 75% of Amsterdammers own a bike. Many even have two or more bikes: a city bicycle and/or a bike for recreation or a racer. Amsterdam is home to an estimated 880,000 bikes. Right now, the number of traffic incidents are going down but let's just see what the combination of electrical bikes and smartphone does to that statistics.

However, there are other reasons compare Amsterdam to a meat grinder, tearing flesh to pieces. One is the attitude to drugs, another the stance towards prostitution.

I've been to Amsterdam five times and find it wonderful. I love walking along the canals and over the bridges, watching the beautiful houses, shopping at the street markets, basking in the sun in the parks, peering into the art galleries and antiques shops, and gaping at the wonders in the museums. It's strange how you can both love and loathe something at the same time. Or someone for that matter.

Cat People

When I was in London 2013, I visited the David Bowie exhibition at the Victoria&Albert Museum. It was truly fascinating even for a person like me who is only a small Bowie fan. Seeing all the clothes, stuff and images brought back memories from the film "Cat People". I saw it together with my older sister and her friends, and I remember that I felt a bit uneasy since I hadn't that much experience of erotic thrillers. I liked the theme song though, Putting out Fire by David Bowie.

From Caucasus 2015

I'm so very fortunate in having many cuddly cats nearby but not in my apartment. I love cats, but I'm allergic to them so I can't have them around me all the time. That's why it's purrfect to have friends like the big and bold grey Pelle, the friendly Ragdoll Orion and the playful Tortoiseshell Elsa to pet now and then.

There are quite a few sayings involving cats:

• Let the cat out of the bag
• What the cat dragged in
• Playing cat and mouse
• Many ways to skin a cat
• Raining cats and dogs
• Cat got your tongue?
• Way the cat jumps
• Cat on a hot roof

When I met researcher Elin Hirsch she told me that research involving cats is not that common, since cats are not considered especially valuable or esteemed animals (at least in the world of research). That was some years ago, and I think the status has somewhat changed since then. For example, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences has a special Facebook page on Cat Research. Currently they are working on a project together with Lund University called Melody in Human-Cat Communication (MEOWSIC) and I do love their logo!

From Peter Korn's Garden 2011

The project is aiming at understanding how cats and humans use melody and other prosodic features when they communicate with each other. They have compiled a list of various cat sounds, with video examples. National Geographic has also made a short video summarising the project. I wonder if the research on cat robots used in the care of people suffering from dementia is taking this into consideration.

Cuddling real cats can pose a danger, since they spread the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. If you get it, you can become more outgoing, risk taking, impulsive and irresponsive (no, I don't think I have it). Strangely enough, this is sometimes called the Crazy Cat Lady Syndrome. 

Grass, Bugs, and Apple

The Drone Papers put together by journalists from The Interception are indeed a terrible read in its own right, demonstrating how much resources the US has used in order to find and kill suspected terrorists which also has led to the death of a vast number of innocent civilians.

"The White House and Pentagon boast that the targeting killing program is precise and that civilian deaths are minimal. However, documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse." From The Huffington Post

However, you get another kind if insight reading the story written by one of the people on the death list, Malik Jalal:

"I am in the strange position of knowing that I am on the ‘Kill List’. I know this because I have been told, and I know because I have been targeted for death over and over again. Four times missiles have been fired at me. I am extraordinarily fortunate to be alive.

I don’t want to end up a “Bugsplat” – the ugly word that is used for what remains of a human being after being blown up by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone. More importantly, I don’t want my family to become victims, or even to live with the droning engines overhead, knowing that at any moment they could be vaporized."

The Drone Papers form the basis of the recently published book The Assassination Complex by Jeremy Scahill and The Staff of The Intercept. The foreword is written by Edward Snowden.

"We are witnessing a compression of the working period in which bad policy shelters in the shadows, the time frame in which unconstitutional activities can continue before they are exposed by acts of conscience. And this temporal compression has a significance beyond the immediate headlines; it permits the people of this country to learn about critical government actions, not as part of the historical record but in a way that allows direct action through voting — in other words, in a way that empowers an informed citizenry to defend the democracy that “state secrets” are nominally intended to support. When I see individuals who are able to bring information forward, it gives me hope that we won’t always be required to curtail the illegal activities of our government as if it were a constant task, to uproot official lawbreaking as routinely as we mow the grass. (Interestingly enough, that is how some have begun to describe remote killing operations, as “cutting the grass.”)"

From Sundsby Säteri 2016

There have been several attempts to publish apps tracking the number of deaths caused by US drone strikes such as Metadata+ and Ephemeral+. However, they have been removed by Apple as noticed by The Guardian. This made Mike Elgan at Computerworld wonder if Apple and Facebook are bad for democracy:

"This trend transfers the job of gatekeeper of what political information reaches the public from publications, editors or news directors to the likes of Apple and Facebook -- the companies that choose, in Apple's case, which apps are allowed and which are banned or, in Facebook's case, which news stories or sources are favored by its secret algorithms.

What that means -- and there's no gentle way to put this, so I'm just going to say it -- is that the people in charge of what voters and citizens know are people motivated by selling tiny computers with "selfie cameras" or ads for tiny computers with "selfie cameras" (Samsung is currently the biggest advertiser on Facebook)."

With the US presidential election coming up, it is interesting to see that the drone programme is not a major theme for the debates between Clinton and Trump. Maybe that's because they both agree on lawn mowing or because it's been filtered out by Apple and Facebook.