Home of Emanuel Ferm

Ever found yourself in a discussion regarding some qualified topic you didn’t have the faintest knowledge of? Fear not, dear reader, because here’s some waterproof arguments you can throw in next time, wether the topic be economics, politics or the latest pandemic.

1. The “after rain cometh sunshine” argument.
It’s a law of nature that everything changes, and thus everything that’s regarded as a negative will eventually turn positive. Are your mates discussing the causes of the current economic recession, using academic mumbojumbo such as V-shaped recession and Gross Domestic Product? Break your silence with an insightful remark that “eventually even the worst of recessions will end”, and you’ll be met with acknowledging nods. Waterproof.

2. The balance argument.
Most things are dualistic, so when a discussion concerns mostly one aspect of a subject simply input a reminder to the second part. For example, next time while you toast to Taylor’s glory, a thoughful reminder of worker welfare will only steer the discussions into best practices of Human Resource management. Once more you didn’t contribute the least to the original discussion, but still made a highly valuable contribution. Fantastic.

3. The “what about X?” argument.
This is a specifically nasty version of argument 2. It’s best described by Johann Hari in The Independent article How to spot a lame, lame argument:

So whenever I report on, say, atrocities committed by Israel, I am bombarded with e-mails saying: “But what about the bad things done by Muslims? Why do you never talk about them?” Whenever I report on the atrocities committed by Islamists, I am bombarded with e-mails saying: “But what about Israel? Why do you never write about the terrible things they do?” And so it goes on, whatever the subject, in an endless international shifting of blame, united in the cry: “What about them! Talk about them instead!”

4. The “if only Y instead” argument.
This is the most idealistic argument. Famine, war, rape, terrorism, hurricanes… Nearly every institution preaching unified thoughts have a cure to all these injustices: “If we only lived in a purely socialist society instead!” or “In a perfectly free market…” and most used “If only everybody were humble Christians/Muslims/Jews/etc!” It’s cute, because they are all right, but only if everyone else thinks the same. Complexity is truly to complex to deal with.

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Use the arguments with care, and no one will notice you actually don’t have anything useful to say. Please feel free to share your stories of success in the comment section.

Among the international students studying in Sweden, there are those who would like to pursue a career here as well. And among those, there are the ambitious kind who actually choose to learn Swedish while completing their Master’s degree. I know one of these students.

What do you do, if you’re an international student spending a lazy summer in Sweden? The kind of person described above chooses to take a summer course in Swedish at Folkuniversitetet. Classes are mostly comprised of other students, or people with titles such as M.D., researcher or engineer. My friend studied for a month at Folkuniversitetet, reached level B1+ and can now interact almost fluently in everyday language.

But what do you do when autumn begins and expenses start to pile up? As a monument to everything that’s wrong with Sweden there is SFI — Swedish for immigrants. So, you try it out. After all, Sweden with its massive immigration and language being the key to get to know any culture, should have a well-developed beginner education in Swedish. Here’s what happens instead.

You state (in Swedish) that you’ve been studying Swedish for 6 weeks. They put you in class C (equivalent to an entry-level course at Folkuniversitetet). Classes here are mostly comprised of immigrants from various nations in conflict, illiteracy is common, income is zero and ambition an unknown word.

You try to argument to the people in charge (in Swedish) for the fact that you have already studied this level. –”But you must take this class before you can go to level D.” What if you would insist you already know everything that is taught? –”It’s good to rehearse.” What if you complete a whole course’s material in one study session? –”This is too much for us to correct.” What if you don’t have anything to do, since you’re already 12 chapters ahead of everybody else? –”Here’s 40 pages with basic verb forms.” What if you complete the compendium in an hour?

On and on it goes. Any direct question is merely answered with that smiling silence which only a brain dead shell of a person can muster out.

The extent to which ambition is crushed, encouragement non-existent and one’s intellect insulted is criminal. While there are laws forbidding the exact same treatment towards the less abled people, someone with even a trace of ambition is effectively broken in the silent name of jealousy. Which is almost encouraged by the standards of judgement followed by the ignorant idiots in charge.

Teaching is supposed to be one of the finest professions around. But this is sickening.

Few situations evoke such interesting characteristics in people as the approach of a difficult decision. People being human, the way one manages the heavy thoughts preceding a defining decision are often quite destructive and treacherous. There’s one of these kinds of thoughts I have encountered far to frequently.

Put shortly, this thought pattern consists of postponing any decision until a perfect mental clarity is obtained. The danger lies in the elusiveness of this clarity – too often it’s nothing else than chasing one’s tail. It is simply not to be found, it’s an illusion. This perfect clarity is yet another manifestation of some sort of inborn laziness in the human nature: it’s easier to blame the inability of decision making on the lack of being certain (“how can I make a good decision if I’m not sure?”) all while giving a simple requirement that is yet to be obtained.

An example of this is the smart person continuously postponing university studies (or any equivalent future defining decision) with the reason that she is “not sure of what I want to do with my life”. So she continues to work at the supermarket or the clothes shop instead, waiting for the mental fog to dissolve. But it never does, does it? I strongly believe that she will never be sure until she tries, makes a decision to go for something and then sees where this new path takes her. The alternative is only an endless loop of uncertainty and waiting.

Another manifestation of this thought pattern is the assumption that physical facts surrounding a person are not supposed to have anything to do with one’s happiness (that would be materialistic, wouldn’t it?). Happiness and prosperity do to a large extent originate from the mind, but the mind in itself is not the exclusive component of happiness. Hard work, creation, productiveness and physical activity can have just as big impact on mental health as thoughts do. Extensive contemplation is just as unbalanced and wrong as any mindless activity.

The harsh truth is probably that perfect certainty is a luxury granted to a lucky few. Instead, the rest of us will never be completely certain, but it sure is better to go for something while figuring out That Big Decision than waiting for a turning point. Any activity, be it the right one or a wrong track, is better than sitting there, thinking, thinking…

Twice a year me and Fredrik create The Dreamhack Game (DHG), at the Dreamhack computer festival. Earlier this summer we got an email from the Multiplay staff, who arrange UK’s largest LAN parties, inviting us over to create what is now the i-Hunt. Apparently they knew of what we do in Sweden, and liked it enough to fly us over to their own event. Quite cool indeed, and of course we made the most out of it. I’d say my first international “business” trip was a success.

The game is advertised as a “contest of intellect, lateral thinking and logical skill”. No special skills or knowledge are required, only the ability to figure out what to do and how to obtain necessary and relevant information. The tasks usually include elements of code breaking, alternate reality gaming, geocaching, deciphering, treasure hunting and various puzzles. Advanced Google skills are fundamental to solving the game, and so are endurance and thoroughness. Once a problem is solved, you move on to the next level. You usually compete in teams, but you can never know the current position of your competitors. This makes it a competition of intelligence cloaked in mystery and with a touch of psycological warfare.

There were a few tasks we made for this event that I’m a little extra proud of. I’ll explain them here, as they give a very good picture of what The Game is really about. But if the reader feels like giving the game – and these problems in particular – a try, then head over to the i-Hunt website (which will be up until November 09), and register to play. An answer sheet is also available if you get stuck and just want to try the next problem.

Stage 1, problem 5 — The Shameful One

An outbound coast
Surrounds or embraces? The city
Hamilton’s (NZ) antipode.

There are two clues here – the haiku poem and the maze image. Both can give the answer on their own, but also in combination with another. The line that is traced through the maze when solved, can be identified by the hunter as the south coast of Spain, and part of Portugal. This is what is referred to in the poem as “An outbound coast”. Furthermore, the location of the square dot indicates “The city, Hamilton’s (NZ) antipode” – which is the city of Córdoba in Spain. An antipode is a complete opposite geographical location, a rare property that Córdoba and Hamilton in New Zealand share. Córdoba is thus the password.

Stage 2, problem 3 — Who’s coming to visit today?

Have you been paying attention to the local tv-station?

In this problem, the contestants had to realize that “the local tv-station” referred to the event-specific daily Youtube broadcasts, mainly the Saturday one found here. The careful watcher will notice the announcement of a new sponsor – Tentacle Technology. However, this company is not to be found on the internet, nor did they actually show up at the venue. Instead, if the URL http://tentacletechnology.com was thought of and followed, a really fancy website was found. The password “puppet” could be found if downloading the latest press release.

Smell something fishy here? That’s because me and Fredrik made it all up; in two hours we had set up the company website, got fake sponsorship deals, marketed ourselves, staged a 31 year old corporate history, stolen product descriptions from IBM and even put together a catchy mission statement. This kind of ARG-inspired problem is one of my favourites.

Stage 2, problem 5 — Think inside the box

In this last problem, the first realization to make is that the cards are actually not part of some unspecified card game. Instead it’s a sudoku, and when solved the numbers revealed in order are 174143214192. For a hunter, this is immediately identified as the IP address 174.143.214.192, and one of the first things to do with an IP is to HTTP it. When done so, a simple website containing the following image was found:

Again, the experienced contenstant would identified the erect and fallen cans as morse code. When deciphered, the final password was “wey“.

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At Dreamhack we attract ~600 players, and at the i-Hunt we managed to get 200 registered players which should be considered good, since it was the first game in the UK for us. However, it looks like I’ll be going back there soon, as I’ll probably be arranging the i-Hunt three times a year in total – which feels great! I’m looking forward to get to know Britain more, as well as to work with creating and further evolving The Game.

I spent this last Saturday at the Louisiana Museum of Contemporary Art, in Humlebæk, Denmark. It has to be one of my favourite places for those one-day excursions, including this time with the very interesting and well-presented current exhibition of “Green Architecture for the Future”. Apart from looking at society’s current sustainability trend with new eyes, I once again started pondering over what art really is, or what it’s supposed to be.

The way I see it, I “understand” art with the help of three axioms. One claims that everything evolves and has to evolve, the second holds as truth that the human eye is naturally attracted to beauty while the last says that humans are not attracted to something similar to what they have seen before. Also I take for granted that there is nothing more beautiful than something “natural”, be it a human face or a landscape.

Taking off from the second axiom of beauty, I believe that the first forms of art all tried to convey something aesthetic. An effort as big as one could amount to was made to create artifacts of beauty: artists strived to encapsulate what the human eye was attracted to.

But when I visited Rome, and saw the perfected works of Michelangelo and Bernini, I realized that “what other offspring of nature is left to depict as perfectly as this?” Somehow it felt as if art – that imitated nature – simply could not be rendered much better than what was achieved back then in the 16th and 17th century. With regard to my first axiom – what were artists supposed to do? Striving a life-time to master techniques already perfected would contradict my last axiom – they would only produce something already seen.

My own theory is thus that the modern art that can be seen today (for example at Louisiana), which ranges from the simplest dots and lines to wierd and unique styles, is the natural next step ahead from when realistic and beautiful art was perfected. New styles that had never been seen had to be invented, new emotions had to be triggered. When yesterday’s art was a contest of talent and beauty, today it’s more about eccentricity and provocation.

The same trend can be observed within digital art. When software and hardware began to allow an artist to be creative in front of the computer screen, the first forms of benchmarks for “great” digital art were realistic depictions of reality. An example is the rise of as-realistic-as-possible special effects in movies. Some years ago this was achieved, and following the same evolution as “real” art the next step was to find a more “unique” style. Here a proper example are the human characters in a Pixar movie. While Pixar could very well create the most realistic humans for their movies, they still choose to make them look “cartoony” in their own sense.

Personally I’m hoping for a renaissance of the talented artist who produce true beauty. While much of the modern art is really cool and impressive, nothing beats a perfect – but unique! – depiction of nature.