Lavonardo

Yeah, count me in appreciating Stanislav Petrov’s maverick actions a quarter century ago.

Playing by the book would have probably resulted in fullscale nuclear armageddon.

[ via Charles Stross. ]

The best-known emoticon, the first computerized smiley face, turns 25 today.

As challenged by Mr. Ylitalo, here’s my take on the oddly topical birthday meme…

Search for your birthday in wikipedia, and pick three events, births and deaths that occurred on that day, and do note whether the day is a holiday anywhere in the world. The challenge two of your buddies to do the very same thing.

23.5.

Events
1618 - The Second Defenestration of Prague precipitates the Thirty Years’ War.
1934 - American bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde were ambushed by police and killed in Black Lake, Louisiana.
2003 - The euro exceeds its initial trading value as it hits $1.18 for the first time since its introduction in 1999.

Births
1707 - Carolus Linnaeus, Swedish botanist (d. 1778).
1934 - Robert Moog, American inventor (d. 2005).
1972 - Rubens Barrichello, Brazilian formula 1 driver.

Deaths
1701 - Captain Kidd, Scottish pirate (b. 1645).
1945 - Heinrich Himmler, Nazi official (b. 1900).
1992 - Giovanni Falcone, Italian judge (b. 1939).

Holidays
There’s a grand total of three things observed: Declaration of the Báb for the Bahá’í Faith, the World Turtle Day and Day of Disunity for the Discordians.

Four liturgical feast days occur: Saint Desiderius, Saint Euphrosyne of Polotsk, Hegumena of the Monastery of the Holy Saviour (1173), Saint Guibert of Gemblours and Saint Montana.

Challenges
Well, let’s let mr. Srpnt and Mane enlighten us what happens on their birthday (apart from eating way too much cake).

Gemischte linke.

• Truthiness is the word of the year, if the Merriam-Webster guys are to be believed.
• Before blogs, there were diaries, and some folks just didn’t know when to stop.
• Clive Thompson’s collision detection seems to be a worthwhile blog to pick up.
• Another fine idea that ought to have been forgotten the next morning once sobriety kicked in: a headcrab hat, straight out of Half-Life.
• Wikipedia provides insight into the etymology of “considered harmful”.
• Compressed history, nominally for writers, but a great source of trivia and facts for everybody.

Twenty years, and some three weeks ago an era came to an end on a dark road in southern Sweden. Metallica’s tourbus skidded off the road, and Cliff Burton, the bassist, died in the resulting crash.

That fatality, obviously, was not a permanent hitch on Metallica’s path towards total world domination. The band has gone through two bassists since - Jason Newsted, recruited off Flotsam&Jetsam lasted some seventeen years, and the new one Robert Trujillo joined from Ozzy Osbourne’s band.

But still, whenever Metallica has released an album after the 1986 Master of Puppets, dissenting voices have been loud, exclaiming that “with Cliff in the band, such garbage would never see the light of day”. Blatantly forgetting that Mr. Burton used to be the semi-hippie progressive element in the band, offsetting the genre-purity and NWOBHM-roots so acclaimed by the leading duo: Hetfield and Ullrich. But we’ll never know what would have happened - would something like Mama Said have appeared on the black album already, or would the band have gotten stuck in reproducing one speed metal masterpiece after the other. Or, in the worst case, would the foursome have disbanded following worse than usual arguments.

Tonight, there’s a seemingly official memorial occasion organized by the local fan club chapter. I don’t think I’ll bother attending - just put on some classic pieces (Orion, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Call of Ktulu to name just a few) that feature his unorthodox view of tooling with Rickenbacker.

And certainly ought to pick up the dvd version of the 1988 home video collection Cliff ‘em All, which chronicles the early days of the band. Crafted as a loving memento for the late bassist, it features clips of low quality and high intensity. And some speaking bits from mr. Burton.

The death occurred before the band had thoroughly broken into the mainstream, and the news took several days to percolate to autumny Helsinki. But that was another age in many ways - newspapers had little room for popular culture, and underground news spread through musicians. The news to our junior high class came indirectly through Roope Latvala, the lead guitarist for the then reigning finnish metal band Stone.

Where n is 9.

• A page on the evolution of speech bubbles in comics.
• independent gaming is all about what the title states. Sadly windows-centric.
• Neatest google maps mash-up in a while: NYC subway mapped onto the streets of the city.
• Never tried out the addiction called World of Warcraft - according to a study, a whopping 40% of its players suffer from acute addiction.
• The firefox crop circle.
• Nintendo DS homebrew portal.
• John Heilemann’s “counter-historical” article: What If 9/11 Never Happened.
• Llamasoft history, from programming a space invaders clone on zx81 to the modern day (most of the tale still not written).
• Amazing kinetic sculptures (and yeah, it is a BMW commercial, but well worth watching).

Visited the annual event remembering the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The occasion was in the Töölönlahti park, in the amphitheatre of the opera house. Which was packed, easily couple of hundred people showed up. The event was put together by a multitude of organizations, and was multilingual - most (if not actually all) of the lines were given in both finnish and swedish.

The event consisted of music and some speeches. Of the latter the best by far was the one by Helena Ranta, the finnish coroner who has toured the troublespots on the earth on behalf of the UN during the last decade.

The main event was the release of lanterns, buoyed by pieces of styrofoam, onto the bay. Which happened pretty much just around the sunset. The lanterns were sold by the organizers for a very reasonable price, and around a hundred of them were put out to the still water to slowly drift out to the sea.

Noted that the image stabilizer of the S3 is not optimal in dark conditions, and that I definitely need to read the manual (which is so going to get printed tomorrow).

Today, it’s twenty years since the worst public nuclear accident in history: Chernobyl.

Unlike such big news as the murder of Olof Palme or the sinking of Estonia, there’s no clear “where were you when you heard”-moment in connection to Chernobyl. Nope, there was no single moment, the ugly truth of a cover-up in the soviet union and profound cluelessness by the local authorities took a long while to sink in. And Finland being pretty thoroughly finlandized back then, it really wasn’t appropriate to hint at incompetence in the eastern neighbour.

So it wasn’t until the ugly truth dawned in West Germany before the magnitude of the event was made public. Cementing the name “Chernobyl” forever as the symbol of nuclear folly. Or of incompetence. After all, it wasn’t the fission reactor itself that failed, but the operators that took it far outside the realm of stability. With well-known results.

The above’s as much as I remember of the thing, but being an impressionable junion high student at the time, might just be plain ignorant of what actually was going on. Somehow, the Challenger-accident struck me deeper than this - being an immediate disaster and not a slowly creeping one.