Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Some spring sights

Peeking spring
Aren't pennyworts ever so lovely? My favourite mark of spring I think.


'What ya lookin at??', or 'Like what you see, baby?'
The latter was suggested by my friend Lisa. Dozens of frogs were busily having it off in a large puddle.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Japanese symbol


It looks like one, doesn't it? But is it? I don't know. What would a Japanese symbol be doing painted in a door in a ruined villa in Helsinki?

Monday, April 20, 2009

Religion etc

I've been getting back to work from last week, by reading up on ancient Greek religion for now. This is in preparation for writing a paper for this conference I'm going to go to in late August. The paper is on the subject of social interaction and cooperation between citizens and foreigners in the religious life of Hellenistic Athens. Quite fascinating stuff, because when you think of 'religion' or 'religious life' in the context of Athens or the antiquity in general it means something different to the modern world. In our time, it is possible to separate the secular and sacred (or whatever is the opposite of secular in this sense) spheres of life. It's not possible in the context of the ancient Greek city state, because religion was intertwined, in one form or another, in every aspect of an individual's life from birth to death. Different rites were performed at every significant stage in a person's way from birth to adulthood. At home, appropriate rites were to be performed for home deities/spirits and for ancestors. People might have their own particular heroes (sort of semi-divinities, originally mortals who received divinity after death) and divinities they felt devotion to. In the deme level (administrative subdivisions of the city state) there was a sacred calendar for the entire year, including, for instance, appropriate rites in the occasion of introducing new citizens (male only) to the deme membership and local festivals. Similar sacred calendar existed for state administration, involving rites when new officials took office, when the assembly convened, numerous state festivals and so on. The religious functions and rites associated with the public life of the polis were not so much to do with piety or faith in the personal sense but rather something that was correct to do to ensure the successful day-to-day existence and future of the polis. All the cults had their own priests, but they did not have the authority to make theological statements nor did they advice people on matters of faith. They were officials who were appointed for a given time who took care of the precinct and performed ordained rites. In fact, especially in later times, selling of priesthoods was very common: they were purchased by the wealthy members of the society who were interested in the public prestige such offices brought and who took upon paying the expenses of maintaining the precinct and conducting the sacrifices etc. While the Greeks shared common deities - Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hephaistos, Hestia, Apollon, Aphrodite, Athene, Ares, Artemis, Hermes, Pan, Demeter and so on - all city states had their own personal forms of the cults. Thus the polis religion and the religious rites and functions were inherently part of the life and prerogative of its members = its citizens; therefore the right of participation of outsiders, those who were not citizens, was in many ways restricted.

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Other than that, I bought a new laptop on thursday (ordered it from a web store and it arrived at 8 am next morning, since I chose a special delivery). I decided for an Asus laptop, due to reading favourable reviews on its quality and durability. Came with Windows Vista. I didn't even look at it, just installed OpenSUSE Linux in its place. So, have taken quite a bit of time to setting up things just right - though I needed to install only a few programs and tweaks, because the OS comes with a full set of software. I am very pleased with it.

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Bad, bad blogger

Arghhh, I'm been an atrociously bad blogger! It's not because I've been busy either, in fact I've spent the past couple of weeks mostly in leisure. I got the article done and sent a couple of weeks ago (fingers crossed), and I also wrote an application for one of 12 post-doc positions at the university of Helsinki (last year only 6% were accepted, but fingers crossed all the same). Then I decided to not do any work for a while.

Lets see, what I have spent my time on then. Seeing my family members of course and photography. Went to a few exhibitions that were quite interesting - for instance one by a Finnish artist at the museum of modern art that depicts and compares the great world religions, especially from women's point of view, through photographic art and other media. Also the museum of photographic art had an interesting joint exhibition of a few artists (one French, one American but living in Finland (I think), the others Finnish) which examines the often strained relationship of people with the /their environment. I have done very little web stuff really, for whatever reason. Apart from not updating my blog, I've also not posted anything much on Twitter, haven't even got around to uploading very many pictures on Vastavalo.

This is not to say that I haven't had anything to do with computers, quite the contrary. I've done lots around Linux, for instance have sought for a way to have Windows alongside Linux in as little intrusive way as possible - I'd like to get rid of Windows entirely but I have to have it because of iPhone; if the phone goes kaputt, the only way to restore it to factory settings is iTunes, which doesn't have support for Linux. In the end I settled for setting up a virtual machine and installing XP on it (a virtual machine, for those who don't know, allows one to use a different OS from within an OS - as opposed to partitioning the hard disk and installing another OS to the second partition and creating a dual boot). I've also been checking out different Linu distros but decided that the one I have, Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), is the best. I really love Ubuntu, so much so that having to use Windows causes strong negative feelings. I think I'm going to be using it forever and eternity. At some point I was thinking that come time to get a new laptop, I'd go for a MacBook. But since I'd want to keep on using Ubuntu, it's very difficult to justify paying around 1000 euros for a laptop. You can get a very decent HP laptop for about 400 euros now. Now, if you compare a laptop with Windows and a MacBook, there actually isn't that much difference in price, because OS X comes with the programs most people usually need pre-installed, whereas for a Windows laptop you'd have to buy - if you were a law-abiding citizen - most of the software. But the picture changes if you compare MacBook with a laptop on which you ditch Windows and install Ubuntu in its place. Ubuntu also comes with everything pre-installed, all of it open source and thus free. Adding to that, I've been reading plenty of comments from people who have used both OS X and Ubuntu saying that Ubuntu is the better OS. So, is the hardware alone so much better in MacBooks as to make it worth paying 500-600 euros extra?

Alright, enough with the geek talk :-) Here are a few more pictures. Happy spring to everyone! Also happy Easter, or just happy holidays to those who are not religious!


Sunny spring day in the city. Shot in Helsinki city center, outside the museum of modern art.

Early evening shadows on a street in Turku

A view from Turku, shot not too far from the Turku castle and the harbour.