My first NAS: Mybook Live Duo

Network-Attached Storage at home: WD MyBook Live Duo

6 terabytes. I love living in the future. I remember when that black box would have filled a room and heated the whole house in midwinter.

There are already various professional reviews out there on the Net, so I thought I would write something a little more personal (but not embarrassingly so, I hope!).

NAS? What’s NAS?  I did not know either as late as last year. It means “Network-Attached Storage.” Basically it is a tiny computer with a big hard disk (or two big disks, in the case of the Duo). You plug it into your home network (or small business, although this is clearly meant for the home). If you don’t have a network, that’s OK too. When you connect it to your Windows, Linux or Mac computer using the enclosed cable, a network should automatically arise.

I actually don’t use a router, just a switch that connects the computers to each other and the NAS, and it works just fine whether there is one or more. The three computers I have tested it with run Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu Linux. The enclosed CD maps the NAS disk up as a network drive in Windows. In Linux, you just find it in Places – Network and start using it. A good thing, since my tiny netbook does not have a CD drive!

Out of the box: The NAS is so lightweight, a man can hold it easily in one hand. I remember back when 6 terabytes (million megabytes) would have filled a room and heated the whole house in midwinter. The future is amazing, isn’t it? It has finally arrived!

The first thing I did was connect it to the mains. It came with a tree-prong head, but I soon figured out how to pop that off and replace it with the enclosed two-prong. It does not even need to be grounded, and it figures out on its own what voltage it is connected to and adjusts automatically.

While the machine was spinning up, I attached the network cable and plugged the other end into the network switch. If you have a router, you should plug it in there. If the router also broadcasts WiFi, you can access the NAS from your laptops, slates and phones wirelessly.

After a couple minutes, the NAS was running. Even before I ran the CD, I could find the NAS under Network, and clicking on the picture of it brought up a menu with help for setting it up. You don’t need to do that, it works fine right out of the box. If you are the only person who will use it, or if you have nothing to hide, you can login as admin without a password and just use the public shares.

Users, shares and devices: I set up a separate user for myself and one for Tuva the Imaginary Woman. I gave each of us a private share in addition to the public ones. What is a share? Basically it is a top-level folder on the hard disk of the NAS. You can have many of these, and they can be public or private. The system comes with some public shares set up already, for things like photos, music and video. But if you have deep dark secrets that you don’t want to share with others, you can have private shares as well. It took me only a little fiddling to hide my private share from my Imaginary Other, and the other way around. You can also have shares that are owned jointly by parents but not children, or other arbitrary groups of users. If you are using the NAS in a business, this suddenly gets more serious, but it is still quite simple.

So shares are only loosely tied to users. You can have many of each, and they don’t need to be one on one. A user can have many shares, a share can have many users. Or not. It is up to the Admin, the first account that meets you the first time you log on the Duo.

Devices is a bit different. As long as you are in your home (or small business) network, you can log on any user from any machine. Remote logon is slightly more complicated. You have to explicitly create a web access account for an existing user if you want them to log in over the Internet. The procedure requires their email address, which will get a mail with the instructions to create a new password. This comes in addition to the password they would have used if they were physically at the home network. (The two passwords can be the same, if they are strong enough to be accepted.) Once the user has created this password, they can log in from any computer on the Internet. (Whether they should is another matter. The solution as it stands today is based on Java, which is as full of security holes as a Swiss cheese, or so the experts say.)

Adding a mobile device is a separate action. It also requires an existing user. You can have web access but not mobile access, or the other way around. Mobile access also requires an app; in the case of Android it is named WD2go (Western Digital to go, OK?) and is free on Google Play. It is simple and straightforward to use, but you first have to register it using a 12-digit code that must be generated on the NAS. This means that even though I downloaded the app at work, I could not register it until I came home and could connect directly to the Duo on the home network. The app allows not only streaming of music but also of video. You should have a pretty new and powerful device to do that, though. And even then it will wait some seconds before it starts playing a song, and even more before playing video.

So each user can have multiple mobile devices but they must be registered separately, whereas on a PC you can log on your account from any computer once you have been set up with web access.

Extreme expansion: The third hole in the back of the Duo was for a USB cable, but contrary to my first imagination you can not use this to connect it to the PC like I did with my long row of external disks (half of which died horribly before the warranty expired, sometimes in mere months). Over time the external hard disks became gradually more robust, and my 1.5 TB Samsung has proved quite a reliable companion. But now that I have the NAS, which is built for heavy duty, it is time for the Samsung USB disk to retire. I gave it one final chance to shine though: Plugging its USB cable into the back of the Mybook Live Duo, it suddenly showed up on all my PCs simultaneously as a share within the NAS, without me having to do anything extra. You can even use a USB hub and connect all your old external disks and memory sticks, and make them all available to the whole family (or office), as well as friends and family all over the world on the Internet.

There are probably limits to how much extra storage you can add this way, but I am not sure what the limit is. I added 1.5 TB, but there are 2 TB disks available at affordable prices, and the documentation explicitly states that you can use a USB hub to connect multiple devices.

In theory I could just let things stay that way and continue to use the Samsung. I mean, it is Samsung, so it probably won’t keel over dead easily. But just in case, I am currently copying the contents to the NAS. That way I can just keep the old disk as a backup. A NAS is made for heavy duty, or so I am led to believe. It is not a backup solution, but more like the servers of a corporate network, where you want the data to lie on the server and not on each PC.

Speed, or lack thereof: Copying takes its sweet time though. I blame the USB 2.0, the system told me it would take 19 hours to copy 1 TB from the old disk to the new. That’s a lot of time, but then it is a lot of data. A letter page with typewriter text is about 4000 characters. 1 TB is a million million characters, or a thousand billions.  There are just over 7 billion humans in the world today. So I could write a short description of each of them to make a terabyte. We’re not quite on the same order of magnitude as the US national debt, though. Perhaps with the next generation of NAS!

Copying from my laptop over the network cable was actually quite a bit faster than copying from the USB disk, but still took some time for large folders. Like the MP3 files I ripped from my hundreds and hundreds of CDs before throwing them away. 12.6 gigabytes of data I have legally bought and paid for. Unfortunately so, in many cases, since most non-Irish CDs have only 1-2 good songs and the rest filler. The least I can do is share them with family and friends. (In Norway this is actually legal, although the definition is pretty strict.) And with my new NAS, I can do that without publishing it to the whole Internet. Another question is whether my family and friends want to hear my music, given that even I only do so sporadically.

One final thought before I close. Even when I am not copying anything to and from or between the WD NAS and the Samsung, they are both blinking frenetically, as if they were busy moving stuff around. What’s up with that? Back when the Samsung was attached to the laptop, it would go to sleep after a few minutes of inactivity. So I assume it is the small computer in the NAS which is doing something, but I don’t know what. Indexing? Quality checking? Defragmenting? Pointless running in circles? I will probably never know.

[Edit to add: Two days later I woke up in the morning and both of the disks had quieted down. I noticed that copying from the Samsung to the WD now seemed to go a little faster. So probably it had done something useful, like indexing or defragmenting.]

But even with that, I am impressed. Not quite indistinguishable from magic, but close enough. I love living in the future, and that future is now well within reach of the working classes here in Norway.

Read for your life!

Graybeard, from game Skyrim

A Graybeard, the vaguely religious old scholars / monks of Skyrim.

Does exercise of the mind cause longevity more than exercise of the body?

In fantasy novels, wizards tend to live much longer than ordinary people, although they don’t stay young. They generally tend to be healthy and spry for their age, though. This trope probably came to be because the real-life template for wizards were sages, who needed that long and healthy life to acquire all that knowledge and insight. So the long life was the cause rather than the effect, whereas in the fantasy stories it is the other way around.

Then again, the other day I read in Dagens Næringsliv (Daily Business in Norwegian) that male priests and university lecturers lived on average 11 years longer than farmhands and deckhands. It was implied that these groups represented the opposite sides when it came to career and longevity. I have mentioned before that gardeners tend to live long as well, but these were the groups that were listed this time, here in Norway at least. That brings up a fascinating reflection: If exercise is good for your health, why do those who don’t have time for it outlive those who do it for a living?

There is hardly any doubt that physical movement is a good thing. I know this from experience. Back when I was on the verge of losing my job due to wrist and arm pain, my doctor told me to exercise – fast walking at the very least – for an hour a day. In 2005 I started doing just that, and my body healed considerably. Not only did the pain recede, but skin rashes and wounds that refused to grow also healed. Moving about is warmly recommended. But it is not something scholars are famous for. Well, they may pace back and forth, but they are not famous for excessive physical activity. Mental activity, on the other hand…

In my own fantasy novel in progress, The 1001st Book, the final Gift of Thoth is that studying his books will not contribute to your aging. That is obviously not what happens in real life, but there may be more subtle ways in which serious study contributes to a long and reasonably healthy life. Let me bring up two hypotheses.

One is that aging of the body is a very slow process. It is usually when the mind falters that things take a sharp turn for the worse. When Alzheimer’s disease, small strokes or other forms of dementia robs you of your survival skills, you get in trouble: You forget to eat, or forget that you have already eaten; you forget to take your prescription drugs, or forget that you already took them; you forget to wear suitable clothes for the weather; you try to do things that your body is no longer strong enough for; your friendships unravel and you may even distrust your own family, causing fear and frustration. In short, a lot of stress for body and mind hasten your decline.

Building a lot of connections in your brain will not hold dementia at bay forever, but it is shown to delay its onset quite a bit. (It happens faster once it happens, but by then you may already have outlived your less thoughtful classmates.) Lifelong studying helps build those plentiful connections. So does spiritual practices. Whether it is the actual study or the willpower you train up by sticking to it, the result is that the higher centers of coordination in the front of the brain grow larger and stay alive longer, as well as developing multiple pathways to connect the various parts of the brain.

The other hypothesis I have is that people who read a lot tend to eat less. While not all scholars are thin, it is a stereotype for a reason. They are certainly less likely to be obese than the average, not to mention their opposites. With all due respect for running around, there is only so much you can do if you are alleviating your boredom by eating. If you don’t have the boredom in the first place because you are deep in a book until hunger starts gnawing on your stomach, that’s one less problem. And there is also the aforementioned willpower to consider.

We live in a world where there is a certain magnitude of chaos, so we may fall over dead any day for any number of reasons. Doing one thing or another will not guarantee us a long life. But still, if someone came to me and asked: “What shall I do to live a long life in this world?” I would feel obliged to reply: “Read a lot. Don’t rest until you have read a thousand books, not counting airport literature. And then keep reading. Read for your life. Read heavily, think deeply, and live purposefully.”

Memrise vs Anki: place yer bets

Instead of doubling the amount of time I spend studying, I am trying to double the precision. Although you can learn almost anything by repeating it 7×70 times, the best time is just as you are about to forget. Anything before or after is less effective. But how do you know when you are forgetting if you don’t remember it?

I have written quite a bit over the past month about Memrise, a free Web resource for memorizing facts, vocabularies etc. It combines two of the most powerful techniques for rote learning: Spaced repetition and mnemonics. Spaced repetition tries to make you recall the fact just before you forget it, as this causes maximum learning with minimum effort. Mnemonics try to associate random facts with something that is easier to remember. This is obviously most effective if you do it yourself, but that can be frustrating. Memrise uses associations volunteered by users, and you can add your own.

I rather like this approach, and the way you can study at your own pace. Unfortunately, most of the time I remember 66% at best rather than the 90% that is the goal of spaced repetition. This was also the problem with the two previous SRS programs I used, AnyMemo and Mnemosyne. (Spaced Repetition Software is SRS business!) So I am testing another free program, ANKI, which has a good reputation among self-study amateur linguists. I am not too optimistic though. Now that this is my fourth attempt, I may have to accept that it is I who am too old for the programs that fit most people. It is the same with physical exercise, after all, but there I can set my own pace. And that’s the thing.

What I really miss is a dial or lever I can set, so the software reminds after e.g. 90% of the time it thinks should be right. Clearly the programs all overestimate my memory for random words. Of course, it would probably have helped if it was not so random, if it was at least somewhat related to my ordinary life. But that’s not what I need it for. I would really like something that was adjustable to me, rather than the other way around. It is kind of discouraging to have forgotten a third or more of the words when it is time to review them. It is also bad for learning – the “memory traces” in the brain weaken more quickly after the ideal recall time, or so I’ve read. So ironically, I would probably even spend less time reviewing if I had that “confidence dial”.

Anki does not have that, but it does have levels in the answers. Instead of just checking for itself whether you got it right, it asks whether it was hard, good or easy. The ideal is good, which is when you remember it with a little effort. If you had to think long and hard, it goes easier on you with that word or fact next time, in the form of asking you earlier. If you say it was too easy, it waits longer. And if you don’t get it right at all, it shows it again very quickly. So that sounds like an improvement.

On the other hand, I liked the suggestions for memorizing words, and I liked the way Memrise used different forms of multiple-choice questions in the early phase of learning a new word, then giving more and more options and eventually requiring you to write the answer. It also requires writing when reviewing, which involves more of the brain and makes it harder to fool yourself (“well, I got it ALMOST right!”).

I have picked up Anki and installed it on my PC and my Galaxy Note 2. (Unlike Memrise which is a website but requires some advanced browser features and can’t be used on my mobile devices.) Anki is also easily synchronized between two (or even more) devices. There are a lot of premade vocabularies and other data sets, and it pleases me to see that a lot of them are for studying Japanese. I downloaded a fairly small one that is mostly tangential to what I have already learned, and am testing it now.

Unfortunately there are obvious errors in the dataset I am testing, although small ones. Occasionally a romaji (western character) is used in a word written with katakana. I saw one obvious misspelling beyond that already in Japanese, and another in the English text. The Japanese is written in a font that is like an uglier Japanese version of Comic Sans. I hope this is a feature of that particular set and not of Anki! It is quite hard to read after the very legible font on my Windows machine, not to mention the downright beautiful hiragana font on the PC running Ubuntu Linux.

Apart from that, it seems nice enough. With the mobile app I can study at the bus, during breaks at work, even while a game is loading. OK, not much since I have a fast machine. But still, very handy. And I like its approach: If I don’t recognize a word, Anki shows it again after a minute. Once I recognize it, it increases to 10 minutes, then a day. I inserted 1 hour between those, the system lets you add steps like that. Then it goes up to 4 days and so on, I am not sure how far it goes. The most important part is of course whether I actually learn the words. I will have to come back to that. But if it turns out to wait too long, like all the rest, I will try to choose “hard” instead of “good” even when I remember, and see if that fixes it.

I really hope I won’t have to write my own. There are already quite a number of these. There’s Supermemo, the original and possibly best, if you can live with complicated. And there’s at least one other that I forgot the name of. I do that a lot, forget names. Although I don’t always remember doing it.

Tsukareru and suchlike

Screenshot Chuunibyou (Oriental magic nap society sign)

Now that I am actually trying to learn a Far Eastern language, I have some newfound respect for the Far Eastern Magic Nap Society. (From anime Chuunibyou.)

The verb “tsukareru” means “to grow tired”. It is one of the few Japanese verbs I learned easily, because the suggested memorization phrase was “If you get tired, Sue will carry you.” While I probably would prefer it the other way around (depending on the Sue), it was still memorable enough to stick with me. Unfortunately, most Japanese words are harder to remember. And as a result, I do in fact grow tired. More exactly, after a bout of memorizing five words, I usually become very sleepy and may even fall asleep in my boss chair at home.

That feels about as ridiculous as it sounds. Five words? Now, the Memrise memorization is a bit more than just reading them. The words appear sometimes in Japanes (in the hiragana script), sometimes in English, and you get to pick the counterpart from a growing list of words (starting at four, ending at eight). The words alternate seemingly at random, and some of the time you must type the Japanese word rather than just picking it from a list. Still, it is just five words at a time. I should not go from reasonably wide awake to wanting to just shut my eyes. But I do, fairly regularly.

Reviewing is much easier, but still, if there are more than 20 (and there usually are 50+ when I come home from work) I may still start blinking heavily if I try to take them all at once.

I wonder if this is becoming a form of conditioned reflex now, from doing so much of my studying in the evening and sometimes early morning just out of bed. Those are the times I am not at work or making dinner or exercising though. I am not a full-time student after all.

***

This is not the only strange bodily sensation I experience these days. Having revisited Skyrim after a lengthy absence, I discovered that protracted fight scenes give me a hoarse throat. I know for certain that I don’t actually shout out loud (unlike some overly excitable gamers, usually much younger than me). Yet the body reacts as if I had been using my voice. Or Voice, in the case of Skyrim? I assume it is the muscles of the throat that involuntarily constrict during the intense stress.  Well, intense for me – I have very little stress in my daily life. I am single after all. ^_^

This may seem strange – it certainly did to me – but it is a known fact that the body reacts to imaginary worlds somewhat like it reacts to the real world. The whole concept of porn is based on this, after all, and it is one of the more successful business concepts of the world. So there is definitely something in it. I don’t need to tell most of my male readers about the ease with which the body reacts to even pure illusion of the mind. And it is not restricted to thoughts of the opposite sex. Angry thoughts cause the muscles to knot and the heart to beat more strongly, and fearful thoughts can cause effects in the body so fearsome that they become a source of fear that feeds on itself, leading to panic attacks. So the body is not a separate thing from the mind.

Perhaps interleaving Skyrim and studies will help take the edge out of either. Certainly many college students already do so, from what I see online…

Or perhaps I could, I don’t know, get enough sleep or something? OK, that’s taking things to extremes. It won’t be tonight, for sure. Because it was tomorrow before I even started writing!

January and money

Screenshot anime Chuunibyou

Yes, there was a time in my life when I felt like shouting “Now the world is mine!” when I had bought a new computer or some other desired item. This tended to not be good for my Januaries though.

Today is payday. Actually, when the 12th falls on a weekend, payday is the Friday before, but I didn’t notice. This arrangement is sure to be a good thing for those who have spent all their money before payday. Once upon a time, I was one of them. Even though I have more money now, I would probably still have been in that situation if I had not changed in my mind as well. There needs to be a lot of money before money stops being a limit. Scientists say that in the USA, the magic line is around $75000 a year. Most Norwegians – not to say Norwegian households – earn more than that, but I don’t. I think. I stopped keeping track some years ago, but I probably don’t.

Back in the days when I had a ridiculously cheap rent and still managed to burn through my money, January was the worst of months. I did not buy a lot of Christmas presents on credit card, so it must have been even worse for those who did. But I noticed that creditors – bank, utility, phone company etc – somehow all managed to have a bill in January, even those that did not bill monthly. (I have later arranged to get all such bills monthly, but I don’t even think that was possible at the time, and certainly not on my mind the months where there were no bills.)

I realized that the various businesses all hit you with bills in January because it was the month you were most likely to be broke. If you ran out of money before you ran out of bills (or, you know, need to buy food too), the natural reaction is to put the least urgent bills aside for next month. This costs the creditor from a few cents to a couple dollars in lost interest, but it allows them to slap a late fee on you that recoups that money ten to a hundred times over. So that is a nice way for them to add to their bottom line. And at the same time, they get a psychological upper hand on you. All good for them, all bad for you. So, don’t buy Christmas gifts next year. Yes, that will be easy! ^_^

Well, this is not a problem for me anymore, since I have more money and less expensive habits. So they have to do something more drastic. Netcom Norway, the Swedish-owned second-largest mobile phone company in Norway, did that. (The number two mobile company in Sweden is Norwegian, by the way. Brother kingdoms and all that.) Now, I am not saying they did this because they are Swedish or anything, but one month they did not send me an invoice. I know this because I have electronic invoice contract with them, so it can’t get lost in the mail or on the kitchen counter. If I had paid it, the receipt would show. If I had received it and not paid it, it would show up as due. (I know this with certainty since I have an invoice for 0.00 from the utility company for a year and a half now.) So, no invoice. The next month they sent me a “reminder” and slapped on a late fee. Free money for them. Almost needless to say, I bought my most recent mobile from a competitor of theirs.

But I don’t sweat the small things. Not having to break out in cold sweat all the time is one of the benefits of living in a rich country and having some small degree of discipline of the mind, although there could certainly be more of that. The time will come when even Norway won’t be able to stand against the coming storm. At that time, it will likely be a good thing to have an uncomplicated relationship with money.

More shiny?

Screenshot anime Little Busters (safe for work and school)

It is just a small thing, but since it makes me happy it is amazing!

The last fluorescent bulb in my home flickered and died, although happily it did not shatter like one did a few years ago. It was time to replace it with a LED bulb, the way I had done with about a dozen incandescent bulbs last year. I was also looking for a smaller bulb for the last spot in the living room 5-bulb main lamp. In addition, I ended up buying a set of three LED downlights for the kitchen. “Make your Home a Palace of Neverending Light!” Well, at least 20 years, according to the packaging. I don’t see why they would stop working then if they’ve lasted that long, but those who live shall see!

I also bought a new charger for my Galaxy Tab 7.7, as I had accidentally swept it off the table where it was charging. The tablet took no damage, but the connector at the end of the cable from the charger broke beyond repair. (I did repair it, but it worked only fitfully at best.) Stupidly it was made in one piece, so I had to replace it all. The replacement has a USB cable that connects the charger and the tablet, so if one part breaks, you need not replace them both.

My trip also brought me past a display of the new Galaxy Note 10.1, the big brother of my Galaxy Note 2 phablet (big mobile phone). The Note 10.1 was very nearly as Shiny as its little brother.  By “Shiny” in this context I mean the mysterious ability to radiate a small but noticeable amount of joy and satisfaction, giving the user a feeling similar to an orthodox worshiper watching an icon (according to studies of Apple fans; I believe Samsung has somehow managed to copy this memetic tech from Apple, by means unknown.)

For those who don’t use Note or iPhone or religious icons, it is similar to the feeling you get when watching a picture of someone you like a lot. Otaku (fans of Japanese entertainment) get this feeling, only more strongly I believe, when watching merchandise relating to their favorite series, such as small dolls of the main characters, or pillows decorated with pictures of them. I have not gone quite that far down the slippery road of the otaku, but it is big business (and parodied in some anime!)

Since I already have the Note 2, I was not seriously tempted to buy the Note 10.1 for its shiny. Hopefully there will be a Note 7 eventually, by the time I am ready to retire the Tab 7.7. But that may be a year or two off if things stay their course, and that is an ocean of time to me. Who knows who will be alive and who will be dead two years from now? We must do all the things that must be done, before they are lost forever. Buying yet another tablet is not near the top of that list right now.  But if you are looking for your first, this one is shiny. And it has a pen so you can draw on it and handwrite.

I consider “shiny” a good thing in and of itself. If objects you use can give you some measure of joy beyond their more prosaic function, so more the better. Increase the amount of joy on earth without harming anyone? Sure. Of course, one may get attached to it, as one may get to other joys: Art, music, architecture etc. (I use “joy” here as distinct from “pleasure” which in my use applies to the senses and fulfillment of instincts, but there is an overlap. Eating when you are hungry – even just a little bit hungry – is a pleasure, but food that is deliciously prepared and presented adds joy of the mind atop the pleasure of the flesh, as it were. There is also a considerable overlap in romantic relationships, but let’s not go there today.)

I would not mind if all of us could live our lives surrounded by objects that broadcast joy, so to speak. But I may be too optimistic about our ability to detach from such feelings. If we cannot die peacefully because we don’t want to part from all the shiny things, then clearly we have gone too far. But overall I think we should not wish for more suffering in the world, but more pleasure, joy and happiness in so far as it hurts no one and goes along with a virtuous life. (Not that I’m going to hold myself up as an example of the latter, but I mean in principle.) So, shiny, but not at any cost.

Memories of light

Screenshot anime Sakurasou

It is fun creating something with someone else. Arguably that may be my best memories.

Back when the Internet was still just beginning to become international, before the World Wide Web, I signed up for an email account and a handful of newsgroups at the Manhattan BBS (bulletin board service, the height of communication technology before the Internet – although the selling point of this one was that it did in fact interface with the Internet, still a rarity those days). Ironically, despite its name it was located in rural Norway. That did not matter – I was finally able to meet people with similar interests (well, some of them) from around the world.

One of my interests was a thick book of epic fantasy that I had recently bought, called “The Eye of the World”, by Robert Jordan. It was the beginning of a series called the Wheel of Time. I was delighted to find that there was a newsgroup dedicated to it, rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan. It was by pure coincidence / hand of fate that I stumbled into a group of people who were roughly as unconventional as I.

Over the next few years we gave the Wheel of Time more thought, probably, than the author had ever done. Accurate predictions and loony theories flew back and forth. But there is only so much you can get out of a book, and so we ended up discussing the real world (or in the case of socialists, a reasonable facsimile thereof) with much the same mindset. The friends, for lack of a better word, that I met in that invisible realm are still near the top of my “relevant” list according to Google. (Although they have been bypassed by the occasional erotica author. Long story.)

It has been many years. I long ago stopped frequenting the newsgroup. Most of us moved on to LiveJournal, and lately we have more or less regrouped in Google+, where we have a couple communities that preserve much of the atmosphere from back then.

A lot of other things have also happened over the years. Several of the regular have gotten married, notably some to one another. And there are Warders, a concept that appears throughout the books but is sadly absent in most other people’s minds, signifying a strong spiritual bond usually but not always between a woman and a man (or, in the case of the Green Ajah, a few men). This bond is intimate but not sexual, something that is evidently difficult for people in our culture to grasp. But among the people steeped in the lore of the Wheel of Time, it has turned out a very useful concept.

And now, nearly a generation later, the Wheel of Time series is completed. Years before that, looking at a picture of the author, a voice in my heart told me without hesitation that he was going to die before the series was complete. I believed for a long time that this revelation was by the divine Presence in my heart, but thinking back on it, it may have been the voice of reason. Be that as it may, it not only came true: The series was 3 books from its conclusion when the man best known as Robert Jordan left this world.

Luckily he had relented on his original plan to have his wife delete his notes and the already written final scene in case of his sudden demise. (It wasn’t entirely sudden, either.) Despite predictions from some of us, the series was not completed by Piers Anthony, but Brandon Sanderson. I suppose it could have been worse. I stopped reading the series a couple books before Jordan died, actually, and haven’t read the two first by Sanderson either. But that doesn’t mean I am not curious as to the legendary Final Scene. And today the last book is out.

Spoilers indicate that Jordan’s climactic scene – which was supposedly written at the same time as the first book – is indeed all that and then some. I may just buy the book when it comes out as e-book later this year … if I haven’t already gorged on spoilers so much that I more or less have read it already through middlemen.

The book is called A Memory of Light. But whether or not I eventually read it, I already have many memories of light brought about by Robert Jordan’s books. And to me, the way he helped bring people together will always be his greatest work.

Norway and Sweden

Norwegian spring - circa 2005

If not for the telltale Norwegian flag, this picture from a half forgotten spring day could just as easily have been from neighboring Sweden.

The “brother kingdoms” of Norway and Sweden should be of interest to all of the world, for the way they illustrate what really matters in a highly developed country.

The two nations share the Scandinavian peninsula, my native Norway to the west and Sweden to the east. Most Norwegians are genetically indistinguishable from Swedes (and Danes), the culture is very similar, and even the languages are mutually comprehensible. Well, older Swedes may have a hard time understanding Norwegian unless they are paid for it, but the reason for this is psychological. For centuries, Sweden was the big brother, not just in population but in prosperity and culture as well. From 1814 to 1905 Norway was basically as Swedish province, but gained independence peacefully after a dramatic cultural revival in the latter half of the 19th century, led by world-famous names such as Ibsen (playwright), Grieg (composer), Munch (painter) and Vigeland (sculptor). This golden age turned out to be temporary, and Sweden remained the leader of the Nordic countries.

Then in the 1960es, Norway won the nature lottery: Under the North Sea lay enormous reserves of oil and gas. Over the next decades, great wealth started flowing into the country: Mostly directly to the state through oil taxes and ownership, but the high-tech oil supply industry also earned large amounts of money. By now, a Norwegian worker is likely to earn substantially more than his or her Swedish counterpart, and pay less tax. For some years now, the UN has declared Norway the world’s best country in which to live. Some envy from the Swedish side cannot be avoided, but there is actually less reason for it than one might think.

It is true that a Norwegian worker (or pensioner) has quite a bit more money left after tax. But it just so happens that most things are more expensive in Norway too. Food is so expensive that Norwegians who live near the border often drive to Sweden to buy their groceries for the week, and even on the south coast people take the ferry to Denmark – a rather long trip for something called a ferry – to buy meat and alcohol. Alcohol is expensive in both Norway and Sweden, but even more extreme in Norway. But it is not just food. Books are substantially more expensive in Norway, cars are a lot more pricey, and housing is disturbingly overpriced. (In Oslo prices are comparable to the world’s largest trade centers such as London, New York and Tokyo, with 10-20 times the population density.)

The surprising result is that the living standard in Norway in Norway is only marginally higher in Norway than in Sweden. Indeed, for a large family the costs of housing and food in Norway may make it harder to make ends meet than in Sweden. (That said, large families are rare in either country these days.)

It seems that while money has poured into the Norwegian economy, there has not been a corresponding increase in the things you can buy for money, and so the prices have risen to meet the newfound willingness to pay.

There are some exceptions to this. One is goods that are anyway directly imported from overseas, such as electronics and everyday clothing. Scandinavians also increasingly import music, video and English-language books from abroad, in which case the nominal wealth of Norwegians translate directly into purchasing power. And with both nations having legally enforced 5 weeks vacation, it is also customary to visit foreign countries each year, where the strong Norwegian currency makes the winter-pale Norwegians into princes and princesses.

But for most of the year, the difference in nominal income makes very little difference to the actual standard of living. There is a lesson to learn from this, I think. It is true that for a developing country, lack of money is a big problem. But for the world’s richest countries, GDP growth is no longer really important. Streamlining public services and reaching compromises on political issues contributes more to the wellbeing of the people. A number of countries should pay heed to this and perhaps take a long good look at Sweden now that their own economies are faltering. Perhaps they can get some hints there.

tsumaranai shukudai

Once again I've received a score that boldly depicts the frailty of the human condition.

Once again I’ve received a score that boldly depicts the frailty of the human condition.” I seem to get a lot of that lately.

As I am painfully crawling toward the end of the JLPT N5 course on Memrise, I get the distinct impression that the number of words I retain is slowly sinking from 66% toward 50%. But it is hard to keep track, because the number of words to review each afternoon is now so high, I have to take them in smaller portions.

And then something like this happens. There’s (finally!) a fourth season of Minami-ke, one of my favorite anime, a slice of life story about three school girls (high school, middle school and grade school) and their wacky friends. And as I watch it, I recognize words from the JLPT N5 vocabulary that I know I did not know beforehand, because they seemed absurdly difficult. Like “atatakai” (which does not mean attack but warm), and “shukudai” (which does not mean chocolate day but homework). These are the kind of weird words that I had to repeat numerous times over the course of days before I could remember them.

One of the first and worst was “tsumaranai”, which means boring. Since “-nai” at the end of a word is pretty much always a negation, this means the Japanese has a word for the opposite of boredom, but I have never seen or heard it used. On the other hand, I had not heard “tsumaranai” used either, until today. I guess knowing a word makes it much easier to notice it. Then again, I have to forge on until I stop noticing the words and just notice what is being said. That seems unimaginably distant.

An infinite number of books

Screenshot anime Minami-ke, Kana and Chiaki

In regard to how stupid you are, I’ve compiled a ten thousand word report.

 In truth, an infinite number of books could be written on how stupid I am. And on many other topics as well.

I recently bought a book called The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. I may review it at some future time, probably at least somewhat favorably. But I have only read 18% of it yet. That is because I stopped at this quote by Neil Gaiman: “I would read other books, of course, but in my heart I knew that I read them only because there wasn’t an infinite number of Narnia books to read.”

I don’t have that relationship with Narnia, having only met it as an adult. But the idea of an infinite number of books is something that crops up in my own fiction in recent years. In The 1001st Book, the divine king Thoth of Attalan left behind thousands of books containing the universal magic lore. Wizards spend decades studying it and even centuries (for the final Gift of Thoth was that time spent studying the Truth does not count toward your lifespan), but they never manage to learn it all. It is said in that world that the person who reads and understands all the books of Thoth will be his reincarnation and save the world, but so far no one has come really close.

My choice of name and locale for the story is not incidental, but is plainly inspired by Japanese author and cult leader Ryuho Okawa, who should have reached 900 books any day now. Okawa does consider himself a reincarnation of Thoth as well as of Hermes Trismegistus, each of which is said to have written thousands of books containing all the secret knowledge of the world. Obviously this immense number of books is purely mythological. Only a few scattered fragments of writings purportedly from Hermes Trismegistus remain, although they are tantalizing in their powerful prose and have exerted a subtle but ongoing influence on Christianity and thus western culture.

Speaking of Christianity, we come to the second association. The disciple whom Jesus loved (generally assumed to be John) writes in conclusion of his(?) gospel: “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.”  Once again, an infinite number of books. Yet in the end the number of books included in the Christian Holy Scriptures was quite limited. Rather than write an unlimited number of books, Jesus Christ entrusted to the Spirit of Truth to expand and bring alive what he had embodied.

The truth is that it is natural for anything higher-dimensional to be infinite in terms of lower dimensions. Did that sound abstract? Think of a mountain, it is 3-dimensional. Think of a photo, it is 2-dimensional (at least the part of it that interests us). You can take an infinite number of pictures of the mountain, from all sides and all heights, and each tiny change in placement of the camera will yield a new picture, even though the mountain is the same. Even if you take them from the same place, the weather and time of day will still make them different. And even after all that, you have only shown the surface of it. Its content, the quality of what it is inside, is not described even after all that.

Therefore, there can always be an infinite number of books, because there are things higher than books. I remember my aunt’s husband saying to me, after I admitted I did not know something: “There could be written thick books about all the things that you don’t know.” And I have been reading such books ever since. And yet there is an infinite number of books that could be written still, about an infinite number of things. Because there are things higher than books, and even something higher than those things. We are immersed in eternity.