This is called time dilation and sounds like science fiction and theoretical mumbo jumbo, but it’s actually possible to prove in everyday life. The clocks on board the GPS satellites orbiting Earth are intentionally set wrong to compensate for time dilation. If they were not, GPS simply wouldn’t be as precise as it is. It’s also possible to see this if you get two very accurate, synchronized clocks, go to an airport, leave one of the clocks there and fly around the world. When you get back, you’ll notice that the clock you brought with you on the journey has actually slowed down a bit relative to the one you left on the airport. You’re probably also fed up with airline food.

Pretty funky stuff right there. I’m venturing a bit outside my normal domain here, so the clock-on-an-airplane story might not be entirely accurate, but I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it somewhere before. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

So why didn’t I think of this when Anniken left in December? With the help of simple physics, I could have cut down the four months she would be gone to mere hours. And, as a bonus, not aged much in the process. Seriously, though, the time since she left in the beginning of December has gone by like that. You can’t hear it, but I’m snapping my fingers. I’m hoping that the remaining time will go by just as fast, even without the use of relative time traveling. Soon it’s only three weeks left until she gets back and I can’t wait to pick up where we left off. Thinking about it feels a bit surreal, to be honest.

All right, if all we want is to see people getting it on, there are certainly easier ways to see that than to watch a TV show where you know it won’t really happen. The movements you see under the covers might as well be one of the participants having a seizure. But there is actually one reason to watch this show: To get a very good laugh. It’s a phenomenal social study. Let’s have a look at this year’s lineup!

Among the 10 contestants, there are – of course – five men and five women. For some weird reasons there are no rocket scientists in the team this year, but we have a wide selection of other professions: Event manager, model/hair dresser, bartender/team leader, phone marketer, another bartender and – wait for it – a horse chiropractor! I didn’t even know that was a profession, but now I know. How the hell does that work out anyway?

All the contestants have their own video profile, and they all come highly recommended – if nothing else to just get an idea of what you might expect if you plan to tune in tonight. Some of them exercise an impressive level of insight; like Stian. He says that his trick is that he is good looking, because he is not that good at talking to people. Probably not the worst thing to have going for you in the context you’re about to enter, Stian.

“Because of the hair and the boobs, I’ve been labeled a bimbo. I’ve heard that a 150 times before. But I’m not, I can just say that at once.” — Tine, 23 years old, Paradise Hotel 2010 contestant.

If you enjoy doing the facepalm, this will be an excellent chance to do it quite often for about an hour. Am I the only one who finds it a wee bit ironic that the the season premiere is scheduled for the Internal Women’s Day?

Personally, I wouldn’t mind being locked up in that Mexican hotel. Free food, free drinks and lengthy discussions about quantum mechanics by the pool. Sure, all the cameras might ruin the moment, but with the density of CCTV cameras in urban areas today, there’s no real difference.

So, yes, I’m only making fun of the participants because I’m jealous.

Since I was going to force myself to take some portraits, I decided to try to take some high dynamic range, HDR, photos. It’s an interesting technique I’ve been sniffing at for some time, but I’ve never gotten around to try it until now. Done right, HDR can produce some stunning results. To create an HDR picture, you take several picture of the same scene with different exposure and magically (or “mathematically”, if you will) merge these pictures to create a greater dynamic range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas in the resulting image.

My Canon 400D can’t take HDR images out of the box, and it only allows three picture to be taken using bracketing. This is all very limiting, and I have to use a plugin for Aperture to create the HDR image from the three RAW images shot by the 400D, but the result wasn’t too bad, considering this was my first go at HDR photography.

One thing is for sure, though. The beard has to go.

In terms of technology and the internet, the last 24 hours have been very interesting. After the earthquake in Chile, land line and cell phone networks went black in many areas, while the internet continued working. Because of this, people were able to communicate with the outside world, send pictures, messages and even connect video calls through Skype and other voice over IP services. The same thing happened to some degree after the Haiti earthquake.

I was following the CNN coverage because BBC World for reasons beyond me stuck to their scheduled programming and aired UK Report as events started to unfold. To be honest, I’m a bit skeptical when it comes to US media, mostly because I’ve heard a lot of nasty things about FOX News. Seeing how they present the news on their web page, I can see why it’s a good idea to be a bit skeptical about those guys. But CNN did a great job.

They were focusing a lot on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, taking information from those sites and presenting it on the air. There’s an ongoing discussion at work about social networking sites and how they can be used when reporting news. Some people want to take it to the extreme and include Twitter feeds with #hashtag searches directly into news articles. One Norwegian newspaper, Dagbladet is already doing this to some extent.

To use social networking sites directly, with out any kind of verification, sounds rather dangerous to me. How can you be sure that the information provided is correct or that the event being reported is even actual? Even though some bloggers claim that modern media will die a slow and painful death at the hands of social media, this won’t happen in quite some time, if ever. This means that established news providers risk a lot by presenting news that might be fake as the real thing. The same goes for the bloggers; if they fabricate stories, they will soon lose their credibility. So who can you trust? As of now, I would stick to the established media. Although social networking sites can be a great additional source for information – as we’ve seen since the Chile earthquake – you can’t rely entirely on them for reliable information. If you start to think that everything you read on the internet is true, you’ll think that Zach Braff is dead. He’s not, by the way.

To whom it might concern; Anniken and Pernille are currently in Panama, they were supposed to go back to Costa Rica yesterday, but were delayed because of bad weather. They are in the area of Bocas del Toro, in the North-West coastal part of the country – about as far away as you can be from Chile and still be in Panama. Internet connections are sketchy at best in the area, and they can’t receive incoming text messages. They can, however, send text messages.

Am I stuck in an antisocial rot? Might sound like it. That I haven’t shaved in two weeks says “yes”. But the reason for my lack of shaving is Norway’s Chuck Norris¹, a.k.a. Lars Monsen. He once said that shaving when it is as cold as it’s been this winter was a really bad idea. He also mentioned that he thought the same thing about showering, but I’m not planning to follow up on that one. The no-shaving-thing works very well, though, -20 Celsius is not a challenge anymore. I should shave soon, though, because I’m starting to scare kids. True story.

Anyway.

As I’ve been examining the Twitter API more closely, it’s struck me how simple the data collection will be. Or how simple it might be, as most other coders I tend to underestimate most tasks. To make it a bit more interesting, I’ve decided to implement everything in Python, a programming language I know jack about. But I see those .py files everywhere, so I’m guessing it can be used for something useful. I was also considering Perl, but after reading a few Perl vs. Python discussions, I decided to go with the Python fans.

So there you have it, my next hobby is the Global Happiness project, to be written in Python. Maybe I don’t have to shave for another two weeks?

1) What was going through the minds of all of Chuck Norris’ victims before they died? His shoe.

Of course, only collecting data from Twitter won’t actually show the actual global happiness. It will show the happiness among Twitter users, people with an internet connection and a sometimes unhealthy need to share. Take myself for instance. Still, with the massive amount of tweets that are coming in, it will at least give some indication of how people feel globally. Another good reason to use Twitter is how extremely easy they make it to access the public time line. It’s a simple GET request and everything I need is available. But what to do with all that data?

At first, I wanted to just query the public time line every minute and look for the words “happy” and “sad” and synonyms for those words. But there are a number of problems with this approach. The the word “great”, for instance. It’s a synonym for “happy” but “great” can also mean a lot of other things as well, not just “great” as in “I’m feeling great” and the probe will quickly begin to collect tweets like the two below and register them as positive tweets.

I want the data collection to be fully automatic, without the need for manually checking data quality or ignoring certain Twitter users. This means I need a better way to get data and this is possible by searching for specific words instead of just looking at the entire public time line. By limiting the number of tweets to process to only tweets containing the phrase “I feel”, and then look for words associated with feelings, the probe can potentially remove a lot of noise and garbage data. But it’s still not good enough and data like the tweets below will get collected by the probe:

Both these tweets would be ignored by the probe because they don’t contain any words associated with feelings, but it’s still garbage that I’d like to avoid. To remove these and filter out even more tweets, I will mostly likely do as the people who put together We Feel Fine. They are limiting their search to sentences that contain the phrase “I’m feeling” and a search on Twitter shows that this is a very good phrase to use. The data available data is limited, but not too small, and the data quality isn’t too bad.

A quick look through some of the search results also shows that people are generally not feeling very well right now. So, what are the next steps? First, it’s probably a good idea to get a white listing from Twitter so that I don’t hit their request rate limit during development phase, which tends to be a lot of trial and error. Then, I need to dig up a PHP framework that can handle one of the many response formats from Twitter, configure a database and collect a load of happy and sad words to search for. When the probe is working and is collecting data, it will be interesting to see what comes in and if it’s possible to use it for anything at all.

This might turn out to be a lot of fun. Or another project that slowly fades away into oblivion. We’ll see!

In 2009 there was also a great deal of things happening in my life, but it was different in the way that I didn’t mind writing about it, but for many a reason, I couldn’t. Now, in 2010, however, things are yet again different. Still, I will keep the personal filter on to some degree, and I doubt that you will ever get to hear the really juicy stuff. But you’ll live. And you’ve already had a couple of teasers in terms of what you might expect.

Today has been a great day. I got up early, had a quick breakfast, took the bus to work and had a great workout at the company gym. We’ve been seeing some very nice weather in Oslo today as well. No, it’s not been hot and sunny, the temperature has dropped below -10 C (14 F) and it’s been windy with heavy snow. Personally, I think that exactly what it should be like in February. I enjoyed the weather so much that I decided to walk home from the gym; about 6 kilometers (3.7 miles). At some point I ate a very nice fast food lunch that I brought with me in the blizzard.

When I got home I sat down on the sofa and watched a few episodes of South Park and a couple of games of curling from the 2010 Olympics. For some reason I find sports that should be boring as hell very interesting. Don’t I sound like a lot of fun!?

Right now I’m still at home, hoping that Anniken will soon pop up on MSN. And as I wrote this, she did. What’s the odds of that happening?

I added a photo I once took of a road sign to this post so you can have a look at what Lightbox has to offers. Personally, I think it looks really nice, and I wonder why I didn’t make the switch until now. I’ve also made a couple of other minor changes based on feedback from you. Thank you. This is probably more or less all the work I will do on the new design, which means that I can now move on to a new Project – with reference to “Half-Assed Efforts” entry.

I’ve been rambling on about various projects for a while; everything from writing a novel to creating an Android application or even a computer game. The computer game is the least likely thing to happen. It will be a lot of work for one guy, even though it’s been done before. But the new Project is supposed to be a hobby, not a second job. I’ve already got one of those, and one is quite enough.

There is one project, however, that I’ve been thinking about lately: Global Happiness Index. By looking at incoming Twitter statuses, and search for words associated with being happy or sad, it should be possible to get an indication of global happiness. For Facebook, something like this has been done before, and I’m sure something similar also exists for Twitter, but it would still be an interesting project. I don’t know much about how to present information visually, but I know how to collect data and I also have some experience with data mining. That said, it all sounds like it might be a lot of work and require more hardware than I currently have.

One thing I know for sure is that it’s about time to call it the night.

Am I pleased with the end result? Well, at least it’s something different than the old one. The navigation is better, the entry calendar is back (yay), and both the sidebar and the main section are wider than before. This gives me more room for images whenever I post that. The only bug I know of so far is the popup used by the NextGEN Gallery, but that’s not something I’ll bother with now. Also, I’ve only tested the design on the latest stable release of Opera, which is v10.10 at the time of writing.

If you see anything fishy going on or have any suggestions for improvements, please let me know.

Update: As Miguel points out in his comment, you won’t see any changes if you are visiting this site on a mobile phone. Mobile phones get pages modified by the excellent WPtouch plugin.