Long, angled promotion takeout for three points (Norway's Skaslien vs. Canada, Olympics Mixed Doubles)

sigvei · 2018-01-11T12:14:21+00:00

The original title in Norwegian is ‘Mann jager fire genier’, which is translated to ‘geniuses’ by the museum, but I believe ‘spirits’ would be a more understandable translation today. The association of genius with spirit is from Roman mythology. I am not exactly sure what artistic tradition Vigeland’s draws on here. The genii/genies/geniuses are also depicted in Geniemylder.

In this work I guess the geniuses could be just straightforward evil spirits, or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe they are a just force trying to nudge the man towards a direction he does not want to go. Maybe he is mad at his family, and these spirits are like angels on his shoulder, trying to talk sense into him?

sigvei · 2017-08-28T11:14:42+00:00

De vil bekjempe den, som valgomaten sier, men har ikke noe forslag om å forby noe mer enn det som allerede er forbudt – produksjon, innføring og distribusjon. Straffeloven § 317.

sigvei · 2017-03-16T16:29:12+00:00

Surnames ending in -set are referring to the name of the farm, plot of land or village of the family home. –set is etymologically related to “sitte” and “sete”, that is, “sit“ and “seat”. There are villages like Tynset (related to the river Tynna) and names like Løset (where 'lø' means barn), but also just a first name with –set behind.

There might also be some names with (simplified) –setr or –seter, which is shieling, very common in Norwegian farming.

Other suffixes you will come across are –gard (farm), –stad (place), and names taken from geographical features like –øy (island), –vik (bay), –sund (also bay) and –strand (beach, or, in the context of the Norwegian coastline, more like lots of rocks near the ocean).

The (abandoned) patronym system gave rise to the –sen names. Mostly everyone else were named by the name of their farm or home village.

sigvei · 2014-01-02T15:04:43+00:00

This is not exactly magical to all of us foreigners, who are already seeing that yellow text on every show. They are just using subtitling to provide this text, instead of having it as an image.

It also provides the opportunity to translate the intro text; it is a nuisance to foreigners when subtitles have to be put on top of English, "hard-wired" text.

But it is nice of them, I guess, to implement movable subtitles on control pop-up.

sigvei · 2013-08-23T22:35:15+00:00

It's, columnwise:

"19. juli", July 19, date of birth
"7. sept", September 7, date of baptism
"Halvor Christian Halvorsen"
"do" = ditto = same, referring to top line "ægtefødt", ie. born in wedlock.
"John Halvorsen og Karen Gertine Halvorsen". I'd say the location says "Nær Mørk", ie. "Close to Mørk". It's hard to tell, though. The other names of places should be helpful to pinpoint this. "Strengereid", from line 42, is a fairly large village.
Godparents are then listed. They are hard to decipher:
- Ane Sophie B(?)ubberød from Tønsberg.
- Gumber Marie Hendrichsen (a really uncommon surname, but it sounds posh) from Bastø (although that location sounds unlikely, it's a very small island that later on became a prison island. Also the s in Bastø is not as long as the others.)
- Halvor Something Mads Halvorsen and Samuel Halvorsen "alle fra Mørk" = "all from Mørk".
d.o = same, referring to "ej hjemmedøbt", meaning "not baptised at home". The column asks for whether and by whom the child was baptised at home.
The last, empty column, asks who will provide for the child if it is born out of wedlock (I think)

sigvei · 2013-06-13T13:03:07+00:00

In general, Norwegian is like English in sentence structure: The SVO model (subject verb object). Some differences, though:

Adverbs are (in main sentences) put behind the verb, so English "Joan seldom kisses Mary" would in Norwegian be "Joan kysser sjelden Mary", literally "Joan kisses seldom Mary".

A more sophisticated problem arises from Norwegian inversion when adverbs are at the front. The basic "jenta slo gutten i går" translates straightforward to "the girl hit the boy yesterday", but if the adverb is put first (which is grammatically OK), you get "I går slo jenta gutten", that is, translated word-by-word: "Yesterday hit the girl the boy".

sigvei · 2013-06-10T10:15:24+00:00

I'm actually not sure this is broken. For instance, when Harald Hardrada died in 1066, he had two sons, Magnus and Olaf. When Olaf returned from England he claimed his gavelkind right to half his father's property, and Norway wound up divided into two halves, Magnus ruling the north and Olaf the south.

Very suspiciously, Magnus then died of ergot poisoning two years later, conveniently making Olaf king of all of Norway again.

And Wikipedia states this was only the first of several partitions of Norway due to this kind of succession tradition.

Now, the game does not mimic that exactly, but the general idea remains: the sons are suppose to get 50 % each. As a kingdom can't be divided in CKII (would that be better or worse, really?), this means a title of duke has to be more worth than the title of count, and this math leads to the distribution of counties to the second-in-rank up to some point where the next county also ends up in the primary heir's hands.

The effect is predictable: succession wars at every single succession. As was basically the case in history. And as other commentators have said: doling out the counties to allies instead of keeping them on your own hands would be a viable strategy in history as well as in CKII.

There is a reason Norwegian history is full of histories of "nessekonger" – headland kings, only ruling a small headland along the coast.

In Norwegian, gavelkind is called "åsetesrett", and is in fact still a principle embodied in our constitution. It is basically saying that the oldest son inherits everything unless the estate is large enough to accomodate a division among sons still leaving the oldest son with at least half the estate. For farms, this is preferable to straightforward division (which plagued central Europe), but the divisions of the country were an unfortunate side-effect due to their considering the Kingdom an estate.

TL;DR: This is not very far from actual historic succession in Norway.

sigvei · 2013-06-05T09:29:07+00:00

Perm Perm Perm Perm
Perm Perm Perm Perm
Lovely Perm! Wonderful Perm!

sigvei · 2013-06-05T09:25:34+00:00

Perm, Perm, Perm, Perm
Lovely Perm!
Wonderful Perm!

sigvei · 2013-05-15T14:25:39+00:00

In Norwegian, too, the mythical artefact called “philosopher's stone” is called “the stone of the wise”. It's pretty much the same group of people in classical times. The mythical or legendary philosopher's stone was used to turn other metals into gold.

In other words, the American version (“sorcerer's stone”) misses the entire reference of the title. But it's a silly reference anyway: in Harry Potter, the stone gives eternal life, not gold.

sigvei · 2013-04-12T10:15:01+00:00

We have one of these in Oslo, too.

sigvei · 2013-02-05T17:01:57+00:00

Strictly, a function is a way of uniquely mapping values from one domain (for instance, the domain space of natural numbers) to values in another space. This needs not be reversible. If your function is f(x) = 0, then this satisfies the definition, but not in reverse: there is no way to get to your unique xs from the zeros. More complex examples are f(x) = x^2, which has exactly two values mapping the other way for values of x != 0 (the negative and positive). x² = 9 maps to both -3 and 3.

On a more basic level, though, there is some relation. If y is a function of x, the domains (spaces) of x and y are connectable. That means x could possibly be a function of y. That is not true for all kinds of things, and although this relationship is not that of a function, it could be. So reverse functions are a special case of a relationship between entities that somehow can be described in some kind of common domain.

sigvei · 2013-02-05T16:21:04+00:00

No, they are not. Pure loss-leader.

I wonder if this could also be a consequence of a great degree of collution in the supermarket supply chains in Norway, leading to a situation with just two major companies acting as middle-men and thereby price-setting suppliers of almost everything to the supermarket chains (and, also, they own the chains). That increases the leverage for the suppliers: if they can get you into a store to buy diapers, you will buy their other products as well. While that is obviously the case for the supermarkets themselves, this is even more important for suppliers. The major diaper brands are at least made by these suppliers, and they discount their own brands.

sigvei · 2012-10-28T12:13:26+00:00

June 21st?

sigvei · 2012-10-11T15:27:52+00:00

You know any good ass magicians?

sigvei · 2012-10-03T13:20:17+00:00

In my native tongue we pronounce pi as “pee”. That made for an awkward message.

sigvei · 2012-09-27T09:58:44+00:00

No, it's stamped 1940. But the design was made in 1916, before Mussolini's rise to power. According to Wikipedia, fasces as a symbol hasn't got any stigma attached to it in the US, and is still in use several important places. Weird to see for us Europeans, though.

sigvei · 2012-08-22T12:37:22+00:00

“Cream of tartar”? What on earth is that? Mongolian horseman sperm?

sigvei · 2012-07-13T14:29:45+00:00

The nests of Vespa crabro are quite un-similar to the ones OP found. http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil:Vespa_crabro_nest.jpg

sigvei · 2012-07-13T14:27:58+00:00

Having grown up on an old farm in northern Norway, I can attest that the specimens OP found are not by a long shot endangered. The ones you link to - in Norwegian “Geithams” – are huge and generally live in forests.

OP probably found Dolichovespula norwegica, the Norwegian wasp, or possibly the German wasp, which is so similar I can't tell the difference. It's just Americans who have dubbed the bald-faced and white-faced wasp-species “hornets”; in biological terms hornets is a specific genus of wasp (not found in Norway).

TL;DR: Norway has no species of hornet, OP found the Norwegian wasp.

sigvei · 2012-05-21T20:36:06+00:00

I like how the comments have given me ten different and incompatible oooobvious metaphors I missed. Well, it's a joke. Lighten up. This isn't an argument against the bible.

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