Notices by David Weir :v_enby: (davidjamesweir@mementomori.social)

Just witnessed what I deem the most “Finland in summer” thing:

A knackered tractor driving around at midnight, metal music blasting, driving into the local kylmäasema (unstaffed petrol station) to refuel.

(As nightlife goes, I consider the midnight tractors infinitely classier than the 3 am mopeds.)

@nemobis Thanks for thinking about this! I would not want the Finnish interface language for everything because some translations are really bad and it makes searching for strings of text in the UI harder.

The simplest solution would be (as @ninafelwitch pointed out) for Google to just stop forcing their translations on the user. This should be a simple opt-out, there's no need for anything fancy.

However, if they wanted to be clever (and I doubt they do, being clever is a cost centre), then Preferred Languages is an iOS concept, with a well-understood API (see e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/a/30293909) - so it is possible and indeed natively implemented to have multiple 'preferred' languages. I have my preferred languages set to English, Finnish, French, Norwegian and Swedish. Google's apps could parse that...

@nemobis It’s English; in the native app.

Does anyone know how to get Google Maps on iOS to not translate reviews? It seems to translate and deprioritise reviews in Finnish, meaning I get a totally different perspective of a place than other people. 🙄

I noticed it started auto translating reviews a few months ago but I had not noticed it deprioritising reviews before.

#GoogleMaps #enshittification

@nemobis You can buy yourself some time if you persuade all your family and friends to move to the Baltics 🙃

@nemobis You can always do an oikaisuvaatimus (even to request to pay more tax) and wait a couple of years. I’ve done that, and in the end I was told in great detail with reference to the relevant laws that no, I didn’t need to pay more.

(This related to a period when I was domiciled in Finland and working mostly in the UK but also in Finland; my UK tax was refunded when I ceased to work there as it was below the tax threshold. I applied to pay it in Finland anyway, but was told that I was not eligible to pay more tax as the UK income had been from a public sector employer.)

@lanodan Also the Swedish etymology is cute - "heavy stone". @rnd

At my high school (one of them; the last one I went to) we had a dedicated fiction library and librarian. It was where the nerds hung out; I was there every day. But I regret I never accepted any pointers about what to read.

Similarly I had a fantastic English teacher in S4 and S5, who was an expert in feminist Scottish literature (adult me now thinks this was very cool). But it always felt my (frankly uninspired) choices of independent reading weren’t good enough: could I find some interesting textual analysis angle on The Hobbit aged 16 and write 3000 words? Probably not. But by then my reading was all non-fiction, reportage and the like, and my school did not approve of using that for final examinations or submitted coursework.

I’m really grateful to that English teacher, their teaching is why I love quoting poetry to my kid and why I agonise over phrasing when I write papers. But I wish someone could have met me where I was with my reading interests and shown me how to develop.

#reading #books

Early career researchers in computational early universe physics, come and work in Helsinki! 💕

This year we are hiring up to four postdoctoral researchers! We have a friendly, supportive group and we do some cool early universe physics with computers.

Our advert is here:
https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/29096

I'm happy to answer any questions! And please do reach out to past and current group members to ask about their experiences working here, their views matter far more than mine.

For what it's worth, I arrived here after my doctorate 13 years ago and except for two excursions (to Stavanger and Nottingham) never really left. It's very nice here.

#physics #hiring #cosmology #UniHelsinki