Ragnchild

Hurray, the holidays are here! After three years of High school, it feels really weird to be finished, I’ve been waiting for this so long and then in an instant it’s over. Suddenly I find myself standing before an ocean of free time, and I can’t wait to dive into it. One thing that I find interesting is how quickly your daily routine can change during a holiday. During a revision period, I would be thrilled to have an evening without homework, whereas now I can sleep for 10 hours and be lazy all day without thinking about it. It’ll be weird not to have that voice in my head that says “shouldn’t you be doing some more homework?” all the time. What I look forward to the most is that now I can do the things I usually don’t have time for, like watching lots of episodes of my favourite TV-shows, work on my design and coding skills, practice violin properly etc. The only thing I don’t like about this holiday is that I don’t have a job, which would be nice to have, and since many of my friends are working I feel a bit left out. Continue reading Hello holidays, good bye homework

Yes, I know this might be a rather unusual blog subject, but it’s something that I find important. Today is World Blood Donor Day, which is a global celebration of voluntary blood donors, and also a day for creating awareness of the importance of donating blood. Many people have a desire to help others, but it’s often hard to find the right opportunity. Well, this is your chance. Most healthy people can give blood, and it’s a really great way of helping others. It really does not cost you anything at all, since your body replaces the blood you donate, and you also get your blood checked for various things, including hemoglobin levels, which can be practical. Continue reading World Blood Donor Day

Normally, when you think about language, you see it as a way of expressing yourself. You can say that your personality helps decide what kind of language you use. Thinking of this, have you ever considered that it might work the other way around as well? What if the language you speak affects the way you think and behave? Since I’m a multilingual person, this is a question I find quite interesting. When I think about it, I do feel different when I talk in Norwegian than when I talk in English or German. When I hear someone speak German, for example, I often get this good feeling. This is probably due to the fact that I associate German with summer holiday and my grand parents.

There is some evidence that when bilinguals switch between languages, their personality changes. This is something that I personally believe is true to some extent, because I have experienced it in my everyday life. It also seems logical, since language is strongly related to culture, that when speaking another language you might associate differently and thus express different sides of your personality. Continue reading Can language affect behaviour?

Finally, summer has come to what seemed like the land of endless cold. It’s been warm and sunny for a week now, and I even went swimming outside today for the first time this year. What I love most about summer though is the air, it just feels and smells totally different, and it’s like you can breathe in a totally different way. I’ve been taking some lovely walks around our local lake, and since my camera decided to work after all, I took some photos which you can view here. The ducks were very sweet, I was able to get really close to them, and after a while they even started following me. That was quite funny, as I imagined coming home followed by a pack of ducks, but they lost interest when they discovered that I didn’t have any food. Later I discovered some adorable ducklings swimming around on the lake, I need to get a picture of those as well. Continue reading Summer is here

This may sound shocking to some of you, but I actually believe that people who make their living out of singing (i.e. pop stars), should actually be able to sing considerably better than the average person. This is why I get thoroughly irritated when I observe what kind of people get fame and fortune from singing hideous songs with a voice that can at best be qualified as mediocre. Yes, I understand that these days a good singing voice isn’t everything, but it makes me wonder why not every person with charisma and good looks gets to be a pop star. Continue reading Do they even have a talent?

There is no doubt about it, I depend on the internet in my everyday life. I still remember the time when we had a dial-up connection, and I wonder how I managed to get by. I’ve come to realize that it is only through being able to use internet as much as I want that I’ve discovered how much you can benefit from it. So, here is a small list of what I like about it. Continue reading What I like about the internet

Usually, I’m the kind of person that cares about what happens in the world around me. People that just don’t care about anything irritate me, and when I see something that is wrong, I often try to think of ways it could be fixed. So why is it that I’m not looking forward to this autumn, when I’ll be voting for the first time in my life?

Well, it’s because the choices irritate me. The politicians make it sound so simple, left or right, red or blue, liberal or conservative. Well, guess what, there are almost 7 billion people on this planet, and classifying their opinions on a one dimensional scale is not going to be very accurate. Very often, I find myself agreeing with one party on several subjects, but disagreeing on another, crucial one, and so I just end up confused and irritated. Continue reading Politics is not that simple

Sometimes, things just seem to pop up in my mind for no apparent reason, and today, it was this particular curiosity: 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 + 1/6 +… (the reason I’m thinking about mathematical series may have something to do with my maths exam coming up, but that’s another matter). Now, this series is called the harmonic series, and if you keep adding the terms in this sequence forever, you’ll actually reach infinity, believe it or not.

Something I find quite interesting is that this particular mathematical construction is actually closely related to music. When you play a note on an instrument, what you hear is a mixture of several pitches called harmonics. The note you hear has a frequency called the fundamental frequency, and the other tones are not perceived as separate notes, in fact, they are what determines the sound of an instrument. Continue reading Music, maths, and universal harmony