100% paraffin

"Paraffin wax is mostly found as a white, odorless, tasteless, waxy solid, with a typical melting point between about 47 °C and 64 °C ( 117°F to 147°F)...It is insoluble in water, but soluble in ether, benzene, and certain esters. Paraffin is unaffected by most common chemical reagents, but burns readily."

             — Wikipedia

Though the sun may go down by 4 p.m. every day and only comes up around 8 a.m. in Lund there is some respite: Swedes love to burn candles.

Compared to other countries in Europe, Swedes burn 45 times more candles every year* per capita. In every house there are countless candles and in every shop there are even more candle holders.

On my recent visit to Gothenburg, where I met up with Viktorija, we went shopping for a day in the city with the country's biggest shopping mall: Nordstan. We didn't spend much time in this shopping mall, but its interesting that it is the biggest (no?).

Going from shop to shop (most of them cheap decorations shops filled with low quality Indian trinkets) we found a lot of candle holders and candles in all shapes, sizes and colours. We actually found a few good candle holders at the second hand shop. Though everything in the place was covered in dust, we got some nice little glass holders for our paraffin fires. Vik took two matching ones back to Vilnius and I kept a rather large (pint-glass style) one for my room.

Buying these holders (and later the candles to go with them) is the least we could do to fit in with the Swedes with their ultra-cozy atmosphere. Its a really nice thing to walk into a house or a restaurant from the cold dark streets and see lots of little flickering lights. Mind you, safety is important as my colleague Birgir can tell you: his tablecloth lit of fire last night after a rogue candle dropped burning wax.

Many people burn candles for ceremonial reasons such as Advent in these long tins with four candles. Others just burn them for the atmosphere they create in the home. Real candles are great, but sometimes they aren't practical.

Something that you will notice in Sweden is that everyone has lights simulating candles in their windows. Obviously they use the electronic lights because keeping eight lit candles on all night between your curtains and your window is neither practical nor safe. Though they aren't the real deal, its still nice when you walk down the frigid streets of Lund to see hundreds of them in all the windows down the street.

Today there was also a celebration where girls put a crown of candles on their heads. Its daring, but it looks cool.

Interestingly in a country so obsessed by candles, I am yet to find a dedicated candle shop such as the ones we have back in Australia.

*Figure completely fabricated for the purposes of emphasizing the point that Swedes like burning candles... a lot.

Skills

Lately I've been surprised about the transferable skills that I had developed in my short, but intense, career in journalism. Being able to talk to people, find people, get around gatekeepers, develop contacts, build rapport, form questions and other skills can readily be applied in the business world.

A lot of it just comes down to basic communication skills. Being able to find the actual meaning in a sentence, rather than being baffled by the jargon and having the courage to refute what the bullshitter is saying, is a skill.

Working with high profile people (as high as the president, prime ministers and cabinet of Lithuania and the president of the EC) has given me some experience as to how these people operate. Inshallah business people act the same way as politicians :-)

Moronism still in fashion

I was shocked, saddened and disappointed this morning to learn that Stockholm had been the target of a (suspected) terrorist attack. Some moron blew up a car, which fortunately killed only one person. As my friend Per remarked in Gothenburg today, "its fortunate it was such a clumsy attack," because it could have been a lot worse in a country that seemed like it should be somehow immune to such disorganized and uncontrollable violence.

Sweden seems rather open compared to other countries and never seems to offend anyone. Anyway, this rendition of John Lennon's "Imagine" by A Perfect Circle sums up the mood for me.

Winners are grinners

A big congratulations to the winners from our class in the first round of Venture Cup:

Brandon with AirOhMail
Ludwig and Mariana with TrackIT!
Taras and Rene with cTrap

All got 10,000 kr tax free. :-)

I really love these fake sparkles that the photographer  put on the big cheques. It would be nice if they put them on the teeth of the winners.

There are more photos on the Facebook page for Venture Cup, but most of them are of an Asian girl eating. Boy was she hungry!

It was good to see three of our classmates win. We also got a win with Fredrick Malmberg. We claim him as our own because he lectures with us and gave us consultation on how to win in Venture Cup. I guess he has shown again that he really knows his stuff!

We also had a win, which we again claim by proxy, with Entrepreneurship masters alumni Michael Hoy, whose project is going to "cure cancer." A commendable goal!

If anyone has photos of Taras and Rene, please let me know and I'll put them up here.

Wondering about WikiLeaks

He may look weird but he is simply a product
of his time.

The WikiLeaks organization and its bizarre looking, but intelligent figure head Julian Assange has got me thinking recently.

Anyone who has engaged me in conversation about the state of journalism knows that the whole world is in deep shit because the mediascape is totally barren. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here is a short summary:

• Journalists used to have normal salaries allocated to them, so they could work hard and do good work.
• Newspapers used to have enough journalists to cover every day issues such as parliament, police beats, court rooms, council meetings, business meetings, conventions etc.
• Now with falling revenues, increased possibilities for media syndication (copy/paste content sharing) and an ever increasing appetite for new snippits of information from bored office workers who sit on the refresh button on news websites, the quantity of journalists has decreased (perhaps 10-fold) and the quality has withered.

Basically WikiLeaks is a product of the world's journalistic desert. No journalist can get out there and find these documents on their own because there is no time for them to work — they are glued to their chair trying to flood their news websites with stories from the wires. Also there is no financial incentive for them to do real journalism. Therefore WikiLeaks was born. Whistle blowers wanted a route by which they could release sensitive information and not get put in jail in increasingly authoritarian "democratic" states.

The powers that be feel pretty comfortable in the world as it is. The fourth estate (the media) is basically a blind old toothless dog that sits at the bottom of the steps waiting to be thrown a bone, no matter how small or mangled it is. Gone are its sharp teeth and energy. So when you have authoritarian governments sitting pretty in their information bubble and suddenly someone comes and radically rocks the boat, of course there is going to be trouble.

It comes as no surprise that governments around the world are condemning all these leaks. After all it makes them look like liars to the people they allegedly represent. It also comes as no surprise to me (perhaps I'm just cynical from working with public officials for too long) that they should try to shoot the messenger and try to shroud the message in uncertainty.

The question is whether people are just going to sit there and do nothing or if they are going to have a good think about it for once...

Article 0

Here is the first paid article I've gotten published in Sweden. Hopefully there is more to come.

I think the article spells out a lot of interesting points for the Swedish system. Basically they are completely disorganized and have no overarching plan about what they will do.

From a personal point of view, I can see that there are going to be a lot of dissatisfied international students in future. The universities are just too plain in what they offer students. At home there were far more services including support staff and other things that aren't available in Swedish university.

Perhaps the universities should stop paying for those automatically opening doors and allocate more money so we can have teachers review our big assignments before we need to submit them for grading...just an idea?