Alexey Smirnov's blog

In August lots of forest fires were burning in Russia. Luckily, I spent this time in countryside far away from any fires. But to begin with, here is a video that describes the situation. Basically, this is what it looked like in our region of Nizhny Novgorod even though I guess the video was shot in south of Russia.

On July 29th I went with my parents to a summer camp at Vetluga river, approximately 150 km north-east of Nizhny Novgorod. Because it felt extremely hot in the city because of the heat wave that stayed in Russia for 3 months, it felt very refreshing in the camp. We have enjoyed our stay in the wooden houses during those two weeks when people in cities and certain villages suffered a lot. Every morning we were swimming in a lake and then after breakfast in Vetluga. Road trips were another activity that we enjoyed.

The summer camp is situated near Varnavino, a small town nowadays which was a monastery in 1600s. St. Varnava has founded this monastery. I guess it was rich and joyful area before October revolution. But then lots of destruction happened and people fled away. What is remaining nowadays are either ruins or stones which are put in place of destroyed churches.

It is quite unusual that despite the wide-scale efforts to restore old churches and monasteries in Russia, there are still lots of ruins in this particular area. I guess this is because it is quite far away from the center of our region and not too many people are living there nowadays. However, this area looks so beautiful that it is possible to justify restoring the destroyed buildings, for example to attract more tourists. There are lots of abandoned homes in the villages, there are also lots of homes that were acquired as summer homes of people living in cities. To me it seems that life there has not recovered yet after Big Bang of the revolution, almost 100 years after it happened. I don’t have the pictures of abandoned country-side life there but it looks very impressive and makes you think of those people, their lives, and what happened to them.

We have visited Svetloyar lake which is famous for its invisible Kitezh town. The story goes that there was a beautiful town 1000 years ago. However, it has collapsed into the lake to prevent its capture when Mongols have approached it during their conquest of Russia. There are a number of theories nowadays of how the lake was shaped, from volcano to meteorite strike to who knows what.

The people’s belief is that you have to walk three times around the lake praying to get your sins forgiven. In other words, this remote place is deeply connected to our history and culture. But we have not walked around the lake, instead we were only swimming there. Also, there are a number of trails out there going to the burial site of three monks respected for their saint lives. Also there is a stone which the saying goes has a footprint of St. Virgin Mary.

There is a village Vladimirskoe next to the lake. It has beautiful museum where local craftsmen are building beautiful things. I have noticed that this whole area of north-east of our region is abundant with crasftsmen – for exapmle Khohloma in Semenov, ceramics in Svetloyar, etc. To me this culture looks like traces of old civillization that we have so little evidence of nowadays. We can only come more often and try to learn more. It is because of the significance of this area that great Rimsky-Korsakov has written opera dedicated to this area.

This summer in Russia is one of the hottest in a century. Already lots of forests and fields are burning. The amount of crops that it is still there to harvest is decreasing rapidly.

We have been walking a lot, one of our favourite routes is that to Oka river on which our town is situated. I have taken a few nice pictures of insects which there are plenty of in the fields.

The pictures have been taken by my Panasonic DMC-FZ8, a camera with a 12x optical zoom and lots of automatic modes to take pictures in. One of its coolest features is its ability to take RAW images but I should confess that over the period of two years I have never used this feature! Otherwise, I enjoy the responsiveness of the camera, its flexibility in controlling shutter speeds and ISO levels.

But I still wonder whether the cameras are at the bleeding edge of software technology. I mean, there is lots of post-processing that we often do in Photoshop or the like which we could do in the camera. Apple is working in this direction – a number of applications have been written that allow to adjust various parameters of a picture after you take it on your iPhone. Therefore, iPhone is the first computational camera or in other words a camera whose software you can tweak in arbitrary ways.

In particular, I would love to have the following two features in my camera:

1. High Dynamic Range imaging. Imagine you take a picture in a room with a bright light coming from window. Obviously, traditional camera allows you to see either inside or outside but not both. The reason is the limted range of light that it can absorb. The key is to take a number of pictures with different exposure levels and combine them. So simple but would make lots of people happy! Available on iPhone (proHDR).
2. Making panoramas – that is, stiching a number of continuos images together. Available on iPhone (PanoLab – FREE!!!)

But there is another way to make panoramas – use cool software called Microsoft ICE. It makes very nice panoramas and can save it as either JPEG or upload to Photosynth, a web site for sharing 3D models.

I would like to describe what I am doing on weekends in Helsinki. Life in a city is certainly different from the life in a smaller town or a countryside. One of the challenges of this life is to do outdoors activities or at least some kind of sports to stay in shape.

This is why I start my weekend from attending a swimming pool, or in fact a Roman bath at Yrjonkatu. The definition of start of the day is quite relative because I am going there typically at 2PM. Earlier during the morning I am reading magazines mostly Communications of ACM or listening to radio. Not so long ago I have discovered Radio Freedom which features prominent journalists such as Vladimir Kara-Murza as well as lots of independent analysts. They often express interesting opinions. One thing that I have noticed is their use of references to literature or books that they have read recently. They are trying to apply the lessons learned from those books to modern life. This definitely characterizes this radio as that of intellectuals.

Anyway, in the swimming pool I am practicing fsreestyle wimming. I am swimming 500-1,000 meters depending on further plans. As of now, I can swim arbitrary long distances but not very fast, pretty much as fast as I could do it in breast stroke. However, the idea of swimming freestyle is to swim faster. But my body is experiencing tough resistance of water I am basically making my way through it. Instead I guess I need to flow through it, integrate with the water. But that takes lots of practice. Anyway, I have bought a 10-time ticket that allows me to get to any swimming pool in Helsinki for 36 Euros.

Then after the swimming pool I spend a few hours reading. For example, last weekend I was reading Economist magazine which I like quite a lot. I have bought another issue because of the funny cover image. There was a special report on social networks. Its main points are:

• MySpace was most visited social network until last year Facebook attracted more visitors. This is because MySpace was focusing on music and movies, whereas Facebook built a platform for content sharing. As broadband Internet spread through the world people got more interested in their own content.
• Twitter is very different from other social networks because it is like a broadcasting framework, not content sharing. The latter always assumes a certain degree of privacy, for example only your friends can see your pictures. In Twitter everybody can subscribe to your tweets.
• So far social networks have been barely profitable because advertisers don’t think that people will click on ads placed on social networks. This is because people are concentrated on their or their friends’ content, not on ads. But the special report argues that people trust their friends’ recommendations most, thus an ad saying that your friend has bought product X will likely influence your decision.
• Many smaller enterprises are using Twitter to advertise themselves. For example one bakery was tweeting upcoming donut sales and soon got over 50,000 followers. Another example is using Facebook as a game distribution platform. A classical Cafe World game has attracted over 10 million players in just a week. This is because of Facebook’s status updates. When your friend says that (s)he has become a Pizza Tycoon you think you should also become one. The network effect takes over. Gaming industry has never seen such growth rates before.
• People are increasingly using mobile devices to access social networks. Most of these devices are GPS-enabled. This opens another avenue for advertisers: location-aware ads.

On Sunday I am going to a lake to skate. I am preparing for a ice-skating marathon which will take place in the end of February in Kuopio. It is a funny thing which I will definitely describe in another post if I take part in it. The idea is that you have to skate as much as 200 km! But of course there are smaller distances such as 100km, 50km, 25km, and 12km. I will try to skate 25km. Because I am using traditional skates, not speed-skating type of gear my speed is not that great. A speed skater can maintain a 30km/h speed during the whole 200km race. Last weekend I skated 15km on a lake at Munkkiniemi and my speed was less than 10km/h.

Last but not least, I got used to going to movies. There is a gorgeous movie theater near my home in Tennispalatsi. I have bought a group ticket that gives access to 5 movies, each priced at 8.5 Euros. This is quite a big discount, as a single 3D movie is priced at 13 Euros. So far I have watched Avatar 3D, Up in the Air, and Sherlock Holmes. All are gorgeous movies.

On January 12, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti just outside the capital city of Port-au-Prince. The devastation – in lives lost, property destroyed, and families displaced – is immense.

Our immediate priority is to save lives. The critical needs in Haiti are great, but they are also simple: food, water, shelter, and first-aid supplies. The best way concerned citizens can help is to donate funds that will go directly to supplying these material needs. The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund will work to provide immediate relief and long-term support to earthquake survivors.

DONATE NOW!

Cities are notorious for their limited number of parking places. But during the winter things get even more complicated. The main problem is not finding a place to park your car but actually getting out of the parking. Here is a video that illustrates these words. In fact, this is not the toughest case that I saw out of my window. A couple of days ago a few guys spent half an hour trying to free up their entrenched friend.

This Saturday I saw camels in the center of Helsinki. They were being fed near a store that sold carpets. I wonder if it was possible to order a carpet made of this particular animal.

I have participated in a half-marathon in Espoo. It is one of the largest running events in Finland, probably next only to the Helsinki City Run.

The course goes through the forest as well as partly through asphalt. This is why it is called a Rantamaraton, or a beach marathon in English. The course is quite tough, it goes uphill quite often. Compared to a course in Hameenlinna which also goes through forests this Espoo run is a lot more difficult because of this.

Before the race I got new shoes with a big discount. I decided to try them out immediately. Initially they felt very light and comfortable but after half of the distance I found out that the feet were badly damaged because of friction. Then I started feeling the muscle jams. I even thought of retiring from the race but I managed to get to the finish line after walking the last few kms. But my time was still fair – 2 hours and 3 minutes, the same as it was the first time I ran in Seinajoki a couple of years ago.

What I really liked was the atmosphere of the city. It looked as if every resident of Espoo went out to streets to cheer the runners. This gives additional strength to the runners.

Another difference was the number of people. In the forests the paths are quite narrow, two people are barely able to share it. When several thousand people are trying to get through a narrow path the intense competition is inevitable. This is why a marathon and half-marathon are started off at different times and partly go through different routes. However, in the end the routes merge and then the number of people increases even more. On that day a lot of people ran faster than I because I had to walk a lot, but I have overtaken a few tired marathoners as well. This constant competitiveness did not allow me to maintain a normal pace. I was confused as of whether I was going too slowly when I was overtaken or that I was going too fast when I was overtaking. Knowing your pace is very important.

Overall, tough course and nice people but I did not have too much luck this time. And I guess this is the last race this season. This year I have done quite of few of those including a marathon and I am very happy. I did not experience any major leg injury this year. Looking forward to having more successful attempts next year!

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

In his book Al Gore describes huge environmental problems that humanity is facing now. In addition, he describes his family and the conditions in which he was growing up. Surprisingly, I found a lot of similarities in the latter part with a way in which a typical Soviet family was grown:

For eight months each year, my family’s home was a small apartment in Fairfax Hotel. My sister, my mother, my father, and I all shared the single bathroom that connected my parents’ bedroom to the bedroom I shared with Nancy

I am wondering now if Gores were suspected in connections with Soviets. Why were they given such a small apartment otherwise?

However, during the summer Gores were living on a countryside. This is also very similar to the Soviet way of life: everybody was trying to escape from a city to a village where their grandparents were living during the summer. Al Gore explains why he became so interested in nature issues:

Had I grown up entirely on the farm, I think I might well have taken nature much more for granted. But being deprived of it at the end of each summer allowed me to know it by its absence and to better appreciate its incompatible grace. Had I grown up entirely in big city, I might never have known what I was missing

When I was a student in the US I was often told that Russian people are too ambitious – they either do nothing or try to send a man to the outer space. I guess the reasons behind the willingness to tackle global problems is this inner happiness that is developed over the years. Only when you can appreciate the beauty do you want to achieve a high goal. And appreciation is developed through exposure to drastically different conditions.

So I think Albert might have found lots of like-minded people among ordinary Russians.

The book is very nicely written. I guess if you want to deliver the message to a large audience you have to take a lot of care of how you present it. Gore does an excellent job in attracting the reader attention with large photographs and large fonts. He uses different types of information such as diagrams, graphs, maps in his book. Often, he has before and after comparisons that make it very clear that global changes are taking place indeed.

I was surprised to find out that there was another global problem that was solved – the problem of ozone holes. When I was in school I often heard that ozone holes pose a danger to the humanity. Then I became a student and I started learning different things rather than ozone holes. After I graduated and started working full-time I discovered Al Gore’s book on environmental problems. Honestly, I thought that this was a book on ozone holes! I was so used to the thought that real progress is happening only in computer science that I was very surprised when I found out that governments have signed Montreal Protocol to address the problem of ozone holes! Since 1987 the levels of the chlorofluorocarbons have declined.

I guess it is possible to solve the problem of global warming as well given the effort that governments make in this direction. But it is very obvious now that global changes are taking place. Here is the temperature today in three different places: it is -5C in Dzerzhinsk, 300 miles east of Moscow, Russia. It is -10C in Saint James, New York, a place where snow is seen only a couple of days during a year. It is 0C in Tampere, a city in Finland which has polar nights and freezing temperatures in general. Things got mixed up.

A follow-up: here is a video that describes plans on saving Netherlands which territory is beneath sea-level, at least a big part of it:

As a friend of nature and squirrels in particular, I present the next movie in the series of squirrel life. This squirrel was trying to shake hands with me. Seriously, I guess it was expecting food. The other day I went to supermarket on my way home and got green apples among other things. Then when I was walking through the forest I saw a couple of squirrels, I guess the one that was featured on this blog earlier. I tried to attract them using cereal which I also got at the supermarket. After disposing a certain amount of corn balls I realized that they were of no interest to squirrels. Then I tried apples – first small bites then the whole apple. The weight of the apple was greater than the weight of the squirrel but it managed to move it in its mouth to the top of a tree where I guess it has its nest. So I do not feel ashamed that I am taking pictures of squirrels without giving back to them. In fact, they are getting friendlier every time, probably they are getting used to me.

These are not that afraid of people. They were approaching me probably expecting food. The other day I was walking to the office in the morning when I saw a squirrel in a park that was people-friendly. It climbed onto my jeans but refrained from climbing the jacket.