everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: Finland

  • Hakkapeliitta spirit

    During the Winter in Finland the ocean freezes over. Highways that normally twist around the lakes in the warmer months are re-routed to cut straight across, efficiently. GPS vendors offer Winter Packs to take advantage of these new routes, cutting Winter travel times considerably.

    But this is Finland. Not only do they keep driving at normal speeds, studded tires helping keep traction on icy roads, they also have world records to break. Which brings me to today’s headline.

    I didn’t know much about tires to begin with, nor anything about Nokian Tyres except that they are one of the original business lines for the company I work for, Nokia. The news story was interesting, bits of trivia on the challenges of designing tires for sub-zero temperatures, but what was really interesting was the section on the Nokian site which described their working spirit.

    Nokian Tyres employs over 3700 people, who have their own joys and sorrows, dreams and values. These is something that we all share: solid faith in our competence and skills, confidence in finding answers together, respect for hands-on hard work. We are there for those in need, and we never give up. This is what we call the Hakkapeliitta Spirit. it is something very tangible yet difficult to define, still natural, genuine, real. Frighteningly simple. And impossible to imitate.

    “Joys and sorrows?” This passage seemed so utterly Finnish. What American company would admit their employees are anything but joyful? My Finnish colleagues here at Nokia have tried to describe to me this acknowledgement that an honest life is a struggle.

    This is something that existed in the early days of Nokia when young Finnish engineers were sent to Singapore with a suitcase of phones and a bag of cash and asked to “set something up.”  The goal of work, for these Nokia old timers, was less about waving your flag at the top of some mountain and more about the struggle (sisu) it took to get there and how that struggle brings people together.

    Broken out into sections, the Nokian site goes on to give you a little thumbnail what it’s like to work at Nokian. Sections are titled things like, Together we can achieve more and include phrases such as, “We support each other and never leave a colleague in a pinch.” All of this comes under the header, the Hakkapeliitta spirit.

    Wikipedia gives some background on Hakkapeliitta.

    The Hakkapeliitta were well-trained Finnish light cavalrymen who excelled in sudden and savage attacks, raiding and reconnaissance. The greatest advantage of the fast and lightly-armored Hakkapeliitta cavalry was its charge. They typically had a sword, a helmet, and leather armor or a breastplate of steel. They would attack at a full gallop, fire the first pistol at twenty paces and the second at five paces, and then draw the sword. The horse itself was used like another weapon, as it was used to trample enemy infantry.

    Wikipedia

    If I’m going to be driving at top speeds on the ice, I know who I want making my tires!

  • More CNN on Helsinki

    Following on the popular Helsinki Snow How piece, CNN’s Richard Quest went on to make three more short pieces about the city I currently call home.

    Helsinki’s Underground Master Plan includes a bit about an innovative new server farm I highlighted in Heating by Bytes that uses the excess heat from the computers to heat the city.

    Expanding Helsinki’s Horizon covers the on-going construction in the old harbor of the city that will almost double the surface area in downtown Helsinki via the Horizon 2030 plan.

    Helsinki’s Battle Against the Darkness is about how the inhabitants of the city cope with the dark, Winter days.

  • Conan O’Brien updates Nokia Ringtone

    Conan available online all week in Finland thanks to Team CoCo. Tonight’s segment? A rockin’ update to the Nokia ringtone!

  • Helsinki “Snow-How”

    7-minute video on CNN about how Helsinki handles it’s annual snow removal operations. The last time Helsinki’s Vantaa airport closed because of snow was in 2003 and that was for just 30 minutes.

  • 200-year old Champagne Preserved by Icy Baltic

    Earlier this year it was reported that several cases of champagne were discovered in a shipwreck 55 meters under the Baltic Sea, off the small island of Åland near Finland. After tasting it, a local champagne expert suspected that the bottles were from Veuve Cliquot, the famous French maker established in 1772. Out of a total cargo of 172 bottles, 168 were recovered intact and in November, more experts were invited to Åland to recork several bottles and, in the process, confirm their identity. Jean-Hervé Chiquet, visiting in November is quoted in the New York Times today

    He was “overcome with emotion,” he said, when he first tasted the Champagne at the recorking in November.

    “There was a powerful but agreeable aroma, notes of dried fruit and tobacco, and a striking acidity,” Mr. Chiquet said by telephone. The oldest Champagne in Jacquesson’s inventory is from 1915, he said.

    The Champagne was probably en route to the court of Czar Alexander II in St. Petersburg when the wooden cargo vessel sank. Though the exact age of the Champagne is not yet known, it goes up against tough competition in the oldest Champagne category.

    The Champagne house Perrier-Jouët claims that its vintage of 1825 is the oldest recorded Champagne in existence. Mr. Hautekeur said Veuve Clicquot’s oldest drinkable bottle was from 1904.

    It’s not clear how old these bottles are but markings on the cork, the shape of the bottles, and plates also found on the wreck puts them in the early 1800’s. Most of the champagne survived and is quite drinkable with the tiny bubbles still visible and the taste, “compared favorably to some of the best Champagnes today.” The total darkness of frigid waters off of Finland served as the perfect wine cellar.

  • Getting Down Finnish Style

    Hope you all had a chance to tune into Radio Helsinki at 4:30 pm and boogie down. For some virtual fun, click play on all three links below at the same time.

    It’s all part of Happy Helsinki and the Helsinki Festival.

  • Finnish Town Rivalries

    Despite their quiet nature, the Finns have a fierce sense of loyalty to their hometown. You would think that a country of 5 million that is a linguistic island unto itself would pull together and present a unified front to the rest of the world but this Wikipedia article shows you that there is quite a colorful rivalry going on between towns.

    A couple of choice bits:

    Some people in Helsinki refer to Kehä III, the outermost of the two ring roads surrounding the Greater Helsinki area, as a “wolf border” (susiraja), outside which there is no civilisation. Outsiders refer to inside of Kehä III as the biggest psychiatric hospital in Finland.

    Those from Helsinki view people from Turku either as naïve and simple-minded, or arrogant and impudent. In Helsinki they have a saying that the only good thing in Turku is the highway leading to Helsinki.  Inhabitants of Turku see Helsinkians as presumptuous and parvenu.

    A popular joke in Turku asks why children in Tampere have a flat nose. The answer is that there is a Turku midwife working in a Tampere hospital. After delivering a child, the midwife holds him/her into the glass of a window and says: “Look now, child. That way is Turku, there is civilisation.” Students across Tampere go to the border of Turku and nail wooden nails to the ground, in order to make the city drift off the mainland someday, and also go to the center of the city and jump there, so that the city would someday sink back to the sea.

    Ouch! With friends like that, who needs enemies?

  • Onkalo, long term planning

    Onkalo, long term planning

    How would you like to be the Project Manager on a construction project that is due to run through 2100? That’s what they’re doing 300 kms Northwest of Helsinki at Onkalo, a long term storage facility for highly radioactive nuclear waste. It’s a timely topic of discussion. While the uncontrollable spewage from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico from BP punching holes in the earth in search of oil, the Finnish Nuclear authorities are working on a place to keep the spent fuel rods confined and out of way, a trash bin, once full, we hope to forget.

    Graphics from Poisiva project brochure

    The crypt, 500 meters down in the bedrock granite that makes up most of Finland, will be sealed up sometime after 2100 when it’s full to capacity. Because it’s radioactive waste and will stay dangerous and lethal for a very long time, the design spec requires the storage facility to remain closed and impervious to breach for 100,000 years.

    One hundred thousand years. Think about that. Put that to scale. The pyramids were built 4,000 years ago. The first cave dwellers popped up around 30,000 years ago. As Michael Madsen, director of Into Eternity, a documentary film about the project put it, “The human species as we know it today is believed to have existed for approx. 100,000 years.”

    Planning for this timeline brings with it all kinds of challenges:

    Geological changes predict another ice age within that time so in order to maintain the integrity of the tunnels, they need to be designed to withstand the weight of the anticipated two mile thick ice sheet.

    Tomb raiders from future generations also need to be taken into consideration. Refined plutonium is valuable and a core ingredient for nuclear weapons and a valuable target turning this tomb into a treasure. If you think what happened to the pyramids when gold was discovered there, keep future generations out will be a challenge indeed.

    It’s an anthropological puzzle. How do you look ahead thousands of generations and figure out how to keep people away? Do you post “No Trespassing” signs everywhere? If so, in what language? Or, is it better to forget this place, leave it unmarked and forgotten? When you lock it up, what kind of locks do you build? Who keeps the key? May this creepy trailer to Madsen’s film will do the trick.

    A review of Into Eternity by the New York Times leaves us with this thought:

    As a species, we are good at forgetting. So maybe the best, ultimate, defense against people messing with Onkalo would be simply to forget that it is there. The best way to keep a secret is not to let on that there is a secret at all.

    But what about the ethical duty to warn those future generations with some kind of marker that would survive the scouring of Finland by glaciers and evolution of language? If, in fact, the canisters are rediscovered a few hundred years or a few thousand years from now, we can imagine our descendants’ reaction at having been left such a nasty surprise.

    Of course, we ourselves could be surprised, like the peasant who found Qin’s army. One joke that went around the Onkalo project for a while, according to Mr. Madsen’s film, could have come straight from a novel by Arthur C. Clarke. What if, the team thought, the first thing it found when it started digging were canisters left by somebody else?

  • Finland Suggest

    In homage to Laura Lippay’s Google Suggest experiment, I decided to do a few of my own.

    No, I didn’t know what the Finnish Men’s Shouting Choir was either.  They some audio clips on their homepage if you want to have a listen.

    Any Search Suggestions of your own?