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Hiroshima, August 6th 2018

73 years after the bomb fell, I attended the Hiroshima memorial ceremony event on August 6th, 2018.

Thousands of Japanese and foreigners gather in the peace park "to console the souls of the victims, and to pray for peace". Hundreds of volunteers guide them along - scouts and children handing out flowers and programmes, crane origami papers and instructions, men and women holding ropes and signs for crowd guidance. A warm and sunny summer day in southern Japan also requires volunteers handing out cups of free cold water and (ve... More

Frozen song - Zero Visibility 10/25 2017

The piece Frozen songs is inspired by the Svalbard seed vault, choreographed by Ina Christel Johannesen for Zero Visibility corp.

On my way to the performance, I crossed the grey concrete surrounding Dansens hus, Oslo, and re-emerged after one hour 45 minutes of new impressions, with mixed feelings and a bag of seeds. The seeds made me even more aware of how sterile and free of vegetation the concrete streets in the Vulkan area are..

The first thing that struck me... More

By lake Mjøsa, July 2015

Soft rain draws circles on lake Mjøsa, no fishes jumping.
Thirty years ago they were. The new normal,
our accustomed poverty

When Alf sang of Mjøsa, fireflies flashed like city lights,
this evening's darkness a witness of
July's lush deception

Ecological impoverishment is invisible, camouflaged poverty.
Culture takes nature for granted, with
short-term memory

Thoughts on Harris-Chomsky emails

So, I haven't really read anything by Noam Chomsky nor by Sam Harris, but it was fascinating to read through their recent email exchange http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-limits-of-discourse . Two clever men, obviously well regarded American intellectuals, and yet they fail to really understand their differences..

Like half of the Internet, I hereby step in with my interpretations..

«Ethically speaking, intention is (nearly) the whole story» - Sam Harris

«As for intentions, there is nothing at all to say in general...be... More

Learning to read: a problem of rhythm?

Recently I've spent some time trying to help children learn to read, working with children at various stages of fluency. It strikes me that an important part of the process of learning to read is learning to «tokenize» or divide a written word into syllables.

This problem depends on a given language's phonetics – but is also a function of how our roman alphabet works. In for example the Japanese Hiragana alphabet, each letter is a syllable. The alphabet starts A, I, U, E, O, KA,... More