Graduation

My summer vacation has officially started. Actually it started already last Friday but I have been just enjoying myself solving puzzles.

The graduation day was warm and sunny. The graduation took place as always across the street in the house of Turku Voluntary Fire Brigade (VPK). It is a beautiful Neo-Renaissance house. We also arrange the matriculation exam there.

The ceremony contains of speeches, music performances and of course rewarding the students with the official certificates and giving them the Finnish white student cap.

This year one of performers was a celebrity, Jackson Shuudifonya, who belonged to the group INDX winning the Finnish Popstars in 2004. The group does not exist anymore, but I found Jackson's music online

We had many students and here is just a small part of them. The age difference between the oldest and the youngest was more than 50 years!

Pi Day

Happy Pi Day for everyone celebrating it. Pi day is celebrated on March the 14th due to the American style of expressing dates, 3/14, and the fact that 3.14 is the approximation of Pi everyone usually knows. However we Europeans write the date 14.3.2009 and the idea of switching the day and month seems totally impossible. We could use 31.4 as Pi Day but April does not have 31 days...

The solution for us is Pi Approximation Day on July the 22th, due to pi being roughly equal to 22/7, an ancient approximation of pi.

I told my students about the Square Root Day 03.03.09 and they probably thought I was crazy. We don't actually have a culture for celebrations like this. Maybe I should start pushing them. We have numerous days dedicated to old Finnish culture figures. Let's add some mathematics to the culture!

Here is Lose Yourself (In The Digits) by Pi Diddy made for Pi Day last year.

Congratulations Waldo's People!

Finland's representative to the Eurovision Song Contest 2009 has been chosen. The six songs chosen on the first round were oddly separated between 3 songs for the taste of young people and the other 3 were definitely for old people. In this case, like so very often, I regard myself as one of the young :)

Last week I was definitely supporting Waldo's People with their song Lose Control. Waldo won, and here is the song. I think it is just one in a dozen and will not win.

During last week I changed my mind because this song started to fill my head. The group is Signmark and one of the performers is deaf. He is signing the words. I think this would have been something new and memorable in the big list of similar songs. I just love the melody. Here is Speakerbox.

The Eurovision Song Contest representative 2008 for Finland: Teräsbetoni

It seems that after some time the young people have started to take an interest in the Eurovision Song Contest. Two years ago we were represented by Lordi who gave us the victory in the finals with the highest score in the history of the contest. At that point Finland was divided in half: those who were sure that Lordi had good changes and those who thought that Finland would make a fool of herself sending the monsters to the competition. I belonged to the first group and Lordi gave us much more than I could never have hoped for.

Last year Serbia won, but we did not do bad compared to our achievements in history. Serbia's song was a ballad sung in their own language and probably that had caused this year most of the Finnish participants to be Finnish songs.

The competition was very tight. Among the three best were two songs to satisfy younger people and one old Finnish ballad sung by Kari Tapio, who stated that if the competition would take place in Serbia, he would not go. That kind of music I am ashamed of in Finnish music culture. Boring, similar to all the other songs in the same genre and not something you can show Europe.

The winner Teräsbetoni is again a hard rock -band, but this time singing in Finnish. That is actually a good thing. Finnish can be very lyrical, but we have also words which suit hard rock very well. Finnish has often been compared to German where the consonants are expressed much stronger than in English.

Again the speculations started: Everybody will be laughing at us! Wrong!! This is a song we can show the world :)