Nostalgia

Thomas Winding, you will be missed

Not so long ago, Danish author Thomas Winding died, 71 years old.

Thomas was famous for writing a lot of books for children, but even more for reading his stories aloud on the radio. He had a deep, calm voice that was known and loved by all Danish children when I was a child.

The death of Thomas Winding seems to have led to a feeling of "mass nostalgia" in my generation. A Facebook group has been created, and the media has written a lot about how everyone will sorely miss the "soundtrack of their childhood".

This made me think. I'm 33 years old now, and I don't think I have heard the voice of Thomas Winding for almost a decade.

Still, his death is kind of a painful event for me. Of course, I will not miss him as such, but he was a very happy memory of my childhood. So losing him is yet another reminder that I am no longer, and will never again be, a happy and carefree child.

It seems bizarre to feel so sad about the death of a person I didn't even know, and haven't thought about for years. But luckily, I'm not alone, and there is a word for this feeling: Nostalgia.

Feeling nostalgic

According to Wikipedia, the word Nostalgia is of greek origin and refers to "the pain a sick person feels because he wishes to return to his native land".

I think this is a beautiful way to describe a feeling that everybody knows, but which is hard to define. The description is absolute nonsense, I know, but so is the feeling itself.

In fact, I find it highly irrational, especially from an evolutionary standpoint. I mean, what is the purpose of an individual wanting to "return to his home land"? On the surface, it seems regressive and foolish.

However, it is hard to believe that any counterproductive sentiment would have been allowed to survive for countless generations to still be present in the human beings of today. There must be some rational purpose to this feeling, but it eludes me.

If anyone out there knows, please drop me a line.

My father

So, having questioned the rationality of feeling nostalic, I want to convince everyone that I am not a robot.

Three years ago, my siblings and I lost our father. He died of cancer, only 55 years old. Needless to say, this was a terrible time for our family. After three years, it is still hard.

But life moves on, and this is how it should be.

However, life paused for a brief moment when I found this picture on my harddisk.



My father was a man of habit. Every day, he would take his dog for a long walk in the forest. Same route every day. Same sticks that had to be thrown into the water at the same spots on the route along the lake, year after year. He once calculated that he had walked more than a thousand miles on this trail, which is only a few miles long.

Our dog, Luna, was a very loving animal, and she absolutely adored my father. She was half Collie, so the herding instinct was very visible in her behavior. I think this is part of the reason that we loved her so much. She always wanted to keep the family together.

The above picture was taken by me. Luna is clearly worried that I have become separated from the leader of the flock, so she looks ahead to assess the risk.

For me, looking at this 5 year old picture simply defines nostalgia. It forces me to forget the present and focus on the past for a while. Never again will I join my father and Luna for that walk, and my home town seems so far away now.

Cat faucet, crude edition

If you're a cat owner, you know that cats love to drink from the faucet!

Being a cat owner myself, I was pretty excited to learn about this Cat Faucet project by Sixerdoodle Electronics. I have often thought about building something similar myself, but I had never gotten around to it.

However, even though the design of the Sixerdoodle Cat Faucet is very elegant, I find it more complicated than necessary (mainly because they wanted to keep it low voltage, it turns out).

So I started wondering how to build the simplest possible cat faucet. This is what I came up with:


(Open above image, with notes, in a new window)


(Diva enjoying the running water)

The complete list of components:

• a solenoid from an old dishwasher


• a movement sensor (the kind usually used to light up a driveway)


• a few bits of plumbing


• a piece of gaffer tape to limit the area monitored by the sensor

(Solenoid from an old dishwasher)


(The movement sensor, pointed straight down)

That's it. The flow of water is controlled simply by adjusting the position of the red valve that lets water into the system. The sensitivity and timeout of the sensor can be controlled with small knobs on the underside.

My wife put a little bowl underneath the faucet to allow the cats to drink from a surface of water as well as from the running water. Excess water simply spills down the drain below.

Contrary to the Sixerdoodle design, my cat faucet is not low voltage (it runs on 230V, our mains voltage in Denmark). However, because both components were designed to be safe and withstand pretty rough conditions, this does not worry me at all.


(The finished setup, tucked away under a small shelving unit)


(Obviously, it takes a little practice!)

In the Zoo

Recently, my friends and I spent an entire day at the Zoo.

It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, and everyone else seemed to have hit the beach, so the place was almost deserted.

We were hung over, most of the animals were drowsy from the heat and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves!

I mean, just take a look at this guy. If such a creature can't bring out the giggles in you, what can?

Also, many of the animals are just breathtaking. Check out this photo. These are by no means lucky shots...Siberian Tigers just are that beautiful.

Actually, the resemblance to our cat Diva is clear, although Diva may be slightly less intimidating...

Looking back, I am surprised to say that the animal that fascinated me the most was the brown bear. There were two of them, and they were very restless.

Watching them from a distance of only 10 feet, their restlessness was contagious. They breathed heavily and kept following the same pattern back and forth in their cage. Maybe it was just before their scheduled feeding, or maybe something was bothering them. We never found out.

Everytime they paused in front of me and looked straight into my eyes, I couldn't help looking down at their claws and imagining the kind of damage they could do to human flesh...those thoughts left quite an impression on me.

The bear is truly an awesome creature, and as I discussed with my younger brother, there is not much you can do to avoid it in the wild. It will certainly run, swim and climb much better than you. This is clearly an instance of the human being superior only with a rifle in his hand.

Spending an entire day in the Zoo was therapeutic to me. It gave me time to process the impressions from the concert we attended at a festival the day before, and it inspired me to ponder life, the universe and everything. I need to do that sometimes.