Ewan's Cycling Blog

The last day started badly but ended with a lovely surprise.  Since this is the last blog for the trip, it’ll be the usual random stuff interspersed with incredibly boring pictures of Swedish roads but…followed by some overall thoughts about the trip. Distance: 121km 😐 — Felt longer Climbing: 1141m ☹️ — I was never over 50m above sea level which indicates how rolling these last 120km were. Route: 😕 — Outside the city, the route was the usual boring roads but the route into Stockholm was good.. Body: 😔 — Who cares?  Last day..   Bike: 🙂 — More thoughts below but I am still slightly astonished that something that I built out of bits and pieces can travel the best part of 2000km powered solely by my legs.  And not a single mechanical on the way. Last night the weather forecast started to converge on rain in the morning and when I woke up it was pretty accurate. More rain.  Summer in Sweden. I couldn’t really face one more Swedish breakfast so I overdosed on coffee while waiting for th

 As I travel from <something>köping to <another>köping, it may help to know that köping is pronounced “choping” and it means “market”.  So Nyköping is effectively Newmarket. Today was, in the end, a good day.  Also, today’s post is a bit longer than normal because it was a short cycling day. Distance: 81km 🙂 — A short day. Climbing: 796m ☹️ — Some punchy 9% rollers on the way Route: 🙂 — Despite the rain and the wind, this was maybe the most enjoyable route in Sweden so far. Body 😐 — No creaks…perfect.   Bike: 🙂 — No creaks…perfect. Unfortunately, the distribution of Swedish towns big enough to have hotels is such that today was going to have to be a short day.  I could either do one 210km day (yeah, right) or an 80km day and a 130km day.  As you will have seen from yesterday’s post, according to the Economist, weather forecasting is now super accurate — for some definition of accurate.  There seemed to be a window between 6am and 11am where it was going to be dry and th

In the comments on yesterday’s blog, Robert pointed me to a great article in the Economist  (which I had missed) on the Dutch, Norwegians and Swedish trying to reclaim their language especially in the scientific sphere.  It’s a nice idea but they’re doomed to failure.  There was a time 100 years ago where non-English words could make it in technical fields ( bremsstrahlung, eigenvector for example)  but the dominance of the USA in science means those days are gone.  The language of STEM is English and so, in many ways, it’s the language of the future and even more so with the importance of computer science. The difficult problem comes when you consider languages like Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese or (maybe) Chinese. These are in no sense “minority” languages.   Many of them have more native speakers than English.  However the corpus of technical language in each of these is dwarfed by the English corpus.  Who cares?  Well…Generative Pre-trained Transformers like ChatGPT “learn” from the