Ville Saalo, moi! 👋

Tulvaniitynsilta in Helsinki, Finland, crossing River Vantaa. #mbjune 📷

This is a leaning tied-arch bridge for pedestrian and bicycle traffic, opened in October 2020. It looks pretty wild from this angle, as if it’s falling down. The bridge deck is arched too, horizontally, so it’s quite unusual in every way. There’s an extensive article about the bridge in Finnish here.

I consider myself a pretty decent cyclist: during my commutes I’m usually the one who overtakes others, or I can ride a hundred kilometers at a more leisurely pace. That’s all anecdotal, however, and it only occurred to me recently that there are ways to actually measure how good one is at cycling, without taking part in competitions: enter power and watts.

Those more serious about cycling keep an eye on their wattage (more precisely, power) and very likely have high-end bike computers that display the wattage in real time. In short, the watts tell the power the cyclist can generate, and the more power the faster they can go, basically.

So what if you’re a more casual cyclist like me and don’t have nor want to invest in a cycling computer? In my case I recently got myself a gym membership after some thirteen years away. (As a side note, it was weird to notice that all the weights had been recalibrated during the last decade! For example, a 10 kg dumbbell definitely wasn’t that heavy the last time I tried!) At my gym are several Matrix exercise bikes, which have a fitness-test program. The program asks you to maintain a cadence (pedaling rate) of 60-80 RPM (revolutions per minute), and then it ramps up the level every two minutes, making it harder and harder to pedal. Once you can’t sustain the 60-80 RPM cadence, the test ends.

In my case I found that a leisurely pace is, for me, about 58 RPM, so already maintaining the required cadence took some conscious effort, even when the resistance was initially negligible. I got exhausted at around 14 minutes and 30 seconds, at which point the device displayed the final results: estimated VO₂max (maximum oxygen intake) of 46,7 ml/kg/min and then just “245 Watts”.

The VO₂max value is good or very good for a male in my age group according to different normative tables, but I don’t remember entering my weight into the device and I doubt it measured it either, so I’m taking that with a grain of salt. However, the watts was what I was interested in in the first place, and that the device should be able to measure precisely. But what kind of a figure is that? I tried to find the manual of the bike and even sent a query to Matrix to find out, but to no avail.

My own research and asking around suggests that the value is probably the peak power output, estimating the maximum aerobic power (MAP). The MAP clearly isn’t that interesting a figure, since you cannot maintain that kind of a power for any prolonged period at all, so what we’re interested in instead is the functional threshold power (FTP), which reflects a rider’s sustainable power output level. According to the online sources I found, a decent estimate of FTP is 0.75×MAP = 183.75 W. (Individual variation exists, though, so in practice the FTP is usually somewhere between 0.7×MAP and 0.8×MAP.)

Fine, but how does that value compare, then? Alone, it doesn’t really tell much so it needs to be scaled for the rider’s weight, and in my case this power-to-weight ratio rounds to 2,0 W/kg. Most tables I found are for professional athletes, which I’m not, but 2.0 W/kg is still good for an amateur. A club cyclist would have the ratio at around 3.0 to 4.0, and the very best of the best cyclists in the world have the ratio of some 7.0, which is just insane, translating to them riding steep uphills roughly as fast as I commute on flat ground.

To double check the results by the Matrix bike I did the test again a week later and got the same results, so at least it’s internally consistent. Next, I tried this online calculator, plugged in the numbers from one of my regular commutes, and arrived at 2.1 W/kg, which is close enough to 2.0. (I use Strava to record my commutes, but only because it has an API. I find the free version of Sports Tracker a much better app and used that one for years, but they don’t have an API, which I need, so what can you do.)

So, what did we learn? The functional threshold power is a good way to measure the relative “goodness” of a rider, but calculating it without a proper cycling computer might not be entirely trivial. Also, for casual riders like me, the figure is basically useless anyway, unless I start to train regularly and in a determined way, at which point I’m not exactly a casual rider anymore. There are also several different methods of estimating the FTP, such as the ramp test that I described, but also an 8-minute and 20-minute test. Anyway, at least I found all this interesting, and in the end that’s all that matters for a blog post!

On February 24, 2022 Russia launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine, upsetting pretty much the entire international community. Early on some people called for a solution where “Putin would save his face”, falsely assuming he was a rational actor with whom you could negotiate. I was from the beginning of the opinion that Putin must not be allowed to “save face” but rather deeply humiliated, underpants pulled over his head, to expose his true ridiculous, psychopathic, kleptocratic self to the Russian people.

The war has now been waging for 1197 days as of writing this, and a few days ago Ukraine did a brilliant attack on Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, truly humiliating their airforce. Operation Spider Web lasted, so we’ve been told, for 18 months, during which Ukraine snuck several truckloads of FPV drones with explosives to Russia, placed them near military air fields, and then finally simultaneously launched swarms of drones from those trucks, destroying billions of dollars worth of irreplaceable aircraft Russia had been using to bomb Ukraine. The New York Times, for example, has good coverage of the event.

In Finland we’ve been following the war with particular interest, given that Russia is our neighbor too. The Parliament is currently discussing Finland leaving the Ottawa Treaty (the one banning anti-personnel mines) which Finland joined in 2012. My take on the treaty has been from the beginning that Finland should not have imposed limitations on itself on how we can defend ourselves. The same strategic effect as joining the treaty could’ve been achieved more easily if we had all just agreed that if Russia attacks, we’ll all shoot ourselves in the foot. Heck, even I’ve been trained to use certain tripwire-based tree-mounted anti-personnel mines – which are no longer in use.

This personal experience brings me to my next point. There was a great write-up on yesterday’s paper on how in some countries people view their armed forces as a separate branch from the rest of society. The civilians may treat the army with suspicion, and their relationship with national defense may be lukewarm at best. In Finland, however, we have a large reservist army, almost a million people, so everyone either has been through a military service or knows many people who have done that. Thus the army is not separate from the rest of the society but very much an integral part of it. This keeps people interested in defending their homeland because ultimately it’s up to us all to do that, not just “the army”.

The Kyiv Independent has been reporting the number of Russian casualties as estimated by the Ukrainian Armed Forces since the beginning of the war. They should be taken with a grain of salt obviously, but the current toll of Russian casualties is just about to exceed one million troops, killed and injured combined. I looked up a figure for each quarter of the war and plotted it up. It’s pretty grim – and it doesn’t even include all the Ukrainian casualties. Find it from the bottom of this post.

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while already. I wouldn’t want people to forget about this war, to think it’s “normal” in any way. That’s why I try to watch every video by WarLeaks who uploads 15-30 minute Ukraine War Report videos 1-3 times a month. He watches hundreds of Telegram videos of people getting blown to pieces so that you don’t have to, and indeed in YouTube you can’t have that kind of material, so his videos are edited to be… not exactly family friendly, but with the gory parts cut out anyway. There’s also the aforementioned Kyiv Independent for good information, and another X account called Special Kherson Cat for timely information about the latest developments. Darth Putin also delivers pertinent parody and commentary.

I do confess that as I am following the situation in Ukraine I don’t have the mental capacity to follow, say, the war in Gaza too. However, there are other people who do that instead, so in the big picture it all evens out.

I’ve also donated money to Ukraine, both for humanitarian and military causes. I have used and can recommend at least United24, Saint Javelin, Zero Line, and SignMyRocket.com. It would also be nice if countries would finally start donating enough equipment to Ukraine for them to win the war, not just enough for them to not lose it. Limitations on how the Ukrainians may use the donated long-range weapons were recently lifted, which is great news.

As of writing this Finland has donated EUR 2.7 billion worth of defense materiel to Ukraine, totaling over 400 truckloads, which I find commendable. The exact contents have not been disclosed, but everything has been based on requests from Ukraine. The way I see it is that the Finnish Defense Forces exist because of Russia. If our gear can be used to defend against that same threat – even outside our borders – then it’s fulfilling its purpose. After all, any tank blown up in the fields of Ukraine is a tank that’s never going to cross the Finnish border.

Slava Ukraini! 🇺🇦

Early in May I wrote that Finland would have two entries in the Eurovision Song Contest this year, as the entry from Sweden was also performed by a Finnish band, KAJ. The grand final of the show was held in Basel, Switzerland a week ago on Saturday, May 17. 🇦🇹 Austria won with JJ’s song called Wasted Love (watch it), and in a sense this was a victory for Finland too, as the stage show of Austria was created and rehearsed in Finland (paywalled source). 😄

I don’t care too much about the Austrian song, but at least it beat the 🇮🇱 Israeli one. Israel had orchestrated a huge advertising campaign for its song, essentially buying a huge number of votes for it, but it finished second (source).

I do like the 🇪🇪 Estonian song that finished third: Espresso Macchiato by Tommy Cash (watch it). Some people got offended by that song in advance because it plays with stereotypes about Italians – as if Italians wouldn’t be perfectly capable of defending themselves if they felt the need for it. Curiously, nobody seems to have asked what they actually thought about the song in Italy, and indeed the Italian jury gave the song ten points! 😛

🇸🇪 Sweden placed 4th and 🇫🇮 Finland 11th, not too bad for either one. Other countries that I would’ve liked to see get more votes were 🇩🇪 Germany with Baller (watch it) (15/26), 🇱🇺 Luxembourg with La poupée monte le son (watch it) (22/26), and 🇸🇲 San Marino with Tutta l’Italia (watch it) (26/26).

Eurovisionworld has extensive statistics on the points each country received from each other.

Finally, here’s an interesting behind the scenes video of what’s happening on the stage while each new artist is being introduced on the so-called postcard, and the TV audience is watching that.

And finally finally, someone made all the artists in LEGO.

When it comes to feats of engineering, everybody knows about the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China. Some even know you can see the Moon from the Great Wall. But how about these other feats of engineering? These wouldn’t be easy even today, let alone at the time they were executed:

• In 1930, eight-story Bell Telephone Company building in Indiana was moved, turned 90 degrees, and moved again to make space for an expansion. The moving took about a month and, incredibly, the building remained fully operational the whole time. 🤯 Saad Ali Faizi has written a great blog post about it, or you could also watch this YouTube video about it.
• The ancient Romans had a mining method named ruina montium where they basically collapsed the entire mountain or at least a huge part of it to access the minerals within. Undoubtedly made possible only by the existence of cheap slave labor, they would carve tunnels into the mountain making it weaker. Simultaneously they would accumulate a huge reservoir of water above the target mountain. Once both feats were completed, all of the water would be suddenly released into the tunnels, hitting the mountain hard from the inside and crumbling it. See this blog post by Marcos Martínez for more info.
• If the ancient Romans were good at turning mountains into rubble, they could also extract huge chunks of them intact as well. The Baalbek Stones are the prime example of this: the Temple of Jupiter has three “small” ~800 ton monoliths in its base. It’s also possible they are in fact part of some earlier temple and just got reused by the Romans in their own temple later on. In addition to the “small” stones, three huge stones between 1000 and 1650 tons have been found from the nearby quarry, all within the top four of the largest stones ever quarried. How these stones were quarried, moved, and precisely placed into the temple is still something of a mystery.

So there you have it: three intriguing feats of engineering that at least I hadn’t heard about before. Along the way I also researched some other topics and fell into a pretty deep rabbit hole with, for example, the prehistoric Megalithic Temples of Malta — some of the oldest free-standing structures in the world.

In September 2023 I had a delicious tortilla burger in a restaurant called Burger Berg in Děčín, Czechia, after a via ferrata experience on the Shepherd’s Wall. Since then I’ve occasionally fondly remembered the dish, but I’ve never before or since seen such a dish in any other restaurant. This week I finally decided to just go ahead and make my own tortilla burgers.

The following recipe serves two adults (two tortilla burgers each) and two kids (one tortilla burger each). The dish is great for small kids who might often struggle to keep all the ingredients inside a normal burger, but this one wraps them into a nice package. Here’s a photo of the original dish I had:

Ingredients

The meat

• 400 g minced meat (beef or mixed)
• 1 small brown onion
• 1–3 garlic cloves
• 2 tablespoons of mustard
• pinch of salt
• pinch of pepper
• powdered red pepper (or smoked paprika)

The other stuff

• 6 large tortillas
• 6 slices of cheddar cheese
• 1 large tomato
• burger sauce (mayo)
• ketchup
• some lettuce
• pickles
• some oil for cooking
• fries
• (Coke Zero for drinking)

Instructions

0. Remember to put the fries into the oven at some point according to their specific cooking instructions.
1. Chop the onion and the garlic fine.
2. Mix with the minced meat. Add the salt, pepper, red pepper, and mustard too.
3. Divide the meat into six equal pieces, then flatten them into steaks about 1 cm thick.
4. Fry the steaks on a pan for roughly 8 minutes or until looking good.
5. Slice the tomato.
6. Apply burger sauce on the center of each tortilla, then circle the sauce with ketchup.
7. Insert a steak on top of the sauce, rub it slightly against it to spread it evenly.
8. Add a slice of tomato, a few pieces of lettuce, pickles, and a slice of cheddar.
9. Wrap the tortillas snugly, then heat them on the pan for a minute or so to give them color and warmth.
10. Serve immediately with fries and ketchup, and an ice cold Coke Zero.

This was a hit and I’ll be making these again. You could conceivably use many other ingredients too, besides the ones mentioned, but I wanted to keep this one simple. I imagine red onion, coleslaw, bacon, nachos, salsa, and pineapple would all fit nicely into a tortilla burger as well.

Finally, as a bonus, here’s a photo of me on that via ferrata:

In Finland we have this thing called Kevätpörriäinen (“Spring Bee”). It’s an annual maganize that publishes stories, drawings, jokes, and puzzles by the Helsinki-area elementary school pupils. The magazine was founded already in 1949 so there must exist families where three generations have already contributed to it. The magazine represents a great tradition and is held in high esteem. You can only buy it from the pupils of the participating schools (or online) and the profits go towards the schools' benefits.

Sometimes the jokes in Kevätpörriäinen have even been read aloud in the Finnish equivalents of late night shows on TV. I figured I’d now do the English-speaking world a service and translate a few jokes from this year’s issue:

What’s a robot’s favorite genre of music?
Metal.
—Frida 1B

Big brother told his little brother:
“Look, a dead seagull.”
Little brother looked at the sky, screaming: “Where, where?!"
—Lauri 4B

What did a ghost say to another?
“Do you believe in humans?"
—Anni & Erika 4C

How do pandas get to a hospital?
With a bamboolance.
—Lumi & Selja 3B

Which birds fly higher than the tallest skyscraper in the world?
All of them, because skyscrapers don’t fly.
—Oliver 3A

A teacher went to see a doctor.
“When I push my index finger on my shoulder it hurts a lot. What’s wrong with me?”
The doctor replied: “You have a broken index finger."
—Kristiina & Taimi 2B

What’s a snake’s favorite subject at school?
Hissstory.
—Luka 3A

A snake asked another:
“Are we poisonous?”
“I don’t know, why?”
“Because I just bit myself on the lip."
—Isabel 1A

“Doctor, my hearing has got really bad. I can’t even hear my own farts anymore."
The doctor writes a prescription.
“Will my hearing improve with this medicine?”
“No, but your farts will become louder."
—Niilo 4C

I don’t watch a lot of Finnish dramas, but 2025 will be written in history for me, as I’ve already seen three great shows this year, which is about three more than I can remember from the decade before.

First, there was Konflikti, aired by MTV3. Technically it was late 2024, but I’ll include it here anyway. In the series unmarked green men attack and take over the Hanko peninsula in the very southernmost point of mainland Finland. The show follows several different people or groups of people. A group of conscripts were practicing in the area when the incident started and are now trying to survive in the middle of an actual enemy; special forces are conducting a reconnaissance mission to the invaded area; the president and the prime minister have very different opinions on how to resolve the situation; and some more.

The very first episode caught me by surprise with some professional military slang that was not explained – you just had to know or deduce it from the context. So the dialog is well written and the budget has been big for a Finnish show, with tanks, ships, and fighter jets zooming around. The show lasts for just six episodes, so there is not too much space for character development, but the characters are different and believable enough. 💥

The next show I watched was Queen of Fucking Everything by Yle. This show follows Linda, a middle-aged woman who is accustomed to a pretty wealthy life with his perfect husband. However, the man turns out to be a scammer, leaving Linda drowning in debt. Linda tries her very best to cover her misfortune and sudden loss of credit records from her coworkers — the kind of people who buy expensive coffees from baristas and then might just abandon them if a meeting comes up – which pisses Linda off, naturally, if it was her turn to buy those coffees with the money she just got from a pawn shop.

The show gets increasingly unhinged in the best way. Eventually Linda, who turns out to be extremely resourceful but also very ruthless if need be, even gets involved with organized crime.

When watching the show you never know where it’s going. Sometimes it takes on some very dark tones, and sometimes the viewer can rightfully think that Linda is quite a bitch, but at the same time you still root for her, as she never asked to be dropped into a blender of social shame and financial ruin. 💸

The last show I’d like to highlight is Kurjen kirous by Nelonen. In this one the main character is an actor named Aki Kurki (played by Kari Ketonen). Aki is stuck in forgettable mediocre supporting roles. He’s convinced he’s meant for greater things and can’t understand why he’s never cast in anything significant. At one point he tells his manager Hannu (the great Antti Holma) that he doesn’t want to do any “crazy neighbors” anymore, which is a fun nod towards Kari Ketonen’s role as a crazy neighbor in another great show called Luottomies.

Anyway, Aki is cast as a fortune teller in some show. The role is very small, but being the serious actor he is, he prepares diligently by booking an appointment with an actual fortune teller. The man offers to do a reading for Aki and finds out that Aki has a curse on him. Being a rationalist Aki walks out from the session – only to witness a smaller prediction by the fortune teller come true.

This offers Aki an explanation for his stalled career: it’s not that he’s had bad luck or anything, but he has been cursed! So, he embarks on a side quest to find out who cursed him, and whether that person could lift the curse, allowing his career to finally take off.

Aki, like Linda in Queen of Fucking Everything, is a multi-faceted character: he is often arrogant and self-important, but at the same time he’s trying to mend his relationship with his teenage daughter and to maintain other relationships too. And of course he takes acting very seriously – just not always the productions he’s in if he doesn’t think they have the artistic value he’d deserve. 🎭

So there you have it: three good Finnish TV shows that might some day even make it abroad as adaptations. Watch these if you get the chance. 📺

For a “zero peach” drink this one is surprisingly peachy. 🤔🍑📸

I’ve been listening to the Hanselminutes podcast for some eight or nine years already, and it is in fact the reason I created myself a Micro.blog blog in the first place. Scott is an empathetic and knowledgeable host and the guests and topics are diverse. Furthermore, I find the half an hour episode length just perfect for commutes when I listen to the show at an ever so slightly increased 1.1x speed. 🎙️

In a recent episode #991 Scott had a chat with Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff about her new book Tiny Experiments. What resonated with me in the show was when they discussed that people are being too absolute about the things they want to do or be. Way too often someone announces that they, say, will start going to a gym, then buy a membership for a year, and then slowly find out it’s not for them after all after the first couple of months. This is then considered a failure and will negatively affect their self image.

The better way to do this would’ve been to think that I think I might like going to a gym, then buy a membership for a month, and then just try it out. If you didn’t like going to a gym then fine, you tried, your hypothesis proved to be wrong, you learned something without losing too much time or money. It was a learning experience instead of a failure.

In a sense this entire blog is a tiny experiment for myself. I have no idea if I’ll still be blogging in a year, but so far I’ve been enjoying it, and it’s certainly not too expensive when Micro.blog plans start at just $1 per month (which is the plan I’m currently using).

So, that’s something to ponder about. If you have children, you tell them that it’s alright and indeed encouraged to just try, you don’t need to succeed. At which point does an adult switch to a mode where it’s not OK to “just try” but you’re expected to commit and succeed?