The Pantograph

The pendeltåg gets it's power from overhead wires. The apparatus that facilitates electrical contact to the wires is called a pantograph. There's a lot of science that goes into these things. First they are places on the train to minimize the effects of air turbulence. The actual contacts are aerodynamically designed and the spacing is such that the bouncing and loss of contact is minimized. The wires above actually zigzag from pole to pole to get even wear across the pantograph contact pieces.

Some trains have two engines and multiple pantographs. One of the pantographs is used to power the engine, the other for the cooling equipment which runs even when the engines are off to keep debris out.

Koelreuteria Paniculata, and I mean it.

The Golden Raintree, Koelreuteria Paniculata, is also known as the Chinese Flame tree. As you can see in the photos here, it has nic yellow flowers. They smell good, too.an excellent tree and unrivaled for late yellow flowers. In th fall, the Golden Raintrees display contrasts 2 inch golden seed pods against a dark green-leafed background. The seed pods look like tiny Chinese lanterns. It has rounded outline, spreading and ascending branches, open, reddish copper-colored foliage in the spring. It is a tough and an adaptable tree used for many landscaping applications. They are very tolerant of polluted air environments.

Getting the big bucks...or what a 50 says about a country

The 50 kronor bank note has Jenny Lind on the front. She's a Swedish opera singer that died in 1887. It's noteworthy that Swedish money has a female on it. I'm pretty sure American paper money of any denomination does not. Having a female on some of the money is apropos given that Sweden has the most gender equality of any nation on Earth, or pretty close to it. On the back, you see a Nyckelharpa (Swedish harp) which is consistent with the Swede's love of music.


Wikipedia has more on the kronor.

Oh, BTW, these bucks are bigger than American money so technically these are "the big bucks."

More than a number: the National Id continued...

Rather than answer the oft asked question "what's in a name?" we should ask "what's in a number?"

Is there rhyme or reason in your id number (the social security number for Americans)? The Swedish National Id, mentioned in a previous post, full of structure. This post describes that structure. It is formed as follows:

Take your birth date, say March 13, 1962. Encode it as 620313. This constitutes the first 6 numbers.

Now append two digits corresponding to preassigned birthplaces. A special two digits were reserved for foreigners and for people born at home in Sweden. Obviously this means there are fewer than 99 possible birth places which is not true nowadays. Let's pretend you were born in a hospital in Stockholm that was assigned the number 37. Now our id is 63031337.

Then, you get one digit for birth number: odd number for males, even for females. Suppose you were the second male born that day, then your number would be 3. Now the ID is 630313373. Hospitals that had more than 5 males or 5 females born in a day got multiple hospital codes - the two "birth place" digits mentioned above.

We're not finished...

Now the interesting part. The last number is an error checking value (called a parity digit in the previous post). Here's how it's calculated:

So far the number in our example is 620313373. The error checking consist of several steps which are hard to describe in a blog, but here goes anyway....

Multiply the first, third, ... the odd digits by 2. Multiply the even ones (second, fourth, etc.) by 1.


6 2 0 3 1 3 3 7 3
x2 x1 x2 x1 x2 x1 x2 x1 x2
---------------------------
12 2 0 3 2 3 6 7 6


This pattern of alternating 2's and 1's prevents someone from switching two digits while typing them, a common human error. I doesn't work if the digits are identical but in that case who cares if they are switched!

We're still not done.

Now add all the digits on the last line:
1+2+2+0+3+2+3+6+7+6 = 32

I don't know what this step does but I know it has a purpose. When I find out, expect another post.

Now round up to the nearest decade. In our case, that would be 40. Subtract 32 from 40 to get 8. The last digit in the ID for this example would then be 8. The final ID is then 6203133738.

Now how are they accounting for the population boom and foreign influx. They are breaking the pattern a little: first the second pair of digits which correspond to the birth month would have only twelve values. Throw that away and allow all 100 possibilities. Similar for the day of the month. Rather than allow 01 to 31, permit all 100 possibilities.



Is there a similar structure with American social security numbers? Yes, there is some structure which is described in Wikipedia: chapter 3 under Social Security Number. If there had been more structure in our Id's, then the identity theives would know a lot more about us.

I have no idea about the re-use policy of either country. That is, when a person dies, is the number returned to the pool of available numbers?

The photo's are just in the theme of numbers. The top photo is the Nils Eriksson Bus Terminal in Göteborg (aka Gothenburg). The bottom image is from a store in Sweden. Neither picture is related to the National Id.

Size - Area and Population

The population of Sweden is 9,016,596 *estimated July 2006). For reference to states within the USA, Georgia has 9,072,576 (2005 estimate), North Carolina has 8,683,292, and New Jersey has 8,717,975.

In terms of land area, Sweden weighs in at a mighty 449,965 square kilometers (= 177,732 square miles). Again, for reference, Sweden is between California (163,707 square miles) and Texas (268,601 square miles).

In terms of population density, Sweden is 20 per square kilometer (51 per square mile) which compares to Iowa, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.

Forms to National ID

Forms, forms, forms. Relocating to another country, even temporarily, involves quite a few forms. One of them is a medical report which includes an immunization report.


I got a complete physical yesterday but had a tough time digging up my immunization record. I can't even find my old Steppenwolf records, much less an immunization record.

After calling every single number in the yellow pages under "travel medicine" and still not finding where I got my previous immunizations (recall I had to take the deluxe immunization package when I went to India in 1998), a colleague recalled it was "Associated Internists." Good thing my colleague's memory is so good: I was within milliseconds of calling Guy Noir, Private Eye.

However, using the "Associated Internists" clue and Google I found that they had moved and changed their name to two names: World Wide Travel something and Beacon Medicine. Since my records were more than 2.5 years old, the time they decided to join catch up with the 1990's, my records were hard copy.
So I went down there for my appointment which was a good news bad news thing. The good news is that I'm about as immune as piece of granite and don't even need boosters for another 5 years. I could survive swimming in a vat of yellow fever, the hepatitis alphabet, and malaria bacteria. The bad news is that it still cost me $66 bucks. Who knows what the insurance was billed?



Then I had to take the signed immunization record to my general practitioner who is supposed to fax my complete check up results and immunization record to a doctor in Sweden. Seems like American medicine offers superbly trained doctors and miracle drugs but is still in the dinosaur age in terms of using computers, IMHO. Worse, the concept of fax'ing and mailing the completed forms (and reading the instructions) seemed foreign to my doctor and all her staff. I knew as I saw them shove the forms into my folder (and I'm not talking a computer folder, this one is made of cellulose) I'd have to call back to "make this happen."


Why do I bring this up?

Well, I've always thought we in the US should have a national database with all our medical records accessible by password. Furthermore, people should be able to mine the database for all sorts of medical data. Imagine seeing a map of the United States color coded by density of the flu? or any disease? Imagine seeing it change over time like a movie: from 1980 to present? Imagine how quickly the CDC could discover outbreaks when they used such maps (assuming doctors entered the data: Jo Smo has the flu on such-and-such data and his address is ...) The computer would use the address to place my data on the map. Correlations with weather, food distribution, pollutants, and all sorts of things could be done. Including not having to worry about clinics going out of business or changing their names!

Data is knowledge.

Anyway, it all reminded me of the national number that every Swede has. It's the same number as on their driver's license, simply transferred to the driver's license when the reach driving age. The number it self is coded. The first 8 digits represent their birth date. The next 2 represent the hospital ward they were born in (some hospital's have multiple wards). The next digit represents which birth they were that day. Boys get even numbers and girls get odd numbers (or maybe vice versa). If there are more that 5 girls or 5 boys born that day, there's a procedure for "creating" a new ward. The last digit is called a check-sum digit. It's value is chosen so that the sum of all the digits is a number whose last digit is zero. This is used to greatly reduce human errors when typing in the numbers into computers. Their computers are already programmed to verify the check-sum.

These numbers are tied to what books they check out of the library, their bank-accounts, their medical records, everything. The American Privacy Rights groups would break out in hives if some one in the US even whispered this. In fact, I may be followed by a guy in a trench coat for writing this. Let's keep it between us, ok? Anyway, the national ID sure makes Swedish society work like a well oiled machine.

I have no idea how Sweden protects against identity theft but knowing the clever Swedes, I know they've done something. I hope to find out.

I do know that if they loose their card. They have to get another but it involves receiving mail in separate envelops on different days: kinda sorta like our pin codes for our ATM cards.

There ought to be a way, maybe a voluntary system, in the US for achieve much the same thing (and more, as I mentioned above) and still maintain a modicum of privacy protection. We have the technology.

Perhaps one of my Swedish readers could elaborate on the Swedish id.

Did you know?

You can get information about any city and most places in Sweden simply by going to the URL www.name of the city or place.se. Examples: one of my favorite islands with one of my favorite resturants is Fjäderholmarna which is found at http://www.fjaderholmarna.se. To see the English version, click on the English flag.

Try the informative Stockholm link, too.

Stockholm Public Transportation

Getting around in Stockholm is easy. There is an excellent subway system that connects with a commuter train system (pendeltag). I stole the pictures from Google Images. Most of the trains are very modern but there are some old ones: the government is slowly replacing the old ones with modern smooth & quiet ones. The system is as punctual as any in the world. The train staff works hard to stay on time because there pay is reduced based on tardiness.