Last minute travel tip

Here's a last-minute travel tip for those who can visit Helsinki before 6th of January: visit the fine exhibition by Samuli Heimonen, Young Artist of the Year 2008. Exhibition details here. Small pictures of the work from his website cannot reproduce the feeling of the originals. 

Perhaps you are a programmer-minded engineer and don't quite like modern art - why should you care? Because Samuli's works are easy to approach and his works will stimulate your mind. Works are layered in such a way that the longer you watch those, the more you will see new images. First impression is certainly not the last one. In his recent interview he spoke about his working methods and that resembled the way I like to do programming: you must do painting/programming frequently no to loose the touch and no matter how short a time you will be doing it, you never know beforehand what kind of a magic will happen. In fact, programming is very close to art when it comes to expressing your idea in some form. You have an idea and you can make it alive by painting, singing, programming, writing and so on. 

Interesting book to read is Donald E. Knuths Literate Programming where he compares programming to writing a book. Make a test: give a topic and plot to a couple of writers and read the result - every book will tell the same story but in a very different way. Some are better than the others. Give a specification to a couple of programmers and study the result - all programs execute the same task, but some implementations are better than the others. And finally: ask some painters to paint a picture of a bear, and the winner is Samuli Heimonen.

//Harri