Tallinn

151’2023 (2023-05-31) – Wednesday

Posted on by What did you learn in School today ?

Today, I learned about:

This post is a tribute to some of my Swedish language students and their families. What they all have in common is that during the month of May, 2023, normally the best of all seasons in Sweden, while being in Sweden, they also decided to explore its neighboring countries.

Adriana

Adriana lives in Brazil, but is enchanted by Sweden and its native language. The first time she went to Sweden with her family was 20 years ago and after that she went there on various occasions. It is a real pleasure giving lessons to Adriana, a very sympathetic person, who can make me laugh aloud with her stories, sometimes including black humour. Luckily, I am normally able to compete with her in that sense.

Paulo

Paulo moved to the region of Stockholm with his family 1,5 years ago and is getting well accustomed. In his company, he tries to speak as much Swedish as possible, although English is also commonly used as the corporate language. Our lessons are always fun, I try to include my knowledge about Sweden from the time I lived there, so that he can understand why certain things are the way they are. Paulo tells me good stories about his earlier life in Brazil and his business trips around the world.

Since Adriana and Paulo had both decided to bring their families to visit the Estonian capital Tallinn, I found it a good coincedence to join their narratives into one. Below are their family photos and some pictures taken during their respective visits to Tallinn. You can find facts about Tallinn in reference #1 below.

These photos from the old town in Tallinn were taken in May, 2023, by my Swedish language students Paulo and Adriana, who independently of each other decided to visit this UNESCO World Heritage site and get delighted.
In the left, uppermost photo you can see Paulo and his wife Patricia, and from the left their two daughters, Sophie and Catherine. Paulo also took the big photo from Tallinn below.
Adriana, in the lower right corner of the righmost, upper photo, which was taken in Stockholm, was travelling to Denmark and Sweden with her family and decided that Estonia was worth a visit. Here you can see her sister Camila to the left and behind them are Adriana’s son Humberto, wit his fiancée Paula by his side. Adriana took the two lower photos from Tallinn.

Giovana and Rodrigo

The Brazilian couple Giovana and Rodrigo left the state of Paraná one year ago and moved to Göteborg (Gothenburg in English) to live and work. Before they moved, we had already had some months of initial training and due to changes in the Swedish immigration laws during the first half of 2022, their travel was delayed, which in a certain way was good, because they could concentrate on the Swedish lessons, using the same time zone as I. As you may know, currently there is a 5 hour time difference between Brazil and Sweden, so while our lessons for me occur in the early afternoon, for them it is much later in the evening. But they are hanging in, and their Swedish is getting ever better!

Giovana and Rodrigo like to travel very much, every once in a while they tell me that they will go to one of the European cities that can easily be reached by airplane from Göteborg. The destination this time was the Polish port Gdańsk, also known by its German name Danzig. If you are curious about Gdańsk, see also reference #2 below.

Photos from the Polish city of Gdańsk taken between April 29 and May 1, 2023. The following work colleagues were there, from left to right: Giovana, Rodrigo, Gustavo, Paula, Igor, and Heloísa. The four smaller pictures were all taken by Giovana.

Joice and Elias

Another Brazilian couple, Joice and Elias, are newcomers in Sweden, also living in Göteborg. They are still in their first months living in Sweden, which means a lot of things to take care of. And it is not only living and working, they also have to see to that their sons are getting good schooling conditions. But from what I have heard, very soon the boys will help me in teaching Swedish to their parents.

During the long weekend in the middle of May, when Thursday was a holiday to celebrate Ascension Day, they decided to go to Norway together with some friends. Below you can some marvellous pictures from their trip. If you want to know more about their destination, Hemsedal and Flå, see references # 3 and 4, below.

Photos taken in Hemsedal and Flå, Norway, in the middle of May, 2023, showing Elias and Joice with their sons Matheus and Thiago. The nature photos were taken by Joice.

That’s what I learned in school today!

Ref.:

1: Tallinn

2: Gdańsk

3: Hemsedal

4: Flå

*: What did you learn in school today ?

2016-01-24 (Sunday)

Posted on by What did you learn in School today ?

Today, I learned that:

The largest prime number ever found was announced last Wednesday, January 20, 2016. So, what is a prime number and what is it good for?

A prime number is defined as a natural number (a positive integer) greather than 1, which cannot be evenly divided by any other natural number than 1 and itself. Examples of such numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc. It has been proven that there are an infinite quantity of prime numbers.

Prime numbers have been known for a long time, e.g. Euclid’s Elements (300 years BC) already mentions them, and in the beginning of the 17th century, a French monk named Marin Mersenne devised a formula, of the form 2p – 1, where p=1 is a prime number, to be used to check for unknown prime numbers. In fact, the largest prime number, which is exactly 274.207.281 − 1, consists of more than 22 million digits, and the search for bigger numbers continue. Please see the three references below for more information about prime numbers in general and also about the discovery of the currently biggest prime number, including an interview with Curtis Cooper, the leader of the project that discovered it.

One of the practical usages of prime numbers is in public-key cryptography, where two large prime numbers are multiplied to obtain a product that it is extremely difficult to factorize and thus break the code. But the search for these very big numbers does not seem to have any major practical use today, although they are very well fitted to test the speed performance of computer hardware.

And speaking about cryptography, having means of obtaining secure data streams is of course essential when we want to communicate data from one point to another. The current standard for data communication in the world is based upon what is called fourth-generation (4G) technology, and although it offers very fast rates of data communication, there are applications that demand even faster data transmission speeds. Examples of such applications are some components of the ‘Internet of Things’ (e.g. driver-less cars), and also in remote surgery, when the patient is in a hospital somewhere in the world, and at the same time the head surgeon is in a totally different place, performing the surgery via advanced, fast video and manipulation technologies.

For that and other purposes, last Friday, January 22, 2016, TeliaSonera and Ericsson announced that in 2018, they will start 5G networks in Stockholm and Tallinn. The rest of Sweden should see 5G in use in 2020.

Update on 2016-01-27: Today’s program of ‘Vetenskapens värld’ on Radio Sweden’s domestic channel P1 penetrates into the 5G technology. It will be a standard mostly used for machine to machine communication, and there are good hopes that one standard will be used everywhere on Earth, with speeds 100 times higher than the current 4G standard. See reference 7 below.

… That’s what I learned in school!

Refs.:

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number

2: http://www.mersenne.org/primes/?press=M74207281

3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5ozBnrd5Zc

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography

5: http://news.err.ee/v/scitech/fd66b9ee-1a44-4d13-aa6c-1f687812b2b8/

6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_phone_generations

7: http://sverigesradio.se/sida/avsnitt/668029?programid=412

+: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VucczIg98Gw