Jacob Christensen

Weatherwise, this photo sums up the summer in Denmark pretty well.

The July weather is unimpressive (unless you are into deluges) but it makes for some pretty impressive sunsets.

As stated in the right-hand column, I predict that the Danish general election will be held during September – and this again means that the election is likely to be called in late August or early September. I have papers to write etc. etc. so I will take a blocation with no updates until mid-August but, if necessary, I will be around.

“There’s an age when boys read one of two books. Either they read Ayn Rand or they read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. One of these books leaves you with no grasp on reality and a deeply warped sense of fantasy in place of real life. The other one is about hobbits and orcs.”

Paul Krugman has more.

And yes, I read the one about the hobbits and the orcs.

I’m working on a chapter about the organisational history of ATP, the Danish supplementary labour market pension, and visited the ATP Building in the outskirts of Hillerød on Wednesday.

Having my office in a container does have some advantages.

Occasionally, Danes go a little crazy.

A manifest for the joyous science (in Swedish) by Anders Hellström and Johan Karlsson.

Instead of publishing a new post about the Chernobyl disaster, I decided to republish my reflections on April 26, 1986 from 2006:

April 26, 1986 was the first warm spring day in Copenhagen. During the spring semester of 1986, I had a rather odd schedule: One of the courses I followed (European Security Policy with Wilhelm Christmas-Møller as teacher), had classes during the morning and the other (Theoretical approaches to international politics with Bertel Heurlin) during late afternoon.

So, what to do when you have three hours between classes and it’s finally warm outside? You go for a walk.

If my memory doesn’t fail me completely, I spent some hours walking around Kastellet – a beautiful old garrison in the northern part of the old town – enjoying the sunshine.

It was only when I came home in the evening that I learned that the Chernobyl power plant had exploded.

My immediate reaction was to shut all of my windows because of the radiation. My next reaction was to think that there was no reason to do so: First, Denmark hadn’t been hit too hard by the fallout from the disaster and second, as I had been outdoors for much of the day, I would already have been subjected to any possible fallout and an open window wouldn’t make too much of a difference.

And the rest, as they say, was history.