User:Alkanen

Me
My real name is Daniel Lindsäth and I'm a civil engineer student from Sweden. I'm currently heavily involved in the founding of a new libertarian party in Sweden.

Languages and grammar
As you can see on the right, my native tongue is Swedish. Since I know Swedish I have no problems with reading Danish and Norwegian (Bokmål), but I can't really speak them, or write for that matter. I've studied French at school, so I have some basic understanding of the language, but nothing fancy. I also automagically have the basics of German since it's often quite common to Swedish.

English is my forte when it comes to foreign languages. I can often write more fluently in that language than in my own. I know more words and can express myself more precisely. It's actually quite embarrasing. =) I pondered chosing en-5, but that might be a slight case of hubris.

I'm fairly strict regarding grammatical rules and spelling (though I do make mistakes, naturally), and I've done some proof reading professionally. I also do alot of proof reading for the Libertarian Party of Sweden (or is that Liberal Party of Sweden? Tricky that...). When I read news papers, menus or advertisments, I can't help but proof read it. This usually leads to me complaining about the illiteracy of my people, since it's goddamn impossible to find a text of more than ten words without a "särskrivning" (e.g. writing "under standing" instead of "understanding").

Books
I enjoy reading books, alot. I read fantasy, sci-fi, philosophy, biology, mystery, you name it. Among my favorite authors are Terry Pratchett and Raymond E. Feist, both of whom are fantasy writers. Terry Pratchett is a master word smith and can easily make the English language sit and beg for him should he so chose (and he does, all the time), it's pure bliss to read his work.

In between the fiction books I read factual works aswell. Right now I'm reading a book in economic history aswell as a book in neurobiology. Both quite fascinating.

Computers and programming
As indicated above, I'm a civil engineer student. My major is computer science and engineering with minors in physics and maths. I'm a big nerd, and spend way too much time with my computer. I once tried to rationalise it by claiming I played games, but I can't use that excuse anymore since I hardly ever have time to play games nowadays. I do, however, occasionally have time to do a bit of programming that isn't school related. At the moment I'm semi-seriously writing a design document for a game, trying to spec a kickass DC client and construct an ANN (multi layer perceptron using the sigmoid function) specialised in number recognition. If anyone knows how the hell to calculate deltas for back propagation between layers with more than one neuron, please tell me.

Politics and philosophy
I'm strongly influenced by Ayn Rand and her objectivism, though I wouldn't call myself an objectivist. Due to this, I have a live and let live-view on politics, and believe fiercly in laissez-faire and it's moral superiority. I live in a socialistic "paradise", and people here can't even think in terms of personal responsibility or understand that the world won't end just because our father-knows-best state stops meddling in everything. They can't seem to understand the concept that me and the people who share my beliefs don't want to control their lives and force them into our own view of humans, unlike themselves. The whole notion is completely alien to most citizens of Sweden.

To help compete the ubiquitous socialism, me and a few others decided to create a political party that is dedicated to the negative human rights, viz. the right to life, liberty and property. We are well aware that we'll most likely gain no seats in the parliament for quite some time, but we hope to bring the idea of negative rights back into Swedish politics.