Results for “norwegian century” 18 found
How early were the Nordic countries secular?
Statistical data on levels of church attendance before the 1960s is fragmentary, but what there is suggests that the low levels of religious participation recorded later in the century were not so new. Clergy returns for Denmark, even excluding the metropolis of Copenhagen, where levels of church attendance were known to be exceptionally low, recorded that only about 8 percent of Danes attended Lutheran services on “an average Sunday” in the 1930s, falling to 6 percent in the 1940s, 5 percent in the 1950s, and 4 percent in the 1960s…In Sweden in 1927 it is estimated that only 5.6 percent attended a Lutheran church on a normal Sunday; by the 1950s it was under three percent.
A Norwegian estimate is of 3.8 percent in 1938, and Finland seems to have been below 3 percent by the 1950s. For purposes of perspective, in most other European countries the collapse of church attendance came in the 1960s.
That is all from the new and interesting Brian Stanley, Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History, published by Princeton University Press.
The world’s longest interview
Defying the stereotype of the tight-lipped Scandinavian, popular Norwegian crime writer Hans Olav Lahlum set the world record for the longest interview on Thursday after spending more than 30 non-stop hours chatting in an online broadcast.
Lahlum, who rarely paused for more than a few seconds, discussed topics ranging from U.S. presidents to his fictional characters during the online show hosted by VG Nett, the online arm of Norwegian tabloid VG.
The new record awaits approval from Guinness World Records.
Fast-talking Lahlum, who is also a left-wing politician, historian and top chess player rarely stumbled during the gabfest, which also covered such scintillating topics as his preferences for mixing puddings and kebabs.
“I think I can safely say that tonight I might go to bed a little earlier than usual,” he said as he and interviewer Mads Andersen beat the old record of just over 26 hours.
Shortly after surpassing the previous record, Lahlum plunged into a weighty discussion on world literature in general and Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in particular.
“Do you have a plan for how you will get Lahlum to stop talking when the interview ends?” one viewer asked VG on its online forum.
There is more here, and the article explains this is part of a broader Norwegian trend toward “slow TV”:
Norway, a pioneer in slow programming, has spawned several lengthy television hits in recent years, and public broadcaster NRK earlier this year aired a 12-hour show centered on a burning fireplace with experts discussing the intricacies of fire wood.
In 2011, it broadcast 134 hours non-stop of a cruise ship going up the Norwegian coast to the Arctic, bagging the world record for the longest continuous TV program along the way.
And an earlier broadcast of an eight hour train journey from Oslo to Bergen was so popular, NRK had to repeat it.
As I’ve mentioned before, so far the Norwegians are having an awesome century.
For the pointer I thank Øystein Hernæs.
Why are Swedish meatballs so much smaller than their American counterparts?
This topic has been knocking around the blogosphere as of late:
I am a longtime reader of MR and there is a question I have been wondering about for a long time. I was hoping you could share your thoughts on meatball heterogeneity. My girlfriend made dinner for me and the entree was Swedish meatballs. I never knew how small their meatballs are. It seems inefficient to roll all that meat into such tiny balls. Wouldn’t it make more sense to roll them into big balls like we do in the US?
First, history + hysteresis play a role. According to Mathistorisk Uppslagsbok by Jan-Ojvind Swahn, the Swedish concept of meatball first appeared in Cajsa Warg's 1754 cookbook. Yet as late as the early 20th century, beef was still a luxury in Swedish culture, whereas meat was plentiful in the United States. America had greater access to game in the more moderate climate and also greater grass resources for supporting cows. The Swedes were also late in benefiting from the refrigerated transport revolution, which started elsewhere in the 1920s and brought more meat to many households. (This tardiness was due to the concentration of population in a small number of cities, combined with rail isolation from Europe.) The end result was smaller meatballs, a tradition which has persisted to this day.
On the plane of pure theory, standing behind the lock-in effect is the Ricardian (or should I say Solowian? Solow is the modern Ricardian when you think through the underlying asymmetries in his model, which ultimately make "capital" non-productive at some margin) fixed factor explanation. A Swedish meatball recipe usually involves much more dairy than a non-Swedish meatball recipe. Constant returns to scale do not in general hold for recipes, much less for loosely packed spherical items involving fluids.
Oddly, the extant literature does not seem to have considered these factors.
From the comments: Lennart writes: "Swedish meatballs, having loads of surface that are fried crispy, are much better than other forms of meatballs for that reason alone. Norwegians and Danish have big meatballs, but that's because they are boiled, so there is no crispy-fried surface to maximize (and hence nowhere near as good)."