October 13, 2002

3:57 PM

19-year-old student behind Finland's deadliest peacetime attack last friday found inspiration from the internet and was said to be a skilled bomb-expert. And yes, the internet as the source of all evil is being heavily discussed in the Finnish media again.
posted by inkeri (31 comments total)

The Internet doesn't make you evil, it makes you stupid!
posted by Dark Messiah at 4:05 PM on October 13, 2002

Being heavily discussed? Haven't seen a single story that has said the internet is evil. Let's wait and see whatever tomorrows tabloids and other newspapers have to say. The internet discussion board was a finnish web board and has been closed. I'm glad the culprit was found this fast, speculation would have gone overboard very fast.
posted by lazy-ville at 4:16 PM on October 13, 2002

It's the jabbascript you've got to watch out for.
posted by holloway at 4:20 PM on October 13, 2002

"He was likely a skilled bomb maker," NBI Deputy Chief Jari Liukku told Reuters. He said the explosives used were unusual and different from those used by the military.

So because he uses unusual explosives he is an "expert"? Maybe he just couldn't get his hands on Military-Grade explosives. You can make a bomb out of household chemicals. The Military wouldn't use Drano™, so does that make some one who builds a bomb with something made to unclog drains an expert?

Stupid Media...
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 4:57 PM on October 13, 2002

Police probing Finland's worst peacetime bomb attack were trying on Sunday to work out whether their only suspect, a chemistry student

Imagine this had happened 10 years ago. I can already see the headlines. "Knowledge About Bomb-Making Possibly Acquired Through Hard Studying in University Library". OK, maybe not ..
posted by Eloquence at 5:07 PM on October 13, 2002

I guess any decent student of chemistry knows enough about dangerous mixtures. to do anything he/she wants.
Like a bad president Bush doesn't make all americans stupid, one skyzo on internet doesnt make all people on internet skyzo.

But media always forget to mention that little , but important distinction. Maybe they fear internet ? :D
posted by elpapacito at 6:34 PM on October 13, 2002

one skyzo on internet doesnt make all people on internet skyzo.

Way to kill my fun! :)
posted by Dark Messiah at 7:26 PM on October 13, 2002

This is neither here nor there but...

Did anyone notice that the one Finnish media source mentioned in the article was called the "Daily Hufvudstadsbladet"? I'm totally moving to Finland!
posted by jennanemone at 8:16 PM on October 13, 2002

What's the kid's name? Why is it being withheld?
posted by hama7 at 8:19 PM on October 13, 2002

"Every kid in Finland has a computer and Internet access. We are investigating that as well," said Haapala.

Okay, now that's worrisome. How did they get all those computers, anyway?
posted by yhbc at 8:20 PM on October 13, 2002

The internet, you say?
I guess the fact that he was a chemistry student doesn't have anything to do with it.
posted by spazzm at 8:30 PM on October 13, 2002

How did they get all those computers, anyway?

Dude! They got Dells!

sorry.....
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 8:31 PM on October 13, 2002

Hufvudstadsbladet is the largest Swedish-language daily in Finland (there remains a significant Swedish-speaking minority), and as far as I can tell it's a variation on Huvudstadsbladet, /hoo voodz stadz blah det/ which would mean, roughly, "Capital Paper", which doesn't sound nearly as fun. Bork!
posted by dhartung at 9:15 PM on October 13, 2002

off topic: Finnish is one beautiful language, and inspired the creation of Esperanto, if I am not mistaken.
posted by hama7 at 10:05 PM on October 13, 2002

Finns are the blondes people in the world, I believe.
Maybe this guy thought they where dying out?
posted by spazzm at 10:15 PM on October 13, 2002

hama...

I studied Esperanto a little bit, and it seemed the biggest influence was Slavic languages. I think the creator was from Eastern Europe. I think he tried to incorporate as many major (i.e., European) languages into Esperanto as he could, but I think the base is Latin with Slavic dipthongs.
posted by Kevs at 11:16 PM on October 13, 2002

You're right Kevs.

I checked it out a little, and it was probably a different
constructed language. Thanks.
posted by hama7 at 11:57 PM on October 13, 2002

Where does Esperanto's vocabulary come from?

About 75 % of Esperanto's vocabulary comes from Latin and Romance languages (especially French), about 20 % comes from Germanic languages (German and English), and the rest comes mainly from Slavic languages (Russian and Polish) and Greek (mostly scientific terms).

Finnish was, however, one of Tolkien's favorite languages, and its rhythms and grammar helped inspire Quenya, the language of the high elves, which he intended as the Latin and Greek of Middle-Earth.

I wish there were more to say about the bombing itself, and the victims, but it appears to be an isolated incident. Although Finland claims low overall crime, its homicide rate is high by European standards. This may have much to do with its proximity to the mob-ridden Russia and particularly Estonia, developed out of historical smuggling links from the West to the XSSR via Finland, and now concentrating on trades such as prostitution. But the phenomenon that springs to my mind in this case is seasonal affective disorder -- and other seasonally variant phenomena -- not to mention geographic factors.
posted by dhartung at 12:07 AM on October 14, 2002

Still relatively little discussion about the evils of internet tabloid headlines say nothing about the internet.
dhartung: mob murders are quite rare, a typical finnish murder is done drunk.
posted by lazy-ville at 1:30 AM on October 14, 2002

Blaming Internet for this is almost as stupid as the time Finnish Police tried to block people from linking to their site.
posted by rosmo at 1:52 AM on October 14, 2002

I studied Esperanto a little bit, and it seemed the biggest influence was Slavic languages. I think the creator was from Eastern Europe. I think he tried to incorporate as many major (i.e., European) languages into Esperanto as he could, but I think the base is Latin with Slavic dipthongs.

I hope I'm not assuming wrongly, but you do realize that Finnish is a Slavic language (Finno-Ugric to be more precise), right? Finnish shares far more with Hungarian than it shares with the Nordic languages of all other Scandivanian countries.
posted by wackybrit at 4:38 AM on October 14, 2002

Actually, perhaps I've overstated it a bit (I am no linguistics major), but Finnish is a 'very close relation' of the Slavic languages.
posted by wackybrit at 4:41 AM on October 14, 2002

And, strangely enough, Finnish belongs to the Ural-Altaic group of languages, to which Korean (How did you guess that I was gonna throw that in there?) also belongs! Wacky world of lingo, it is.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:43 AM on October 14, 2002

wackybrit: Actually, perhaps I've overstated it a bit (I am no linguistics major), but Finnish is a 'very close relation' of the Slavic languages.

Sorry, man, but I think you're way, way off there. Pretty much the only similarities between Finnish/Hungarian and Slavic languages are the geographic proximity of their speakers and the loanwords shared between the two...

Here's an interesting link on the subject:

http://www.pp.clinet.fi/~pkr01/sounds/hungary.html
posted by syzygy at 5:37 AM on October 14, 2002

Esperanto? Doesn't that mean "hope"?

I had an Estonian friend in high school. I said to her, "Isn't your language rather close to Finnish?" and she freaked out. "No! No! Nothing like Finnish!"
posted by jennanemone at 8:00 AM on October 14, 2002

Jenn: Close; it means 'one who hopes.' "Dr. Esperanto" was the pseudonym of Ludwik Zamenhof, who created the language in the 1880s. (As a Pole living in Russian-ruled Warsaw, he had a close-up view of Babel and thought things would work better if everyone spoke the same language.) That's a funny story about your friend (the humor residing in the fact that Finnish and Estonian are extremely close, closer than Dutch and German); it's a perfect illustration of Freud's "narcissism of petty differences." Many years ago, when I was working at Atticus Books in New Haven, a customer gave me a name that I thought was obviously Czech. I said as much (rather proud of my ability to distinguish West Slavic languages), and he drew himself up and (obviously highly offended) informed me that he was not Czech but Slovak. Oops.

wackybrit: You're right that Finnish is not related to the other Scandinavian languages, but as syzygy says it's not related to the Slavic languages either. It is related to Mordvin, Udmurt, and Samoyed, though!

hama7: Thanks for the constructed-languages page.
posted by languagehat at 9:13 AM on October 14, 2002

An update on the bombing...the student's name is "Petri Gerdt" and they've released a photo of him. It can be seen in the Helsinginsanomat (Finland's main newpaper).
posted by borgle at 10:23 AM on October 14, 2002

As for the language...Estonian and Finnish sound almost identical to the non-Estonian/Finnish speaker. Sometimes it can be funny. In Finnish 'strawberry' is 'mansikka'. In Estonian it is 'maasika'. Close, but in Finnish 'maasika' would translate in to "land pig".
posted by borgle at 10:27 AM on October 14, 2002

their only suspect, a chemistry student who was among the seven dead, had found bomb-making instructions on the Internet.

Am I the only one confused by the media harping on the "Internet link" when they clear say that the student was a chemistry student? Wouldn't that provide greater access to that knowledge than typing in "how to make a bomb" in Google. bleh.

Next thing you'd know, they'd be blaming video games for the Maryland sniper's attacks... oh, wait a second...
posted by mkn at 12:26 PM on October 14, 2002

"Police still have no motive for the attack, but they say they did not consider it likely the attack was linked to terrorism." (BBC article)

"Terrorism" means nothing more than "bad guys" anymore, it seems. Certainly so if attacking uniformed combatants (Kuwaiti attacks on US Marines) is terrorism, but setting a bomb off in a shopping mall is not.
posted by brantstrand at 1:16 PM on October 14, 2002

I read some of the discussion the bomber had had in the discussion board, went way beyond searching google, and now the government is seriously thinking about how to limit such discussion on the internet. Finnish and Hungarian are related languages, but there's still not much of a similarity, linguistics are strange. Slavic languages are not related to these two.
posted by lazy-ville at 6:46 AM on October 15, 2002