First page of Beowolf
The first page of the Beowulf manuscript (public domain image from Wikipedia). The mythical king Beowulf is believed to come from somewhere around here.

Ostrogothia is the latin name for the region in Sweden where this site and its author resides. (For details, see Ostrogothia on Wikipedia.) Ostrogothia is by many scholars believed to be the origin of the Goths who sometime before or during the 1:st century A.D. migrated from Scandinavia to today’s Poland and further and in the 3:rd and 4:th centuries ravaged the Roman Empire. (To confuse things, the Ostrogoths are not associated with Ostrogothia but are a group of Goths that emerged several centuries after the exodus of the Goths from Scandinavia.)

Ostrogothia lies in the heart of a land that the historian Jordanes in his The Origin and Deeds of the Goths refers to as Scandza and which he describes thus: “If wolves cross over to these islands when the sea is frozen by reason of the great cold, they are said to lose their sight. Thus the land is not only inhospitable to men but cruel even to wild beasts.”

Modern Ostrogothia is rather more peaceful than that of the original Goths and offers a good life to its citizens, both professionally and recreationally.

Professionally I’m the director of R&D of an AI company that is developing and selling medical applications.

I spend most of my spare time in the stable training dressage and jumping with my horse Golden Boy GR, a Swedish Warmblood. When not in the stable I also do various other sports such as running, weight lifting, and snowboarding.

During those long and freezing Ostrogothia winter nights, when the wolves are said to lose their eye sight, I read about science, technology and philosophy, I write software, most recently deep learning applications, and I watch the occasional movie or Netflix series.

This blog started as a technical experiment: getting a web server and a blog server up and running. It was a solution in search of a use. It has with time turned into this rather slow-moving blog.

You can reach me either through a comment or as arto dot jarvinen at this domain.

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