Happy Halloween!

Strangely enough alot of reasons why I prefer Erlangen to Hamburg involve headaches the day after...

WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence.

Hakim Bey - TAZ

Sounds Interesting: The works of Hakim Bey. He is an american anarchist, sees himself as the last pirate and invented the TAZ, the temporary autonomous zone.

i just like spam. "We sell you a completely worthless degree. MBA, MSc, PhD available. yours kindly, Adam Branch, MBA, MSc, PhD"

Anybody else sees the ridiculousness of this?

The European Constitution is going to be signed today. It then still has to be ratified by the member countries of the european union, but it is already a great step towards a more unified Europe.

The big ceremony is in Rome. Lot of people do speeches, they cite Victor Hugo and Erasmus of Rotterdam, they mention the great achievements of european politics in the last 50 years, they talk about future, war on terrorism, and a lot of other stuff. What they do not talk about is: the constitution is 400 pages thick, it weighs nearly 2kg. Who will read this? And even worse, you just cannot read it. I tried. I gave up on page 4. (And I managed to get to page 15 in Joyce's Finnegans Wake...) It is completely ununderstandable, I tried in german, english, french, portuguese. Not a word. It is all in Law-Speek.

A constitiuon is something so important, that it should be short and readable by everyone. And it should not regulate everything, it is a foundation for laws, not a substitution. But I am just a stupid phyisicist, so I may be wrong. I will just keep on being amused by the TV commentaries like "Oh, now he switched to a language we do not have a translator for..." (like Dutch and Portuguese...)

Mana Mana, didee dididee.

If you use Evolution to read your mail, do not switch on the remote spam tests. They take forever and do not really improve your spam filter results, if you have got a decent filter (like spamassassin with roules du jour...),

Something is seriously wrong. Bayern3 is playing really good music tonight...

Conservative Punk What a strange Idea. And thank god, they own the real TRUTH, they want punk music be freed from those left wing propagandists which prevent the youth of today from thinking and knowing the TRUTH. Yeah, VOTE BUSH because he is PUNK!

engrish.com not only has people with similar problems, it also offers solutions:

Women just can't say no to me. They always answer something like "Well, ehm, you know, ehm, can I call you in twenty years...?"

Stories of a science slave part 15: This saturday I got a call from somebody in our management (or whatever you want to call it). She does not understand some graphs a collegue made and therefore needs urgently his phonenumber. I offered to phone him, because I do not want to give away his number without his prior consent. This started a discussion, that if we wouldn't be so stupid (to make graphs she does not understand?), this all wouldn't be needed and bladiblabdibla. I said goodbye and hung up. I am still completely pissed about that. Not the phonecall itself. But that was the last bit to really annoy me (and a lot of people can tell you that it needs a hell of a lot to annoy me for more than 15 minutes...)

Enough about work, I will talk to my Prof tomorrow what to do...

I went out to buy a new car radio on saturday. My old one still worked, but it started skipping bits from CDs and it started falling apart. And it had too much nobs, which were to easily touched: if you wanted to turn the volume up or down, you could forget that on a slightly bad road... So went out to buy a new one. I wanted one with classic design: two big, heavy nobs which you can only turn with some force and maybe some buttons for station memory. It also should play CDs and have some way of connecting external sources as an iPod. OK. So far, so easy.

In the store, they had a display of different radios. All with price tags I could afford where complete crap: all of them had SuperHyperMega Organic Displays with a gazillion of colours, they had JKHGSD and EBBBC and FFFHGQT and UMMMPF and a lot of other fancy abbreviations. They had customisable screensavers! They had at least 5000 nobs and buttons, joysicks, movable frontplates (and I do not mean removable, I mean you turn it on and then the techno-ballet starts, bits and pieces are moved by motors, sliding in and out, turning around...) And they had an amazingly bad sound.

The ones I liked (with two nobs, one line-text only display in black and white...) started at 700 Euros. And you needed a Mercedes to put them in, everything below that would be just wrong. So I ended up buying a much too expensive Blaupunkt-Radio, which has only a black and white display, you can switch of the annoying flashy animations and it has two AUX-inputs. And it is a solid, robust Blaupunkt with a good tuner...

Another one passed away. Inês disappeared from the blogging world. I will miss your posts about Bogart, about films and about everything. Say hello to the Real Life for me and tell it, I will come around some day, maybe :-)

Yez, Yez. Se Spiegel will be afailable in Inglish as vell. Now you inglishspeakers can se best internet news-site read! And without using the fish...

That's advertisment... Simple message, we build planes that bomb britain. No naked women which distract you from the product. Yeah, they could do publicity then.

(That is where you end up when searching for a description of an old geiger counter (Frieseke & Hoepfner FH40T)...)

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Sewing machines belong to the machines I do not understand. I just spend half an hour to sew some shorts (some small hole, 5cm sewing). The fifth attempt looked good, maybe it even survives the next washing :-)

The other is a singular other and completely different. Every other is different. (In German: Der Andere ist ein singulärer Anderer und ganz anders. Jeder andere ist ganz anders., found in the WIkipedia Article about Jaques Derrida)

I just like modern philosophy. It is so straightforward and shows deep intellectual understanding of the otherness of the others. Or so...

Just finished reading the Status Report our Project has to hand in to the Comitee of Big Bosses. Once more I realize that I am only a stupid grad studend who has no clue about the big picture.

This report contains a table of the current manpower situation. It lists the FTE (Full Time Equivalent) for each sub-project and the whole project. A typical line is: Subproject 1: 7.8 FTEs, Subproject 2: 5.3 FTEs, Subproject 3: 3.0 FTEs, Total 26.7 FTEs.

Conclusion from this table: either I cannot do math (as addition of Manpower is nonlinear and synergy effects multiply everything by enormous factors) or we have 10.1 FTEs in Management. Which is too much, and besides that these 10 FTEs are not doing much (at least usefull).

Besides that I do not understand where the numbers for the sub-projects come from. In my counting I only get something like 4 to 5 FTEs for Subproject 1, which I (officially) belong to... So: is 1 PHD-Student (who gets paid for 20h a week) something like 2 FTEs (working 80h a week)?

But maybe I am just too stupid to understand management...

Aniversaries today:

• 30 years ago, the first Ikea opened it's doors in Germany
  
• 10 years ago, the first Netscape Beta Version (Link to Navigator 0.91 for Win3.1) was made public (For you Archeology Geeks out there: All Netscape Versions...)
  
• Roger Moore turns 70
  
• ...
  

When I grow up, I want a library like this...

Browsing my 1000 Lire Edition of Dante's Divina Comedia...


Per me si va ne la città dolente,
per me si va ne l'etterno dolore
per mi si va tra la perduta gente.

Giustiza mosse il mio alto fattore
fecemi la divina podestate
la somma sapïenza e 'l primo amore.


Dinanzi a me non fuor cose criate
se non etterne, e io etterna duro.
LASCIATE OGNE ESPERANZA, VOI CH'INTRATE.

Discovering the marvels of Wikipedia...

This day 512 years ago Indians discovered Columbus...

Why don't they make DVDs of good movies for a change: Moebius and La Estrategia del caracol for example...

Hallo, Hallo, Ich bin dein Ohrwurm...

Tonight we have a really kitschy Bob Ross(TM)-Sundown(TM) in Erlangen and I left my Camera in Hamburg...

15 years of re-unification of germany... And still no flowering landscapes, Mr. Kohl...