Studentenpack

Sometimes I wish I could write.

Next to me in the bar two students of philosophy and german, reasoning that democracy with it's tolerance and with demonstrations being allowed, leads to all protests being in vain, as allowed protests are no protests at all. We need a totalitarian system to be able to really protest and to articulate discontent. From then on it went somehow downhill, occasional highlights were the insight that professors are not really the scholars of childish imagination but real people who do spend time away from books and sometimes do say stupid things and the insight that most students try to construct their biographies to appear as some kind of intellectual (the insight went not as far as to self-awareness).

A table further away a group of teachers, discussing everything. From the difference between canoos and kayaks, passing the geography of Erlangen to who has the orange CD. Everybody very convinced, very intellectual, very distinguished.

The third table was a frustrated physicist and his (new) girlfriend, those two were a bit boring compared to the other two tables, just like any new geek couple they were just awkwardly trying to be romantic.

Any decent writer would make a whole book out of this personnel. My Inaptitude just allows this blog post...

Something positive

Originally I wanted to post my thoughts that we are currently slippering into a new Weimar Republic, the large political parties losing ground, small come up, economic crisis is there, political turmoil will follow etc.

Originally I wanted to rant about the german internet censor law, also something which Weimar was good at, creating stupid laws which restrict civil rights and will backfire soon; and I wanted write about a letter that I am writing to our regional deputee in parliament.

But something positive would also be nice: it's amazing how much better a document looks if you TeX it! Having to work everyday with word and framemaker, seeing a TeX document after some time is really an enlightenment. It's so much better to read, it is so much better to look at! Linux Libertine is a nice font and LaTeX rules! (And yes, the letter I wrote contains footnotes)

Incompetnce

Yesterday the german Bundestag passed a law which requires internet providers to block access to sites depicting child pornography. Which sounds like a good thing to do, child pornography is bad. But what it really shows is the inability of our politicians to handle things. During the last four years they have not done a single thing which would go the roots of a problem. Child Pornography is solved just by putting the blinds on the intarwebs. School shootings will be solved by prohibiting paint ball and computer games. Economic crisis will be solved by paying huge amounts of money to banks which proved not being able to handle money. Exercise: find more examples of this.

Germany is governed now by a coalition of CDU and SPD, conservatives and social democrats. Opposition is liberal FDP and greens. None of them, neither government nor opposition showed any competence at all. When watching any discussion, they showed a complete ignorance of the facts, couldn't even talk well. So, why are they there? Is there nobody left in politics? Where did all the competent people go? Industry? Emigrated? Abducted by aliens?

Why did we even vote for them? Just out of habit? Lack of alternatives? Probably the latter...

So, join a party? Which? Will it make a difference? Or just accept that the world is going downhill and turn into an egotist collecting riches and let rome burn? Current mood: the latter. Let it burn, maybe in 2000 years it's a tourist attraction. I'll go looking for a lyra...

Prostitution

I have just signed up with adsense so I can get rich with this blog. Click on all ads. Read it often. Search often. Make me an internet millionaire!

(Google has your data anyway, so why hide?)

The future

If you ever wanted to do minority report gesture control and own a mac: this is your first step.

I use for movements to the left the script tell application "System Events" to keystroke (ASCII character 28) using command down to switch to the workplace to the left. To the right use ASCII char 29. Be sure to set the thresholds right for the motion detection, else it drives you crazy...

Too old for that shit

Just returned from a night out. It started with a bunch of old physicists getting drunk, chatting about cars, computers and ye goode ole times at uni(TM). So far, so good. At about 1AM we left the bar and entered a club, tonight a special appearance by Bukovina Club - remixed music from the balkans.

I started listening to that kind of music 10 years ago, remembering one of the best concerts of my life, Emir Kusturica live at a castle in portugal. This music was cool till about a year ago when it starting to get popular. So tonight, when we entered the scene, the music was blasting too loud for the speakers, only leaving a frequency range tolerable for people who have blasted away their ear-drums by mp3 players injecting the best of charts into their ears at a volume which silences a jackhammer.

The dancefloor was filled with drunken kids whose motoric abilities were only topped by their self-esteem and their conviction of being the future elite of germany, just because they made it to a provincial university. Those frustrated youths were so indulged into their egocentric movements that every movement on the dancefloor was interpreted as an attack, a sexual assault or at least an aggressive gesture. This only was interrupted by couples who seemed to have no place to go to be in private and needed to fiddle around on the dancefloor, dancing with a vulgarity which you cannot find in a peep show.

Probaly I have to find some new kind of music which is still so uncool that I can enjoy it. Or maybe I am just getting to old for that shit and should stay at home and get drunk on my own.

Style not speed. Elegance not exertion.

Something we should achieve. Curtesy of the tweed cycling club...

A huge part...

The largest part of the web users in germany won't be affected by the child-pornography-blockers wich will be installed. So the official statement, why we should have it, even if it is a step into the direction of censorship, providing at least the possibility to block other websites.

The largest part of people will not be affected by the online searches the police is allowed to perform now on any computer without notification. So the official statement, why we should have it even if it is a step into the direction of a surveillance state.

The largest part of people will not be affected by raster-searches,...

It's only about Schadbären and Potential Evildoers. The rhetorics used for things like that is a very interesting thing, as is the logic and the numbers.

Blocking child-porn is a very good thing, people producing shit like this should be tarred and featherd, hung and quartered. But the reaction to this (and most other threads on having a civilised society) is mostly ridiculous and can be mis-used for a lot of things. I don't think it will be misused, I am just annoyed that politicians think we are dumb and throw their stupid rhethorics at us which just turns out to be hot air in the best case or completely wrong and misleading bullsh*t in the worst.

Random illumination of the week

Successes are done by the team, Failures are done by the individual.

Some things are the same in University and Industry...