Spam

I turned on word verification as I got fed up with spam. Sorry if making comments is getting a bit more cumbersome, but I hope you still keep on commenting.

Books...

Today I finally got my photo-books printed from photos I put up on flickr. Well. The photos have not been of very high resolution, but they look much worse printed. The colours are a bit too dark and they are not as homogenious as they should be (especially skies look weird, sometimes you see stripes). Printing them out myself and giving them to a book binder would have produced a better result and been cheaper... So, I am not really convinced, but your milage may vary.

Intelligent Design

Day No. 1:

And the Lord God said, “Let there be light,” and lo, there was light. But then the Lord God said, “Wait, what if I make it a sort of rosy, sunset-at-the-beach, filtered half-light, so that everything else I design will look younger?”

“I’m loving that,” said Buddha. “It’s new.”

“You should design a restaurant,” added Allah.

--- Found in The New Yorker

Sweden

Swedish Girls
Originally uploaded by perreira.

Pictures from this weekend's trip to Lund and Malmö...

Visited Countries...

create your own visited countries map

Off for the Weekend...

I would like to live in Sweden
When my work is done
Where the snow lies crisp and even
'Neath the midnight sun
Safe and clean and green and modern
Bright and breezy - free and easy
Sweden - Sweden - Sweden - In Sweden
I am gonna live in Sweden
Please don't ask me why
For if I were to give a reason
It would be a lie
Tall and strong and blonde and blue-eyed
Pure and healthy, very wealthy
I'll grow wings and fly to Sweden
When my time is come
Then at last my eyes shall see them
Heroes every one
Ingmar Bergman
Henrik Ibsen
Karin Larrson
Nina Persson


--- Divine Comedy, Sweden

Smiling Verboten

As of November smiling will be officially verboten in Germany. Everybody caught smiling in public will be shot immedeately. Laughing has been already frowned upon for years and will now be prosecuted with utmost force. Jokes have been banned.

Geee. I just love this country.

Whales Weep Not!

They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.

All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of the sea!

And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep of the sea

as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale's fathomless body.

And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking the wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and forth,
keep passing archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.
And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.

And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves in a ring
when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood
and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat
encircling their huddled monsters of love.
and all this happiness in the sea, in the salt
where God is also love, but without words:
and Aphrodite is the wife of whales
most happy, happy she!

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.


--- D.H. Lawrence

Just saw Star Trek IV - The Greenpeace Voyage

Bad Science

[...] the humanities graduate journalists' parody of science, for which we now have all the ingredients: science is about groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures. They are detached from reality: they do work that is either wacky, or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory and, most ridiculously, "hard to understand".

More here. (via 3quarksdaily)

Attack of the Killer Elevator

Cameras

My collection of old cameras keeps on growing...

Lomo Lubitel 2

Build by Lomo (Leningradskoye Optiko Mechanichesckoye Obyedineni) from 1955 to 1980. A copy of a Voigtländer Brilliant. Format 6x6 cm (aka 120). Astonishingly good for a cheap russian copied camera.

Minox B

Build from 1958 to 1972 by Minox GmbH in Wetzlar. Format 8x11 mm, integrated CdS meter. THE spy camera.

Zorki 1b

Russian copy of a Leica II with an Industar-22 lens (50mm, f3.5, interchangable, M39). Build from 1948 to 1956 (mine is one of the earlier variants as it has still the old Leica times of 1/20, 1/30, 1/40...)

Random Picture

Cochon Bourgois

Just returned from a weekend trip to Budapest, on my way to my second flat in Hamburg, short stop in Erlangen to take a diving lesson (which unfortunately is at the same time as my riding lesson), finding in my letter box my Lufthansa bonus-miles card aside of the status of my stock depot...

"I live above my means but below my standards" -- Oscar Wilde (Not sure, but he would have said something like this...)

Science and Media

A portuguese newspaper is starting a program to get scientist making an internship in their offices to promote the communication of science to the public. Which is a nice idea. This is what they say why it does not work nicely now:


A relativa pobreza da comunicação e divulgação da ciência realizada pela comunidade científica e pelas instituições de ciência deve-se em grande parte a um desconhecimento por parte destes profissionais das rotinas, critérios e cultura dos media. Este desconhecimento é gerador de desconfiança, fechamento ou mesmo de mal-entendidos e conflitos que poderiam desaparecer através de um maior contacto entre a comunidade científica e a comunidade dos media.


Translated (badly, but hopefully understandable...):

The relative weakness of communication and divulgation of science done by the scientific community and their institutions is caused to a huge part by a lack of knowledge on the side of these professionals about the routines, criterions and the actual culture of media. This lack of knowledge generates distrust, closedness or even misunderstandings and conflicts which could disappear if a better contact between the scientific community and the media community is established.


I am one of the first to rant about the incompetence of scientist to promote their works. There is nothing worse than physicists trying to do publicity about their own work; most of the time the result is boring people to a slow and horrible death. And most of the time there is not even a conscience of having to transmit science to the public (which is dumb and won't understand it anyway...)

But to just blame it on the scientist I think is also wrong. A lot of journalists have passed through the sacred corridors of our physics institute. They have asked questions. They filmed. They did not even try to understand the stuff people tried to explain them. They filmed people in lab coats (nobody actually ever wears them in a phyics institute, there is no need...) standing in front of complicated machinery with lots of Blinkenlights (which has been specially constructed for this filming and serves no purpose whatsoever). They have absolutely no idea how science works.

So, what I would propose is an exchange instead of an internship... Get scientists into the newspapers and get journalists into a university (a science faculty to be precise, as most of them have studied something or other). The only problem: find a university actually crazy enough to do this and find journalists crazy enough to do a thing like this.

Poetry

Reading a book of poems from Al Andalus (translated into german of course, as unfortunately I do neither speak arabian nor mozarabian nor hebrew...). A time and a place I would like to have been. The names alone sound very poetic: There is Ḥafṣa bint al-Ḥâdjj al Rukûniyya, there's Abû Bakr Yaḥyà bin Aḥmad ibn Baqî al Qurṭubî, there's Shemu'el ben Yosef ha Lewi Ibn Nagrella (who wrote the poem below...) to name but a few...


Mein Freund, nur Schlaf sind alle deine Jahre,
das Gute wie das Üble nur ein Traum.
Verschließ davor die Augen und die Ohren!
Ermanne dich! Es gebe Gott dir Kraft!
Laß ruhn, was dunkel ist in deinem Leben,
in ihm, der alle Dunkelheit versteht!
Schenk ein den edlen Wein, zu süßer Speise
aus schöner Frauenhand mir dargereicht,
ein Wein, so alt wie Adam, doch so jung
wie frisch gepresst aus Noahs erster Rebe!
Sein Duft ist wie der Duft von Zimt und Myrrhe,
sein Anblick Korall un lautres Gold,
wie Wein, den David reine Königinnen
kredenzten oder süße Konkubinen,
Als man den Wein in dunkle Krüge füllte,
erfüllte helles Seitenspiel den Raum.
Jerimoth sang: "So sei er eingelagert,
im Siegelfaß verschlossen aufbewahrt
dem, der mit weiser Hand den Kelch ergreift
und Rebensaft mit reinem Herzen trinkt;
dem, der den Spruch des Predigers befolgt
und nach dem Tod die Rechenschaft bedenkt."


--- Shemu'el ben Yosef ha Lewi Ibn Nagrella

Random Picture

Des Nouvelles du Bon Dieu

Chêre Écrivain,

why are all the characters in The Story based on such a small number of prototypes? Why do all dialogues contain so few content? Why does nobody actually communicate with each other? Why are the individual storys so badly written? Is consistency asked too much of a character?

Overall, I know much better writers than You. Try harder next time.

A disappointed character.

If it only be warmer...

Found this If they only would be situated in somewhere warmer climates... (and would have a language which actually one could have the hope to learn some day)

News

Interesting to see the news coverage about the portuguese forest fires. They appear here in germany just before the sports news, but still with pictures and videos, even interviews with people who lost everything. That's more than the hunger catastrophes in Mali and elswhere in the Sahel get...

They mention numbers (for example that in Pampilhosa da Serra 30.000 hectars out of 39.000 hectars in total burned down), they mention that it is really dry (the driest year since 1945), they mention that a lot of these fires are caused by people (either voluntarily or by carelessness). What they fail to mention is: most of portuguese forests is eucalyptus, planted there, not being a native tree of the region. Which grows really fast and is therefore the favourite tree for paper industry. But it also burns. Really fast. It's reproduction is based on burning down the forest.

If it isn't eucalyptus, then there is pines, also not really a native tree, but dominant before the eucalyptus, since all the oaks went to the bottom of the atlantic in form of ships. Which also burn quite good (the pines, not the oaks on the bottom of the sea, of course). This combined with a lack of forest care, ignorant politicians, underpaid fireman with not enough equipment, people who snip their burning cigarettes out of the car window while driving through dry woods etc. leads to the country burning down every year.

Of course this is a simplistic view. But it is already more complex than the "fires caused by extreme dryness" which they try to sell in the news...

And, as germany right now is blessed by papal visits and aproaching a new election, we have other things to care about than a country just next door burning down, not to speak of millions of people dying of hunger in the Sahel.

[Update] Interesting numbers: Numbers of planes equipped for putting out fires: France 11, Greece 10, Italy 16, Portugal 0 (yes, that's a zero). Instead of buying them from Canadair (which are kind of monopolists...), a portuguese minister wants europe to develop it's own. Yeah. So spent billions of euros and a couple of years to get an all european one instead of extinguishing fires with some foreign planes.

BTW: The fires have now reached the outskirts of Coimbra...

[Update 2] A Canadair Bombardier 415 Firefighting plane costs something like 35 Million Canadian Dollars... Development took three years from program start to first delivery. Make your own figures about developping a european version (involving a burocracy of european dimensions instead of just the Bombardier R&D Department).

Bobby Henderson is the Prophet. Ramen.