From A To Ced

It's incredible how much power Google acquired over the last few years. After a conversation over lunch here at the company I felt the need to write down my thoughts.
We were talking about how much we rely on its search functionality: we use it so much, it basically is our entrance portal into the web. We wondered what would happen if suddenly Google would charge for every search run? Would the Google addicted revolt? Or would we simply switch to another search engine, as has happened before.

Another interesting fact is that I stopped using bookmarks and switched to remembering keywords instead. This is very efficient, just type in the appropriate keywords in the Firefox address bar and Google's I'm Feeling Lucky-functionality will take you to the correct website most of the time.

At the lunch table we concluded that humankind, at least the internet-centric population, makes an important neurological step: instead of remembering the details, we are remembering the keywords. Our brain is filled with an index to the knowledge out there. This enables our brain to enlarge it's capacity by offloading its content to the collective knowledge-base and thus relieving it from the burden of keeping everything in memory. A part of the brain changes from a memory machine to an index machine. This is quite remarkable and I'm very curious about how the brain and society will adapt to this change in the future.

Überall auf der Welt spriessen sie aus dem Boden, die Piratenparteien. Als Ursprung der Bewegung fungiert die Piratpartiet aus Schweden. Diese haben sich folgende Kernthemen auf die Fahne geschrieben, welche den gleichnamigen Parteien in anderen Ländern als Vorlage dienen.

• Bürgerrechte und persönliche Freiheit
• Befreit unsere Kultur: Urheberrechtsreform
• Wie Patente und private Monopole die Gesellschaft schädigen

Das originale Programm der Schweden ist hier in einer deutschen Übersetzung einsehbar.

Die schwedischen Piraten hatten bereits im Juni dieses Jahres erfolg, sie erhielten genug Stimmen, um ein Pirat in das europäische Parlament zu entsenden. Auch die deutschen sind Vorreiter, letzten Sonntag erreichten sie ein gutes Ergebnis von 2% der Wählerstimmen aus dem Stand.

Die Piratenbewegung ist international, Politik wird jedoch auf nationaler Ebene betrieben. Darum ist es kein Wunder, dass auch die Schweiz seit diesem Sommer ihre Piratenpartei erhalten hat: Ich bin seit 4 Monaten mit der internationalen Piratenbewegung verbandelt. Als Teil des Gründungs-Teams habe ich versucht, eine erfolgreichen Start der Piratenpartei Schweiz zu ermöglichen. Seither habe ich in verschiedenen Funktionen meinen Teil dazu beigetragen, dass wir bereits rund 2.5 Monate nach der Gründung ein eigenes Parteiprogramm sowie Merchandising-Material wie Flyer, Stickers, Buttons und T-Shirts zur Verfügung stellen können. Bereits sind wir schweizweit über 450 Mitglieder und der politische Charakter der Partei beginnt sich zu formen.
Auch hierzu rege ich die Diskussion an, wie verhalten sich Piratenpolitiker bei einer allfälligen Wahl in ein kommunales oder sogar nationales Parlament? Die Diskussionen hierzu werden in unserem Forum rege geführt.

Und nun wird also am Sonntag in Luxembourg auch eine Piratenpartei gegründet. Ihre Webseite piratepartei.lu ist seit einigen Tagen online. Vielleicht mag jemand vorbeischauen?

It's spring! This means lots of reproduction going on (unfortunately not currently for me, as I am single once more.. but who knows what the future brings). If you are bored at work or suffering from insomnia at night, you can always watch the fruits of the reproductive efforts made by a pair of kestrels. The Bildungszentrum BZM in Muttenz, Switerland set up some high quality video feeds that even include night-vision!
The kestrels inhabit the wooden box since March 31th. Enjoy: http://www.turmfalke.ch/live_cam.htm

As a tester I often engange in the beautiful art of drawing state transition diagrams. Drawing them on paper is a fast way to manifest your thoughts, but for long-term storage a digital format is more suitable. When I browsed my mind, Visio immediately came to be the optimal solution. It is a general purpose drawing software that supports flowcharts, UML diagrams and a multitude of other visualization techniques. Unfortunately, my company does not have a license for that great tool, which forced me to look for an open-source alternative. I found Dia, which is actually designed to be run on Linux under Gnome. Luckily there's a Windows port and even an installer package. Dia is not high-end, but serves basic purpose very, very well.

Yeah, you have read correctly. In the current issue of New Scientist I picked up the link to http://fold.it/, a new approach to solving the mystery of how proteins are folded. Rather than using raw computer processing power, this project harnesses the "idle" brains of computer users all over the world. The game is available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux (!). I am currently downloading the software and hope to be able to twist and turn some protein chains on my Ubuntu system very soon. Have fun!

Charel is on tour, so I fill the gap with a funny video related to todays absolutely big head-lines.
Headlines: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24070088-13762,00.html
Video: http://www.atom.com/funny_videos/made_meat/

This was a strange day. The weather here in basel was bizarre; it was quite cloudy in the morning, changing into a terrific summer day in the afternoon. After I have finished my work at the company I made a visit to the Universitätsbibliothek to return an overdue book and then decided to sit on a bench just at the "Riviera", meaning at the River Rhine. I managed to capture the remaining sunrays until vast dark clouds began to appear the east end of the sky. While sitting there I listened to my latest musical enlightenment, the "Sagas" album by one of my favorite bands, "Equilibrium". The german band plays some sort of Pagan Metal interspersed with instruments like pan flute, acoustic guitar and - on this album - many natural sound samples. The sound of birds, waves, tree leaves and others help this album to become a wonderful, pleasant journey into another world. Far, far away from the concrete appearance of the Basel buildings. I was sitting there and enjoying the sun glittering in the rhine while listening to the beautiful score produce by the masterminds from Equilibrium. After weeks of struggling with life and its implications I experienced a moment of total happiness; sorrow and pain were just washed away from my soul by the strong and cool wind at the riverside.
I can end this day with a broad smile on my face and want to share that little piece of fullfillment with you guys.

Check it out! Equilbrium homepage ! Equilibrium myspace
Equilibrium finally managed to convert myself into a complete, obediant and loyal fan of their soulful music.

Link: http://goosh.org/

Goosh is an unofficial web page that accesses Google via its API and offers a Unix-shell-like interface to the search engine.What an excellent idea! Try changing the directory to wiki (cd wiki), searching and going back to Google (cd ..).

I just came across an interesting fact. James Lind, a surgeon's mate in the Royal Navy concurred the first clinical trial in the history of science. He aimed to find a treatment for scurvy in 1753. Scurvy is the result of a diet lacking ascorbate (vitamin C), frequently a feature of long trips on the sea. Onboard, it mostly consisted of salt meat and zwieback.

You find excerpts of his pioneering study here. Also, a video documentary from BBC television is available.

I never leave my flat without my precious iRiver portable music player. Being able to listen to some music whenever I want is essential for my well-being. Since there is only 1 GB of space on the player, the albums had been changing quite a lot. But surprisingly, for a few months now, I have not uploaded anything. I liked the music so much that I never felt the need for changing anything. It was just the right combination of different styles and degrees of heaviness. Just yesterday though, I thought some fresh tunes would be nice, and that is the reason I decided to post these - to say it in darwinistic terms - successful albums here. Must be good music after all! Here we go:

• Sonata Arctica - Unia Very melodic and symphonic metal, not really heavy. The lyrics are interesting and the singer's voice is beautiful to listen to.
• Subway to Sally - Bastard The newest release by the german band StS. Melancholic medieval metal. This work is not as heavy as earlier stuff by Subway, a lot of acoustic guitars and different other instruments.
• Subway to Sally - Nord Nord Ost This one came out just before 'Bastard' and contains some catchy songs. "Sieben" is also played quite a lot at goth parties.
• Atreyu - Lead sails paper anchor Metal or even rock, so soft and slow that I would recommend this even to people who do not listen to metal usually.
• Blutengel - Seelenschmerz Culty german dark electronic music. The band splits EBM lovers in two parts, either you love or hate it. Anyway it's very stereotypical music, but perfectly made.
• Equilibrium - Turis Fratyr Now we're getting to faster stuff. Pagan metal from Germany with German texts. I love the atmosphere this album creates. When I close my eyes, I almost think I'm in the forest, riding a horse, fighting some enemies..
• Soilwork - Stabbing The Drama Melodic death metal from Sweden. I absolutely dig the vocalist's ability to modulate his screams to the rhythm of the songs. Incredibly good stuff.
• Ektomorf - Outcast Hungarian thrash metal! Very heavy and aggresive. For those hateful moments...
• One Man Army & The Undead Quartet - Error in Evolution Swedish death metal band. You have to see them live to really feel the vibes, but the album is anyway a good representation. Sick lyrics, sick music.
• VA - Psionic Groove A fantastic compilation of new psychedelic trance tracks. I am absolutely in love with the last track, High Paradise by 1200 Micrograms. I also attached a youtube video from a festival featuring this track.

As the English version of Scienceblogs was highly successfull, a deal was struck with Hubert Burda Media in Germany to host a similar portal for scientists, but of course in German! Great news! I'd always wanted to recommend Scienceblogs to people without any scientific education, but held back because of language constraints. Now I can recommend Scienceblogs.de! There are already 12 bloggers who have permanently moved their science and science-related blogs to their new home; and hopefully this website will see a similar growth as its English pendant. From 12 to 70 bloggers in 2 years is remarkable.

One week ago I was attending a party in Liestal at the modus club. It was called "Hotzenplotz ir Räuberhöhli", featuring mainly DarkPsy-artists. DarkPsy is subgenre of psychedelic trance, it's faster, harder, darker and more psychedelic. And it really was an explosion of strange sounds and mind-shattering beats combined with a beautiful decoration of the club. Check out the pics made by Manu on her website. If you look carefully, you will even spot me in some pictures.. Well hidden!

In other news, here are my current favorite webradio stations I listen to while writing my master thesis or at least trying to:

• Electo-Radio.ch (tune in): A nice selection of the newest and freshest electrohouse club tracks, keeps me in a good mood
• Bassdrive (tune in): Kickass drum & bass tunes directly broadcasted from Chicago, helps me overcoming the after-lunch dizziness
• HBR1 I.D.M. Tranceponder (tune in): Psychedelic and progressive trance without interruption, good for late afternoons and getting ready for partying
• Soma.fm Illinois Street Lounge (tune in): A great station to disturb your coworkers. If you like the music, you are an exception :-)
• Triplag (tune in): For your shamanic moments.. A DarkPsy-station that will fuck up your brain. Helps me flying away after a day in the lab!

As the announcement on PZ Myers' blog, Pharyngula, states, the recordings of the Beyond Belief 2: Enlightenment 2.0 conference on religion, culture clash and science are online! I have not started watching them, but for sure I will enjoy all the sessions in the following weeks.

To give you a quick description, I'll quote their website:

The aim of Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0 is to invite participants
to undertake together an ongoing reconnaissance of Enlightenment ideas
in the light of advances in primarily cognitive neurosciences,
evolutionary biology, physics etc. though not by any means scanting
history, philosophy, law. The word reconnaissance is used advisedly.
Although reconnaissance now usually means a military
information-gathering exercise, the preference is for original root -
recognoscere - which roughly suggests 'to get to know again'. The hope
is to explore our current sense of Reason, Truth, Belief, Human Nature,
Progress, Virtue and the Good Life in this light. It could be argued
that the Enlightenment was not quite the disaster that some critics
have suggested, and that version 2.0, and subsequent releases, could
conceivably be a dynamic improvement if we set our minds to it, guided
by that eudaemonic impulse.

As I went out walking this fall afternoon,
I heard a wisper wispering.
I heard a wisper wispering,
Upon this fine fall day...

As I went out walking this fall afternoon,
I heard a laugh a'laughing.
I heard a laugh a'laughing,
Upon this fine fall day...

I heard this wisper and I wondered,
I heard this laugh and then I knew.
The time is getting near my friends,
The time that I hold dear my friends,
The veil is getting thin my friends,
And strange things will pass through.

(by: Unknown)

I wish everyone a pleasant Samhain's eve. Take a minute to think about the beautiful balance between life and death.