10.27.06
Posted in Rants at 1:27 am by thomas
Whenever somebody says “We can’t leave Iraq immediately!”, the person has to immediately present a realistic plan on whatever else they want to do with the country.
The plan will have to follow these guidelines:
- Use no more troops than the US can afford (that’s 200,000 without a draft)
- Don’t rely on other mythical sources of cannon fodder (Nato, Russia, China, Martians)
- Do not exceed our already overcharged spending limits (maybe another trillion dollars between friends)
- Do not use magical thinking (”The Syrians will fix it!”, “Iraq has 200,000 trained policemen”, “The oil will pay for it”, “Turkey will be ok with this”)
- Define success of your plan in less than ten words
Any takers?
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10.23.06
Posted in Japan, Modern Life at 11:51 pm by thomas
A good friend of mine, Markuz Wernli Saitô, is currently working on a monumental art project called Momentarium.
Over a period of eight weeks Markuz is inviting people in the streets of Kyoto in Japan to become a part of a daily, one-hour art performance. He is following a strict schedule for these performances, so you can plan ahead and visit him at one of the scheduled spots should you be in Kyoto over the next few weeks.
The performances are quirky and thought provoking and you can follow along on his website where he is posting a daily video. He has also been featured in this YouTube video with one of his weekly public tea ceremonies – this one was held in the Kyoto train station.
The videos range from not-much-going-on to very interesting. Especially in the later ones Markuz has found his stride and he has quite a lot of meaningful interactions with random pedestrians around him who visibly slow down, stop and start to think about where they are and what is going on. Their daily lifes have been interupted for a moment of reflection, and they are now a part of what Markuz is doing.
This is a lesson that we can all learn, that by following our daily routine and blindly running from home to work and back, we are actually losing a part of our lifes to pointless activity. Sometimes it’s good to slow down, sit down, relax and reflect.
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Posted in Rants at 1:49 am by thomas
If you’ve been reading some of my previous rants you already know my opinion about the American-made disaster that the war in Iraq has become. It took the leading class in Washington a lot longer than I would have thought, but it seems the dimensions of this clusterfuck are now slowly sinking into the American consciousness.
And since we have elections coming up, we are now hearing more and more shrill and desperate attempts in delaying the inevitable: Accepting the naked truth.
The Republican administration under Bush has systematically destroyed all the easy ways out of this situation and all the options that are left are horrible in their consequences.
Newsflash: There are no winners in this war, and the Americans are not even in the finals.
Naked Truth:
- Sometime, rather sooner then later, the US troops will leave Iraq. This is inevitable since a draft is near impossible to push through in the current political climate in the US. Without a draft, there are not enough troops to even just keep the lights on in Baghdad. In addition, everybody – literally everybody – in Iraq wants the US troops to leave immediately. There is nothing the US can do about this fact, other than actually leaving.
- The US troops will leave as fast as they can. While there is a lot of talk about
“phased withdrawal”, once the first troops leave, it will be impossible to keep the rest of the troops supplied and safe. So they have to leave faster. And faster.
- Nobody can partition the country other than the Iraqis themselves. American politicians and the chattering idiot-journalists on cable news talk about partitioning a country. To enforce such a partitioning would need more troops than all of Nato could supply if they even would dream of such a thing. The Americans can’t do it by themselves – see my remarks above about the lights in Baghdad.
What pisses me off again and again is the pure racism that I can hear in what American politicians and journalists say about the people of Iraq and their future. It is their country and their future and they don’t need some American deskjockeys to tell them what to do with their lifes. Isn’t it enough what has been done to the Iraqis already?
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10.16.06
Posted in Modern Life at 10:21 pm by thomas
PC World is featuring a great article that lists a lot of the vintage computer TV ads that can be found on YouTube.
It’s amazing how far we’ve come in the last 25 years. We went all the way from computers barely able to add a few numbers and show text in black and white to the amazing machines we all own nowadays that each can do more than the best computers available to researchers only twenty years ago.
What’s interesting is how often these ads tried to sell the educational value by showing home-assignemnt-like projects that frankly were never done like this in real life. Children did learn a lot on these computers, but almost never in the way the grown-ups thought it would work.
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10.15.06
Posted in Media, Modern Life at 1:50 pm by thomas
The Dove Real Beauty campaign has been around for a few months and it’s probably one of the best things a company involved in the beauty industry has ever done on TV and in print.
They have this really amazing Flash movie on their site where a normal-looking woman is being transformed into one of those poster girls whose faces are pure artificial constructs. It’s on their homepage or you can get to the Flash movie directly here.
Another example is the FluidEffect site (click through to the portfolio), where there is a small “Before” button next the beauty shots of celebrities and you can directly compare the before/after of the massive Photoshop treatment all these photos get nowadays.
Here’s another portfolio where you can rollover to see the magical disappearance of man-boobs and a beer belly on some manly dude and refurbished bikini lines on a female model.
And here’s one more example from Sweden with step-by-step explanations of all the details in a typical glamour shot.
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Posted in Good Stuff at 12:09 am by thomas
This is one of the best things I’ve seen in a while on the web: Kiva.org
This site creates opportunities for everybody to become involved in creating a better world. Small business owners from all over the world apply for microloans through local loan agencies who then pass this information on to Kiva.org.
Just go to their site and look at the list of businesses in need of comparatively small amounts of money which will allow them to take that next step and grow. What makes this such an attractive concept is that you see the person who will receive the money and once the loan is provided to the business, the local loan agency provides regular updates about the status of the business. You can literally see how much your money will change somebody’s life.
With just $25 you can become part of the solution. Go do it now.
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10.14.06
Posted in Navel Gazing at 11:10 pm by thomas
Over the last two years I’ve been fighting a long, sad struggle against comment spammers on this site. I’ve tried filters, which worked for a while, but filters have to be updated all the time to keep them effective. And thanks to a never fully understood misconfiguration I actually managed to delete all old comments on the site about one year ago.
After that I shut down comments alltogether. That was very unsatisfactory, because even with the low volume of posts and comments, it was still nice to hear from my readers from time to time.
Now that I’ve switched to WordPress I thought I give it another try. The comments were open for less than a week before the first spam started arriving again. But this time I’m going to not give up to a bunch of fuckers who destroy online communities for profit.
Check out the new and improved commenting interface with cute-o-matic (TM) spam filtering! I saw something very similiar on a site a while ago (can’t remember where…) and I liked the idea a lot, so I rolled my own version. It should be 100% effective against automatic spam robots that are trolling the site.
Let the commenting begin!
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10.12.06
Posted in Good Stuff at 1:31 am by thomas
Why not? 
This is your chance to make 2006 the year you write your first novel! Go and check out http://www.nanowrimo.org, because November is National Novel Writing Month!
I did it in 2004 and had a finished novel on my desk by the end of the year. Tried again in 2005 and got stuck about halfway through, but I’ll probably try again this year and who knows? Maybe I can put together a second novel, which seems to be the real challenge as far as I can tell…
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10.09.06
Posted in Science at 1:24 am by thomas
In one of those happy googling accidents I stumbled over this transcript of a panel discussion: Great Terraforming Debate
Several distinguished planetary scientist and two of my favorite science fiction authors, Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson, are discussing the question: Are we morally and ethically allowed to terraform another planet?
It’s an interesting dilemma to even figure out the basis of this discussion – if we can’t prove beyond doubt if there is or isn’t life on Mars, can we make any kind of decision?
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10.03.06
Posted in Photography at 1:00 am by thomas
We’ve been on a road trip a few weeks ago all across Nevada along Highway 50, and then on down into Utah and to Las Vegas.
Here’s a shot just off the Great Basin Highway near Ely in eastern Nevada. I had my Kodak Medalist along for the ride, but took only about two rolls worth of pictures with it. This is one of the better ones:
Click for a large version, shot on Ilford Delta 100 Professional.
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