December 31, 2004
Satellite Photos: Tsnuami, before and after
News magazine SPIEGEL online has several satellite pictures of places in Indonesia: what they looked like before the tsunami, and what they look like now.
The death toll is expected to rise above 140 000.
Posted by dr at 4:23 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 30, 2004
buying computer hardware at the grocery store
I'm in Germany over Christmas and New Year's. That's not exactly a culture shock - there are not too many shocking things in this country. One oddity is that, from time to time, people get to buy PCs or some other fairly expensive IT products at their local grocery store!
Obviously, you don't want to ask the girl at the checkout for advice about these things.
But many people don't need to.
So the other day, I got up early and made it to the next discounter at 8.15am, just after they had opened. I was lucky to get an external Firewire/USB2.0 hard drive with 250 GB capacity for only 149 Euros. That's enough for 320 decent-quality movies, or 22 weeks of continuous music.
During the five minutes we were in that store, around seven other people bought the hard drive, and they had only three left. Sometimes it's a good idea to get up early!
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December 29, 2004
Thank god, Christmas is over. I'm quitting the Christian Club.
I don't care much for Christmas customs -- the event just doesn't mean a lot to me.
"That's sad", many people might say.
"It's just your Christian frame of reference that makes you say said", I will reply. Why's that?
I have never been a big believer, but until about a few years ago, I would reply when asked about my religion: I'm Christian.
That has changed for a variety of reasons. One of them: the increasingly visible fundamentalism. To me, fundamentalism is equally connected to the Christian religion as it is nowadays attributed to and exemplified with Islam. The crusades of the middle ages, the genocides in various regions of the world (e.g. Australia), the imperialism of new-born Christians in America: while all these things may take place against the 'true' spirit of Christian beliefs, they are carried out by Christians, and the Christian belief of the originators does not keep them from their deeds.
Now, I'm not saying, Christianity is bad per se. Islamic fundamentalists are expressively implerialistic, and you'll find orthodox Jews full off hatred against their neighbors.
The point I'm trying to make here is that empirically, that is, looking at what's happened in the history of mankind, the big world religions have not turned us humans into a better species overall. Religion has never helped us understand to be better people.
Instead, religion has done something else.
The religious framework conditions us to follow rules and think within a predefined, authoritarian framework. This is the system we learn to live in, for better or worse. Follow the authorities, follow the ones you admire. I believe that Prussian thinking is one of the factors in society that ultimately get teenagers to bring machine guns into high schools, palestineans to leave hidden bombs in plastic bags on a crowded bus, millions to march for Hitler or to vote for administrations that spread fear and establish the Orwellian state.
Again: it's not the Christian or any other religion that makes people commit terrible crimes. But religion trains people to use a system of rules to make decisions. Religion gets people to turn of rational thinking in order to follow rules that don't make sense in today's world anymore. Don't eat pork! Don't sleep with your girl/boyfriend! But if you do, don't use condoms! Eat fish on fridays! Be nice to the cow! Wear a headscarf.
Of course, a disclaimer is warranted. There are quite a few smart, courageous and outspoken religious thinkers. But what most liturgies convey, what the Bible and the Quran teach and what the Church dictates and the common people on the street believe couldn't be further from the philosophical debate among the intellectual elite.
So, we have established that I'm not part of that Christian club anymore. In the western world, that's a pretty difficult thing to communicate. Consider a Jew who turns up at a Christian wedding. He'll be well respected. Or, they don't give you a
hard time when you don't eat pork on the plane because you're a Muslim.
But saying: hey, I'm agnostic, or atheist is what gets you sad looks. You're the lonely infidel. Maybe I should find a good term for someone like me. Until then, I'll keep ticking this little checkbox in web forms for your profile. The one that's labelled "spiritual, but not religious".
Posted by dr at 10:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 25, 2004
Merry Merry. Happy Happy.
An anonymous girl and an anonymous boy wish you merry Christmas. Luckily, I found out where to get a cut at some point during the 20 years that went by since the picture was taken.
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December 24, 2004
Thank you, Poland!
Looks like extending the European Union to the East has already brought some return on investment. Polish deputy minister for science and information technology Marcinski showed the courage to intervene at last minute to stop software patents in Europe.
Such patents, said to stiffle innovation among open source developers and small to medium size enterprises, failed to get approval of the European Parliament earlier. However, Brussels buerocrats managed to somehow push the proposal through the system, leaving it up to the council of ministers of agriculture (!) to accept the proposal.
Poland showed some new thinking - and teaches the commission a lecture in democracy. You better think twice before out-smarting the parliament.
Posted by dr at 2:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 22, 2004
Missing public outcries, or: how to get our priorities right.
For the first time in 17 years, Brandon Moon can call himself a free man. For 17 years, the guy had been doing time at some prison in El Paso, Texas. Now, they found out that he's innocent. What's the first thing he's doing? He's praising the judicial system. When the local District Attorney apologized to him for the mistake, he gladly said, "Sir, I accept your apology." If there's something that people learn in jail, I think it must be humility.
Moon's story goes down as a little 'human interest piece' in most American newspapers. We're happy about the achieved justice, the world has gotten a bit better. What people forget is what cases like Moon's tell us about injustice. Do people get locked up just because they happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time?
Thousands have been incarcerated by the Bush administration for more than a year now in a camp on Cuba. No lawyers, no phone calls. A russian billionaire is arrested and his company broken in pieces by Putin's government, either because he failed to pay taxes, or maybe because he wanted to run for president.
A public outcry? Political consequences? An enquiry? One would expect so, but the sad truth is that nothing like that is happening. People get excited about an American president who is human enough to fancy his intern. Other people have to step down because they had been getting a golden handshake from their former employer before they took a political (well: partisan) office.
Without wanting to defend the wrongdoing that's going on there, I wonder if the public perspective isn't skewed here. We're seeing outrage only for a selection of what's really going on. If this is supposed to change, we will need more sensible journalism. We will need reporters that get their priorities right.
I felt reminded of another guys story - a geography student, let's call him G., whom I losely knew from the days when the Internet was still in its infancy, when we were both active in the German BBS (mailbox) scene. One day, his house was searched by some armed special unit, and after he turned himself in a day later, he and his girlfriend were locked up in a high-security prison as terrorism suspects. He happened to have rented an apartment in Madrid, into which one of Spains top-notch ETA terrorists had moved lateron. G. and his girlfriend spent a year in prison, had their pictures as 'terrorists' in the papers. Only then both were proven innocent in a three-day trial.
By the way - G. works as a reporter now.
Posted by dr at 11:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 20, 2004
The Trick Bike
One of the first things I learned when I moved to the U.K. recently: to get things for cheap, go to your favorite Charity Shop. These are little stores that get donated stuff. Yeah. Stuff. That means: everything. Mostly old pants, shoes, shirts and socks, or furniture that needed to leave the apartment, because it was replaced by equally cheap, crappy but well-designed IKEA furniture.
Now, the Charity Shop brought an improvement to my life. In Dublin, where I lived until recently, there was no such thing as a "good deal". Here in Edinburgh, you might get lucky. For 35 pounds, I got myself a trick bike at a store that's in a basement underneath Edinburgh's Waverley train station. They only had three small bikes left when I got there on Sunday, so I got the one shown below. Since it's a trick bike, I'm trying to have some fun in my bedroom with it.
(To go to work every day, it's probably the least comfortable bike I've ever had.)
Posted by dr at 10:49 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 19, 2004
blogito ergo sum.
Why do people blog? Why bother telling thousands of people (yes, you!) out there about my life?
First of all, there are probably not thousands of people who read this. It's an illusion to think that our lives are actually interesting. Reality TV has worn off. It's an even more common illusion to think that we all have something to tell. The sad answer is, we have very little to say to the world. That's why nobody switches on his TV at prime time to see - me. Blogging gives me and all the others the illusion to have an impact on the world.
So, are we all unimportant? In a sense, yes. There's a nice story in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker triology, that boils down to an explanation of the electric chair of the future: The Total Perspective Vortex. To kill a man, show him how small he his compared to the universe. The pope doesn't matter. Usama doesn't matter. Edison didn't make a difference to the universe. Earth will be destroyed sooner or later, so why care?
Maybe I'll answer this another time. For now it may suffice to say that a butterfly in the amazonas can create a tornado in the US Great Plains. Why not be a butterfly?
I for my part will leave notes and ideas here, notoriously replying to rhetorical questions with the wrong answer, as another way to tell myself: David, you're alive!
Posted by dr at 4:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack