Global Playboys.net

The standard calculator of Mac OSX might be right for my granny, but not for a real techie. Recently I was asked how to convert 50 billion byte to MB. Usually I would enter 10^9/1024^2. Try to punch this into the default calculator. No way.

PEMDAS from Donkey Entertainment is more useful.

I believe that we have come this far by the skin of our teeth. That we always make it just by the skin of our teeth, but that we will always make it. Survive. Endure. I believe that this hairless embryo with the aching, oversize brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes will endure. Will endure longer than his home planet — will spread out to the stars and beyond, carrying with him his honesty and his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage and his noble essential decency.

“This I believe with all my heart.”

Robert A. Heinlein wrote this item in 1952. His wife, Virginia Heinlein, chose to read it when she accepted NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal on October 6, 1988, on the Grand Master’s behalf (it was a posthumous award).

Mrs. Heinlein received a standing ovation.

Read the full poem.

I picked up this song from the last chaosradio podcast and really felt the need to spread it. The instrumental version was released back in 1995 and was featured on the Mission Impossible soundtrack. Recently it was remixed by a German DJ called Tocadisco. Brilliant tunes, brilliant lyrics. Love it.

No government is a way of life.
No government means to trust your friends.
I know who I am and you know who you are. [...]

There’d be no government,
there’d be no government.
People would do what they wanted,
and there’d be no government. [...]

No government is an easy time.
No government is an exciting life.
We’d work for ourselves,
and we’d love for ourselves,
and for no government.

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I just finished reading a really great book, you probably haven’t heard about yet. It’s by Timothy Brook and deals with the upcoming issue of globalization and all its various aspects.

As a liberal supporter of globalization you will love this book because it shows how adventurous souls from all around the world came together and exchanged goods and ideas. My favourite part is where the VOC (the Dutch East India Company) keeps hijacking Portuguese ships because they interfere with global trade.

Order it at amazon.com

If you should ever need some nice pictures for a project and don’t wanna worry about licensing, have a look at the Flickr Commons. Especially the ones from the Library of Congress. Nice stuff. I really hope they put everything on flickr soon.

Today I tried to remove all my data from the various google services I had been using over the last couple years and leave the data monster. Biggest effort was to delete all the contacts in my address book. There were around 900 and you can only delete 20 at a time. I also found google docs from like 2 years ago. Really scary. My web history showed around 1500 search querys a month for the last year. I don’t like being profiled like that.

From now on I keep whatever I can on my own server. That inclueds webhosting, email, bookmarks and openid. Works better than expected so far and gives you lots of flexibility. The only thing I couldn’t substitute so far is google reader. There is an opensource rss reader, you can install on your server, but it’s not really what I’m looking for. For the moment I’m at bloglines, which I find pretty nice.

I’m not sure if the whole thing was worth the effort, but if things on the internet continue to move in the direction we’re moving now, it’s gonna be nasty.

I encourage everyone to make a similar move and try to reduce it’s data footprint. Here are some practical advises:

• Searching: use http://scroogle.org. You get the same results as from google, but without the spying. They also have a SSL-Version at https://ssl.scroogle.org/. Very handy.

• RSS Reader: This was my main issue, why I decided to stick with google for such a long time. Try Bloglines Beta. They have similar features and accept OpenID.

• E-Mail: Lavabit offers fully encrypted, free E-Mails with a strong focus on privacy.

It’s Easter Sunday and thus time for some intolerant statements against religion. I already knew that there is a negative correlation between intelligence and faith, but today I learnt that the same is true for wealth.

The graph compares income and the importance of religion and different countries. The richest European and least religious countries can be found in the right bottom corner, the poorest and most religious in the top left. Here is the article that describes the phenomenom in detail.

CSI means Committee for Sceptical Inquiry. Their mission is to analyze popular prejudices or paranormal claims in a scientific manner. These findings are published in “The Sceptical Inquirer”, a bimonthly journal. Some recent topics include global warming, vaccines, UFOs or cinema fiction. You can read most of the articles online, but there is no RSS feed. (If I do something more than 5 times, I automate it.)

I tried to extract the relevant content Dapper, a service that lets you create a feed from almost any website. Here is the feed for “The Sceptical Inquirer”: http://www.dapper.net/services/sceptical_inquirer

Works like a charm, with one entry per article. It would just be nice to get rid of the “Buy Back issue” entries. Enjoy.