Was giving up Tetris a Mistake?

A doctor specialised in laparoscopic surgery claims that playing about three hours of nintendo weekly helps with your work as a doctor. Now I wonder, will also help my sewing, crocheting, cooking - hairstyling even? Is it a gentle hint, that I should turn into a borg as soon as humanly possible?
Via boingboing.

Gender Equality in Japan and Elsewhere

Did you know that homemaking was a compulsory subject for Japanese school girls till the mid-90ies? After that it became compulsory for boys too. So if you are a Japanese man driven to be a househusband by economic changes or inlination you know all about the business of home economics. And you can watch your fictional colleagues on tv. You may think, gender equality in Japan - sounds too good to be true. And you are probably right. As in so many other societies, independent women are blamed for all sorts of social evils. So now the LDP proposes to change the article on gender equality in the Japanese constitution, stressing traditional family values.

Ah yes, the Japanese may be obsessive neophiliacs when it comes to technical gadgets, but change their society and conservatives start to panic like everywhere else. Don't they know that social change is driven by technology more often than not? No moveable type, no reformation (I'm thinking Gutenberg, not blogging software) and hence no capitalism. No washing machines and reliable birth control, no careers for women.

We are comfortable with thinking that changing from flint to bronze to iron tools caused massive changes in culture. At a pinch we may even admit to having passed the ages of transportation and (digital) communication. Yet when it comes to women they leave their 'traditional' sphere from mere egotistical spite? How utterly ridiculous; no spinning jenny, no Wollstonecraft; no sewing machine, no Pankhurst; no 'pill', no feminism. Whoever wants women back in the home will have to persuade the industry to stop producing these things.

The Beauty of the Human Mind

The small contraption is encrusted with shells. Lost to the world from around 80 B.C. till about 1900, the Antikythera Mechanism stayed under water for about a thousand years (via boingboing). The technology for differential gears was lost with it and had to be reinvented in the 19th century. In the early 70ies of the 20th century the Antikythera mechanism was gamma rayed and scientists found out that it is a geared device to simulate the movements of sun and moon across the zodiac. You will find a java animation to give an idea how the machine might have worked. I blame light pollution for not knowing anything about the star signs. And the technical drawing looks just like wheels within wheels to me, but if you wish to know about gears, look here. What did it mean to the ancients to be able to simulate the flow of time at the crank of a wheel - apart from obvious benefits to their navigational skills? But I am just as much in awe of the scientists who figured it all out with nothing but blurry black and white photos. Now it won't be long till someone trys to build an approximation of the instrument. And then they may get the little ASIMO robot to turn it for you (via Kottke).

The Inscrutable Offside Law

Yes, I love to write about things I don't know anything about. It's because I'm hypersuperficial, but you knew that all along. Today news about the arcane offside law in soccer tickled my fancy. It is just about possible that I know even less about soccer than maths. Perfect. Now it seems that soccer referees may know this rule, but a scientist claims it is humanly impossible to keep track of five moving objects at once.
Whatever next? Will the (five?) referees of future soccer matches be cooped up with cameras and pronounce their decisions like gods from a machine? Do we desperately need hovering cameras such as 'Colin' in Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams? Strictly confined to soccer pitches, of course!
I, for one, was simply invigorated when I found out that it doesn't matter two straws whether you know the offside law or not, because it cannot be implemented properly.

More Beautiful Maths

The other day my extremely significant other and I were talking about the beauty of maths or otherwise. He doubted that mathematicians were able to see the beauty of their subject. I'm quite convinced they do. Not least because I happened on this amazing site: the evolution of a Lorenz system - done in crochet (via the nearnear future). You'll find some lovely animations of similar equations and the crochet instructions plus a picture of the lovely object if you click on the 'Intelligencer'.

And while I'm at it... For all those who thought the Fibonacci Series was hardly more than a teaser: Here is some more stuff on them - complete with further links and a 30 minute bbc programme.

Flash Wonderland

One thing is certain: You can't see a grin without a grinner. You may try, but without some lips and teeth to do the grinning, it will be an utter failure. Now before this harrowing ineluctability gets you down, join Alice in her interactive Wonderland and play with the Cheshire Cat. It may be a little shy if confronted by a heavily armoured corporate firewall, but otherwise it's game.
(Via boingboing)

Cooperation and Creativity

It is lovely when you call it addressing Darwin's blind spot. Amazingly enough it turns into an instance of 'stating the obvious' when you read about it in a FastCompany article which overturns six common myths about creativity (via kottke.org). Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School has conducted an eight year study on creativity in business environments. One of her preliminary findings is this:

There's a widespread belief, particularly in the finance and high-tech industries, that internal competition fosters innovation. In our surveys, we found that creativity takes a hit when people in a work group compete instead of collaborate. The most creative teams are those that have the confidence to share and debate ideas. But when people compete for recognition, they stop sharing information. And that's destructive because nobody in an organization has all of the information required to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.

Isn't it sad to think that most companies are too fear-driven to actively embrace policies that are really good for them? Or, more horridly even, are companies like people who persist in doing what is bad for them although they know better?

Enthusing at Length

I really do feel a need to explain why I’m so glad to have found Esther Wilberforce-Packard’s Topic Drift. Should I go to the lumber room and rummage for some dusty old literary terms? Better not. I’ve always loved Jane Austen’s Juvenilia. And I was fascinated by Wilde’s idea of ‘Poems in Prose’. (The idea – not the actual prose poems he wrote. They are oozing with sentiment and leave an aftertaste of an aestheticised moral that does no one any good.) Then Joyce’s and Woolf’s ideas of epiphany were intriguing. But what is the use of artistic epiphanies, if you hide them in longish novels?
Where else should they have hidden their epiphanies, you might ask; and you would be perfectly right. They had novels, letters, diaries, essays, short stories even, but they did not have blogs. I am too lazy to even attempt to prove it, but I give you this link in which art lovingly embraces technology, happy with yet another way to express whatever needs to be expressed.
Via boingboing

A New Literary Genre is Born

Yesterday was a very exciting day. I discovered a new literary art form. And what is more, I have been looking for this genre for decades. When I landed on Topic Drift I knew I had finally found it. As of now I shall sit in front of my screen hitting the reload button. Later on, I may perhaps find a minute or two to enthuse at length.

Doommongering is Bad for You, Really Bad

The story of incense and candles in churches emitting harmful pollutants has raced round the world, see for example the calcutta telegraph. But that was two weeks ago. So why harp on about it still? Because this news will be used to thicken the atmosphere of fear we're supposed to live in. While the fear of terrorism (in America) or the degeneration of the social services (in Europe) serve to paint the general outlook on things grey in grey, we are pestered with all the things that are unhealthy for us. Food scares, the anti-smoking-hysteria etc. And now roman catholic services.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the science behind any of this is faulty. However, it may well be that fear of all those things is itself the most harmful 'substance' you can expose yourself to. There is research indicating that you will live a long and healthy life no matter what harmful substances you expose yourself to as long as you have lots of fun.
Alas, alas, this does not make exiting, scandalous news. Alas, alas, experiencing well-being and pleasure is incredibly cheap.
Oh dear, I'm pontificating. So instead of worrying about worrying too much, pay a visit to the subservient stickman. Like me, you may not be too keen on the seedier aspects of his personality, but watch him turn into kermit or even take a trip may make your day.

Just Letters

Drop everything and instantly go to this site! Letters seem to move randomly over the screen. But they're not. You are there with so many other users who drag them along. It's the most interactive thing I ever saw or did. Presently there are 74 others who are 'playing'.

Elizabeth Gaskell and Cybersociology

This post by boingboing is a treat! Not only does it presuppose the existence of cybersociology, but it also takes for granted that evolution is applicable to human society. It quotes the description for a lecture course set up to explore the nature of cooperation. And this description reminded me of a passage in Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. Miss Matty is impoverished through no fault of her own and starts selling tea to eke out her living:

Miss Matty, as I ought to have mentioned before, had had some scruples of conscience at selling tea when there was already Mr Johnson in the town, who included it among his numerous commodities; and, before she could quite reconcile herself to the adoption of her new business, she had trotted down to his shop, unknown to me, to tell him of the project that was entertained, and to inquire if it was likely to injure his business. My father called this idea of hers "great nonsense," and "wondered how tradespeople were to get on if there was to be a continual consulting of each other's interests, which would put a stop to all competition directly." And, perhaps, it would not have done in Drumble [Manchester], but in Cranford it answered very well; for not only did Mr Johnson kindly put at rest all Miss Matty's scruples and fear of injuring his business, but I have reason to know he repeatedly sent customers to her, saying that the teas he kept were of a common kind, but that Miss Jenkyns had all the choice sorts.
(quoted from the Gutenberg e-text)

So open source programming and the WikiPedia show us that Cranford is not quite as utopian as we used to think. How very very comforting.

Journalists and Taxi Drivers

There was a fair amount of self-doubt the other day, when I extrapolated the decisive influence of taxi drivers on journalists from a tiny pause in a radio presenters' question to a foreign correspondent. By now I have made the transition from wild surmise to dead certainty when I watched the late night news yesterday. There must be a 1001 interesting things to report on egypt. Yet the human intest slot at the end of the programme showed a feature on the plight of cairo taxi drivers.

Japanese Country and Western Song

Today I spent some time in the uncharted backwaters of the German blogosphere and hear what I found: A country and western song converted from a 78 RPM shellac record to MP3 - in Japanese! Or is it? The stylised clopping of hooves, the swaying rhythm is all there, but further than that - who can say? The site is in German, but right clicking the song and saving it shouldn't be a problem.
Via Schockwellenreiter

Skimming the Surface - Again

Take a boy to the edge of a lake and watch him looking for a stone to send skimming over the surface of the water. Later he grows up into a physicist who somehow manages to get paid for skimming stones. So now we have a new field of scientific investigation. Shin-ichiro Nagahiro and Yoshinori Hayakawa used a virtual lake front called Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics. This helps them to verify the 'magic angle' for stone-skip”. I am glad to note that they give my friend, the jesus-lizard, a mention. It seems he knew all along.
(via news is free)

The Fibonacci Serendipity

The dilemma? I'm completely hopeless when it comes to "... the different branches of Arithmetic - Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision... " (Lewis Carroll). Nevertheless I sometimes get a vague idea what it is all about. Take the strangely beautiful Fibonacci series. Only recently I gushed about them to some friends and then couldn't explain what they are all about. Now I'll only have to refer them to this wonderful (flash) site, which I found here.

Taxi Drivers and Journalists

Yesterday, talking about the upcoming elections in Palestine Eddie Mair, radiopresenter on BBC4s PM, asked a correspondent, so what are people saying in taxis (tiny pause), on the streets?

Realising that "the man in the street" is really a taxi-driver, I instantly dreamed up a whole new career for myself. I would get a taxi license and hover near journalist haunts. Faking a broad local accent or extra broken English I would then pour my most cherished opinions into their inebriated minds. And hey presto I'm into international politics.

World leaders relax. I don't drive.

Something Alive and Kicking, feminism?

I seem to be obsessed with dragging the outside world into the blogosphere. Take this quaint little story. The news agencies announce the death of an actor who peaked in the early 80ties, but was never into stardom. A (female) editor tries to convince her male editor-in-chief that this definitely is a story. She is seconded by two (female) assistants. The editor-in-chief: 'Don't push me too hard'. 10 Minutes later the female editor gets the go ahead to write up this news. A miracle? Not quite. The boss took the advice of another (male) editor. I'm not sure about feminism, but masculinism is alive and kicking.

The Colour of Global Slush

There I was, shopping for a thermos flask and my smithereen-fragmented brain thought it had some extra capacity to wonder whether it was ok for me to write an English blog although I'm German. Then the corner of my eye caught sight of a poster for slush. Amazingly, this solved my moral dilemma; I'll go on writing English while I can. The poster offered slush in blue, red and green. Yet you could only buy the stuff in the German regulation sirop colours red and green (have a care, this is supposed to be woodruff (Waldmeister), not lime). Red and green, green and red, and as far as I know this has been going on from time immemorial.

There must be a whole universe of slush colours out there: lime, tangerine, blue, if need be. The Italians drink a pale white almond slush. I won't be stuck with the eternal choice of green and red. I'm global. Well, ok European. Alright, alright, I may admit to the odd hyperlocal prepossession, but not when it comes to slush!

Just a Surface

Hypersuperficial Animal

Recently I've heard about the jesus or basilisk lizard. This wonderful animal can walk on water (seeing is believing). It seems to be a perfect symbol of blogging. You may have difficulties totally immersing yourself into anyone topic, but you're certainly not going under either.

And has everyone please looked at this stunning photograph of two jousting (or was it jostling) black presidential knights? Thank you, wonkette!