The SmartS Club

Rather involuntary train rides (especially long ones, going to boring places for a boring event) are good for updates on some thoughts lingering in the lower levels of the brain-at-ease. My latest trip (from Berlin to Bonn) unearthed the never-ending squabble about the elusive 'free will'. Neuroscientists make headlines proving with alacrity the absence of free will by experimenting with brain-signals that precede the apparent willful act - by as much as seven seconds! Measuring brain-activity way before the human guinea pig actually presses a button with whatever hand or finger he desires, they predict with breathtaking reproducibility the choice to be made. So what? Is that the end of free will? I am afraid that those neuroscientists would accept only non-predictability as a definite sign of free will. But non-predictability results from two possible scenarios: a) a random event (without a cause) b) an event triggered by something outside of the system (but caused). ...

Recently I enjoyed following a presentation at Platoon/Berlin on Alternative Currencies. It was a great pleasure to hear that very smart guy Gabriel Shalom introducing his video "The future of money" - and the video itself was a nice treat. But I felt increasingly at unease listening to the narrative about the presentation of the video at SIBOS, 'the worlds biggest banking conference'. There was some sound of pride in the voice of Gabriel and giggling in the audience when he reported that after the 7.5 minute short video there was absolute silence, no questions, no comments, nothing… "we dropped the evil-bomb", he said to the amusement of us folks. My problem was that common-sense in the room (well, it was a tent at Platoon): *they* are the bad guys *we* are the good guys. To phrase it drastically - even though I never dug too deep into the history and concept of money myself there was really nothing unexpected, scary, chilling, thrilling or excitingly...

that guy is simply - a clown at a site of charlatans: http://bigthink.com/ideas/38681 If taken serious Michio Kaku is threatening the reputation of science. I know, such scientoid babble defends itself as being visionary. It is not.

Have I mentioned my personal 'affinity' to those bubble-brains at bigthink.com ? I guess I have - their poster boy physicist Dr. Michio Kaku regularly d-explains the world by oversimplifying some piece of natural sciences. Some might smile about it, others yawn - I think it is actually dangerous. Well, here it is. The recent piece is tied to a freshly published paper about some accelerator-experiment in which some particles seem not to obey the speed-limit. In his article "Breaking the speed of light and contemplating the demise of relativity" Dr. Kaku states that the scientists reported that they have recorded particles appearing to travel faster than the speed of light. Um, maybe. Maybe not. The scientists explicitly stated that they publish their data to stimulate a wider discussion as they wish to figure out what makes those particles to *appear* to be faster than light. All is based on the measurement of time - done by a synchronization via GPS signals. Some...

Those blogs at blogspot.com (as the one you are glued to right now) sport a nifty little navigation thingy in the very top row, allowing you to navigate, randomly as they promise, to the 'next blog'. As it turns out the thread of 'next blogs' is eagerly woven from the keywords in the title of the last blogentry - can you follow me? So, naively, I had named a contribution "The love of science" - and guess what: clicking on 'next blog' carried everybody through a flood of pages of marriages, personal religious or pseudoreligious confessions, decorated with clouds, sunshine and eerily smiling elderly women... Don't get me wrong! Nothing against personal beliefs, religious orientations, feelings. But I dont expect to be dried out in intellectual wasteland just because I use the wrong words in the headline of a post of my own blog! So I changed the title. The blogpost is now named "fascinating science". Everybody who bookmarked a link to th...

At times I dig the website edge.org - at times I am grumpy … a bit like in a real relationship, I believe. As a constant I am at unease with their narcissistic appearance and the almost audible smack, when they believe they have said something really earthshaking - which is about every time they update their page. But, well, I come back almost daily... So I was eagerly waiting for the latest oeuvre in classical print "Future Science, Essays From the Cutting Edge" - edited by Max Brockman (Vintage Books), son of John Brockman the legend; tore open the package the minute I fumbled it out of the mailbox and started reading on my way back up to the apartment. The book comprises of eighteen essays from eighteen obviously brilliant, young researchers. Essays on their work and their plans. The author list seems absolutely random to a European scientist and there might be a long list of equally impressive minds around, but, hey, this is a nifty little booklet! As a physicist I w...

finally I managed - zero hits on this site yesterday. That is a drop of undisputable 100% compared to the average, the highest high, the lowest low. Simple, clear 100%. Pure silence for 24 hours. No annoying clicking sound in the web, no widget started, no counter moved. Definitely: vacation even for my virtual self. I am reminded to stretch out on the farm, let kids and pigs rush by and enjoy the silence of the mindless vacuum inside my eerily smiling skull. Giving room, however, to the darker thoughts of an overstrained summer-brain. Thoughts that are usually safely absorbed by the omnipresent beach-novel dealing with murder, love and murderers in love. Lacking any of these divertions here, I simply wonder: that little village behind the woods - was it called Sechzehn Eichen or rather Sechzehn Leichen? I will go and check - tonight!