The SmartS Club

Last weekend I was reading about microbial fuel-cells that are able to convert sewage-waste to electrical energy ( Nature) . The authors' carefully phrased result ('Mutually complementary substrates may take advantage of substrate interaction in the cell metabolism, and generate a total effect greater than the sum of the individual contribution of single substrate for electricity generation.') will definitely be more streamlined for the 'dumb public' to 'make it more accessible' leading to something like 'energy-problem solved by using synergy'. Want to bet? It will happen. The researchers found that two different processes for the generation of electrical energy by microbial fuel-cells can interact synergetically - enhancing the efficiency (in terms of total Coulombs as well as conversion rate) above the added efficiency of both individual processes (as interesting as it is, I am always a bit nervous when looking at the error-bars. But that ...

I don't do dinners - it would scare my last remaining friends away. I learned that it is only me who strongly believes in my cooking-skills (but hey, I think it's great food!). How lucky I felt to be invited to a lovely get-together involving professionally prepared food recently. The host carefully arranged his guests at a number of tables, making sure that nobody sat close to anybody they knew. As he is really great with people it worked wonderfully and nobody froze in desperate silence with a featherbrained smile on her face. Clamped between a huge greek-embassy-woman and a romantically active bundle consisting of an artist and her Argentinian Tango-wife I stared straight ahead and so got to listen to an architect I would have never met otherwise. He was as passionate about his job as the girls were about 'Tango' in its amazingly varied physical representations. It was clear that he was not interested in making money by simply arranging concrete around people. ...

I have a cat that is extremely catlike. Cuddly (whenever she wants to be), scratchy (whenever the world has been mean to her), smart (always), in need to be left alone (except when she needs not to be left alone). When a dustball crosses her path in the wrong moment she gets totally flustered and scared and runs for cover. I know, there ought not to be any dustballs where she is. I should keep the place tidy anyway. Problem is: a vacuum-cleaner is worse than dustballs. Life is not always easy. So my friend hid behind the big fridge for over a week, only coming out at night to get some food and then disappearing again through that small gap between fridge and washing-machine.  I started to get worried and tried to coerce her out of there. Great food didn't help. Sweet-talking led to nothing. Turning the lights off - or turning them on. Futile. She seemed to blame me for the dustball-scare. She was totally unforgiving and made me feel terrible. One evening I talked with a ...

I promised not to click on bigthink.com anymore. But, ooops! it happened again! "We need to teach kids creative thinking. And we're teaching them the opposite" - "...the basis of education is not answers, but questions" (this specific quote is by Lawrence Krauss on Big Think but could come from anybody with a brain mushy enough to devour the latest coelhoisms on that site). Guys. No. Go borrow the 3 to 10 year old kids from your neighbours (your neighbours will love you!). Pack them into your car and drive a few miles. Once they overcome shyness and see that you might look funny but you are a possible source of information, they will bombard you with questions. Rapid fire questions. Relentlessly. Kids are asking questions! The task is not to teach those critters creative thinking (what should that be? show them a conventional textbook way to be unconventional?) - the task is to give them access to as much knowledge and as diverse answers as possible so...

Some friends carry a significant bundle of brain between their ears. And they know how to use it. It is scary - because after I talk to them for five minutes I am not sure anymore if I am smart enough to cross a street. Sometimes then even breathing seems like an overly complex intellectual task - and if you start focusing on that, you start coughing and then you die. But then again I am flying. All the weight of the the past laden weeks that pulled me to the ground is gone; the bleakness of a long, sleepless winter-night disappears and gives way to a smile -  a ray of sun that illuminates the whole world. People like that should know of their recharging-power. Never forget to tell them. Somehow. Even if it makes them blush. Years ago I thought I shouldn't. And the next day he was gone. And so was his whole world. I was wrong.

Somebody told me: 'start every blog-post with blood!'. I do, sometimes. They get twice as many clicks as the others. Or mention sex. Five times as many clicks. A combination of both (last post) ? One seems to annihilate the other or was it the mention of 'science'? Some years ago, when everybody claimed that GooglePlus was the Big Thing and Facebook was evil, clicks were still the most important reputation-currency in the virtual world. Shady companies sold 'likes', 'friends' and simple clicks to bolster your ego-metrics. And in those days I wrote a little snippet about one of the then upcoming blog-sites, which I hated and adored. It stood out in the deluge of self-help sites which babbled about 'ten ways to beat your boss' (and they did not mean physically). This guy essentially wrote about 'ten ways to beat your boss' - and he meant it. Physically. It was amazing how he built a reputation by an incredibly honest and direct s...

Not too long ago journalists were absolutely clear about what scientists have to deliver to get their science-stuff into the magazine: catch-phrases, blood, sex, pictures. They were bossing everybody around. Obey or go away. They called it science-journalism but it was annoying, damaging crap. The public was fed a shale derivative of science. It never really went away because it takes some time to deflate the Ego of those know-alls. But then it got worse. A new breed of smart-*sses was angrily demanding: Every scientist should be blogging! Yeah, right. Those autistic geniusses from the basement of the engineering-department were supposed to chatter about their passions? Oh, and Twitter! Use Twitter! 140 characters are enough! And let the public devise your next research project; they must be involved - being tax-payers, lalala... That has gone by. Finally we are told that professional science-communicators are hip. Now we are talking. It took them only about 25 years to discover...