The SmartS Club

Computers aren't as evil anymore as they were in my days. You had to be a system-programmer and carry a hot soldering iron in your pocket if you wanted to change the font in a text-document. In the last millennium I was struggling to print out a report on some experiments that had not turned out well at all. I was a bit nervous as it never is a real treat to report on undeniable failure. No data. No explanations. No fame. But it got worse. The printer didn't like me. With the clock ticking away it just covered page after page with astounding garble. Special characters, squares and numbers... You have seen that. That's when the fingers get sweaty and you need a new pair of socks every fifteen minutes. I kicked some boxes, replaced the printer-cable, restarted the bastard, rebooted my computer, printed again. And the sun came out! Page after crispy page there was my report. And after the last page, just when I collected my prose, prepared to face my master, the pri...

I love the folks at Edge.org - they are all hyper-smart and obviously found their dream-jobs, allowing them to muse over stuff they are interested in, add some smartisms to the debate, drink good wine - and still get paid. Where can I apply? Edge put out the new Annual Question: "What do you think about machines that think" and got a storm of responses. Folks, please! What do you think about your colleague who *might* think? What do you think about your boss who doesn't? Why a machine? Has anybody ever come up with an idea of what 'thinking' means - how to measure the depth, width, weight,... of thinking? Those questions allow for so much fluffy, touchy-feely response, because they entirely fail to define what you are talking about. Of course some of the entries zoom in on Artificial Intelligence, that widely misunderstood techno-baby of the sixties.Is 'thinking' really just an advanced mode of 'computing'? Artificial Intelligence was not a...

A person walks into a room and cuts the throat of a number of people. Please check - is this ok if 1) A is a man 2) A is a woman 3) A is member of a majority 4) A is member of a minority 5) A does so in the name of religion 6) in the name of atheism 7) in the name of the country 8) in the name of the governement 9) ...

You know those science shows, right? The mad professor on TV. An Einstein-lookalike (the hair, the tongue, wild eyes, lab-coat, dry-ice, smoke, bubbles, bang!). This is the impression your kids get: science is stupid crap. Putting an egg in a microwave and watching it blow up - that is science. Freezing a rose with liquid nitrogen and then trampling on it - close to Nobel-prize. We scientists know: it is not. But our PR-professionals tell us that we *have to* communicate like that. We have to be accessible. That's why they always smuggle their fishy last sentence into the press-releases: 'this brings us one step closer to quantum computing' - no! 'so, time-travel seems not that unlikely at last!' - wrong! The guy responsible for science at Der Spiegel told us years ago: 'if you want your stuff published, we need a catchy title, awesome images. And you know: sex sells'. He was not joking! And look, the most widely quoted research result of the Forschun...

We got this great side-board from a friend. He moved and had no place to put it. We moved and had no furniture. The classical win-win situation. We now had a stylish, perfect 70s norwegian beauty in our living-room. An expensive piece that conoisseurs would kill for. It is great, it is elegant, it is big.  Way too big for our apartment as it turned out. So we put it in the basement. As the basement is dark, humid, moldy - home of vicious spiders and man-eating multi-legged creatures crawling up the brittle walls and scurrying behind decaying cardboard boxes whenever you put a foot on the ground, sometimes getting inside your shirt or attacking your calves... (but this is another story) - we called my friend weekly to have him rescue that treasure. I really felt bad about it. But now my favorite source for ultimate taste, the treehuggers (oh, click here and there ), tells me that we are way ahead, style-wise... Some italian designers are sporting moss-covered furn...

Cabdrivers internationally are artists, musicians, dancers, writers - anything but cabdrivers. That was different in pre-oh-so-hip, pre-wall-came-down Berlin, where cabdrivers (east and west) used to be just angry, crabby old cabbies, and proud of it. They were eloquent only when it came to convincing every happy visitor why it is no good idea to be a happy visitor, ultimately proving their point by ridiculously overcharging for an annoying ride. General misanthropy wasn't fashionable only in a tiny yellow car - it was a hallmark of Berlin. Yep, east and west. A colleague of mine, coming from the Netherlands, got a convincing performance at the fish-counter of a local supermarket. When he tried to strike a jolly conversation by asking:"what goodies have we got today?!" he was served the perfectly berlinesque response: "fish.". (period.). With the wild and art-packed Berlin going down the drain so disappears this element of style and so mutate the cabdrivers. ...

Someone said every good blogpost starts with blood. And that guy's blog is insanely popular for good reasons. In contrast, Richard Dawkin's blog is popular for god reasons (yeah, that was cheap). While scrolling through my twitter timeline I am getting a bit tired of the religiously fervent atheism of @RichardDawkins whom I admittedly pity as he just completed his transformation from an interesting thinker to a t-shirt salesman. Glittery, silver double helix neclaces, bold atheist-'A' bumper stickers. Boring stuff. He must have fired his best ghostwriters after the n-th remake of his smart bestsellers (you do remember them, don't you?). Fortunately, before wasting too much thought on why elderly men tend to get so narrow-minded, self-pitying, and self-centered (and while laboriously calculating my own age) I was getting aware of a conversation at a nearby table in the run-down coffee shop that serves the most intense espresso in town - 'so strong, they ba...