The SmartS Club

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!

There is no lack of sites web-wide the authors of which believe "modesty" must be a talibanesque expletive. Guys (mostly) who smack their lips too shamelessly in total complacency of their writings buy themselves some chunk of electro-space and install a website called Smartass or the like. If you are *certain*, however, that your brilliance will enlighten the world, go call your site bigthink.com . Then, no name, no topic seems too big to tackle and to comment on. I have to disappoint you, however, bigthink.com is already taken. Those big talking folks at bigthink just published a collection of 'visions' by so-called experts and ask us (yes, me, you, the plebs!) which one of those visions might influence 'the world' the most. We are allowed to cast our vote. The visions come in handy in easily understandable little video-clips. Just in case we are too stupid to read. http://bigthink.com/ideas/39160 Those 'visions' are stunningly unimaginative: e...

The new format 'Smart-SPresso' will start shortly - delivering lucid as well as tartly formulated comments on web-wide utterances. Stay tuned. And be prepared to comment vividly!

Do you know the feeling that just when you return to a website to get a screenshot of an incredibly incredible post you realize that it has been taken off seconds after you got there? Instead of cursing and cussing and calling 'liars' those smart-s'ess amongst us who always claim that 'the internet never forgets' you should dig up the archives of waybackmachine.org and thumb through history. Even though I failed to excarvate my favourite from the german weekly "Die Zeit" of May 10, 2005 I am confident that one or the other embarassingly useless piece of historical document is stored forever somewhere in California ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive ). My favourite? Well, in Germany a notorious cannibal was sentenced to 13 years in prison. An apprentice at Die Zeit had a preliminary headline set free to the public, reading "13 Jahre Haft für einen Haps (okay okay das geht nicht)" (something like:"13 years for a mouthful (oka...

The chinese dissident artist Ai WeiWei, who was detained nearly 10 Weeks ago for unspecified 'economical crimes' was freed on bail today. The chinese news agency Xinhua reports that he is freed after admitting his crimes, which are now said to be related to massive tax evasion of his company "Fake Cultural Development". Artists in Berlin - among them the literary nobel-laureat Herta Müller - will read texts of Ai Weiwei, which were published in his blog but deleted by chinese authorities (Monday, June 27, Literaturhaus, Berlin). These texts will be published in german language end of July by Galiani as "Macht euch keine Illusionen über mich".

After some remarks on my comment to Dr Kaku's (a popular figure from bigthink.com ) overpopularization of physics one more comment on the wave-properties of an electron seems appropriate: There is a famous experiment illustrating the consequences of the wave-description for the probability to find an electron at a given point in space. If an electron-source is placed in front of a metal-sheet with two narrow slits, a recording-device behind this screen would detect a distribution of incoming electrons that is identical to an interference-pattern of waves passing through the double slit (as would be seen when shining coherent, monochromatic light (a laser produces this kind of light) on the two slits). This interference-pattern shows up no matter how low the rate of electrons coming through. Even if only one single electron per hour would pass through the slits, there would, finally, be a distribution of detected electrons given by the well-known interference-pattern. This...