The SmartS Club

It is magic. Every day at 1 pm straight Smart-S gets hit by a little click-storm. Nothing dangerous - far from a DOS attack. It actually warms my heart to know that somebody has made some code crawl this little-known dusty corner of the net to see what has been deposited there. Some empathetic robot silently weeping when things get rough in the world of the smart-ss's (does it ever?) and chuckling about the shallow jokes (are there any?). Cute. After observing this for a few months, though, I start to wonder whether that little lump of bytes couldn't be extended a bit so it is able to leave some, umm, comments? Maybe? Hello?! Some feedback (supportive, controversial or otherwise) would be nice for once! What good is a silent empathetic reader, ultimately - be it a machine or humanoid? It is like that ever-loving mother who listens to the crap you do in your childhood, the annoying stuff you call freedom while growing up, your self-pity when you fail just another rela...

What made America greater than this: Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame With conquering limbs astride from land to land Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. „Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!“ cries she With silent lips. „Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door. Emma Lazarus, 1883  Statue of Liberty

Sometimes you are alive. Sometimes you are dead. Well, you feel like it. Which is strange. Because, I suppose, when you are dead - how does it feel? Deadish? I thought the whole concept of being dead is that all that conscious stuff - and very much so the 'feeling'-thingy - vanishes. Exactly what you sometimes yearn for. When you are too destroyed to get up, for example. New-Years' morning, when you feel like you are dead. Well. We talked about it. So. My blog was dead. When I had to renew my payment-details I got trapped in some super-smart login loop, that always told me to renew my payment-details before I could log-in to go to... you got the idea. Now I got some reanimation done and there we go again. Life looks much better now. Even though some things look very non-ok. But let's not talk politics. Or emotional, private stuff. thanx.

Every now and then a memory from my early coding-years pops up in my mind. When I had acquired my Atari 1040F (1MB RAM, 100MB external harddrive), I was of course hex-dumping the OS and as the programmers obviously never had worked with that much space before (I believe my first Apple ][ had 8kB) they just bumbled around wasting Bits - in the middle of all the tech-stuff there was the line "Dave Staugas loves Bea Habling". Just so. In the ROM. It never got out of my brain again. And it popped up again right now. I  believe I can only lay it at rest if I know: ... did they eventually get together?  Can you please tell me? (thanks)

The discussion about reputation-metrics in science is dragging on. By now everybody knows the standard indicators (publications, impact-factor, citations,...), everybody uses them, everybody criticises them - and everybody ignores them if necessary. It has become a ritual to do metrics-bashing (while boasting about the own Hirsch-factor). Something has to happen.  Now.  (It won't.) While researching new metrics can earn you a living, the output, quite frankly, can bore you to tears. The same folks that were unable to show how scientific excellence maps onto numbers, now open the floodgates. They  spread their concept of 'excellence by Excel' from research to knowledge-transfer to impact on society - expanding the food-chain to be tagged.  Get real!  What societal impact does a scientific result have? The discovery of superconductivity? Research on linguistics of micro-languages? Any result: societal impact? Good luck! The science-community is feeli...

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. ...