18.06.07
Ring your bell
A German pastor found a new use for the church bells: He was angered by a youth meeting of the nationalist NPD party and rang the church bells until the party had to end their meeting.
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07.04.07
Hobin Rood
The overwhelming lesson of five decades of Third World aid is that, paid from taxation, it takes money from poor people in rich countries and gives it to rich people in poor ones.
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04.04.07
Water of Life
In an interview with the Zeit (in German), Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe explains his view of the world-wide water problem facing mankind. A few select quotes (translated):
- Currently, water usage grows twice as fast as the world population. In addition, water is a limited resource for which we use up fossil reservoirs even today.
- In Bejing, the water level drops half a meter every day.
- Water diminishes faster than our oil resources, but nobody talks about it.
- The enthusiasm for biological fuels is ecological madness (...) To produce one litre of ethanol, 4560 litres of water are needed. Imagine that!
- Car drivers in the rich industrial nations are being subsidized by the poorest of the world's population.
- Compared with the climate change, the water crisis is much more menacing.
- Every day, we pay one billion dollars in agricultural subsidies. For this money, we could fly each cow and bull in Europe around the world, first class.
The whole article leaves me rather thoughtful...
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23.02.07
Buy yourself a chicken shed
Via Johannes, I got to know Kiva. They're an organisation that makes issuing a microcredit as easy as shopping for books at Amazon.
I love it – and did it. I guess it's also another way to put aside some money.
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20.12.06
Engineers are the new priests
If I would have had to decide which career to pursue 500 years ago, I probably would have gone into politics. At that time, it was kings and members of the government that influenced the society. 1000 years before that, it was religion that had the most influence.
Today, technology is the driving force. It changes society in all aspects - ranging from the health system or education to solving environmental problems. I want to continue to invest myself into technology meeting the needs of mankind.
Konstantin Guericke, founder of LinkedIn, in an interview in the German Manager Magazin.
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17.11.06
Vote-o-Matic II
(I'm publishing this entry a few days later due to our internet connection having been down).
A few more articles (in German) about voting machines:
- A good summary of what happened recently
- A timeline on voting machines
- A collection of material on voting machines compiled by the CCC (Chaos Computer Club)
Don't forget: Sign the petition!
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15.11.06
Vote-o-Matic
And now for something completely different: An appeal to my readers. Please sign the petition against the usage of voting machines in Germany (if you are a German citizen). Als someone trained in Computer Science I can think of many technical and non-technical reasons why not to use voting machines. Here are a few of them:
- The election is irreproducible. There cannot be a recount, you have to trust the sums output by the machine.
- Unfortunately, there are many ways of manipulating the results. Most voters without any technical background will probably assume that everything just works and cannot be manipulated. This is unfortunately not the case. I find it outrageous that our governments never even mentions possible risks (just like with the new electronic passports).
- The German election system is much more susceptible to manipulation than e.g. the US system. Therefore, we cannot just assume we can directly use their experiences.
- The cost for the machines is rather high, and the usefulness highly dubious. I'm wondering in whose interest it is to introduce such machines.
- The normal way of politics to deal with these problems is to trust that new versions of the devices and more strict security measures will solve the problem. If that would be true, there would be no security issues in web servers, operating systems etc. anymore. A perfect system is only possible in theory, and therefore just the low complexity already makes the paper ballot seems to be the best system.
Here's an interesting report from the US as well as video showing the manipulation of a voting machine (based on research done by Princeton University. And here's a German article.
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06.11.06
Christian democratic politics
I found the following ̃“definition” in Andreas Malessa, Das fromm-deutsche Wörterbuch (The Christianese-German dictionary). I don't usually like this kind of books, but I quite liked this one:
CDU
Literally: Christian Democratic Union. German party that promotes politics based on the gospel. That is, feeding the hungry, visiting prisoners, taking in homeless people, preserving creation, bringing down the mighty ones from their thrones, lifting up the humble ones, filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty (Luke 1:51-53; Matthew 25:35-36).
(If you don't know what this is all about, Wikipedia can help you.)
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26.09.06
Show me your friends and I show you who you are
Why does our believing president share his thoughts on the rescue of mankind surrounded by a “hot granny” rivalled by “hot nymphs” offering a “jerk-off-guarantee”?
Gerhard Henschel uses strong language, but so does the German tabloid Bild he attacks. He is right in asking why representatives of the church and of political parties with Christian background cooperate with Bild to spread their agenda and even show deference to the newspaper's editors, especially Kai Diekmann, ignoring the fact that Bild actively promotes anti-Christian values. It seems that in order to reach the public's attention, any cooperation partners are fair game.
German Articles on Gerhard Henschel's new book Gossenreport can be found in the Tagesspiegel and the taz. They are both worth a read.
Questions remain that we need to ask ourselves: How can the church be taken seriously if it supports those that intimidate, threaten and suppress others? How can the bible be taken seriously if we praise such people for spreading it?
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13.09.06
If in doubt, make 'em pay
Since April 1st, 2005, German tax departments are able to retrieve information about all financial accounts and their balance of every German citizen – even without the consent of the respective banks. Most people are not aware of this, since this change was not much publicized in the media. I remember feeling a bit uneasy about this at the time. An article in the German “manager magazin” shows in detail, why everyone should feel uneasy about this, even if they “have nothing to hide”. A few select quotes:
Random sampling in Northrine-Westphalia showed that nine out of ten account enquiries were not justified adequately.
…
Munich tax criminal law expert Jan Olaf Leisner says: "Just a few years ago, the civil servants were ready to discuss disputed issues before demanding tax payments. But today, they will often file a tax notice immediately. And to increase pressure, in most cases the authorities will start a criminal procedure immediately.“
…
And during the house search, the tax department's investigator supposedly intimidated company owner Torsten Werlin's (name changed) children massively: “Your dad will probably go to prison soon”, a civil servant sneered. Werlin's wife could endure the pressure of the state power and the neighbour's whispering soon enough: she filed for divorce. When after a several year-long lawsuit the judges finally confirmed that the tax claims were not justified, the company had filed for bankruptcy long ago.
If that's not enough, you can find more examples in the lawblog. Again, it shows that the state shouldn't be trusted too much. In the end, state power is exercised by (fallible) humans.
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23.11.05
The rewards of perseverance
Louis Pasteur is said to have quipped “Chance favours a prepared mind only”. It seems that this happened to Tim Kehoe and his eleven-year quest for coloured soap bubbles. In the end, it wasn‘t Kehoe who discovered the actual formula used now, but it was his perseverance that laid the foundation for the discovery.
I am very impressed by his single-mindedness despite major failures along the way. And the best thing is, in the end he seems to have gotten much more than just coloured bubbles.
I wonder what could be achievable for the kingdom of God in the same manner.
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08.05.05
A History of the GUI
There's an article on GUI history on ars technica. It's a nice read. It has this interesting quote that intrigued me (my emphasis):
Douglas Englebart completed his degree in electrical engineering in 1948 and settled down in a nice job at the NACA Institute (the forerunner of NASA). However, one day while driving to work he had an epiphany: he realized that his real calling as an engineer was not to work on small projects that might only benefit a few people. Instead, he wanted to work on something that would benefit all of humanity.