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I just ran into a big problem of today’s web search technology. Sure, Google made things a bit easier compared to the early players in the market like AltaVista (who does still remember that?) but if you search for something of which you only have a picture in your mind, Google fails totally.

I was after an image I had seen once, most likely on the site Worth1000.com, of a photo-shopped MC Escher picture, drawn by a very young Escher and graded by his art teacher.

I remembered that I might have seen it on BoingBoing.net, but, can you believe it, I did not find a search function on that site! OK, so Google has BoingBoing probably indexed in its entirety so I searched for worth1000 site:boingboing.net but did not see any search result that might be the right one.

The search function on worth1000 also was of no help.

What now?

I remembered that I had this image once published in a post of a long defunct web site. I rarely throw data away because storage is so cheap, so I was off to some Google desktop searches because I was sure that the source files for that web site were still somewhere on my machine. To no avail, but I guess mostly attributed to the fact that I misspelled Escher as Esher – darn, how Americanized I am! But then again, I just tried again and there are indeed no search results for Escher on my computer either.

Back to basics: go to the top level directory where that image file might be if it was indeed  there, use the windows 7 search for all *.jpg files and display thumbnails.

And there it finally was!

With the textual information in that image “Dream House” and Maurits I could finally locate the whole series Childhood Renaissance 3 on Worth1000. After all this effort looking for this image I certainly had to look through – and enjoy – the rest of the entries to this contest, and this one here I liked the best…

I heard recently a rumor that Google actually attempts to remedy the shortcomings I encountered. This rumor told that Google is now starting to attempt to OCR the images in its index and adding whatever it finds as textual, searchable info to its index. Would not have helped in my case as I did not remember that the words ‘dream house’ and Escher’s first name were in the image, but I can imagine that it will help many.

For years now I have this little music video Apache in my collection of notable cultural pieces. This was a version with very low volume so I always had to crank up the speakers to enjoy it. I actually considered downloading it, plugging it into Premiere and cranking up the volume.

Today, when cleaning up my G1 I ran into that little musical jewel again and decided to find a better version of it. And, sure enough, there were plenty of version on Youtube and by going through those I learned a lot about the artist, Tommy Seebach, and the long history of the song Apache.

I had the feeling that this master piece would fit right into my exhibition of visual and auditory gems from around the world that I started with Japan, continued with a stop in Germany and arriving now in Danmark.

Without further ado, here now the Danish contribution to the culture of the world…

It appears that I am not the only musical connoisseur, judging by some of the comments on Youtube:

• Strangely fascinating.
• The bass on this music rockss!!!!!!!!
• Epic music video, I wish I was in this band.
• The biggest artist Denmark ever had.
• RIP Tommy bommy
• very nice!how much??
• those apache girls…

Speaking of “those apache girls:” When I watched them my aging music teacher in high school came to mind. He was actually so old that he had manned the piano in the movie theaters during the era before the talkies. I still see him making fun of female dancers during my high school days and calling them ‘hupp Dohlen.” Sorry, if you are not a native German speaker you will miss the comedy in this. An attempt to translate would result in something like hopping jackdaw, with hopping pronounced as in the deep south; but this translation will not do “hupp Dohle” justice. Gustav Rinke must have seen exactly these apache girls in his mind when he coined his unforgotten expression. I am sure, Gustav Rinke, you have left this sphere by now – fare thee well, your creation lives on!

in order to remember the site and spread the word – here’s a pointer to Sketchory, which offers free sketches and animations of those sketches (how to do sketching) under very liberal licenses, speak Cretative Commons.

Here is one example…

I have to admit that I liked and enjoyed the – unfortunately only – two Microsoft ads featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. In case you have not seen them, here they are…

and

For me, Microsoft has redeemed itself for all the bad things it has done in the past. That might sound a bit strong, but these ads are so good that I admire Microsoft that it had the guts to run them. OK, it must have been so far beyond anything the usually confused participants in this game could understand that it was mostly rejected – and the ads have been pulled.

I think that the ads have nearly a Monty-Pythonishness and only a person well trained in Douglas-Adamishness can really appreciate them. This group is rather small, so it was drowned by the masses.

Compared to the Apple ads with John Hodgman as PC and Justin Long as Mac the Microsoft ads are so totally senseless that they have broken reality – and I can’t help it, but I like surreal. Forces you to look beyond the daily seriousness. OK, the Apple ads don’t appear serious, but they are, they are adversarial in nature by trying to put down the PC. (Funny side note that the PC character became the more lovable and better known, publishing books and being interviewed by Xeni Jardin of Boing-Boing fame.)

Now lets look at the MS ads – off-the-wall, surreal and imaginative – and, I forgot, weird. What MS shows me here is that they could be just as unusual as Apple as a company, but that they have decided not to go this route because there were too few people to understand what they would have been doing. Instead they went with that what is real to most people – confusion!

So, by catering to the reality of this majority of the population, they managed to dominate the world with their software and now they can come out of the closet – and they did.

Congratulations!

(sing this headline to the song “What a difference a day makes, 24 little hours…)

Found this on my quest to read the web every day:

In Seminole County, Florida, kids who get all A’s and B’s, have a good attendance record, or receive good marks for behavior can get a free Happy Meal at their local McDonald’s.

There is additional interesting trivia to this story, like the fact that the envelopes the report cards are sent in have this offer printed on – have to say, a probably very good and inexpensive ad campaign for McDonalds, probably just printing the envelopes for the school and maybe even paying the postage.

But that’s not really the point – what I find so fascinating is that the kids that have good grades, probably because their parents keep them away from junk food are now directly targeted to lower their grades. It is probably true that a Big Mac once in a while will not kill a kid, but why get them started in the first place. There is so much good food around actually nourishing a body that there is no need for Big Macs.

And want to see what happens if the exposure is increased and made permanent? Look at this guy who was loaned out to the the US for just a few years…

and what happened to him when he moved back to Italy a few years later after a diet of good American junk food…

PS: sorry for the little bug that I got onto your screen up there at the top of the article – it’s totally harmless, so don’t worry.

In 2005 Brian Greene explained superstring theory to the TED audience in laymen’s terms in a very engaging presentation.

Three years ago the Hadron collider at CERN, which has one if its goals to confirm string theory, was still a few year away from completion. But now we are nearly there. Interestingly the public is taking notice now as voices have been raised that this machine might be dangerous. Loud voices actually, so that the CERN website for the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) has to address these concerns and dispel them…

TGVs and mosquitoes

The total energy in each beam of protons in the LHC is equivalent to a 400 tonne train (like the French TGV) travelling at 150 km/h. However, only an infinitesimal part of this energy is released in each particle collision – roughly equivalent to the energy of a dozen flying mosquitoes. In fact, whenever you try to swat a mosquito by clapping your hands together, you create a collision energy much higher than the protons inside the LHC. The LHC’s speciality is its impressive ability to concentrate this collision energy into a minuscule area on a subatomic scale. But even this capability is just a pale shadow of what Nature achieves routinely in cosmic-ray collisions.

During part of its operation, the LHC will collide beams of lead nuclei, which have a greater collision energy, equivalent to just over a thousand mosquitoes. However, this will be much more spread out than the energy produced in the proton collisions, and also presents no risk.

Microscopic black holes will not eat you…

Massive black holes are created in the Universe by the collapse of massive stars, which contain enormous amounts of gravitational energy that pulls in surrounding matter. The gravitational pull of a black hole is related to the amount of matter or energy it contains – the less there is, the weaker the pull. Some physicists suggest that microscopic black holes could be produced in the collisions at the LHC. However, these would only be created with the energies of the colliding particles (equivalent to the energies of mosquitoes), so no microscopic black holes produced inside the LHC could generate a strong enough gravitational force to pull in surrounding matter.

If the LHC can produce microscopic black holes, cosmic rays of much higher energies would already have produced many more. Since the Earth is still here, there is no reason to believe that collisions inside the LHC are harmful.

By all probability these concerns are in the same category as the fears that people would die when going more than 50 miles an hour on this devil’s machine called train. But there have been experiments in the past that seemed rather harmless and turned out to be deadly. I am thinking of Pierre and Marie Curie,
who discovered radioactivity. They did not know that this new phenomenon they had discovered was poisoning them during their work and I remember the anecdote of demonstrating their discovery to friends at a party by circulating a vial with this new substance which you could see with your eyes closed.

So, there is a chance that this microscopic black hole that might be created by the LHC does indeed attract matter and energy from its surrounding, grows and swallows the universe as we know it.

I am actually sure that this will happen, at least in a number of parallel worlds. These parallel worlds are, as far as I know, also postulated by string theory, so we are really approaching the unified theory of life, the universe and everything, a theory that contains its own annihilation – cool!

I have worked at CERN for a little bit, being involved with the old myon-neutrino experiments and I have to admit that it would be a fascinating experience to be at CERN for the first activation of the LHC. I imagine a scene similar to the setting in Douglas Adam’s ‘Restaurant at the End of the Universe‘ – everybody is seated in an exquisite restaurant expecting a great show watching the universe to end.

And, you know what – in one of the parallel worlds according to the string theory to be tested – that will be so!

Bruce Kodish is writing the first full-length biography of Alfred Korzybski, author of “Manhood of Humanity and Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics.”

He directed my attention to a post in his blog in which Korzybski contemplates the relative size of a city (Manhattan) and us puny humans. It is indeed fascinating that we with our small human bodies move so much mass – look at the immense masses of the whole of Manhattan that was piled up by these little ants that fill it’s street now with life.

In his post Bruce shows the following 1921 film Manhatta created by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler. I just love the work of Paul Strand and so I just had to post that video here as well…

One scene really drove it home for me how small we are really in relationship to the things we construct, and that was one worker swinging a sledge hammer and chipping off minor pieces of concrete. So little effect, but still, after many of these hammer swings – and some other actions I have to admit, a much bigger goal is reached. For me that was a great lesson what you can accomplish with perseverance.

I am still struggling with sizes changing with the distance – I had thoughts about this a few times when watching a big plane fly by. There are, from my vantage point, these very small units of life in this metal tube high up in the air. I am sure that they are not really aware how small they are, but they probably still take themselves very seriously.

No, I actually don’t have a point here, it’s just something I have not really understood yet – maybe you have an idea…

Lego just had it’s 50th birthday, and we really should congratulate this company for these great toys. Yes, they are often seen as toys, but more and more people discover that they are much, much more.

We have not seen yet, real skyscrapers  or bridges built out of Legos (or better Lego Bricks, how the company want us to call them) but I can not imagine that this will be too far in the future.

Ho do I get such a crazy idea, you might wonder.

Look at this, if this guy can build glasses that are so much more useful than regular ones with just a bit of ingenuity, boring subjects like houses, and bridges can not be far behind.

During engaging computer work…

and while taking a little rest…

Lego inventors unite! Let me know what else you created.

I ran into a collection of imagery of space from the 50s and 60s of the 20th century. Isn’t that amazing how that sound, speaking of the 20th century as so long ago?

One of the images I seemed to remember was of an outpost on the moon created by Frank Tinsley.

But then there was an image of a very early Perry Rhodan novella – and THAT was fascinating. I had not quite started to read science fiction when this novella had come out, but some six years later, but I certainly had read this novella when it came out in the second or third edition – so I knew…

… “Venus in Danger” – novella #20!

For many years after coming to the wild west I had my family in Germany collect Perry Rhodans for me and then send them to me in batch, but this had stopped now about 20 years ago.

So I have to admit, I am not quite up-to-date any more.

A few month ago I had realized that and found out that I could actually subscribe to an electronic version of the newest issued and get them in my email in-box. I had not subscribed at that time as I did not think I would have enough time to read them, but at least I got myself a little fix in form of a free issue that was offered – novella #2300!

Can you believe this – 2300 – at 52 weekly booklets that is about 46 years.

Harbingers of Chaos

So – what has changed in the last forty to fifty years?

Certainly the cover design feels more modern, but I am sure that the next half century will eradicate that difference. Then there is the price – the old one about 20 cents (at the exchange rate at that time) and the new one weighting in at about $2.50 – with the inflation rate I guess the price has remained stable.

Then there is one noticeable difference. The subtitle of the series in 1962 was “The Great Space Series” but today it’s simply “The Greatest Science Fiction Series.”

OK, now to work – gotta finally read my free novella “Vorboten des Chaos” – and maybe, just maybe, it’s so good that I will indeed subscribe.

Pink Floyd albums where very early members of my album collection, and they were plentiful. It all started in college where some smart marketer started to sell music albums for sometimes up to 25% cheaper than the going price in music stores.

At this time of growing up, hanging with friends, drinking beer and listening to music, being cool, Pink Floyd was definitely one of the favorite musics. The right stuff to totally space out.

Running into a video of  a Pink Floyd concert from 1988 on YouTube today brought these memories back and for all of you who like their music, here is what I found…

Believe it or not, up to now I never listened to the lyrics of the songs except some snippets that you could not miss, like “Teachers, leave us kids alone” from The Wall.

That shall be remedied today with the lyrics of the song above,  “On The Turning Away”

On the turning away
From the pale and downtrodden
And the words they say
Which we won’t understand
“Don’t accept that what’s happening
Is just a case of others’ suffering
Or you’ll find that you’re joining in
The turning away”
It’s a sin that somehow
Light is changing to shadow
And casting it’s shroud
Over all we have known
Unaware how the ranks have grown
Driven on by a heart of stone
We could find that we’re all alone
In the dream of the proud
On the wings of the night
As the daytime is stirring
Where the speechless unite
In a silent accord
Using words you will find are strange
And mesmerised as they light the flame
Feel the new wind of change
On the wings of the night
No more turning away
From the weak and the weary
No more turning away
From the coldness inside
Just a world that we all must share
It’s not enough just to stand and stare
Is it only a dream that there’ll be
No more turning away?

Blows your mind, doesn’t it?

And, by the way, I still have those vinyl albums.

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