instead of repeating myself, I started a blog-a-like thingy on http://buckybit.spaces.live.com - stil pending on the IDEA of having a Blog anyways...

- not every life is interesting. Not everybody NEEDS to seek attention...- I guess, I don-t really feel like it... - sorry...

Instead, why don-t you listen to Ben Folds? He-s our modern-day Mozart:

...listening to dangerous music again, fell into a hole after finishing the novel, very unhealthy mood...feeling the darkness, seeking, longing for it, Robert Burton, Friedrich Holderlin...the melancholy in its final stage isn-t anything about
emotional imbalance; it is rather about the knowledge that nothing can take away the cold from your heart. It is the knowledge about the inevitability of what is ahead...one should not fight but embrace it. Yet, it is a private matter and none shall speak about that. "The rest, is silence..."

[ He'd never seen much difference between the Tsar's regime and American capitalism. To struggle against one, he figured, was to struggle against the other. Sort of this world-wide outlook. "Was a little worse for us, maybe, coming to U.S.A. after hearing so much about 'land of the free'. "Thinking he'd escaped something, only to find life out here just as mean and cold, same wealth without conscience, same poor people in misery, army and police free as wolves to commit cruelties on behalf of the bosses, bosses ready todo anything to protect what they had stolen.]



50th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL 1956 - 2006
New Scientist - 18 November 2006
www.newscientist.com
(sounds phoney, but it-s a respectable UK-no-nonsense-science-magazine.)

"The most important development in physics that I can imagine in the next 50 years would be the discovery of a final theory that dictates all properties of particles and fields. That may be too much to hope for. A major step in this direction would be the discovery of particles like gauginos or squarks that are required by supersymmetry. Alas, we don't know what the masses of these particles would be, and they may be beyond the reach of any particle accelerator.

On the other hand, we can confidently predict breakthroughs in cosmology. We will know whether the density of dark energy varies with time at a rate comparable to the cosmic expansion rate, or is essentially constant - a crucial clue to the nature of dark energy. We will either have confirmed the general idea of inflation by discovering signs of cosmological gravitational waves (which I expect), or we will have ruled out inflation by showing that these gravitational waves are weaker than predicted. We may be using laser interferometers in space to detect cosmological gravitational waves that bear clues about the behaviour of the matter of the universe at energies higher than we can reach in accelerators. But the origin of the universe will remain obscure until we make more progress toward a final theory." [Steven Weinberg forecasts the future in www.newscientist.com "50th Anniversary Edition]



"Cosmologists have much to look forward to: the direct detection of dark matter and gravitational waves, the extraction of more secrets of the early universe, the discovery of the cosmic neutrino background, possibly an exploding black hole, understanding dark energy, decisive evidence for or against the existence of other dimensions of space, new forces of nature and the possibility of time travel; perhaps even nano-sized space probes. I could go on.

All this is exciting, but take a moment to think back 50 years and look forwards. None of the greatest discoveries in the astronomical sciences were foreseen. The transformation in the practice of science brought about by the web is barely 30 years old. No one predicted it. Pulsars, quasars, gamma-ray bursts, the standard model of particle physics, the isotropy of the microwave background, strings and dark energy were equally unexpected. None of these was predicted 50 years ago.

Perhaps scientists are as blinkered as the politicians and economists who failed to foresee the fall of the Iron Curtain and the climatic implications of industrialisation. Yet this myopia may not be a fault. Perhaps it is a touchstone. If you can foresee what is going to happen in your field over the next 50 years then maybe it is mined out, or lacking what it takes to attract the brightest minds. Nothing truly revolutionary is ever predicted because that is what makes it revolutionary."
[John D. Barrow forecasts the future in www.newscientist.com "50th Anniversary Edition"]



["Think about it (...) like Original Sin, only with exceptions. Being born into this don't automatically make you innocent. But when you reach a point in your life where you understand who is **** who (...)who's taking it and who's not, that's when you're obliged to choose how much you'll go along with. If you are not devoting every breath of every day waking and sleeping to destroying those who slaughter the innocent as easy as signing a check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself? It must be negotiated with the day, from those absolute terms."]

Here is how Against the Day opens:

"'Now single up all lines!' 'Cheerly now. . .handsomely. . .very well! Prepare to cast her off!' 'Windy City, here we come!' 'Hurrah! Up we go!' It was amid such lively exclamation that the hydrogen skyship Inconvenience, its gondola draped with patriotic bunting, carrying a five-lad crew belonging to that celebrated aeronautics club known as the Chums of Chance, ascended briskly into the morning, and soon caught the southerly wind."

His last novel Mason & Dixon (1997) took me about 3 years to finish. It-s because you cannot read a Pynchon novel like Tom Clancy or leCarre or Grisham... - you have to do your homework, if you really want to enjoy it fully. And it-s part of the fun too. This means research: reading the books, Mr. Pynchon read probably to write the book, he wrote. I studied 18th century history again. I know now how to survey with old instruments and by looking at the stars. I know about the Royal Society's history and the Vaucanson automatons. etc...

I start reading chapter by chapter and re-read each chapter several times. Enjoying the pace, the humor, the language, the ideas. Stopping, reading reference-books. Embracing the possibility to read books about the things he mentioned; contemplating for days and weeks over certain subjects, biographies, avoiding the notion to write articles, essays, books myself. When I return to the novel, I have forgotten certain characters, plot-lines. So I start again... and again...

It also helps to have a broad knowledge of all possible things, and to know a lot about history: not just simple dates and numbers, but the overall picture of what life was like, let-s say in 1875 or 1913 or 1943 etc... His latest novel arrived finally after 10 years of hard work. It is big. It is mindblowing. It will take time to read. So, I am going to be rather busy for the next weeks, months, maybe again years.

That's the opening. Now compare the opening lines of Jules Verne's novel The Mysterious Island: "'Are we rising again?' 'No! On the contrary! We're going down!' 'Worse than that, Mr Cyrus, we're falling!' 'For God's sake, throw out the ballast!' 'There! The last sack is empty!' 'Is the balloon going up now?' 'No!' 'I hear the splashing of waves!' 'The sea is under the basket!' 'It can't be more than five hundred feet below us!' Then a powerful, booming voice cut through the air: 'Throw everything overboard!...Everything! We are in God's hands!' Those were the words that resounded in the sky over the vast watery desert of the Pacific about four o'clock in the evening of March 23, 1865."

The new layout is bad. The fonts are to small. Even the articles seem to be shorter. What happend? Did they recently decided to 'upgrade' for a 'new' consumer-group? I loved the classic serif-letters and black&white-pages. Now it looks just like any other publication, rather at the lower end of looks... They went with the new look also online on their Webpages. But here it kind of works ok (if you haven't costumized your browser to the degree that you will not notice). And I only mean the look. It is ridiculous how slow their pages are. The most respectable computer-mag since when? 1976? And in the july-issue was an article about programming-performance-enhancement... very funny.

Photography vs. Drawing when you see something interesting with your own eyes, you might take out your photo-camera, aim and click and you're done. Archiving another pic onto film or memory-card. So far, so good. All this takes only seconds as a process. You do this several times a day, depending where you are on your vacation, field-trip, etc... When you see something and decide you want to capture it in a drawing instead, you not just stay for a sec. but actually might invest hours, sometimes maybe days, depending on how deep and detailed you want your drawing to be. You watch every single detail and you have to think about it-s means, it-s structure, it-s purpose etc. - you learn the 'history' and the 'nature' of this thing you are looking at for quite a while. You become interested in architecture, biology, history, etc. through the years and you become more sophisticated in recognizing, distinguishing and properly specifying what you see. You 'learn' how to see. You learn nothing when you just click and go on. This is one reason why I condemn most tourists and a certain group of wannabe photographers. They know nothing.

I don-t work for them and I would not do cross-marketing but there is a blog-worthy news to all those who don-t know: the 1up-podcast (1upyours.1up.com) - is simply GREAT. It definitely is for 'older' guys ( a lot of swearing) but if you wanna know something about the game-industry beyond nice-talk you're well served. Garnett, John, Luke and Shane do a great job of talking the talk and telling some blunt and funny things about games and game-industry.

winfs is dead

the only real innovation for vista/longhorn is gone. why upgrade?

xp/directx overhead slows down games. vista makes no difference. files get bigger. the only reason apps don-t crawl is the constant powerup of cpu/gpu...

 

Twit 60 on net neutrality

patrick and leo discussing the issue - high class, esp. very smart comments from patrick

improve gamespot tournament.tvdon-t fall into the pro-game trapmake up your own game-competition, based on button-mashing framework:

a, complete abc objects in dead-rising; b, 3 players compete in fastrun for level x in game xyz ; c, first 10 kills in street fighter on xbox-live

I started reading the forums again and already am dissapointed about the numerous stupid threads posting the same questions again and again, people saying stupid things, trolling and being ridiculous (farcry-public forum). You have to question how old this guys are and I regret reading this stuff and wasting my time, just as you- dear reader - would waist yours by reading my blog.

offline: heading for some adventures in the 'real world'.

"Read this aloud & your inner ear, by itself, will be carrying out at least the equivalent of a billion floating-point operations per second, about the workload of a typical game-console. the inner ear together /w the brain can distinguish sound that have intesities ranging over 120 decibel from the roar of a jet engine to the rustle of a leaf, & it can pick out one conversation from among dozens in a crowded room. it is a feat no artificial system comes close to matching.

But whats truly amazing is the natural system-s efficency. consuming about 50 watts the game-console throws off enough heat to bake a cookie, whereas the inneer ear uses just 14 microwatts & could run for 15 years on one aa battery."
(Brain Power by Kahul Sarpeshkar p.17 ieeespectrum |May 2006|Int Issue)