David Simon (“The Wire”)

history politics

A recent lecture by David Simon

Very much worth seeing. He has his own perceptive that is coherent and thoughtful and based on his first hand experience. For me was able to shed some light on why the USA is the country with the biggest jail population. According to him 7% of inmates are there for violent crimes. Prisons are a profitable and growing business in the US. I don’t agree on his views in terms of labor. Would maybe be nice if the world would still be like he sees it. Small countries like Germany can still work under those premises. But only since they supply the rest of the world with their products. You don’t see many US made cars in Germany. Robots don’t need unions. Things have changed so dramatically in the last 10, 20 years. But the political system and peoples minds and perceptions are stuck in some fairy tale land of the 50s.

Science PR – good luck getting the Manhattan Project going today

history politics technology

Yesterday two ‘science stories’ ‘broke’: “Neutrinos traveling faster than light” and “Computers can read images out of the brain”. I am borderline clueless on matters of physics, so I leave that one alone. The fMRI mashup by Nishimoto et al is borderline in my view. The presentation of their findings makes it way to easy to drum up headlines like “Brain Imaging Reveals What You’re Watching” or “Scientists Reconstruct Brains’ Visions Into Digital Video ”

Only spending little time with the setup it seems that the experiement pretty much reveals that 5,000 hours of youtube video are so stereotypical that even a fMRI of the v1 can match some patterns back. For a given individual, after hours of learning. To suggest that the video shown on the right as ‘coming out’ of the brain is extremely misleading.

Having two of those studies in one day means nothing of course. But one can go off on a tangent and wonder why – I am sure wonderful – people and scientists drop science in exchange for head lines and eyeball. Maybe it is time to decide over the 2012 budget? And I am sure that given realities of today it is much to get money for “we can go back in time” or “we can film your dreams”.

I have doubts that the Manhattan Project would have a chance today. Rewind to 1940: Some professors had drawn some numbers on chalk board. Up this day only very few
people understood what they were talking about. I certainly have no clue. They had no computer simulated films. They had no precedence. The bomb they were talking about
was by multiple magnitudes bigger than anything that had done before. There was nothing in reality to show for. Just scribblings on a chalkboard. And some common consensus among a few people. One could see this happening if they would have asked to disappear into the desert to do a bit of thinking. But they needed a bit more: Factories bigger than anything else that had been built. And 10% of all electricity in the entire US to run them. To make a handful of matter that -according to science- might make one big boom.
All based on science. And politicians and military people did go with it. And they built different models that both worked after five years.

apple: don’t bother

Apple technology

iTunes just rejected to play a song that I purchased 3 years ago, since it told me I need to authenticate my current computer.
Instead of trying to figure out what is broken with the Apple authentication for that song I just went ahead and bought it again on Amazon. Without CRM.

Apple is notorious for having one of the worst user management systems for their online services. The documentation of my Apple ID changes and resets
spans many pages. There are none for other systems and services that I used equally long.

Funny how one company can be so great in a couple of areas and fail so consistently in others.

surprisingly insightful

history marketing media

Adweek ventures into cultural history. And – in my opinion – they actually do succeed.

requested architecture/executable not found

Apple technology

On a recent Macbook Pro (i7, Macbook Pro 8.1) post Feb 2011 I did not have much love from a kernel driver. Oddly google was not that helpful.

/var/log/system.log system log complained along the lines of:

[0x0-0x30030].WebToGo.ePlus2_1[1106]:
/System/Library/Extensions/HuaweiDataCardActivateDriver.kext failed to load -
(libkern/kext) requested architecture/executable not found;
check the system/kernel logs for errors or try kextutil(8).

The fix was pretty simple: Just boot the machine into 32bit mode. Turns out the default boot mode is 64bit on later hardware. One way to find out which OS mode you run is to go to:

About this Mac
More Info …
click directly on the Software item on the left.

You will see 64-bit Kernel and Extensions: “Yes” in the second last line.

If you hold the numbers 3 and 2 during boot then you will be in 32bit mode and get probably much more love from 32 bit extension. In my case it was an Aldi Surfstick S4012 based on a Huawei one that caused some grief in 64bit.

Since not many 64 native machines are out there it explains why this topic is not easier to google right now.

median artery incidence

free of any reason

Some people say that humans genetically mutate to become better typists and cite the increased incidence rate of media artery cases. Oddly “homo facebookinensis” is still a noogle.

ecoli map germany

daily life deutschland internet

I made a map of the current ecoli outbreak in Germany.

There is actually also a german version: Ehec Karte Deutschland

gammaslamma

misc

Gamma Slamma is a great little tool to remove gamma flags in PNG files. You just drop files on it. Simple as that.
Unfortunately 4 years after its inception it is increasingly 404ing. So here a link to the DMG in case you need to download it:
GammaSlamma 1.1

I miss my Onyxes

technology

A, the good old days, when I had hair (well kinda) and computers were large, big and expensive.
These emulators from Nvidia reminded me of that time back last century.
And they also get to show how much horsepower actually is in a modern day GPU.

logos

art marketing

Honest logos. Could easily be extended. Probably since companies with much to hide pay more for their branding.