The Aesthetics and Beauty of Knowledge
Shih was the opposite of facts and raw information; shih was the elegance of knowledge, the insight and skill to organize knowledge into meaningful patterns. As an artist chooses colours or light to make her pictures, a master of shih chooses textures of knowledge – various ideas, myths, abstractions, and theories – to create a way of seeing the world. The aesthetics and beauty of knowledge – this was shih.
– David Zindell, The Broken God, 1993
Geek Attitude
The attitude thing is about flexibility, portability, creativity, sociability and jamming (ran out of suitable “ity” words!). It’s about improvising – in the practical and musical senses of the word; not getting tangled in boundaries and the “right” way to do things.
Definitely the only way to travel.
– Martin Delaney – “Laptop Music”.
Kuehleborn's World
Kuehleborn's Unfathomable Thoughts
The most beautiful Love Song
This is – IMHO – really the most beautiful and romantic love-song a nerd can sing to his girl-friend.
I still watch TBBT every week, but unfortunately the episodes are not as good, funny, or at least “nerdy” anymore as they used to be, especially in the second and third season. The girls in the show shifted the centre of gravity of the story to the love-affairs of the four friends, instead of having fun with Geek LifeStyle.
However, this episode, S07E06 “The Romance Resonance”, was for once very good again, and the song, that Howard wrote and sang for his wife Bernadette (since it is the anniversary of their first date), proves that the makers can still add some geeky flavor into it.
More of that, guys; please!! There are already too many trite TV-shows about vapid teenage people with their shabby love-troubles.
If I Didn’t Have You (Bernadette’s Song)
If I didn’t have you
Life would be blue
I’d be Dr. Who without the Tardis
A candle without a wick
A Watson without a Crick
I’d be one of my outfits without a Dick-ie
I’d be cheese without the mac
Jobs without the Wozniak
I’d be solving exponential equations that use bases not
found on your calculator making it much harder to crack
I’d be an atom without a bomb
A dot without the com
And I’d probably still live with my momAnd he’d probably still live with his mom
Ever since I met you
You turned my world around
You supported all my dreams and all my hopes
You’re like Uranium 235 and I’m Uranium 238
Almost inseparable isotopesI couldn’t have imagined
How good my life would get
From the moment that I met you, BernadetteIf I didn’t have you
Life would be dreary
I’d be string theory without any string
I’d be binary code without a one
A cathode-ray tube without an electron gun
I’d be “Firefly,” “Buffy” and “Avengers” without Joss Whedon
I’d speak a lot more Klingon Heghlu’meH QaQ jajvamAnd he’d definitely still live with his mom
Ever since I met you
You turned my world around
You’re my best friend and my lover
We’re like changing electric and magnetic fields
You can’t have one without the otherI couldn’t have imagined
How good my life would get
From the moment that I met you, BernadetteOh, we couldn’t have imagined
How good our lives would get
From the moment that we met you, BernadettePublished on Oct 24, 2013
Written by Kate Micucci and Riki Lindhome
Published by Warner-Barham Music LLC (BMI)
Performed by Simon Helberg, Johnny Galecki, Jim Parsons, Kaley Cuoco, Kunal Nayyar, and Mayim Bialik
& © 2013 Warner Bros. Television
Tresorit – Create and access content easily.
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Well, it was not that easy to access my content, because I lost my password. 🙁
Tresorit is another cloud storage service, like the well-known DropBox. I signed up for a Tresorit account when it was in its very initial stage (6 months and 13 days ago!); there were no mobile apps for it. So, I installed the desktop application, uploaded my first Tresorit and sat back to wait for better times to come. Then they released their Android app and now, finally, the iOS-app.
Because I was an early bird, I received 50 GB of storage! Downloading the iOS-app gives me an additional 5GB Bonus space, so I hurried to the iTunes Store to download the app and…damn, what the hack was my Tresorit “LetMeIn”?
Frantically firing all my possible passwords into the login screen, I began to face the horrible fact that I obviously didn’t recall my password. I always thought my password-system was watertight – what a terrible mistake!
Tresorit has no way of recovering your password, due to security reasons, as they say. So the problem is, actually…they’re too strong!
Okay, after several attempts, I finally hit the magic word and I was able to Login again.
Really Strong!
They even challenge the Hacker-community with a bounty of $25,000:
Hacking Challenge
Unlike other cloud storage services, we make sure no hacker, Tresorit administrator or government agency
can get your data from our servers.
If you run out of storage with your DropBox account, ánd your iCloud, Box, Google Drive and SkyDrive space, you probably should think about Tresorit. The Free Plan offers already 5 GB, which is not too bad.
Springpad: Re-imagining the personal organizer for the social and mobile world.
Springpad is a rather new online NoteBook service that has some features from Evernote and some from other ways to organize your ideas, plans and whatever you stumble upon during A Day in the Web. And also in Everyday Life – “done better” as they say it.
I found it yesterday and of course, signed up without hesitation. Then I downloaded the apps for Android and iOs, the “Spring It!” clipper for FireFox and the Chrome extension. Now I’m supplied with enough tools to browse the web and capture everything that is worth capturing. And that is a lot, so I’ve been using other online scrapbook-services for years, like Evernote and Diigo. Diigo syncs all my BookMarks to Delicious. Evernote can import these BookMarks, but unfortunately that is a rather complicated and time consuming thing to do. So I always postpone this to my once-a-year “Digital Gardening”-Day. Springpad had no trouble at all synchronizing with Delicious and imported my >3,000 BookMarks within a few seconds.
Springpad is free, at least for now. I’m not sure if it ever can or will replace Evernote, but it is always good to have some competition and keep the guys at Evernote sharp and humble.
The downside is: with Springpad, Evernote and Diigo, I now have three online NoteBooks (not to mention more scientific reference managers and academic social network-services like Zotero, Mendeley and Cite U Like, that I use for my work as a musicologist), all with their own pros and cons. So I hope there will be some synchronizing tools available shortly.
Bohemian Gravity
A new Physics Song by Timothy Blais, a parody of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (as is obvious from the title). Like Queen’s Brian May, Blais is also a physicist, his thesis is online, and a great musician. Good performance, funny, and, since his thesis was submitted for a master of science, I suppose the science behind the lyrics is correct. But I’ll have to check that later 🙂
Is string theory right?
Is it just fantasy?
Caught in the landscape,
Out of touch with reality
Compactified
On S5 or T*S3Space is a pure void
Why should it be stringy?
Because it’s quantum not classical
Nonrenormalizable
Any way you quantize
You’ll encounter infinity
You seeQuanta
Must interact
Via paths we understand
Using Feynman diagrams
Often, they will just rebound
But now and then they go another way
A quantum
Loooooop
Infinities will make you cry
Unless you can renormalize your model
Of baryons, fermions
And all other states of matterCurved space:
The graviton
Can be thought of as a field
But these infinities are real
In a many-body
Loop diagram
Our results diverge no matter what we do…
A Quantum Soup (any way you quantize)
Kiss your fields goodbye
Guess Einstein’s theory wasn’t complete at all!I see extended 1-D objects with no mass
What’s their use? What’s their use? Can they give us quark plasma?
What to minimize?
What functional describes this
String?
Nambu-Goto! (Nambu-Goto)
Nambu-Goto! (Nambu-Goto)
How to quantize I don’t know
Polyakov!
I’m just a worldsheet, please minimize me
He’s just a worldsheet from a string theory
Reperametrized by a Weyl symmetry!Fermi, Bose, open, closed, orientable?
Vibrations
Modes! They become particles (particles!)
Vibrations
They become particles (particles!)
Vibrations
They become particles (particles!)
Become particles (particles!)
Become particles (many many many many particle…)
Modes modes modes modes modes modes modes!
Oh mamma mia mamma mia,
Such a sea of particles!
A tachyon, with a dilaton and gravity-vity-VITY(rock out!)
Now we need ten dimensions and I’ll tell you why
(anomaly cancellation!)
So to get down to 4D we compactify!
Oh, Kahler!
(Kahler manifold)
Manifolds must be Kahler!
(Complex Reimannian symplectic form)
If we wanna preserve
Any of our super-symmetry(Superstrings of type I, IIa and IIb)
(Heterotic O and Heterotic E)
(All are one through S and T duality)
(Thank you Ed Witten for that superstring revolution and your new M-theory!)(Maldecena!)
(Super-Yang-Mills!)
(Type IIB String!)
Dual! Dual!
(In the AdS/CFT)
(Holography!)Molecules and atoms
Light and energy
Time and space and matter
All from one united
TheoryAny way you quantize…
Lyrics and arrangement by Tim Blais and A Capella Science
Original music by Queen
A Bookless Library
Via Time U.S.
A Bookless Library Opens in San Antonio.
On Saturday, Bexar County Digital Library – a $2.4 million, 4,000-square-foot space, also known as BiblioTech and located on the south side of San Antonio – opens to the public. The library, built with $1.9 million in county tax money and $500,000 in private donations, looks like an orange-hued Apple store and is stocked with 10,000 e-books, 500 e-readers, 48 computers, and 20 iPads and laptops. It has a children’s area, study rooms and a Starbucks-esque café. Most importantly, it will have no printed material.
It is probably inevitable, but this is too soon, at least to me. I couldn’t live without my e-reader, my iPad, my computer, but I do love my books. And when I go to the library I want to see and smell Real Books!
Having fun isn’t hard…
when you have a library card
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It is not a matter of impressiveness, but I admit that I am very proud of my books. In an earlier blogpost on my Dutch personal website I compared the book to a vinyl record and the e-reader to a CD/mp3-player/iPod/Spotify. The digital version sounds better, takes less space, is less vulnerable and, best of all, is portable. But the downside is: you don’t have a relationship with the music you are playing. When you put a record on the turntable, back in the olden days, you was teleporting yourself for 20 minutes to another world. The same with books. My e-reader contains more than 1,700 titles in a space of just one very thin paperback, is much lighter, reads just as good, has a built-in dictionary, and best of all, is portable. It allows me to read everywhere. I use my e-reader (Sony) or my iPad (Zinio/Kindle) for the stuff I just want to read, just to read a story or to acquire knowledge. Science, Fiction and Science-Fiction. However, there still are some books I just want to possess. I want to look at my bookcase every now and then and remember the good times I had when reading that particular book.
Call me old-fashioned, it doesn’t bother me at all. At least not when it comes to books. And sometimes, when I really want to be in another world, I go to my library, where I hope to find Real Books!
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More Online Courses for Independent Learning.
This week on FaceBook via FreeYourKids: MIT Open CourseWare publishes virtually all of its courses online for free. Not entirely new, but still interesting as another option for independent learning.
“The idea is simple: to publish all of our course materials online and make them widely available to everyone.”
Dick K.P. Yue, Professor, MIT School of Engineering
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Read also this post on the Open Culture-website:
625 Free MOOCs from Great Universities (Many Offering Certificates).
And then there is edX, that will launch mooc.org in the first half of 2014.
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A New Look
I have always been very proud of this blog. When I started it, it was hosted on wordpress.com. It is still there, although it hasn’t been updated for a while. You can also read it there with the beautiful and quite popular Andreas04-template by Tara Aukerman. When I transferred the blog to my own server, I used this skin again, but the internet evolved and the template became obsolete, it wasn’t able to work with the newer plugins. So I found the ExtizeMe-template by W.Regenczuk. Beautiful, very beautiful, although it came with a few minor annoyances. So I was already thinking about using something else, but that was easier said than done.
Last week Twitter decided to change the script for the profile badge. Why? I don’t know, and they didn’t inform me about their plan; suddenly it didn’t show up anymore on my websites, leaving only an empty box in the sidebar 🙁 .
@#$!^&*#%.
I had to generate a new code for my badge and the only problem was: it worked perfectly on all my other websites – built on Drupal and some of them also on WordPress, but unfortunately not with the ExtizeMe-theme.
So, it was time to move on and choose another skin for this blog.
That wasn’t easy; finally I chose the Obandes-theme, by someone named “tenman”. Not completely satisfied with it, but for now it will have to do.
My twitter badge works fine, BTW 🙂
Geek Fun.
Costumed Roleplaying is a custom of dressing like fictional characters, better known as “Cosplay”.
The WonderCon – convention this year took place in Anaheim, CA, on April 1, 2013.
Here is the video:
That is fun, and I wish I could have been part of it!
On the opposite of the geek-spectrum there is this video: PSY “Gentleman” Parody – Fed Up Angry Geeky Girl! It is supposed to be fun, but for some reason I’m missing the sense of humor to understand the parody. I think it is stupid. The original K-pop song by PSI isn’t much better, of course, but probably the G-word attracts too many people yet?
Here Geekiness has been corrupted into something common, to say the very least.
Walking on the Geek-Side of Life means Living on the Edge. But this video is a Fall into the Abyss of Banality.