Yearly Archives: 2007

Micky Maus Basteleien

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Als ich jung war gab es in der Micky Maus immer (oder zumindest oftmals) Einlagen zum Basteln. Da waren recht skurrile Sachen dabei, aber ich glaube mir gefiehlen die Spiele am besten, Speziell ein Spiel bei dem die Panzerknacker einen Geldraub verübten und von Micky, der Polizei etc gefangen werden mussten. Bei diesem Spiel diente Entenhausen als Spielbrett, und das Spiel war über mehrere Hefte aufgeteilt. Ich erinnere mich dunkel, dass mein Bruder und ich damals dieses Spiel mit Lego-Steinen nachgebaut hatten.

Wie dem auch sei: Dank Claudio Eckert gibt es nun eine Sammlung der Micky Maus Bastel-Extras Online. Ich muss gestehen dass ich sehr überrascht war dass so viel zusammen gekommen ist.

Und siehe da: Der Bastelkrimi ist auch dabei!

Mickey Maus Bastelkrimi

Die Polarstation, die Abenteuerstation, das Fernsehstudio, das “Fangt die Panzerknacker”-Spiel und das Mini-Kartenspiel erinnere ich auch.

Not my Week

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After suffering from insomnia earlier this week, I seem to have eaten something yesterday that wasn’t very good for me. Since I didn’t really eat much, I suspect that the yogurt I had for breakfast wasn’t edible anymore. It tasted fine, but who knows – I do not actually trust the canteen’s fridges.

Last night I felt really, really sick. But of course today I am almost OK again and I decided to go to the office. Luckily it is a really quiet day, so I will probably not have a problem leaving early. I really hate this… luckily I don’t get ill very often, and it’s never anything serious (knocking on wood!) but stomach- and headaches are just so distracting, you can’t really use your time for much else when you suffer from them.

Insomnia Revisited

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1:37am. I can’t sleep. I just lay awake in bed for about an hour. And I forgot to buy new cocoa so I can’t have a hot chocolate. Not really much I can do, except try to sleep again in a half hour or an hour.

I really hate it when I cannot sleep. Kinda messes up my entire rhythm. Luckily I don’t have this problem all so often; but when it happens it usually lasts a few days. And at the same time I am exhausted – I can’t really use my time to be very productive, either. I am truly not getting any younger.

Six Years of Frankfurt

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I just realized I never posted the milestone “Five Years of Frankfurt” after doing so (almost) every year I’ve lived here (1, 1.5, 3 and 4). And that, now, I have actually lived here for **six years**.

Six. Years.

That’s a long time.

I originally moved to Frankfurt to work at a small consulting company, and ended up working for a large IT company instead. When I first told people I’d move down south they all told me… “Frankfurt? Are you insane? That’s a horrible city!” Of course, life doesn’t really follow such preconceptions, and I actually found out that Frankfurt isn’t all that bad. Sure, it’s expensive and the traffic is insane. The streets are quite dirty… and the public transportation does really suck. But in some way, Frankfurt has grown on me. It’ll never really be “home”, but hey, home is where the heart is.

There are some good things to be said about Frankfurt, actually. For one thing it’s really small – you can cross town very quickly, and nowhere is really far away. The airport is 12 minutes from the central station by subway (if there are no delays…) It’s also got a pretty cool skyline. Just walk along the river at night, it’s quite a sight. No comparison to, say, Tokyo, but it’s really not bad for a European city.

It’s a pretty convenient city. I live in Sachsenhausen. Easy access to downtown, and pretty much everything I need within walking distance (supermarkets, subway, tram, dry cleaning; I can even walk to the central station and the south station).

I also enjoy the high percentage of foreigners. If I recall correctly, it’s about 16% for entire Frankfurt; some suburbs are higher. One of my best friends here is Turkish, and you will see a lot of African and Asian people. You’ll hear at least three or four languages spoken when you go to the central shopping district during a busy time. I love that.

Would I recommend moving to Frankfurt? It kinda depends on your personality, of course. I doubt I’d want to live in the middle of it with kids. But hey, if you’re young, single, and get a job here… don’t be scared of the town.

We have not learned from history

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Dear World,

the German government has gone crazy. More specifically, the interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble has gone out of control. For months he has been making more and more demands for stricter and stricter laws to fight the “threat of terrorism”. Our government wants to:

* **Use [evidence obtained by torture](http://www.tagesschau.de/aktuell/meldungen/0,1185,OID5045872_REF1,00.html)**: While he says that German law enforcement may not torture or encourage others to torture, it would “not be responsible” not to use information obtained by such means.
* **[Build databases about potential terrorists](http://www.sueddeutsche.de/deutschland/artikel/633/83550/)** which are to include such data as religion or professional training.
* **Expand video surveillance**: “At train stations, airports, big streets and places video surveillance is feasible and expedient”.
* Use the **army as a security force inside the country**. This was planned for the soccer world cup but not implemented until the G8 meeting at Heiligendamm.
* **[Shoot down hijacked airplanes](http://www.tagesschau.de/aktuell/meldungen/0,1185,OID6256592_TYP6_THE_NAV_REF1_BAB,00.html)** – which was actually determined to be illegal by the constitutional court. This doesn’t stop them from saying “we’ll do it anyway”.
* **[Make conspiracy a crime](http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/92400)** and ban so-called “Gefährdern” (dangerous individuals) from using Internet and mobile phones. He also considers the **[killing of suspects](http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/92400)** to be in no violation with basic law: At most it would be a “legal problem”.
* **[Search private PCs via a government trojan horse](http://nrrd.de/dasbuch/hadez/1984_zeitgeist_german_chancellor_merkel_wants_push_tough_anti_terror_legislation_online_seize_)** – in secret, of course, without any oversight.
* **Retain all connection logs of personal communications** – telephone calls, text messages, email and so on – for six months, regardless of any suspicions of criminal activity. This law was passed on November 9th, 2007, but has yet to be ratified by the Bundesrat and signed by our president.
* Introduce **biometric passports and ID cards**, which include fingerprints saved on an RFID chips, and keep all the **biometric data in a central database**. Biometric passports have been implemented as of Niovember 2007; the central database and the biometric ID cards are still planned.

Germany is **the** country which should really know better than this. Of all the people in the world, we should be the ones who learned from history. Unfortunately, we haven’t: Not only do our politicians kick our fundamental laws with their feet, the reaction of the German people is to shrug their shoulders and to vote for them again. “I have nothing to hide”, they say and look the other way.

I now know what it must have felt like, back in the early 30s. Of course we won’t get another Nazi regime. Death camps are really bad for PR. Instead we’ll get something more similar to the East German regime: A surveillance and police state. But unlike East Germany, where the system was dictated by the Russians, we’re doing it to ourselves this time. And similar to the Nazi regime, I am pretty sure everybody will claim “we didn’t know anything” afterwards.

Normally, I’d hope for the free, western world to come to our aid. Failing that, I’d pack my things and move out of the country. But what free western world? Those who should be the shining beacon of freedom and democracy are doing even worse things to their own countries. It is a sad state of affairs when China is a shining ray of hope – while China is a dictatorship, conditions there are improving. Everybody else seems to be hell-bent on making things as bad as possible as quickly as feasible.

Probabilistic Universe

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>”The quantum theory makes even bizarre events possible. For example walking across the street we expect to wind up on the other side, however there is a finite calculable probability that you will dissolve and wind up on Mars, dissolve and wind up on the Earth again. Of course we will have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe but in principle it could happen.”
>
>– Michio Kaku

I managed to grasp intuitively what I have understood for a while: The way the universe formed and why it works the way it does.

We know that the universe is probabilistic on a fundamental level. To many people, this is counter-intuitive, but I think it *has* to be probabilistic. There is no alternative. Look at it this way: We know the universe had a beginning (the big bang). What was there before the universe? Even if it is part of a greater Multiverse, you only shift the question up one level. Somewhere, at some point, there had to be a start of it all. And before it (the universe or multiverse) existed, there could not have been anything. No space, no time, no matter, no energy, nothing. This is really an axiom.

If the fundamental nature of, well, Nature was deterministic then the Universe could never exist. The natural reaction of nothing is, well, to do nothing. Only a probabilistic universe had, by definition, a chance of coming into being:

Since “nature” is probabilistic, there was a small chance, no matter how infinitesimal, that the universe would come into being out of this nothing. And so it did. Since there was no time, and nobody to measure or wait, then it doesn’t matter how small the chance was. It was >0, and so it happened “eventually”.

It’s self-contained logic, in a way. But it works out beautifully and solves the question of “why” quite neatly: The answer to “Why?” is “Because.” There is no reason, no intention, no purpose. The creation of the universe was random, and there is no other logical explanation for it.

I have always “known” there is no creator god (because the concept seemed so unreasonable). It is like something “clicked” and the whole thing fell into place. To argue, no, to even seriously entertain the notion, that there could be any other reason (be it deterministic or divine intervention) seems completely silly to me now.

Maybe this is grossly unscientific (I have not the slightest idea how you could prove this hypothesis). Maybe it is totally obvious to a lot of people. And maybe it seems quite stupid to you, the reader. But, somehow, this is important to me.

German? WTF Dude?!

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> Why is your blog suddenly in German?!

I was asked that question twice after I posted [two](/2007/11/06/demonstration-gegen-vorratsdatenspeicherung) [articles](/2007/11/07/medienecho-zur-demonstration) in [German](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language). The answer, of course, is that it isn’t. My blog will remain mostly English for the foreseeable future. But those two articles were about something that is mostly of interest to Germans (new data retention laws pushed through parliament by the government).

I still intend to start blogging bilingually. However, WordPress doesn’t really provide the facilities for this. I have some ideas to work around those limitations, but they involve writing a new WordPress theme… and when I see (http://www.php.net) I get headaches.

Milk Prices

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The milk I like is now at €1.09 for full milk and €0.99 per liter for low fat milk. The cheapest milk my local supermarket carries is now at €0.66. That’s DM1.29. I am pretty sure that milk cost no more than 0.99 DM when I moved to Frankfurt six years ago. And at any rate, the prices were €0.89 for my favorite milk and €0.46 for the cheap milk about three or four months ago. Talk about a price hike.