I have not been posting much on this blog lately. Since the birth of our daughter, I have been keeping track of the mundane details of our daily lives on another blog (sorry - private!) and since I can only focus on one social diary at a time, I sorely neglected this one. Also we are quite naturally not going out as much as we used to, so there really isn't much to say.

I have finally also started a technical blog - I guess every computer-geek needs to have one.

This editorial which appeared in the NY times after the last US Presidential election in 2004 expresses well my feelings on what is at stake in the election today. It is a choice between fundamental models, between the enlightened secularism of modernity or the dogmatic theocracy of the dark middle ages. This may not be an obvious choice in general, but it is for me.

After the lunatic fringe of the christian right and the social conservatives got to run the country for a while, now it is time to give the forces of critical rationalism a chance again. Let's see how the future turns out



http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/opinion/04wills.html

The Day the Enlightenment Went Out
By GARRY WILLS

Evanston, Ill.
This election confirms the brilliance of Karl Rove as a political strategist. He calculated that the religious conservatives, if they could be turned out, would be the deciding factor. The success of the plan was registered not only in the presidential results but also in all 11 of the state votes to ban same-sex marriage. Mr. Rove understands what surveys have shown, that many more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin's theory of evolution.

This might be called Bryan's revenge for the Scopes trial of 1925, in which William Jennings Bryan's fundamentalist assault on the concept of evolution was discredited. Disillusionment with that decision led many evangelicals to withdraw from direct engagement in politics. But they came roaring back into the arena out of anger at other court decisions - on prayer in school, abortion, protection of the flag and, now, gay marriage. Mr. Rove felt that the appeal to this large bloc was worth getting President Bush to endorse a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (though he had opposed it earlier).

The results bring to mind a visit the Dalai Lama made to Chicago not long ago. I was one of the people deputized to ask him questions on the stage at the Field Museum. He met with the interrogators beforehand and asked us to give him challenging questions, since he is too often greeted with deference or flattery.

The only one I could think of was: "If you could return to your country, what would you do to change it?" He said that he would disestablish his religion, since "America is the proper model." I later asked him if a pluralist society were possible without the Enlightenment. "Ah," he said. "That's the problem." He seemed to envy America its Enlightenment heritage.

Which raises the question: Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?

America, the first real democracy in history, was a product of Enlightenment values - critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences. Though the founders differed on many things, they shared these values of what was then modernity. They addressed "a candid world," as they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, out of "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind." Respect for evidence seems not to pertain any more, when a poll taken just before the elections showed that 75 percent of Mr. Bush's supporters believe Iraq either worked closely with Al Qaeda or was directly involved in the attacks of 9/11.

The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies.

Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.

It is often observed that enemies come to resemble each other. We torture the torturers, we call our God better than theirs - as one American general put it, in words that the president has not repudiated.

President Bush promised in 2000 that he would lead a humble country, be a uniter not a divider, that he would make conservatism compassionate. He did not need to make such false promises this time. He was re-elected precisely by being a divider, pitting the reddest aspects of the red states against the blue nearly half of the nation. In this, he is very far from Ronald Reagan, who was amiably and ecumenically pious. He could address more secular audiences, here and abroad, with real respect.

In his victory speech yesterday, President Bush indicated that he would "reach out to the whole nation," including those who voted for John Kerry. But even if he wanted to be more conciliatory now, the constituency to which he owes his victory is not a yielding one. He must give them what they want on things like judicial appointments. His helpers are also his keepers.

The moral zealots will, I predict, give some cause for dismay even to nonfundamentalist Republicans. Jihads are scary things. It is not too early to start yearning back toward the Enlightenment.

One thing I have learned over the last 8 years that what I assumed to be universal principles of good government are anything but. I had assumed that the principles on which modern republican government is founded, like the idea of natural human rights, the importance of rule of law or the use of rationality in decision making were pretty much accepted by broad consensus.

By observing my almost physical disgust at the idea of people like George W. Bush or more recently Sarah Palin having any position of leadership in a modern state seemed to indicate some of my core values being violated. What abhors me is their lack of intellectual curiosity and their reliance on dogma as the primary tool of decision making. The fact that a substantial part of the US population seem to favor such an approach shows that my core value are not that universal after all. Accusing them of dogmatism only exposes my own dogmatism and the hypocrisy of considering rationalism and the values of the Enlightenment as the universal principles of modern democracy. Even though these values have been the foundation and founding principles of most modern states - like the US, where they are expressed in its declaration of independence, its constitution and its bill or rights.

But does this make the universal? After all, what is wrong with torture, if you believe in knowing a priory that the person in front of you is guilty, what is wrong with censorship and burning books if they spread lies against what you know to be The Truth? After all torture and censorship amongst other, worked quite well as tools of government during the middle ages and in fact most of the history of humanity. Then why make such a fuss about it?

Thus I declare that I consider certain Beliefs to be self-evident. That government should be based on reason and the rule of law in as much as humanly possible. That free though should not only be tolerated but encouraged. That all human being are born equal with certain fundamental rights - life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, to name just a few. And that it is the primary purpose of the state to create an environment where its subjects can exercise those rights without being subject to arbitrary infringement.

In that sense, I support Barack Obama for President of the US. I don't know if he will be a good president, but he seems to be a rational kind of guy and as the last 8 years have shown this is not something which should taken for granted.

I am happy to live in a city which is environmentally conscious enough to have a special after christmas recycling program for retired christmas trees. It is not just good for the environment, but also a nice symbolic gesture as all those trees come to life again in new forms within the city, throughout the park system.

Walking to work this morning, I could see trees all over by the curb, waiting to be picked up.

Today is winter solstice , the astronomical event which is at the core of so many festivities around this holiday season. It marks the shortest day/longest night of the year and also the turning point after which the days are beginning to get longer again. It seems than nearly every culture originating in the northern hemisphere has come up with some festivity around that time, often involving fire, light and a spirit of hope and optimism as things are taking a turn for the better again.

When christianity became mainstream in the Roman Empire, winter solstice fell on Dec 25th in the Julian calendar, which was turned into a festival to celebrate the birth of Chirst - to superseded the Roman Sol Invictus festival. We know very little about the real birthday of Jesus of Nazareth - except that it most certainly was NOT in winter.

Todays christmas traditions in particular, have been shaped by a wild mix of influences over the years, roman, germanic, celtic, medieval, victorian to modern commercial and consumerist and still only represent a small fraction of the cultural heritage surrounding this time of the year.

In that sense, a happy holiday season to all!

380 W 33rd - General Post Office

One of the frequently asked questions is how Santa manages to deliver all these presents in time for Christmas. The key to this might be as for many other problems in efficient order fulfillment and supply chain management: outsourcing!




Straight from the factories in East Asia via a chain of UPS, Fed-ex and USPS straight under the Christmas tree! Large scale order fulfillment agents like Amazon.com now even allow goods to be gift-wrapped before shipping and delivery directly to a 3rd party address.

While red suit, flying sled and reindeers may be good for parades and ceremonial spectacle, the real miracle these days is happening on 33rd St - somewhere in the under-belly of the giant beaux-art structure , which is the New York City home of the US postal service...

Today, I spotted the first $20 bill signed by current Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson - slightly more than a year after he was appointed. I guess that might be about as long as it takes for fresh money to make it from the mint to any random ATM. The same withdrawal still includes the last 4 previous Secretaries of the Treasury

AOpen MP915

Being a hard-core computer geek, I had always felt the need to have a generic PC to run Linux or FreeBSD in addition to my now somewhat aging powerbook, which I use as a desktop and writing pad (when closed due to desk-space constrains...).

Given the space, noise and esthetic constraints of living in a NYC studio apartment - suburbanites, think walk-in closet - a standard desktop or server was pretty much out of the question and another laptop didn't seem ideal either. I was planing to use it as a server, which is accessed remotely and need a monitor and keyboard only when something goes wrong.




AOpen makes a know-off design of the Mac mini - not as nice as the original, but not bad compared to other PCs. Like the Mac Mini it's a squre box about the size of the CD-ROM drive. Since it uses laptop parts, the computer itself can be low-power and thus much quieter than most desktops. Since it's a barebone system, prices start at about $300 - $400-$500 for a reasonable machine. The other nice thing, is that it has an S-Video output for the monitor, so I can just connect it to the TV and switch the channel when I need to see the output. As the keyboard, I use a Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard, which is about 3 times the size of the PC, but I guess there are not many alternatives for cheap super-small server-room keyboard & mouse combinations.

Thanks to using plain-vanilla hardware, installing Sabayon Linux from the live CD was a breeze, bypassing the somewhat manual install-process of Gentoo Linux on which it is based and which I really wanted for its flexible source-based package management system.

21st st & 7th ave

For the longest time, wooden water towers, which are required to provide steady water pressure for any building over 6 stories, have been a standard in New York's urban landscape. More recently, cell-phone antennas or whole base-station assemblies like here, are popping up on roofs of low-rise buildings all over the city as the user density increases. Unfortunately, they don't look as nice and romantic as the wooden water towers.

Just noticed that this is the 500th entry. As time goes by...

Requiem for a marathon runner

My powerbook G4 suddenly crashed just now. I guess a laptop crashing is no big news for windows users, but my old 15' G4 powerbook, still running OS X 10.2.8, had been up for just a few days short of a year, without interruption. Careless heavy usage, suspend & unsuspend a few times a day, plugging and un-plugging USB & Firewire peripherals, applications crashing or hanging every now and then, but the system itself kept running without a glitch. Quite a testament to the robustness of the Mac OS X platform! Somehow, when the software upgrades stopped coming in, I just forgot to reboot. Once it got close to a year, I wanted to reach that milestone before doing another routine reboot, but I guess it was not meant to be. I was fiddling with the Airport Icon on the menu-bar (my Netgear wireless gateway crashes about every few weeks and needs to be power-cycled...) when the user interface suddenly froze. Maybe at its core the OS was still working, but I had no way of getting to it any more and no choice but to pull the plug.

There was something of a scare in lower Manhattan this morning, stopping trains, moving markets and apparently annoying a whole lot of people. I was on my way to work about that area around 9am. I noticed the unusually warm weather and that it was raining, but I didn't smell anything in particular. Maybe I have lived in NYC for too long? What was it supposed to be? An unusual smell of rotting vegetables? And what is supposed to be unusual about that? The various scents of rotten food, garbage, urine and a whole plethora of unpleasant odors are such a part of the cityscape, specially when it is hot, that we tend to just tune it out after a while. Or maybe I just wasn't in the right neighborhood.

Somewhat belatedly, I started using flickr to upload some of my recent photos. If time magazine declares "you " - that means all of us - as the "person of the year 2006", the age of participatory media must well have arrived. Poking around in the vast archive of photos people have uploaded, I am amazed at the coverage that we all have collectively achieved. Hardly any place or angle remains unexposed. For example, I noticed that my picture of the Bloomberg Tower , which I thought was a pretty unusual perspective, already existed in a few copies - most of them better. The search for bathroom , currently returns over 150'000 pictures...

Soon comes the day, where casual tourists can leave their cameras at home, since all the pictures they would take have already been taken and are available on flickr. It has probably always been the case that thousands of very similar pictures, of common "Kodak spots", existed in the shoe-boxes of photo amateurs, but now it just becomes more obvious as they are universally accessible. It can even be useful to take a virtual tour of a location you plan to visit, since the pictures here show many angles and lights - not just the flattering ones, the advertising pictures want to show you. If the view from the hotel is really a construction site rather than the beach, there surely will be a picture to show that...

Today marks the 5th year in " The Global War on Terror". After the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs, this is the 3rd Great Metaphorical War. While wars on metaphors are politically very convenient, they also have the unfortunate drawback that they can't really be be won, since metaphors are basically ideas which can't sign a declaration of unconditional surrender.

Terrorism takes its name from the irrational fear, which it evokes in the hearts of its victims. We can only hope that fighting a "war" against our own fear isn't going to be ultimate self-defeating - in addition to being distracting from the police work necessary, to find and stop people who have committed, are committing or want to commit horrible acts of any kind - imaginable and unimaginable. Could any serious struggle be really won if it required to surrender the moral high ground and and to betray some of our most fundamental values, like the notion of unalienable human rights or the rule of law instead of the rule of men? Maybe, but the question is by whom and at what price...

Talking about the long tail effect is all the rage right now. If the cost of production and finely targeted delivery of something is sufficiently low, suddenly many little obscure things can become viable. One of my favorite examples is a company that sells wooden computer peripherals - worldwide obviously, but on the other hand, you probably won't see their superbowl ads any time soon.

Translated into the media wold, the popular wisdom goes that participatory media will ultimately spell doom for traditional, edited media. Instead of relying on the professional judgment of editors and the reputation of media institutions like newspaper magazines, studios etc., media consumers would have to increasingly rely on recommendations, word of mouth delivered efficiently in some fancy new forms of collaborative filtering and content aggregation. Supposedly micro-payment schemes would funnel money directly from advertisers and subscribers to the content producers - creating a new class of intermediaries.

Being the quintessential prototype of this new class of media giant is one of the reasons why Google currently has a stock-market valuation in the stratosphere, a kind of single company stock-market bubble. Curious to see how long the long tail gets, I signed up as a "media-partner" for their AdSense program with this ridiculous little blog - which is more part of the problem that the solution for this new age of nearly unlimited soap-boxes and dabbling dilettantes... Just for the fun of being one of the smallest business partners of the worlds second largest technology and media company (by stock-market valuation).

Thanks to some help from tech-support it seems that the iBlog tool has overcome the sudden but very stubborn and persistent refusal to update this website that had started sometime in August of last year. This should suffice the prolonged silence and spotty record for the last 6 month or so.

I might have given it a rest for good at this point, if it weren't for the guilt of abandoning my most loyal (and probably only...) reader - an expat New Yorker, now living upside down in Perth, Australia. Erin - I hope you are having a good time down there - here's to you and I hope you enjoy the continued coverage...

Since I don't have a TV, I was trying to find a place in the neighborhood which would have the 2nd presidential debate on a TV screen. I thought it might be fun to watch the debate with a bunch of strangers, experiences politics as a public affair, a "res publica". However unfortunately, the Yankees were playing that night, which means that all available public TV screens were tuned to the game. I have been told that in some other neighborhoods, e.g. nolita or lower east-side it would have been quite easy to find to debate in public spaces.

Recently somebody brought up in a discussion the popular neo-conservative doctrine about the importance of succeeding to install and spread "pro-american democracy" in the middle-east. Was this just an misspeak for "American-stye democracy" or a deeper Freudian slip? Since democracy is by definition the absolute and unconstrained rule by the will of the majority of the electorate in question, how can it be said to be "pro-anything" in any absolute or lasting sense? But I suspect that despite the the stated and maybe honest objective of many war supporters in the US, that of liberating poor oppressed Iraqis and bring them the blessings of democracy, there is an unspoken assumption that we might want them to be "pro-American" - even more so than democratic, if push comes to shove.

With our government having a long history of supporting some of the worst kinds of dictators, as long as they were sufficiently "pro-American", or "our kind of dictator" - like Saddam Hussein, Augusto Pinochet (once, quite some time ago...) or Muammar Gaddafi (now once again...), one might get some idea which way the wind is blowing.

If uncertain where you stand on the pro-American vs. American style democracy in Iraq issue, use the following imaginary experiment as a measure of : what would/should we do if Saddam Hussein would reach a majority in the planned Iraqi elections? What would we do if the people would vote for a Taliban style islamic state?

avoiding the chaos around Penn Station during the RNC

I am one of the 500'000 people whose daily commute passes through the underground maze of Penn Station. I don't know who had the bright idea to to hold the upcoming RNC with all is nightmarish security needs right on top of one of the the nations busiest commuter hubs in one of the nations most congested metropolitan areas? Maybe the same kind of people who seem to have ideas like that democracy and freedom can be forced upon people at gun-point (or was that also just a pretext...)?

Despite thousands of cops turning the the area around MSG and Penn Station into some kind of heavily fortified high-security "Manhattan Green Zone". Despite the need for an army of bomb sniffing dogs who are supposed to be searching each of the thousands of train cars entering its perimeter. The responsible officials are giving themselves defiantly optimistic that it's going to be business as usual, presumably with only a few minor delays and glitches. Yeah, right - but one has to admire the self-delusional powers of wishful thinking...

Like many thousand New Yorkers, I am fulfilling my duties to the common good, by staying away from the whole mess to reduce congestion and chaos by as much as I can. I am planing to stay for the week down south at the Jersey shore. Making life a little bit less miserable for those who don't have a choice to avoid it!

Or why some people think, that blogs are evil

Since I have this little counter gizmo which also provides access tracing on all the pages of this blog, I have been observing some of the access pattern. Surprisingly, it seems that most accesses come from random strangers by referral of a search engine and most of them by accident...

I can easily understand how blogs, with their sequence of unrelated topics in close proximity on a page, can confuse search engines and searches alike. Any rare combination of search-terms, even though spread over adjacent but totally unrelated articles can make even the most obscure blog, like this one bubble up to the top ranking of a popular search engine. In order to be more search-engine friendly, I have reduced the number of full-text entries in the category listings. Let's see how much it helps.

The other common source of hits are typos - mine and the searcher's. It's quite amazing, how many hits can be generated by close misspellings of what appears to be a popular search term - or at least a commonly misspelled one. When I become aware of such a typo, I fix it.

a pedestrians view of New Jersey driver's sensory limitations

Every night, I have to cross a congested intersection to the train station at Metropark. The whole area is generally a mess during evening rush hour, when the huge park&ride parking garage structure spits out cars like a hornet's nest. Crossing that street is quite hazardous even in the marked cross-walks, when drivers that had been waiting for an opportunity to do a left turn, do so with screeching tires. Who has ever stood between a grizzly and her cubs, can imagine what it means to get in between an aggravated, tired and hungry commuter and his/her dinner... Given the moral and legal weight of vehicular manslaughter, I don't assume malicious intent, but rather a lack of attention and imagination. For a New Jersey driver, it may be so beyond their wildest dreams to encounter a pedestrian, that they don't bother to look into the cross street before taking the left turn and probably rather be talking on their cell-phone.

No, not really - but it seems that any self respecting Internet geek needs to have a blog ;-)

Ever since arriving to New York, I used to keep a scrapbook to keep all kinds of clipping from shows I had seen, noteworthy restaurants or bars I had been to or just any random event I felt worthwhile remembering. After a few moves and living under the space constraints of Manhattan appartments (think attack submarine ...) I though it would be better if such souvenirs would be kept virtual and online.



I used to have a homepage long before the Internet or rather the World Wide Web hit mainstream. A crude page, crafted by hand with a text editor - and I still don't know how to do much better. With the frantic technical, social and economic evolution of the Web all around it over the last few years of the dot-com-bubble, my virtual presence has turned from avant-guard to obsolete... Then I got a mac, which comes with all those digital-lifestyle apps, endowed with Apple's sense of style and instinct for new paradigms in personal computing. Thanks to that and with the addition of this latest tool - iBlog - I might just be able to re-claim a position slightly ahead of mainstream in the use of the Internet...

This blog is a log in the nautical sense. Mostly a record of events and observation of things I see, read, hear, experience or think while living in New York City. Not of interest for anybody else but me, like a journal or a diary, but openly accessible so I'll have to watch what I write - on the odd chance that somebody could stumble over it by accident, although it is well hidden in the wast sea of information out there. A strange and intriguing tension between public and private...