randform

Tim and me hereby protest against the current plans to build a car gigafactory in Berlin’s vicinity as it poses a too big threat to Berlin’s water supply. There had been massive droughts in the last two years in Brandenburg and the factory is sought to use up as much water as over 75 000 people (for estimation: approx. the amount of people who arrived during the refugee crises in Berlin). Apart from this it is thought to be partially built into a high degree water protection area. We are joined in this protest among others by Nora and Theresa Lantez (website) who live much closer to the envisaged plant and for whom the impact on their living environment would be very direct and rather destructive. Here you can see Theresa dancing:
Theresa Lantez in Bernau.

update Sept.6, 2021: According to the public plans given by Tesla all of the buildings will be built into water protection zones. Moreover the plant site is surrounded by a special european protection zone the Natura 2000 zones. According to my counting the chemicals in the factory exceed by far the allowed limits for a waterprotection zone. In the town hall meeting a representative of the Tesla factory answered that the allowed limits are not exceeded, if one counts each processing unit as a kind of “separate factory” (in german: Aufteilung in Anlagen), because in this way the volumes and weights of hazardous substances of each “Anlage” stay below the limits.
There are descriptions of what can be seen as a separate “Anlage” in the allowed limits for a waterprotection zone. I am not a law person but it appears to me pretty clear that the argumentation of Tesla is simply wrong.

Since the town hall meeting in 2020 things got worse, because Tesla now wants to set up a battery factory as well, where alone the cathode material exceeds limits by about a factor of 20 and the public town hall meetings for the new plans were cancelled.

In the randform post “Gesture steered Turing machine” I used data gloves, which were made following the instructions of Hannah Perner-Wilson who is a member of the gloves project. Being weary of sitting too much at the computer I had also written in this post that I would like to make more use of body movements and in particular include danse-like movements in computer interaction and in particular in programming.

Unfortunately rather shortly after I had written the post a not so nice medical indication in my vicinity which was -at least partially- due to too much computer sitting urged me to more or less dramatically speed up this project.

The gesture recognition for my gloves, which were used in the Turing machine example, works, but it is not yet fine grained and exhaustive enough. So I had to look for an easy and fast and at least to some extend workable and affordable solution which would insure a more direct and precise steering possibility, like some version of key gloves. To make it short: In the end I made my own version with Tims help. Again it’s only a start but still.

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A new astlab project, which comes closer to realize something which I have carried around in my head for now almost ten years.

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Tim’s midi-osc article has now an explanation on How to sew the vmeter sleeve and a video which shows the wireless vmeter in action:

The last blog post received quite some comments which I would like to answer. So reader Jared Khithim asked about the use of my proposals for a pre-preprint achive:

..this seems to be a quite clear violation of your copyrights! Are you going to sue Holtzbrinck?

Reader M. Boulangel saw this similarily and wondered wether I wouldn’t like to set up my own preprint archive and last but not least reader Mandy asked about the CC-10 birthday party:

…is boring talks the new berlin party scoop?

So regarding the copyright issue: No – I don’t want to sue Holtzbrinck. In fact it’s not only that I find my suggestions not overly original and rather intuitive but also that I think that it’s good that at least some people care about the issue. Moreover I don’t want to set up a preprint archive – I actually had already set up** and maintained a preprint archive for almost ten years at the former sfb288 which starts with lecture notes* by Ludvig Faddeev from autumn 1991.

I could also imagine that eventually some kind of pre-preprint archive may exist already at some institution, as there are meanwhile many institutional repositories. Or there may be related projects. Like for the Mimirix project we used trac for (amongst others) reading the students works and who knows wether there aren’t universities who already set up their own online dissertation pre-print archive. I still think it would be good to have something like this with a long term support offered by a global public institution like the arxiv.org. A company like Holtzbrinck has to keep its own business interest in focus and this may unfortunately turn out to be eventually at some point against the original idea of science.

Concluding – I eventually would use my “copyrights” passively, that is in case someone would e.g. try to forbid the arxiv.org to set up such a thing, because of copyright issues (there are still software patents in the US) then I could eventually try to help the arxiv with my timestamped proposals, which are distributed over the internet. But I don’t think that this is going to happen.

*the preprints have no licence, since back then a kind of creative commons share-a-like licence was sort of self-understood for preprints, I actually don’t know how the arxiv handles these new laws.
**with technical help from colleagues

Regarding the party… the party of course started after the talks, images after the click.
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Tanz im Aufbauhaus inspired by 90’s hip hop music, Klaus Nomi, Kraftwerk, Nina Hagen and the Megaphoneannouncements at S-Bahnhof Friedrichsfelde-Ost.

The song is about humans and machinization. Translation eventually later.

Tonträgerindustrie auf dem Ladentisch

I left a long comment at the Berlin city blog Spreeblick which discusses the role of commercial social media, their democracy and the Gema (the german perfomance rights organization). The comment is in german and you can read it also after the click.

Addition on 20.08.2012: A part of this comment which deals with social media and democracy can be found translated in the randform post “translation.”

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update 6.2.11: Here an image of yesterdays great show. Nora and Theresa Lantez dancing “Farruquita por las dos” as a fight of the generations.
(eventually some more images to come)

Short note for the Berlin locals. Theresa Lantez, featured in this randform post runs a show with her mother Nora Lantez on saturday. Nora Lantez is a professional balletdancer (education Berlin) with a 3 years extra specialization in “spanish dance”. The show “Flamenco- Impressions” is at Studiobühne at the FF Marzahn, music by Cayenne Katrin and Josè Ramirez.

Soheil Nasseri (who was featured a couple of times here on randform) is again becoming an actor. This times he is going to play the role of a pianist of the 19th century (means in particular one hour of Chopin). He will perform together with an orchester and the ballet of John Neumeier, Lady of the Camellias. The show is going to be end of Mai in the Metropolitan Opera House, which fits in about 30000 people!
(small clarification added on May 3: The Metropolitan opera house fits in 3800 people at one performance, since there are 8 performances with Soheil Nasseri this gives altogether about 30000 people who may attend his performances)
Before this big event is taking place he rehearsed his performance here in Berlin in the Salon Christophori – a repairshop for fortepianos and other historical instruments in front of ca. 100 highly critical inhabitants of Berlin (…just to make sure that New York gets the right quality! ;-) ) His performance was partially together with Tuyêt Pham (mimicking the orchester).

The performance was no exception since next to the repairshop (where you can by the way adopt the repair of a fortepiano) Salon Christorphori hosts a series of high quality performances of artists who enjoy the possibility to perform in a rather casual context (and with better conditions than in a department store). Unfortunately the future of the Salon is rather unclear since the place is currently refurbished with unclear (and most likely gentrified) future tenant situation.

“Small” cultural occasions like the above described are important for the cultural life of a city. They serve not only for local communication and entertainment but are equally of educational value. Unfortunately as described before music education in Berlin is not as it could be and more unfortunately the situation is worsening. In a protest note well-known musicians protest against the cutbacks of music education in schools .

Soheil Nasseri with Tuyêt Pham saying good bye

That is how it currently looks in front of Salon Christophori

Another musical event I attended last week (just in case you wonder what I am doing):
The fantastic crossover project featuring the flying steps and the well-tempered clavier -> youtube video

I am aware of the fact that it may be funny if a mathematical physicist speaks about theatre.

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