randform

Holm Friebe, an unknown riesenmaschinist, Cory Doctorow and Martin Baaske alltogether in the mudd club

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Yesterday I was at pianist Soheil Nasseri’s debut in the Berlin Philharmonie. I saw an earlier concert of him lately and thus I was curious how his performance would be this time.

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According to this BBC report the Svalbard International Seed Vault, also entitled as “Noahs Ark” or “doomsday vault”, is scheduled to be formally opened on 26 February. According to the seed vaults website:

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is currently being established in the permafrost in the mountains of Svalbard, is designed to store duplicates of seeds from seed collections from around the globe. Many of these collections from developing countries are in developing countries. If seeds are lost, e.g. as a result of natural disasters, war or simply a lack of resources, the seed collections may be reestablished using seeds from Svalbard.

Every good gardener knows that fragile plants need to be saveguarded from agressive exponentially growing weeds. (via beton und garten). And if things are out of balance people in Germany are confining them sometimes with what is called a Rasenkantenstein (see above image).

Due to the rapid climate change again mostly fragile plants are dying and thus biodiversity is on the decline, which made the Svalbard International Seed Vault necessary. Frankly speaking I think the vault is rather a grave, as I am not sure wether the seeds would survive under new circumstances.

And unfortunately I am rather pessimistic wether the above Berlin bud (top image which is of today!) is going to survive, looking at the very likely future frost.

Below some images of the shoots of a syringa heidge by G. Mein entitled: “Vor Hecken schützen”:

the band tonrand, which was already fetured in this randform post with their song “not me” has now a website on last.fm, where they published their latest song: hallusions (lyrics, vocals, music: Cat Caspari, music, arrangement: Niko Lai).

addition 26.02.13: The tonrand profile on last.fm had been erased. The music is no more available.

trait- or trademarks ?

Is it really true that the german sentence “Ich liebe es” (“I love it”), i.e. a pretty common but rather personal expression of affection had been transformed into a registered trademark ? At least this is what the trademark R next to the sentence on the flag seems to indicate. What happenes if one uses this e.g. in a song ? Does one have to pay royalties now to fast food chain McDomalds in this case ? Does anyone know ?

I try to avoid to make too many commercial promotions on this blog. Here a little exception, since I am happy to have made the acquaintance of the main movie star in the above film: Anna Brüggemann!

So go watch the movie “Berlin am Meer” or at least the trailer, which displays also images of this crazy city.

There is currently a big discussion in Germany about the violence of youngsters and how to adress them. In particular on a meeting in Wiesbaden the christian democratic union decided to enforce the punishment of criminal youth, like e.g. to raise the maximal youth sentence from 10 years to 15 years a.s.o.

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Climate change will directly affect future food availability and compound the difficulties of feeding the world’s rapidly growing population, this could be more dramatic then previously assumed. It is also sort of wellknown that the livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global and especially regarding global warming see e.g. this FAO report. So in principle for the environment it would be best to be vegan. (see also this cornell study)

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image source wikipedia

Fireworks may be great fun, if they are composed in an artistic way. And may be the fascination about fireworks is connected to the human dream to control fire. However especially with fireworks we know that this can go terribly wrong.

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