randform

We managed our relocation. I overstrained my right hand a bit and had eye problems due to the dust, but finally everything got squeezed into the appartment so that we could hurry to Berlin in order to see relatives and solve some other problems.

The bad thing about germand appartments is that they usually have no built-in closets, so you have to move around all these big armoires (or live out of a suitcase).

We were lucky to find two rather antique closets, which you can carry in parts. One closet was in an attic and covered with cobwebs. The printed letters on its back indicate that it had been under a US Army Requisition Demand right after the war. Seems after it came back from the army the owner didnt like it too much anymore – given its abandonned situation in the attic.

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Right now and for the upcoming weeks I am without internet access at home, so basically without internet. Here thus fast a blog post related to the financial crisis.

About 2 weeks ago the Group of 20 finance ministers and central bankers of the biggest developped economies had met in southern England in order to prepare for the upcoming G20 summit. A “sustained effort” was pledged to end the global recession and to cleanse banks of toxic assets. In particular according to Bloomberg

“Our key priority now is to address the value of assets held on banks’ balance sheets, which are constraining banks’ lending” and damaging economies, the G-20 statement said.
Banks are still hoarding cash after being stung by more than $1.2 trillion of writedowns and losses.”

Meanwhile governments -in particular the US government- are pumping money into the market. For example in Europe the total amount of money has almost doubled within the last 6 years (money supply wikipedia, the Berliner zeitung march 28, 2009 Tagesthema diagram is including 2008 but unfortunately not visible)

And still inflation is low – as if the money would disappear!

And even more mysterious: the pumped-in money meanwhile exceeded the amount of one or two trillion dollars, which were acclaimed as possible losses. And still the money is been hoarded.

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I just came across these funny videos from the mission of Man System Integration Standards which were mostly shot at skylab. See e.g. this video about how to use paper.

The videos and documents display the problems of finding a well-adapted architecture for space travel. For that the Skylab investigations into anthropometry and biomechanics were apparently necessary.
Similar investigations were also undertaken in Australia. In particular the australian government was recently seeking 2000 volunteers for the ADF Aircrew and Crewstation Anthropometry Project which was organized by the Centre for Applied Anthropometry.

A reader called Hein Kleist wrote:

I find it a little dangerous that you suggest to let problematic banks go bankrupt! Don’t you know that the collapse of Lehman Brothers almost destroyed the world financial system? There could be a chain reaktion of an unknown size!

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Recently I had the chance to take part at three workshops. One in London at Imperial College, then a workshop in Goettingen and then a workshop on the island of Langeoog. I don’t know wether I find the time to report about the workshops. At least on my last day in London I made a visit to icy horniman park and some pictures which you may find behind the link.

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a post about austrian/german cuisine

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I am currently too much on the move for blogging, hope to catch up at a higher pace in some weeks.

But I’ll try to answer comments. (e.g. like this one about the storage of genetic information)

randform wishes a happy new year to everybody!

just be careful – in particular given the rather bleak economic outlooks it will get even more easy to loose oneself in dreamworlds, so I wouldn’t wonder if the boom of the game industry is going to continue. In this TED video (via serious games) David Perry describes the evolution of video games, however of special interest in this video may be an -what he calls opinion of a student- which is a (realistic?) documentary about a self acclaimed video game addict (second part of the talk, the whole talk is about 20 min). The documentary describes the cognitive changes which are due to excessive video gaming.