... Soon after the death of Jim Henson, Sad Kermit spiraled downward into a life full of addiction, romance and pain. The songs and videos on this webpage shed light on Sad Kermit's descent into his dark, hurting world ...
-- sadkermit.com
... Kermit is singin all the sad and painful hymns: Creep, Hurt, Needle in the Hay, etc. ... check the 'Needle in the Hay' video.
(via kottke)
The faculty of Harvard Law School has unanimously approved a motion for open access: articles will be made freely available in an online repository. With the success of this motion, Harvard Law becomes the first law school to make an institutional commitment to open access to its faculty's scholarly publications [...]
-- law.harvard.edu
This could easily mean that open access has become - or will become soon - main stream. Let's start looking for another worthy cause to fight for.
I'm still not perfectly convinced about the benefits of google's search faces option. If you'd look for faces related to Rock 'n' Roll, you'd expect something different, wouldn't you?
A: Make me a sandwhich.
B: What?! Make it yourself.
A: Sudo make me a sandwich
It’s our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to “hand code” everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.
So says Khoi Vinh, design director of NYTimes.com. Right he is.
Watch the ultimate machine. It's purpose is to switch itself off, when being switched on.
60% of the world's reproduced oil paintings come from a village in China. REGIONAL made the painters portray themselves: Self-portraiture and emerging artistic consciousness in Dafen.
(via boingboing)
Very polite Bruce Lee gives us a short intro on kung fu in a 60ies television interviewing environment. Brilliant.
(via kungfugrippe)
"Juno" a very nice movie, that you shouldn't miss. For my pubertal readers its a must see. It is far from being realistic but it can calm you down when it comes to teenage pregnancy. Great soundtrack. Great dialogs. Great cast. Here my favorite line:
You should grow a mustache
... calm down, calm down, i'm not going to.
Paul Krugman, author of well known works on trade theory, wrote quite cheerful stuff in his early days: Theory of Interstellar Trade. Here is the abstract:
This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the good than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved.
Great ... Economics, is there more science we possibly need?
(via ny times)
Image upload test successful. Above you see Sergio Mendez and Brasil 66 singing 'Day Tripper'. Click the image for a youtube clip. Lovely, a whole lot of crochet dress action ... To complete the brazilian flavour, here are two livestreams. The first one comes directly from Rio and features popular brazilian music. The second one is very much into bossa nova.
The Vatican has published a new list of seven - this time 'social' - sins:
Obviously they are not meant to replace but to augment the already known "seven cardinal sins".
(via bloomberg)
The cartoonist does a whole lot of featuring for The Velvet Underground and Nico lately. First he found this video at archive.org with 1:04:16 of brilliant noise and then he got these songs, which allegedly are part of the Live at the Gymnasium, NYC, 1967 recording.
...just keep posting this kind of material. Lovely, lovely ...
How I’d Sink American Vogue in five issues. I’m not aware of a german life style magazine, worth being sunk that pretty … Gala, perhaps or Bunte. But they do not have that Vogue-seque design reputation. Other ideas? Stern does not work.
Now for some Youtube music extravaganza. First watch the pieces of youtube user HaydnHuckle. He only shows clips of jazz piano, no cuts, no enhancements, only a piano captured by a handcam. And then, you might know him already, watch Ronald Jenkees, who is a brilliant nerd.
Lets post another mathematics piece. Robert Lang is an origami artist and maintains a webpage on his art. Here he collected a list of math origami links, which are interesting, to say the least.
The Manchester City Council is looking for a Teenage Pregnancy Implementation Manager (advertisment in the guardian). Hm, appealing, though it is a full time position.
(via cohu)
A huge huge thanks a lot goes out to Scott Klarr for his large and superb collection of programming language cheat sheets.
(via kottke)
TaxProf, a member of the law professor blogs network, found a paper by James Felton, Peter T. Koper, John Mitchell and Michael Stinson on "Attractiveness, Easiness and Other Issues: Student Evaluations of Professors on Ratemyprofessors.com", Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 45-61, Feb. 2008, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Felton et al. (2004) reported that web-based student evaluations of teaching (SET) demonstrated a student preference for course easiness and instructor sexiness. This study explores these same relationships with a larger and improved database. Results indicate even stronger relationships than previously reported. In addition, this study demonstrates significant cultural differences by institution and discipline in the relationships between Quality, Easiness, and 'Hotness' in web-based SET.
Yahoo! closed down it's famous Design Innovation Team, firing the whole creative staff. Yahoo! plans to close down all it's innovation teams. Is this the first step towards becoming a Microsoft affiliate?
(via information aesthetics)
The Pearce Sisters, a very dark, yet a very nice, animated short movie.
Do you know SAS, the business intelligence tool with the 60ies-charmes? If the day comes, when you need to find the first and second largest value from a set of observations, here is how it'd work:
proc summary data=&inputdataset.;
var &variable.;
class &class_list.;
output
out=&output_dataset.
sum=idgroup(max(&variable.) out[2] (&variable.)=)
/autolabel autoname;
run;
Somehow idgroup and out[2] do the trick. Why it works and what else to look after can be found in "Getting the Most from PROC MEANS" by Andrew H. Karp.

Rockabrunder (sprich:Rockä-brander), das ist ganz klar der anglizusmus des jahres. Aber, weiss jemand was das ist, ein Rockä-brander? Ein futteral, in dem der rockstar jeweils sein plektrum aufbewahrt?
image ©2007 Alex Brown
Taking someone else’s idea and increasing the quality by 5% occurs at the price of a 50% decrease in their commitment to execution
--aphotoeditor
There is not much to add. This seems to be the most common 'commitment killer'. Probably more common than any other managerial failure. So, hands off my business, do your job.
The 28th January is Data Protection Day - An initiative of the Council of Europe with the support of the European Commission.
Eloquent JavaScript - An opinionated guide to programming
by Marijn Haverbeke
I had a quick glance over three chapters. Seems worth having a closer look. (via schockwellenreiter)
Folks,
here is one of the worthiest causes to get arrested for. Reenact the the commercial above on the Spanish Steps by Holy Trinity in Rome. See the result below:
Respect guys, If necessary I'll bail you out.
(via decio: il blog)
Sun announced an agreement to acquire MySQL AB, an open source icon and developer of one of the world's fastest growing open source databases. This acquisition accelerates Sun's position in enterprise IT to now include the $15 billion database market and reaffirms Sun's position as the leading provider of platforms for the Web economy and its role as the largest commercial open source contributor.
...this would be Sun's published opinion, and here is MySQL's:
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, an open source icon and developer of one of the world’s fastest growing open source databases for approximately $1 billion in total consideration. The acquisition accelerates Sun's position in enterprise IT to now include the $15 billion database market. Today's announcement reaffirms Sun's position as the leading provider of platforms for the Web economy and its role as the largest commercial open source contributor.
Pretty much the same. I will need a night to think the consequences over. Yet, one thing is for sure: This truly is a large wedding.
Random House has agreed to permit Lessig's The Future of Ideas to be licensed under a Creative Commons - Attribution-Noncommercial license. You can download the book for free here.
Maila Nurmi dead at 86 (http://www.vampirasattic.com/).
B.B.C.'s 100 Things We Didn't Know Last Year

New Years Eve at Cassiopeia's in Berlin.
A lovely picture galleries for christmas: Scared of Santa. There are more than the initial sixteen pictures and they ones comming later on tend to become better and better.
The 24th Chaos Communication Congress (24C3) is the annual four-day conference organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). It takes place at the bcc Berliner Congress Center in Berlin, Germany. The Congress offers lectures and workshops on a multitude of topics and attracts a diverse audience of thousands of hackers, scientists, artists, and utopians from all around the world.
Here are the scheduled events. A whole lot of interesting sessions among them. Unfortunately I can only join at one day ... and I still have to decide which day it will be.
In the video above Prof. Mattuck of the M.I.T. explains the geometrical view of y'=f(x,y): Direction Fields, Integral Curves. It is part of the course Differential Equations.The lecture lasts 48 minutes and is easy to understand and still interesting. Now i know that integral curves can never be tangents.
Yale provides some of its courses open access. It comes under creative commons which allows to non commercially share alike or remix as long as you give credit to the authors. That is quite a free license:
... but, unlike the M.I.T. with its open course ware, Yale does not yet offer math courses. What a pitty.
(via openaccess-germany.de)
No updates for quite some time, but do not worry, I'm fine. Until I post again you may read Rio Baile Funk - The adventures of DJ Rideon in the world of Rio Baile Funk or you could practice the very Japanese algorithm dance, which makes you a better person ... according to the lyrics.
I'm just listening to Binki Griptite's Ghetto Funk Power Hour (mp3-download, 80MB). Does this strike a chord? If so, it is one week left. For all the others: More cryptic pre christmas funk soon here. In the meanwhile listen to Binki Griptite's Ghetto Funk Power Hour, especially to Sharon Jones' "Why Don’t We All Stop Paying Taxes".

"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."
So said Hedy Lamarr. Later on she and her close friend George Antheil invented the "spread spectrum" technology, which is widely used today both in military communications security and cellular phones. They thought one could use it to protect remote controlled torpedos from being jammed by the enemy. The Navy at the height of World War II considered the idea too cumbersome, which it was, given the technology at hand at that time.
(src wired published in 2000)
Here we have 26 tips on how to become a great photographer. The tips are easily to be converted to almost any other profession. Maybe central asian war lord would need to develop different skills but for all the others, read!
Learn as much technical stuff as you can, because Rule Number One is, the client doesn’t really care about your vision of the world. They care about their vision.
-- A Photo Editor
... and enjoy ...
Here we see animal, a hero of my childhood and Rita Moreno. That animal was one of my male role models may explain a lot.
Who can figure out what Rita says to animal in second 52? Starts with "Oje Buddy" which means "Listen up, buddy" as far as I know. One sentence may mean "Look at me, when I'm talking to you!" but theres more.
Remember, remember the fifth of November, The gunpowder, treason and plot, I know of no reason Why gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, ’twas his intent To blow up the King and Parliament. Three score barrels of powder below, Poor old England to overthrow; By God’s providence he was catch’d With a dark lantern and burning match. Holloa boys, holloa boys, make the bells ring. Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King! Hip hip hoorah! A penny loaf to feed the Pope. A farthing o’ cheese to choke him. A pint of beer to rinse it down. A faggot of sticks to burn him. Burn him in a tub of tar. Burn him like a blazing star. Burn his body from his head. Then we’ll say ol’ Pope is dead. Hip hip hoorah! Hip hip hoorah hoorah!
Harper's Magazine publishes a small list to keep in mind on Guy Fawkes Night:
...and here is a papercraft Guy Fawkes mask.
Because I always forget it, here as a reminder for me: How does perl's grep work:
grep {BLOCK} ARRAY;
or rather
grep (EXPR, ARRAY);
example:
@sesamestreet = ("b-bird", "ernie", "bert", "elmo");
$yeah_no = "";
if(!grep{$_ eq $ARGV[0]} @sesamestreet){
$yeah_no = "not ";
}
print "$ARGV[0] is ".$yeah_no."in sesamestreet\n";
ELEKTRO - Check this vintage page from way back in the nineties. Techno galore and the HTML is awful. They used to run a club in the early nineties in Berlin. I think it went out of business in 1995. I still have and sometimes wear a t-shirt with the logo. Well, obviously they are still active, they maintain a myspace profile. Respect guys.
Wir haben letzten samstag das halbfinale der rugby w.m. gesehen. Frankreich gegen England. Muss man ja gesehn haben. Die schoene fand uebrigens Sébastien Chabal allemal schicker als die ganzen geleckten fussballfatzkes. Dann wisst ihr ja jetze, wo es stilmaessig hingehen wird.
National Geographic publishes pirate pictures - just like Der Haken - and puts a lengthy article on top.
I received this letter by email. Since I consider the mentioned controversy as interesting I'd like to share it with all Euro users: Letter to the Belgian Monetary Authorities.
Naomi Klein published a new book "The Shock Doctrine", in which she states the existence of 'desaster capitalism'. Starting from Milton Friedman's 'only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change' she looks at recent crisis and desaster and their economic outcome. The next step would be to propose that crisis is actually staged or made by whomever powerful enough to drive his cause. I don't know whether this is done in the book but I'm curious. Read the Guardian post for a first glance.
For those, who do not have the time to read the whole thing, she produced a short film, which actually has been part of this year's Venice Film Festival programme. The movie is made well, gives the facts correctly and illustrates the main ideas of the book, though there is no time for in depth analysis.

You chose not to speak because of Friedrich Nietzsche? ... Far out.
Kanye West's "Can't tell me nothin'" in Zach Galifianakis' version. Brilliant!

Hilly Kristal, founder of the CGBG, died at the age of 75. Rest in peace.
(via nytimes)
What a lovely yet handy belt. A must have.
24th Chaos Communication Congress 2007: Call for Participation
Dear reader, I am busy right now. I may be able to post something interesting next weekend which would be soon enough, wouldn't it? In the meantime check the colorful video of M.I.A. ... so 90ies.
I'm currently on a quest for data on the U.S. real estate bubble. I did not yet find proper material. What I found instead is the site of the St. Louis Fed. They offer a whole lot of macro economic data about U.S. issues for free on their economic research pages.
Thirty years ago Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx died. "Time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana."
(via dahlmann)
Blog follows book: Beautiful Code. As for the book, I made it up to chapter "Finding Things" by Tim Bray, which was my favourite so far. By now my recommendation concerning the book is 'buy'. By the way, all royalties from the book go to amnesty international.
This would be more or less me, here are
How'd you look like? ...
spend hours watching lovely index cards
The silent movie returns. Ok, not silent, but without spoken dialogues. Heres to HBO for http://hbovoyeur.com/. A flash site that tells some stories. Make sure you've got half an hour and broadband access to the web. Explore it, it's great entertainment.
(via vowe)
Breaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash
Joanna Partridge reports from the set of the 2008 german young farmers calendar photo shooting:
Young female German farmers pose for the 2008 Young Farmers' calendar in the Bavarian countryside.
The calendar girls all come from farming backgrounds and say they wanted to show the modern side of farming. The calendar will be available on the German Young Farmers' website, where it normally sells out in a couple of days.
By doing so, she tenfolds my page traffic. The video footage at reuters seems to generate a big buzz among internet users. It is sex and pets that sells, sex and pets ... and thats why I repost youtube's "Hand Holding Otters".
(via boingboing)
George W. went to Albania. In the video below he greets the cheering crowd and, er, well, he somehow loses his watch. On the video in the 40th sec he wears a watch and after 2min 40sec it is gone. I'd love this story to be true, man, I am so much into stereotypes. That'd be so great. I mean it really takes one daring pickpocket to go for George W's watch:
(via vowe)
Time magazine photo essay entitled What the World Eats.
As a little public service I thought I would offer a little form to query google's face search. There seems to be demand
This band I was planning to found ... is has been founded already in 1976: The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. Whats left for me to found?
(via boingboing)
What this is? Its the physical development of centerfold model of the playboy since December 1953 to December 2001. They seem to reveal a trend which is described by Martin Voracek, research resident and Maryanne L Fisher, PhD candidate. Their study is called "Shapely centrefolds? Temporal change in body measures: trend analysis".
(via improbable research)
A new google feature that sparks suspition that the do-no-evil company heads towards online face recognition. Consider this:
http://images.google.com/images?q=nimitz
http://images.google.com/images?q=nimitz&imgtype=face
Well, er, I don't see the face recognition use case here. You'd normally have a name and look for the corresponding face. All the "face recognition engine" would have to do, is figure out if the candidate picture shows a face. It does not need to figure out what face it shows. Furthermore most of the pictures showing faces have the relevant information on who it shows somewhere written in the context. There is no proper face recognition involved yet. I cannot query "Guy who stole a bike at Luton main station last Wednesday" and then expect google to return a face and the corresponding name. It just doesn't work ... or maybe it does actually work already, then these would be the suspects. Then I cannot expect google to find faces for names that do not have the relevant information written somewhere in the context ... Not yet. By now it only seems to be a funny feature:
http://images.google.com/images?q=strauss&hl=de
http://images.google.com/images?q=strauss&imgtype=face&hl=de
Are there even funnier face queries?
(via Kantel)
Neue nachrichten zum thema Rukumbine. Ich hatte mittlerweile kontakt zur University of the West Indies und habe einige wenige neuigkeiten:
I checked the Dictionary of Jamaican English, which has 'rookoombine' as a word of uncertain etymology and without a clear meaning; they claim it to be a "nonsense-word carrying sexual suggestion" and refer to the same song lines. However, they have this version of the refrain: Oh Rookoombine eena Santa Fe.
The Dictionary has no entry for santampee, but santapii (= centipede) may well have santampii as an alternative pronunciation.
The Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage lists santapee (different spelling, same word) as meaning (1) centipede; (2) a contemptible and dangerous, rowdy woman.
...also kurz rukumbine ist ein spasswort mit sexuellem drall und santempi koennte eine lady mit gewaltpotential sein und denn hab ich durch variation der schreibung noch eine quelle gefunden:
"Sing with me class, how about Shenenley Duffus...
Ruckumbine inna mi santampee, Ruckumbine! (Repeat)
Engine a run pon fire an' coal,
look pan de gal wid har big nose hole!
Come mek we Ruckumbine inna mi santampee, Ruckumbine! (Repeat)
Gal inna tree a pick ackee, bwoy anda tree a rub him khaki pants.
An' den we Ruckumbine inna mi santampee, Ruckumbine! (Repeat)
And please don't aks me a wha' "santampee" be."
Na, da koennt ick doch ganz richtig gelegen haben mit meiner letzten these. Jetzt haben wir es doch fast komplett. Schaun wir mal: Here are the
Good mornin' mother Cuba, how do you do?
Me ear say you buy a new pair o’ shoes.
Me ear say you buy one brand new hat.
Mother Cuba tell me how much you pay for that hat.
Chorus: 2x Rukumbine inna mi santampee, Rukumbine!
I said the higher the hill, the greener the grass,
The younger the girls is, the sweeter she kiss.
Chorus
I said, girl in a tree a pickin' ackee ,
Boy underneath her, wash him khaki pants.
Chorus
I said, engine a run with fire an' coal,
Look 'pon the girl with the big nose hole.
Chorus
So, und jetzt nochmal kontrollhoeren.
Here's a history nerd post. BBC has got a properly crafted interactive british history time line. Furthermore here is a time lapse video which compresses the american civil war to four minutes, showing the geographic expansion of the north an the south or better the areas controlled by union and confederation. And there is even more: A seemingly infinite collection of photographs brought to us by the UCLA. Changing Times: Los Angeles in Photographs, 1920-1990.
This might inflict trouble at home, but still, let me introduce to you my new online diary hero : Douchebag1 with his site http://www.hotchickswithdouchebags.com/ where he is into Deconstructing the Unholy Wrongness of Hottie/Douchey Coupling. Don't miss his myspace profile.
Please make sure you figure out what a douchebag is to fully understand the greatness of the site.
This one is lovely. Imagine two chatbots or wannabe Turing machines chatting with each other. Here are resulting conversations. This is my favourite. A is Alice and J is Jabberwacky. They operate on quite different approaches:
A: Who is your favorite philosopher
J: Can’t say. I’m not very much into philosophy.
A: Can a book have no title?
J: Of course.
A: Blimey.
J: Are you British?
A: Does it seem like that? I was born in America.
J: You are definitely flirting!
(via Kottke)
Why is your cursor moving, when you move your mouse? Here is the answer.
(via vowe)