Happy New Year 2012 everyone !

Happy New Year 2012 everyone ! I hope you have had a good start into the New Year and hopefully don’t start it with too many items sitting in your in-box and waiting for you to get you into the same hectic and trouble like every year.

Still looking for some good New Year resolutions ? Check out this Lifehacker article: Top 10 Easy-to-Keep Resolutions for This New Year. And here are some more general hints and insights about making New Year’s resolutions: The Science Behind New Year’s Resolutions (and How to Use It to Achieve Yours)

Don’t need any of those ? I don’t have any but I actually like this one from Garfield.

May be you are just curious about the most successful blog postings on Lifehacker last year ? Here they are: This Is the Best of Lifehacker 2011: about How-To guides, DIY projects, photography, Mac and linux downloads, desktops and workspaces, browser extensions and Android apps. How about starting an information diet this year ? Or some very basic means to improve your health: “A Half-Hour Walk Can Make a Big Difference, Even If It’s Your Only Activity” ?

Many seem to say the world will end this year: the Bible, the Maya Calendar, Nostradamus, http://www.polereversal.com/. Most likely this will be a mis-interpretation of “information” one can find there or elsewhere; don’t forget my last posting from last year: Common knowledge doesn’t exist. : It is more a question of belief which evidence you accept and who you trust … and how you interpret information.

Nevertheless, even if the world would end this year, let’s just continue to do what we do now, let’s do it right and with our full power, let’s follow the philosophy of Martin Luther, to whom the following quote was attributed:

“If I knew that tomorrow was the end of the world, I would plant an apple tree today.”

Image from Wikiquote.

My favorites for week 33, 2010

Something to laugh: my favorite comic strip of the week – about next generations

This “Moderately Confused” comic strip reminds me of a day a few years ago when friends visited our house and had promised their kids that I would show them my turn table player. With big eyes they watched how I played one of those gramophone records on this strange device – strange for them of course. Man, I felt old that day.

Something to watch: my favorite video clip of the week – about people under water

Can people walk, talk and breath under water ? Apparently they can – as long as this is no real water as in this Amazing Japanese Fake Pool.

Something to learn: my favorite tip of the week – about “undo” in firefox

Hit Undo in Firefox’s Address Bar to Browse Your Recent History is a tip published by Lifehacker beginning of this week: Hit the undo shortcut (Ctrl+z/Cmd+z) in Firefox’s address bar to move through your recent history via keyboard and find tabs you’ve closed—sort of like a lightweight version of the Undo Closed Tab feature. And: You can re-open closed tabs in browsers like Firefox, Chrome, and Opera by hitting the Ctrl+Shift+T shortcut (or Cmd+Shift+T on Mac) … !

Something to enjoy: my favorite photo  on flickr under a Common Creative license – about the smallest monkey of the world

"Pigmy marmoset" by Tambako The Jaguar. “This is is a pygmy marmoset, which is the smallest monkey of the world. They come from Brazil …” writes Tambako the Jaguar in the description to this photo. He has an awesome collection of animal photos in his flickr photo stream.

Something to talk about: my favorite quote of the week – about decisions made by groups of people

A committee can make a decision that is dumber than any of its members. ~ David Coblitz ~ What is said here about a committee might hold true as well for teams or any other type of group of people. As a project manager I should believe in the power of teams, but frankly speaking I actually buy this quote. Often teams come up with a bad decision, because that decision is not derived from true thinking, intelligence and honesty, it is derived from politics and power struggle. >> Where there are people there are politics << is a quote from a PM education class about taking control of an existing project I participated in more than one year ago. My father used to give me the following advice: “Stay away from the opinion and behavior of the majority”.

The year of the astronomy

2009 not only is the year of Charles Darwin ( read more about this also here in “The bamboo raft” ), it is also the Year of the Astronomy, as has been decided by the UN and the International Astronomic Union (IAU) on December 20th, 2007.

Exactly 400 years ago Johannes Kepler published what he had discovered about the physics of the sky, the laws of planetary motion: "The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at a focus." And: "A line joining a planet and the sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time." (The third law has been added at a later time). Galileo Galilei, not the inventor of the telescope, was the first to use it – after making some improvements – to look at the sky. When he saw mountains, lowlands and the landscapes of the moon and when he observed the moons of Jupiter he discovered that planet earth is nothing special in the universe, just an orb like many others.

The knowledge those two gained was in total contradiction to what human mankind up to that time thought about the fundamentals of our world. Described more by philosophers like Aristotle and Ptolemy and strongly supported by religions and the Christian Church the picture of the world up to this time was a “geo-centric” one, describing planet Earth as the one and only centre of the universe. Some say that this gain of knowledge initiated by Kepler and Galileo has been the most dramatic one in the history of human mankind, it definitely was part of the Scientific Revolution, as well as Charles Darwin’s discoveries.

Geo-centric picture of the world according to Tycho Brahe.
Source: wikipedia.

You must imagine this time when only a few people knew what Kepler and Galileo knew at that moment. What they had discovered was not just a little improvement of our knowledge about the world, it was a revolutionary change in total conflict with traditional knowledge, an attack against religions and church.  People probably were not that open minded anyway these days but under these circumstances people like Kepler and Galileo had to make a tough decision whether they wanted to practice what we would call knowledge sharing nowadays. It probably was not really an option for them to hold back their knowledge, but with that they started a fight against those forces who claimed to know everything about our world at that time. Sharing knowledge in these times could easily have a major negative impact on those attempting this. Galileo actually found himself in front of the Inquisition where he had to argue about his findings and  finally confess that he was wrong. especially also in regards to his support of what Kepler had published.. At the end he has been found suspect of heresy and has been put under house arrest for the rest of his life. It took the church until 1992 to come up with an excuse how the Galileo affair had been handled and to admit that our planet is not stationary.

Knowledge sharing in these days is much easier, isn’t it ? At least for us as we live in an open and democratic world – which is still not the case everywhere on this planet. Nevertheless, who of us would ever be in the position to discover something as spectacular as Kepler and Galileo did ? Sharing knowledge about information technology or project management, discussing things like social software or SOA is by far less dramatic compared to those topics “discussed” 400 years ago. But still we have big discoveries to make: finding the theory of everything, explaining what happened during the first sub seconds after the big bang or even before it,  finding ways to produce the amount of energy we need without killing us and our planet, findings cures against our major diseases.

Source: bild der wissenschaft 2/2009 (article “Die Astro-Revoluzzer”) and wikipedia

Today, 53 years ago, on August 5th, 1955 …

"VW Käfer Cabrio" by Schockwellenreiter.

… the 1 millionth VW (Volkswagen) Beetle was “born”, according to the Brockhaus Multimedia screen saver on my home computer. Since June 2002 21.5 million VW Beetle have been sold. Manufacturing of this car started in summer 1945.

Its successor was the VW Golf. The VW Beetle inspired designer to come up with the VW New Beetle manufactured in Mexico starting in 1998.

From Axel’s archives: a pocket calculator eating magnetic stripes

After I blogged about how I used a logarithm book in school to “compute” something like log(99) I want to write a little bit about the “computer” I worked with while being at the university studying electrical engineering.

This was the time between 1980 and 1983. As you all know Personal Computers had just been invented at that time. The IBM PC  was announced in August 1981, thus those computers just became available while I was a student but you can imagine that at the beginning they were not used widely and they of course have been too expensive for a poor student.

During my training at IBM I learned how to write Assembler programs on a System/370 and how to write APL programs on an IBM 5100 Portable Computer. Nevertheless, those computer have not been available for me as a “personal” computer during my time at the university.

The “computer” I started using at the university was what has been called a programmable calculator: the TI-59. If I remember correctly I had to pay more than 500 Deutsche Mark for this, which is around 250 € nowadays or around 330 $. Programming was done with a very low level language: statements consisted of three letter words either describing one of the keys of the calculator or some constructs like a label (LBL) or a goto (GTO) or STO and RCL to store and recall a number from a register. Number of register and program steps could be configured depending on how I wanted to use the memory, the largest program I could write could consist of 512 steps.

Programs could be stored on or read from a magnetic stripe through a magnetic card writer/reader built into the upper part of the calculator below the red LCD display. A video in this Wikipedia article illustrates nicely how this worked.

The most complex program we wrote was for dimensioning an electronic transistor circuit requiring some iterative algorithm to correctly determine the voltage at the different pins of a transistor. Besides this we of course also spent some time on writing first computer games, like the Lunar Lander ( text only version ), where the player has to enter the right amount of fuel to be used at the right time for slowing down the vehicle as it is coming down to achieve a safe landing, while the “computer” computes and displays speed and altitude of the vehicle all the time.

From Axel’s archives: a logarithm book

Yesterday during a lengthy phone call I had some time to explore the bookshelf in my working room at home. One antique item caught my attention: a logarithm book.

As looking into it I can’t believe that we used that to “compute” logarithms in the 70th when I went to high school. It took me some time again to figure out how it works. Nowadays we simply press the logarithm key on our pocket or windows desktop calculator and compute a logarithm without thinking too much about it.

As mentioned in the introduction to this book the tables used in it would show the mantissa for decimal logarithms. Hmmm, what was a mantissa again ?

According to wikipedia a mantissa can be many things. It is also called significand, a word even my Windows Life Writer spell checker doesn’t know. A significand (also coefficient or mantissa) is the part of a floating-point number that contains its significant digits. Depending on the interpretation of the exponent, the significand may be considered to be an integer or a fraction.

That explanation does not really help, does it ? After further reading I discovered that for computing a decimal ( base 10 ) logarithm the mantissa would be the part of the number behind the comma.

Let’s make a practical example how this book works. For numbers between 100 and 999,99 we know that they can be expressed in a form 10^2,mmmm where mmmm would be the mantissa. We know that the integer part of an exponent to base 10 for a number between 100 and 999,999 is 2,  thus we are only interested to find the mantissa – that’s what the table in this book actually is doing.

For 501 it tells us that the mantissa is 6998, thus the solution for the decimal logarithm is: 2,6998. After pressing the logarithm button on my pocket calculator I get: 2.6998377258672457172791038131756.

Looks like the book does work ! I just can’t believe that I belong to a generation doing such antique way of computations !

Anyway, in another posting probably next week I show you what “computers” I used as a student.

Pioneers in these days

“The explorers of the past were great men and we should honor them. But let us not forget that their spirit lives on. It is still not hard to find a man who will adventure for the sake of a dream or one who will search, for the pleasure of searching, not for what he may find.”

Sir Edmund Hillary

 

Sir Edmund Hillary was the first to stand on the highest mountain of the world. In 1953 he and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers known to have reached the summit of Mount Everest (8848 m), the highest mountain on the world. 30 years long several expeditions had tried to achieve this without any success.

The New Zealand mountaineer died on January 11th in the age of 88 in Auckland, New Zealand. A historic pioneer is gone, one who had the opportunity, the strength and bravery to discover a place on this planet dangerous to reach, where no man has been before.

Last year he visited the Scott Base on the south pole to participate in the celebration of its 50th anniversary. It was named after Captain Robert Falcon Scott, another of those pioneers who gave his life in an attempt to reach the south pole as the first man. He was second after Norwegian Roald Amundsen, and he had to pay a high price.

Are the days of these pioneers gone now ? Is there any place left on this planet to go where no man has been before ? Do pioneers of the future have to travel into aerospace to discover new places and even new civilizations ? Did I watch Star Trek too often in my youth ?

We have to be aware of the fact that with Sir Edmund Hillary an era comes to its end during which part of our planet was unknown.

About Marco Polo, innovation from China and the passion to write

Marco Polo was a great traveler. He was born in 1254 and died in 1324, thus became 70 years old and spent 24 of those years with traveling. At an age of 17 he accompanied his father Niccolò and his uncle Maffeo for their second trip to China to the court of Kublai Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan. Kublai Khan seemed to like him, thus Marco decided to stay there for a while and actually started again to travel for Kublai Khan now on diplomatic missions and to explore his kingdom. A passionate globetrotter, I must say.

I was watching a TV-movie about his trip recently with Ian Somerhalder starring as Marco Polo. Images below are taken from that movie.

As they entered China they had been astonished and surprised by all the innovative things they discovered there and had not seen before:

gunpowder and fireworks	a compass	charcoal	ice cream	paper money

In these times the world had not been explored entirely yet, thus it was possible to reveal innovation by simply bumping into new cultures isolated from the rest of the world.
Nowadays we won’t have that luxury anymore to reveal innovative things like this by simply traveling around, since there might not be any undiscovered civilization anymore on this planet. In order to obtain some breakthru innovation like Marco Polo did we would have to travel to extraterrestrial places which itself would require some huge amount of innovation to overcome todays limitations of physics preventing us to get there where other intelligent life might exist. Or of course they might show up on our planet some time and bring us some breakthru technology – or the end of our civilization.
Thus the easy way to obtain innovation could be also the most risky one. Traveling a distance like Marco Polo and his friends did through many unknown countries actually has been a risky endeavor as well in these times.

Marco Polo also was a passionate writer. What a pitty that blogging had not been invented yet. There is a scene in that movie where they rest in the desert and Marco is taking notes into his diary.

His father: “What is this ?”
Marco Polo: “My diary. I document our experiences and our route to China.”
His father: “We are trader. Would be better if you spent your time on arithmetics.”

His uncle Maffeo (angered, trying to take the diary away from Marco) : “And what if someone else finds this and uses our route and will become rich instead of us ? How would you like that ? Knowledge is power, and power leads to prosperity. That’s why we are here, Marco, so that the family Polo controls the gate to the plentifulness of China.”
His father: “Books belong to the most dangerous things in the world, Marco.”
His father asks him to hand the book to him, but Marco refuses to do so and leaves.
His uncle shouting: “Who ever would actually ever read this writing ? Those who find your bones ?”

Somehow this reminded me of the discussion about blogging ( simply replace “book” or “diary” with “blog” in the dialog above ): What is this good for ? Shouldn’t we spend our time on something more important ? And: isn’t it dangerous to actually reveal your own knowledge ? And if not: who would read that anyway ?

I wonder how many people have traveled this route to China before, discovering all these amazing things without letting the rest of the world know about ? Marco Polo might not have been the first one, but he was probably the first one who was passionate about writing things down and sharing them with the rest of the world.