NASA has put together awesome pictures of Earth from opposing sides of our solar system shot from Saturn (by Cassini) and from Mercury (by MESSENGER).
Earth as seen from Saturn and Mercury
kulu wa-shrabu wu-srifu
Come Ramadan people seem to think it says “كلوا و اشربوا و اسرفوا”. A slight error it seems, but a grave one actually. *sigh*
Ghazali gegen Geistiges Eigentum
Wenn mir noch ein Muslim mit “Geistigem Eigentum” kommt, haue ich ihm den Ghazali um die Ohren:
der Körper ist der Teilung fähig, der Geist aber nicht
— Al-Ghazali, Elixir der Glückseligkeit, S. 39
Chinese Steel
Watching bootlegged movies you get funny thoughts:
why does the Chinese word for steel (钢铁) have both steel and iron in it?
In dinu veritas
Lese mal wieder Imam Ghazalis “Elixier der Glückseligkeit”. Projekttitel: “in دِينُ veritas” 😀
Room 237
Just finished Room 237. The post structuralist in me screams “Yeah!!” … the rest is dumbfounded.
Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python
Raymond Hettinger gives a great, concise and immediately useful examples of idiomatic Python.
Summarizing the NSA Surveillance Program
Summarizing the NSA surveillance program:
Why is this secret?
We had a hunch, you wouldn’t like it.
What did it accomplish?
Nothing yet, we are still waiting for the big coup, that will silence all critics.
How much does it cost?
We don’t know exactly, you know, secret budgets and stuff. Probably somewhere in the billions.
This is basically the confirmation of the things I wrote over a year ago (German).
Reporting 1.2k crashes
Interesting proposition: how do you report 1.2k crashes at once?
Fareed Zakaria’s Talk at the Bon Mot Book Club
Fareed Zakaria talks about how where you come from deeply biases how you view world events, how this ties in with a truly global economy. He also talks about “how we are building a global economy [and] a global society quicker, than we have a global political system, that can deal with it.”
He argues that since the late 1970s two major forces are shaping our world:
1. secular, interconnected, interdependent markets and trade
2. large scale religious and nationalist movements