rebearth

Tuesday evening there was a talk by someone called Marc, who had previously quit his job as a banker, because he wanted to work for something he believed in more, but he couldn't find anything. He wanted to make the world a better place, but didn't quite know how to do it. Until one day, he met a famous architect who had designed an environmentally friendly building and made money with it and suddenly Marc realised that environmentally friendly and economically viable need not be in contradiction. Thus Marc decided to found a web portal under the name of "rebearth" which he wanted to be a portal ("a hub") to "grow a world where 6.6 billion people would want to live in".

I think his main point is: most environmental and social reform organisations try to tell people how they should live and thereby they only upset the non-believers. The better way to improve the world is provide people with an alternative that I actually prefer and would choose voluntarily. Unfortunately he didn't have any good examples for this (except for that architect's building), so that he was basically preaching vaporware. (Although the basic idea is good, of course.)

I didn't like his talk too much, because it was very pushy. He tried to engage the audience and be interactive, but imho he couldn't quite hide the fact that he is a marketing guy. Marc is influenced by talks of people that had engaged and inspired him, but he himself did not give on that engagement and inspiration. I think that virtually all people who come to such a talk are already pretty convinced to want to improve the world and are just waiting for something concrete and tangible to start working on. (Incidentally this is an experience, which he himself once had: searching the internet for good voluntary work and simply being overwhelmed by information.)

Finally he presented an example of a project launched through rebearth which. It's the design and construction of a house "where you would want to live in" environmentally friendly, cheap and comfortable. This kind of reminded me of the "open-source car": initial idea of that project was to engineer a complete plan for a car which then could be built cheaply and royalty-free (i.e. not patent fees and license fees) in a poor country, possibly using parts of old factories imported from developed countries. But it's also about having fun and using open-source and the internet for something real. Check the site to find out for yourself...

Good luck to everyone who wants to make the world a better place.
And patience to all those who think that people "should" change...

why are there so few women in science?

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

I'll dare to leave this article almost uncommented, waiting for your comments. I am really interested how you like it. I have some thoughts of my own on the subject (which don't contradict Phil's article) and which I'll post at some later time here.

How Wikimedia plans to spend donations

If you use Wikipedia as often as I do, you'll certainly have noticed the Fundraising banner on every of their pages. I needed some time find a place where the Wikimedia Foundation actually says what it plans to use that money for.
Here it is: Planned Spending Distribution 2007-2008

On their donation page, Wikimedia lists the following uses of donations:

• $200 – We can make Wikipedia available in developing countries through DVDs, books and pamphlets.
• $100 – We can pay for two Wikipedia Academy events in Africa.
• $60 – We can send three students to our annual Wikimania conference.
• $40 – We can deliver 100 million pageviews of free information!

The latter two points are covered in the above cited plan, the first two points are not. Perhaps I should ask them about that...

ticket to fly / ticket without return

Ich habe meinen grausamen Plan in die Tat umgesetzt und für den 5. Januar ein Ticket ohne Rückflug nach Toronto gebucht. Als Ausgleich für die Familie werde ich dafür schon am Freitag, den 14. Dezember Morgens um 7:25 Uhr in Frankfurt ankommen. Am 5. Januar geht der Flug auch schon sehr früh, so dass ich schon am Freitag, den 4.1. nach Frankfurt fahren muss. (Am Montag drauf habe ich auch schon wieder eine Vorlesung.)

Ich kann jetzt also die Tage bis zum Heimflug zählen. Es gibt bis dahin allerdings noch sehr viel zu tun!

I can't believe this :))

In our packet switching class to today we listened about buffer size and the professor started by asking us how big we'd think today's router's buffers are. Since now one had a spontaneous answer to this, I volunteered by shouting "20 packets per line-card". Contrary to what I thought this did not remove the shyness from the class and the other students still didn't propose their guesses. Finally the prof asked each student by name and the answers slowly came in: 19 packets, 100, 2000, and the last students even guessed in the millions and billions.

The prof then started his lectures and after then minutes we learned the answer: it's about five million packets per line-card. I could be happy with this result, since I had made the first guess, but not the worst. Actually I thought it would be quite a waste to store so many packets, that's why I came up with the low number. (And also by the theoretical stuff that I knew.)

But on with the story. 15 minutes further in the lecture, the prof had a slide given the buffer size according to different formulas. With today's formula we get a buffer size in the millions, with tomorrow's formula we get a buffer size in the ten thousands and with the formula of the future, buffer size will be only about 20 packets per line-card. Yes, you read that right! 20 packets. That's just the same number that I guessed! What a strange coincidence. %-)

But it also shows: I have my head far more in the far future then in the now of the present. Actually, I didn't answer the question that the prof asked, but I answered the question that I am thinking about myself all the time. Not about the present, but about the future.

Thanks for reading this.

PS: Of course, I know that this event was basically chance. But it's still funny to think that I hit that number exactly. And everyone who knows me knows that I am really a dreamer of the future.