Category Archives: Joke
Stultitia loquitur
Having seen so nice pictures of Erasmus this week at “Dürer, Cranach, Holbein, Die Entdeckung des Menschen: Das deutsche Portrait um 1500” I had to look his famous quote
Utcumque de me vulgo mortales loquuntur – neque enim sum nescia, quam male audiatur STVLTITIA etiam apud stultissimos – tamen hanc esse, hanc, inquam, esse unam, quae meo numine Deos atque homines exhilaro. Vel illud abunde magnum est argumentum, quod simulatque in hunc coetum frequentissimum dictura prodii, sic repente omnium vultus nova quadam atque insolita hilaritate enituerunt: Sic subito frontem exporrexistis, sic laeto quodam et amabili applausistis risu, ut mihi profecto – quotquot undique praesentes intueor – pariter deorum Homericorum nectare non sine νεπενθη temulenti esse videamini, cum antehac tristes ac solliciti sederitis.
Somebody that I used to know
Who needs a leader?
asks a second-hand report in Nature” last week citing an earlier PNAS study Continue reading Who needs a leader?
Florence + The Machine = Happy New Year
Look Ma, no pedaling!
Sorry for this little advertisement of the Bullitt here but it really deserves some attention as well as my friends at Tiramizoo.
It’s all electric now … The 1200 Watt bicylce
There has been so much progress with electric motors and high capacity batteries finally reaching widespread use. There are kayaks with an electrict support (Torqeed here in Starnberg, that I wished to have one yesterday at Ammersee). There are engines for ultralight planes like the Electraflyer while I just read at science.slashdot about an electric airplance.
The most fascinating piece, however, I have seen last Sunday at bike expo here in Munich is a 1200 Watt kit that can be mounted on most frames of current MTBs. Tthat’s a lot of savings compared to buying a custom built e-bike like the KTM eGnition, Elmoto, eRockit, Grace or eSpire that all come at weights of 25-35 kg.
The kit will be sold by the next month by ego-kits.com while here are two pictures from the Munich fair.
Continue reading It’s all electric now … The 1200 Watt bicylce
Less than one mistake in every 6 million deliveries
I have seen recently a TV documentation about the Dabbawalas in Mumbai who deliver freshly cooked food to the workplaces and return the empty boxes back to the customer’s home. According to Wikiedia.
In 2002, Forbes Magazine found its reliability to be that of a six sigma standard. More than 175,000 or 200,000 lunch boxes get moved every day by an estimated 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas, all with an extremely small nominal fee and with utmost punctuality Continue reading Less than one mistake in every 6 million deliveries
Open letter
a screenshot from Pubmed without words
probably as good as an email that I received recently:
This is the final reminder of your registration.
THE ABOVE BARCODE CONTAINS YOUR BADGE AND TICKET INFORMATION!
Please be sure to PRINT out this e-mail and BRING it with you to the meeting. The barcode included on this reminder will speed you through the registration and materials pick-up area.
…
Please consider the environment before printing this email.
Bad project
God is in the house
Last Sunday night, I heard an interesting broadcast at Ö1 on the way back from St. Moritz “Nach dem Willen Gottes. Religion, Erziehung und Gewalt. Gestaltung: Sebastian Fleischer” while couldn’t find the song played during the last 30 seconds.
Finally, here is it, although the Nick Cave version on youtube is still another one than at the Ö1 broadcast. An email clarified it:
Continue reading God is in the house
On the impossibility of being expert
The BMJ christmas edition has again some nice papers – with a theoretical account on denialism and the next paper on the impossibility of being expert. This looks like the best joke there, sorry Tony, probably unintended.
Since Alvin Toffler coined the phrase “information overload” in 1970, the growth of scientific and medical information has been inexorable. There are now 25 400 journals in science, technology, and medicine, and their number is increasing by 3.5% a year; in 2009, they published 1.5 million articles. PubMed now cites more than 20 million papers.
Yea, yea.
More river surfing
Including here is the interesting mathematical problem of a soliton – a self-reinforcing solitary wave that maintains its shape while it travels at constant speed, yea, yea.
Vaya con dios
(not visible in Germany, sorry it’s a Sony, try youtubeproxy.org.uk).
Ig Nobel Prize 2010
I haven’t seen the ceremony award 2010 so far but read of a prize for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride (Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Ilja van Beest of Tilburg University, The Netherlands) and of the management prize for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random (Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy), yea, yea.