Tomorrow, maybe

I’ve been to the theater last night. They played a very interesting piece, which was spun around living and surviving in dictatorships. It was called Tomorrow maybe – Über-Leben in Diktaturen.

Every time I visit an event like this, or a museum, or if I experience some other kind of art, I realize that I should do this much more often. Culture can be such an inspiration for the rusted mind. It can influence the thoughts and give way to new directions of thinking in such a wonderful way.

Supplementary material

To increase the usefulness of my poster for the INCF Congress of Neuroinformatics 2011 in Boston and to be a good citizen ™ in the land of reproducibility, I decided to build a small homepage alongside the poster with supplementary material such as linked references, all scripts used for the study and the revision numbers of the software used.

Nerd celebrity

The other day, at that small workshop on Creating, Documenting & Sharing Network Models in Edinburgh, I had the pleasure to listen to a very nice, spontaneous, and entertaining lecture by Steve Furber (a principal designer of the ARM processor, which powers all modern smart-phones). He talked about the history of hardware design in general and explained the role of the different tools for synthesizing circuits from high-level functional descriptions.

A very much recommended book that also circles around the history of hardware is The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. And I got reminded of the almost ancient TV show Triumph of the Nerds. Both are definitely worth checking out!

Lapin rôti

I just come back from a very nice dinner with three colleagues at La Garrigue in Edinburgh [Update 2015-08-11: their place in the New Town seems closed now]. For starters, I had “Le petit pot d’escargots et gésiers de canard confit, sauce tomate et croutons à l’ail”. My main course was “Le lapin rôti avec pipperade Basquaise et petits pois à la Française”. And as if this would not have been enough, I finished off with “La tarte au chocolat, rayon de miel”. Delicious!

Arrr!

My congratulations today go to the Pirate Party in Berlin! Very well done! Let’s hope that they can really stand up to the high expectations that their voters put into them and that they can cope with the rough tides of real world politics.

And of course, I feel very sorry for the clowns of FDP. Not!