Reports from Earth

My kids caught me play­ing chess with the com­puter and wanted to play too. Jason5 — the five-year old learned very quickly how to move the pieces. Even the knight was no prob­lem: "two for­ward and one to the side". […]

On March 5th, "Kony 2012", a bril­liant, touch­ing and shock­ing, 30min video was posted on youtube, aimed to raise aware­ness of the abduc­tion and abuse of child sol­diers in Africa. The video was designed so well, it hit the soft […]

As a sup­porter of the fan­tas­tic free (open source) oper­at­ing sys­tem Ubuntu (a com­mon vari­ety of Linux), I like to help the com­mu­nity with (hope­fully) some use­ful info. My Ubuntu posts so far seem quite pop­u­lar — and sup­port­ing free […]

Open Source Soft­ware like Linux is a great way to get an idea of what humans can accom­plish — and pro­vide for free — out­side a cor­po­rate envi­ron­ment. Of course, there are a few changes for those switch­ing from Win­dows […]

I am Whit­ney Hous­ton fan. I am sad to hear she died. How­ever, I am also a fan of many other artists many of which will never be awarded a head­line with any major news ser­vice — even if they died. […]

Crony cap­i­tal­ism is a term describ­ing an econ­omy in which suc­cess in busi­ness depends on close rela­tion­ships between busi­ness peo­ple and gov­ern­ment offi­cials. It may be exhib­ited by favouritism in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of legal per­mits, gov­ern­ment grants, spe­cial tax breaks, […]

In recent decades, fuelled by the need for never-ending eco­nomic growth in the post world war 2  eco­nomic par­a­digm, sci­ence has become "soft" or "semi-science". Mod­ern sci­ence increas­ingly fails at decou­pling sci­en­tific facts from sep­a­rat­ing, polit­i­cal or pri­vate motifs. Impor­tant […]

It seems that in the past decade more and more peo­ple become aware that life is not get­ting bet­ter for them. In par­tic­u­lar in the US, Europe and other devel­oped coun­tries. I see many pop­u­lar web­sites blam­ing the new world […]

The ques­tion is not "Is the cli­mate chang­ing?" or "is it get­ting warmer?". These are fairly uncon­tro­ver­sial ques­tions and less impor­tant than these: What if .…not CO2 but other human fac­tors are much more sig­nif­i­cant to our cli­mate? What if .…the […]

I am very impressed with the super effec­tive activism of the AVAAZ (mean­ing "Voice") cam­paign net­work. They take on var­i­ous crimes that threaten democ­racy, peace or the envi­ron­ment. It is easy to sup­port them — just go to www.AVAAZ.org. Effec­tive […]

This unlikely event sounds too good to be true. Nev­er­the­less, while the "valid­ity" or rel­e­vance of the Malaysia tri­bunal may be seen as rather sym­bolic given the unchal­lenged global dom­i­nance of the two nations, it does fit the recent "trend" […]

When a respected dis­si­dent, some­one who is extremely crit­i­cal towards the gov­ern­ment and usual not shy to blame it for rather sever acts, essen­tially states "this time it's not the gov­ern­ment — relax peo­ple it's not always a con­spir­acy" — […]