Yay! This is the 1000th message! My weblog is getting old…

Murphy’s law

It seems like poor Sheila had a bad Monday…

Could have been me with the grape juice and light trousers!

No green flash

… but great photos as usual over at Susan‘s!

The Tragedy of the Kursk

is today’s Top Story on Deutsche Welle.

The 118 crew members have officialy been declared dead.

More news are available on the UK Ministry of Defense home page today.

Icons

I’ve created a list with little icons and their shortcuts so you can use them in your postings on my site. It has its own path:
http://serendipita.org/icons

Danke Jörg, daß ich die meisten der Icons bei Dir klauen durfte!

You know you’ve been on the internet too long if…

… you dream really weird things. Last night, I dreamed I was in “Little World”, whereever that may be. It was kind of like a tiny amusement park and had a web site at http://www.little-world.com/. I just tried the URL, but got an error message: “The attempt to load www.little-world.com failed.”

NIC.net reveals the domain belongs to someone from Japan.

Anyway, it was some fantasy land with cute little houses and stuff, and I have been there before – in other dreams. Strange how you recognize a place and feel like you’ve been there before, but you know it was only in a dream. Yet, the place feels kind of authentic because it’s been the same in all the dreams.

I wonder if my weird dreams have something to do with the headache I’ve been having for two days now. It was really bad last night, so I went to bed at nine and slept for 14 hours. It’s better now, but not gone entirely.

Physics

Britney Spears’s Guide to Semiconductor Physics. I wonder if this helps to make physic lessons more attractive.

Link via /usr/bin/girl and via Schockwellenreiter, who found it at alt0169.

Happy Birthday! Und schon wieder ein Geburtstagskind. Alles Gute, Dagmar! Willkommen im Club der alten Schachteln! <Grins>

North pole melts

I just heard in the news that the ice cap of the north pole has molten (um, or is it “melted”?) for the first time in 50 million years. Scientists are not sure about the reason, but it may be the global warming.

I’m sceptical about this global warming thing. I think records about temperatures have not been collected for a time that is long enough to say that our atmosphere is warming now. Also, nobody knows about climatic cycles in dimensions of hundreds or thousands of years, so who can tell if our atmosphere is really warming because of the carbon dioxide emissions, or because it always does every 5,000 years?

Here’s a New York Times article about this: Ages-Old Polar Icecap Is Melting, Scientists Find – Ages-Old Polar Icecap Is Melting, Scientists Find, by John Noble Wilford.

Chicken Run

Jörg war gestern im Kino:

“Hennen rennen. Was soll ich sagen: Gesprengte Ketten mit Hühnern aus Knete, mit Anleihen aus Indiana Jones, E.T., James Bond, Mad Max III und vielen anderen Klassikern. Kurz und gut: Ein Mordsspaß. Sehr zu empfehlen.

Ich führe jetzt hier ein neues Rating-System ein. Drei Clowns bedeuten: absolute Spitze!”

Dann müssen André und ich da wohl auch noch mal hin. Am liebsten würde ich ihn ja in der Originalfassung (nicht synchronisiert) sehen. Aber in Bonn gibt’s den offenbar nur als Original mit Untertiteln in einem ganz kleinen Kino. Hm… Vielleicht doch lieber auf deutsch und dafür mit vernünftiger Leinwand und Ton?!

Brand New Day

Wow, Hal and Audrey went to the Brand New Day Sting Concert. I’m envious!

It sounds like they enjoyed themselves immensely. Hal says that there are some distinct advantages to living in Las Vegas. Oh yeah, it seems so!

Happy Birthday! Heute hat mein Papi Geburtstag. Alles Gute!

Lindenstraße

Obwohl ich ja nie fernsehe, werde ich mir dieser Tage doch mal die Lindenstraße anschauen – aber nicht im Fernsehen!

Noch bis zum kommenden Sonntag ist im Haus der Geschichte hier in Bonn nämlich eine Ausstellung mit Requisiten aus der TV-Serie, u.a. ist die Küche von Else Kling, zu sehen.

Sowohl auf der Site der Lindenstraße als auch auf der vom Haus der Geschichte gibt’s was über die Ausstellung zu lesen.

Sinnspruch?!

Gestern spuckte mir der Spruch-Generator auf Traumwind diesen Spruch aus:

Heute ist Morgen eigentlich schon wieder Gestern.

Kapiere ich das nicht, oder muß es heißen ” Morgen ist Heute eigentlich schon wieder Gestern”?

Fires in the Western USA

I’ve been following the news about the fires for several days (and also before around the time there were fires in Garret‘s neighborhood); it’s sad how it seems to get worse and worse.

Deutsche Welle Radio News:

“Wildfires raging across the western U.S. intensified on Friday with stronger winds whipping up even more of the blazes. So far this year wildfires have consumed 2.1 million hectares of land, an area the size of the state of Massachusetts. Fires sweeping through Montana also knocked out two power lines that carry electricity from a giant power plant there to the Northwest and California. Officials said there were now 92 large fires burning across 12 states, with 16 new blazes pushing resources to the limit. There was no relief in sight for firefighters battling in the worst fire season in nearly 50 years with weekend storms expected to bring lightning strikes and gusty winds, which could spark even more blazes. More than 20,000 firefighters from the U.S., Canada, Mexico and as far away as Australia and New Zealand are battling the blazes.”

German Language Course

I just discovered that the Deutsche Welle offers a German course online. It offers PDF and MP3 files. Garret, why don’t you give it a try?

Mathematical Art

Ooops, so many German postings today. Here’s something for everybody: Ken Musgrave’s Site has lots and lots of fractal art. Have a look!

Jules Verne

It seems that many people are searching the web for authors and books today and somehow find their way to my site. I just got email from somebody who was looking for The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne and found it here.

Finally, I start believing that 50% of your visitors come from search engines… just like Philip Greenspun keeps saying in Chapter 7 – Publicizing Your Site (without Irritating Everyone on the Net) of Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing.

Hey! It seems the whole book is available online at Mastertexts: The Mysterious Island. (By the way, they have many other good books, too. Check out their Title List.

Noah Gordon

I received an email today from someone who has found my site when searching for Noah Gordon at Yahoo (hey, finally someone who doesn’t seem to use Google – Update: I hear that Yahoo is powered by Google… oh well.) and obviously had a look at my Ten Books list. He saw I pointed to some books by Noah Gordon and sent me the link to his new web site, NoahGordonBooks. While I don’t think all of Gordon’s books are extraordinary, most of them are quite good, and I never regretted reading a book by him.

Schon wieder die Rechtschreibung

Die Zeit ruft die Dichter zum Diktat! Aufruf zum Rechtschreibtest – nach den alten Regeln von Jens Jessen

Die Zeit ruft die gegen die Rechtschreibreform protestierenden Autoren zum Diktat nach alten Regeln auf. Wer besteht, darf weiterhin protestieren, wer nicht, sollte wohl lieber die Klappe halten. Auf das Ergebnis bin ich schon gespannt!

Manila User’s Guide

An Acrobat version of the Manila User’s Guide is now available online.

Bryce

Hey, Susan finished the cover image for Real World Bryce 4. It’s beautiful and looks almost real! (Compare it to the photos André and I took while at Bryce.)

Do I see Thor’s Hammer on Susan’s picture?

Look out!

The Exploding Dictionary

“The basic idea was to take a set of publicly available dictionaries, index them into a SQL database, and then cross-reference them to near death. :) As a researcher, this should be a very useful resource. Hypertext is the researcher’s dream come true, allowing for instant jumps to related or unknown material.”

Try it!

Von Büchern bis zum Internet – Books and the Internet

Die Zeit Nr. 34 vom 17. 8. 2000: Vom Blei zur digitalen Tinte – Sechshundert Jahre nach Gutenberg kann jeder drucken, was er will. Von Jörg Albrecht.

The article mentioned above is available in German only, sorry. However, the Project Gutenberg is available in both English and German:
Homepage des Projekt Gutenberg Digital (German).

Gutenberg digital – English and German versions.

And here is the Gutenberg Homepage, also available in German, of course.

Noch mehr Gutenberg-Links hat der Schockwellenreiter!

Antarctica

Because it’s been so hot lately, today I’m taking a trip to Antarctica…

• The Seventh Continent, Ethan’s Antarctic Home Page. He’s working in Antarctica and has a journal, a photo gallery and other interesting stuff. (The picture was taken from that site.)
• Alexandria Digital Library: Antarctica. Lots of links to sites with data, photos, animals, etc.
• Wired Antarctica. The site is intended for children, but has lots of info, a FAQ and photos.
• British Antarctic Survey: “British Antarctic Survey (BAS) undertakes a world-class programme of science in the Antarctic and related regions, addressing key global and regional issues through research, survey and monitoring.”
• The Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica (CARA) Virtual Tour: Antarctica
• Lonely Planet: Destination: Antarctica. “Antarctica is the last vast wilderness on the planet. Its gigantic icebergs, mountain ranges and the emptiness of the polar plateau boggle the mind, while its temperatures, winds and weather send shivers down the spine. It’s a place of extremes – beautiful and serene, savage and violent…”
• To the end of the earth – Judd and Mary’s journey to Antarctica, with a great Photo Journal.

Some photos from To the end of the earth (a click leads you to a page with thumbnails of more photos):