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):

Anlässe zur Skepsis

Vom Sceptical Inquirer bis zum paranormalen Fahrrad – der Schockwellenreiter hat es auf die Leichtgläubigen abgesehen und bringt jede Menge Links. Sehr lesenswert! (Auch wenn es Jörgs längstes Posting bisher ist… )

Mein paranormales Fahrrad von Gero v. Randow (Herausgeber) habe ich auch gelesen. Noch eine wärmste Buchempfehlung von mir!

Web pals

Happy Birthday to Hal!

Hal considers Feynman to be “a minor deity in my personal panthaeon“.

By the way, I like the way he uses the weblog icons all over his site. Looks nice and is helpful because you see about which weblogs he’s talking today.

Susan says she read and enjoyed Genius by James Gleick, a biography of Feynman. André owns the book, too, and we both liked it a lot!

Susan: “The description of Los Alamos is one of the things that’s stayed with me, and has fed the interest that eventually led to a plan to have a Glowing Man trip later this year.”

Finally the search engine for BookNotes works!

Yum! Pan-cooked peaches over at Al’s. (It seems he is a fan of Feynman, too.)

Hurray, Oliver is still alive! And he went to the Expo, too.

Books

Craig asks: “I’m addicted to paper and books, are you?”

Yes, I am! Of all the media people have at home, I can do without TV/VCR (André and I don’t own one), I could do without Radio (if I had to; but I just love SWR 3), maybe I could even live without a computer and internet connection (although it would be very difficult), but I could not live without my books and a good library nearby!

(Craig pointed to Books, paper and the e-world.)

Quote of the day

“Science is like sex – sometimes something useful comes out of it, but that’s not what we are doing it for.” – Richard Feyman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988)

Richard Feynman was one of the most fascinating physicists (and personality!) of the 20th century, and I found quite a bit of information on him on the web.

• A biography from which I took the photo of him
• The biography on the Nobel site
• Feynman on teaching (excerpt from Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman)
• A man, a genius (a memorial)
• There’s plenty of room at the bottom (I haven’t finished reading that one yet.)
• Cargo Cult, ai site on sceptical thinking
• An obituary from the Boston Globe

Update: Thanks, Garret, for posting the following link to another Feynman page: http://www.crunchygods.com/weirdo/feynman/

Which, in turn, pointed me to Feynman Online, which pointed to the Tuva Trader, etc., etc. …

I can warmly recommend Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman! and What do you care what other people think?, two books in which he tells some of his adventures. (Die deutschen Ausgaben sind erschienen als Sie belieben wohl zu scherzen, Mr. Feynman! und Kümmert Sie, was andere Leute denken?.)

By the way, the Nobel e-Museum is a pretty interesting site as well!

Languages

Transparent.com offers basic phrases in more than 30 languages, for example German (hey Garret, you can start learning German right away! ) and more exotic languages like Swahili, which is spoken in Kenya and Tanzania, and even Latin, the official language of the Vatican. Each language’s section contains a page with “surviving phrases”, which include audio clips to learn the correct pronounciation.

Update: In case you need an even more exotic language, Martin pointed to a Pidgin phrasebook, and Duncan posted a link to The Scots Haunbuik.

Sceptic

The Sceptic’s Dictionary.

Link via Schockwellenreiter and Sean.

Ever wanted to be an astronaut?

asks Zannah. Yes, when I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. In elementary school, I knew all the planets of our solar system in the correct order and dreamed of flying to the moon. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’d be fit enough to pass the tests of NASA or ESA. However, here’s a site with infos for wannabe-astronauts.

Here’s another site: a Virtual Journey into the Universe. The site requires flash; however, here is the HTML-only site.

Deutsche Leser kennen vielleicht Benjamin Blümchen: Meine Lieblingskassette war immer Benjamin Blümchen auf dem Mond. Bis heute kann ich daraus noch Dialoge mit originalgetreuen Stimmen wiedergeben.

Szene auf dem Mond, wo Benjamin die Professorin und die zwei Säbelzahntiger trifft und erfährt, daß das Mondgestein aus Zucker besteht.

Professorin: “Frag schön, Gulliver.”

Gulliver (einer der Säbelzahntiger): “Krieg ich was?”

Und Martin, ich finde es gar nicht schade, daß Manila noch keinen Sound eingebaut hat. Da kannst Du lange warten, daß ich den Dialog aufnehme und als Gem poste! :-P

Mathematik

Als Vorbereitung für meine Examensarbeit in Mathematik beschäftige ich mich gerade mit dem Schwarzschen Spiegelungsprinzip, dem Riemannschen Abbildungssatz und elliptischen Funktionen, wie z.B. der Weierstraßschen p-Funktion.

Sieht so aus, als würde ich daran noch eine Weile zu knabbern haben, bevor ich ans eigentliche Thema, Dreieckspflasterungen, gehe.

Musik

Weiß zufällig jemand, wie der Song Bilder von Dir von Laith Al-Deen im Original hieß und wer den gesungen hat? Danke für Hinweise!

Went to the movies…

Oops, the day is almost over, and I haven’t flipped the page yet!

I just came back from watching The Green Mile. It was a really impressive film, I think. But someone should have told me it was so long. There was a break to change film rolls, and I don’t think this ever happened since I saw Dancing with Wolves.

I’m always surprised that I like films based on novels by Stephen King. I’ve read only one book and a few short stories by him, but didn’t like them at all. However, I saw Stand by me and Shawshank Redemption as well as The Green Mile, and I liked them all! Maybe that’s because I learn about the author in the credits after the film…

Great summer weather?

I will never ever complain about the weather again. At least not this summer. For weeks we had something that resembled April more than July or August, and now it’s horribly hot and humid outside. I like the sunny warm weather, like yesterday, but today it was so humid! We had a thunderstorm early in the afternoon and some rain, but it didn’t really help. The weather makes you want to take a shower every half hour.

The most powerful force in the universe is gossip

Hal has a list of 20 Things It Took Me A Lifetime To Learn. I agree with Hal that # 20 doesn’t really make sense.

Over

Everything is over. The weekend (which was nice, but stressful), and the Weblog Rallye, too. The results are here (in German). I’m number 19. Not bad if you take into consideration that I tried only twice on Thursday and didn’t use any technical help.
I’m exhausted and tired.

See you tomorrow!