Day without Weblogs “Each December 1, World AIDS Day, the creative community observes A Day With(out) Art, in memory of all those the AIDS pandemic has taken from us, and in recognition of the many artists, actors, writers, dancers and others who continue to create and live with HIV and AIDS. […] Last year, more than 50 webloggers observed the first Day Without Weblogs. Since then, the personal web publishing community – weblogs, journals, diaries, personal websites of every kind – has grown significantly. Once again, I invite everyone who produces personal content on the web to participate in this global observance.”

I’m going to participate – how about you?

The US election

Heh. It’s great fun to see how humorous some reactions to the elections are. Duncan Smeed posts this email on his blog: Notice of Revocation of Independence, and also points to a response.

“To the citizens of the United States of America,

In the light of your failure to elect a President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today.

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchial duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories. Except Utah, which she does not fancy.

Your new prime minister (The Rt. Hon. Tony Blair, MP for the 97.85% of you who have until now been unaware that there is a world outside your borders) will appoint a minister for America without the need for further elections.”

The weekend is here!

Phew! Finally, the weekend.

This afternoon, I spent four hours teaching fifth graders how to use the internet. Some of them already had been playing around with it, but they mostly knew fun sites. Some of the kids didn’t like the ‘useful’ sites I showed to them, but some actually spent a lot of time learning how humans digest food. “… ‘and then the food reaches the small intestine, which is over five metres long.’ – Whoa! We’ve got five metres of intestine inside us? I’m not even two metres tall!”

It was fun, but a bit exhausting as well. Have you ever tried to watch eight ten-year-old kids on five computers at the same time?!

Antarctica

The Bancroft Arnesen Expedition:”Historic Expedition: Join Ann Bancroft (USA) and Liv Arnesen (Norway) in their quest to be the first women to ski and sail across Antarctica – 2400 miles, 100 days, 250 pound sleds, 30 degrees below zero.”

They have an online journal, too.

Danke für den Link, Imke!

A four dimensional maze

I found the four dimensional maze over at the Curmudgeon. What a fascinating idea! I’m still working on it…

Teaching

Smartclass.com:

“… let’s have textbooks written, researched, documented, packaged and published by students. Let’s have whole courses in high school and college and professional schools and training where students write the textbooks.

That’s what they do. That’s all they do. For the whole course. Get together. Research everything they can find. Organize it. Present it. Publish it. Get together online or onsite, whenever they need to, with whomever. Use the web to help gather information, connect experts, resources.

As a student, writing your own textbook, given the access you need, the tools, the support, the expertise – you feel smart. You feel yourself getting smarter.”

Interesting idea.

Link via Serious Instructional Technology.

Can you read Kanji? Well, I can, at least a little bit. This is ‘Andrea’ in Kanji. Find out how your name looks in Kanji here. Link via Jörg.

Short posting

Sorry, folks, that’s it for today. A friend from university and I spent the afternoon teaching 13 kids how to use Windows and Word. We had 6.5 kids each , but it was still pretty exhausting.

Tomorrow, we are going to continue with some more Word and a quick introduction to the internet.

See you tomorrow…

Humor?!

Normalerweise poste ich ja keine Witze, aber diesen fand ich doch erwähnenswert…

Treffen sich zwei Planeten. Sagt der eine: Du siehst aber schlecht aus. Sagt der andere: Kein Wunder, ich hab Homo sapiens. Darauf der Erste: Mach dir keine Sorgen, das geht vorüber…

Think about it!

Stimmt’s?

Wie war das noch mal? Wenn man eine Muschel ans Ohr hält, kann man darin das Meer rauschen hören. Nee, stimmt nicht, man hört das Rauschen des Bluts, das durch die Muschel verstärkt wird. – Stimmt auch nicht!

Wie in der aktuellen Zeit zu lesen ist, hat jede Muschel eine bestimmte Eigenfrequenz, mit der die Luftsäule darin schwingt, und damit verstärkt die Muschel Umgebungsgeräusche dieser bestimmten Frequenz(en): Tönende Säule, von Christoph Drösser.

Physik

Und ebenfalls in der aktuellen Zeit las ich (offline):

Higgs-Suche am Ende

“Lange Gesichter im europäischen Teilchenlabor Cern bei Genf: Generaldirektor Luciano Maiani hat überraschend entschieden, die Suche nach dem Higgs-Teilchen vorerst zu beenden. Kürzlich hatten Physiker am Beschleunigerring LEP erstmals Hinweise auf dieses geheimnisvolle Partikel gefunden und damit eine Verlängerung der Laufzeit des LEP erreicht (Zeit Nr. 42/00). Doch die weiteren Ergebnisse überzeugten das Cern-Management nicht, einer erneuten Verlängerung zuzustimmen – dies hätte den Neubau des nächstgrößeren Beschleunigers LHC verzögert. Im Jahr 2005 kann das Cern die Suche nach dem Higgs-Teilchen wieder aufnehmen – wenn die Amerikaner bis dahin nicht schneller gewesen sind.”

Weblogs

Jörg linked to yet another article about weblogs: You’ve Got Blog, by Rebecca Mead.

So is this an article about blogs, or is it an article about the relationship between Megnut and Kottke? To me, it sounds more like the latter, and like an advertisement for Blogger and Pyra. On the one hand, the author talks about learning about bloggers’ private lives through their blogs in an ironic way, like it was something bad, but on the other hand she can’t seem to get enough of personal news, especially from Meg.

Somehow, I think Mead has gotten the whole weblog business wrong. Or is it me? I don’t think neither I nor my blog fits her image of weblogs and webloggers. She makes fun of ‘famous’ bloggers, but obviously doesn’t know any other blogs, since she doesn’t mention any besides Megnut, Evhead, Kottke and Fairvue – none of which I read, but all of which I know from hearsay. Oh, and a friend of Meg is also mentioned, one who “collects photographs of the mirrors of Web celebrities”. She is talking about Heather Champ and Jezebel’s Mirror. But Mead should have taken a closer look: Everyone can post their mirror shots to FOJM (Even I did, and I’m not a web celebrity!)

I just checked there – there’s a link to the article:

“The New Yorker has confirmed something that I’ve known all along! You’re a star.

It’s not too late to get in on the action. Submit your own mirror photograph so you too can brag that The New Yorker has tagged you a Web celebrity!”

Okay, back to the article:

“Getting blogged by Kottke, or by Meg Hourihan or one of her colleagues at Pyra, is the blog equivalent of having your book featured on ‘Oprah’: it generally means a substantial boost in traffic — enough, perhaps, to earn the blog a mention on Beebo.org, which has functioned as a blog best-seller list. (An example from a blog called Fairvue.com: ‘Jason K. linked to Fairvue. My life is now complete.’)”

Right. Ms Mead, could Nolan (author of Fairvue) be ironic here? Or even sarcastic? (Just in case you didn’t notice: I’m being ironic here, too.)

I think that this celebrity blah blah is only true for a certain kind of weblogger. And it’s the readers who make someone a blog celebrity, it doesn’t seem like the celebrities themselves do everything to become famous.

Most of the weblogs I read are quite different from that kind. My weblog community feels more like a bunch of friends, not like a lot of groupies who worship some weblog-gods and -goddesses.

And I like it that way.

If you’d like to read some more comments, I suggest

Sprichwörtlich…

Der Schockwellenreiter hat einen neuen sprichwörtlichen Ausdruck ge- bzw. erfunden:

“Und von Usability haben die bei Netscape auch noch nichts gehört. Gegen die Seiten von Netscape sind die Wahlzettel von Florida ja ein Musterbeispiel von Klarheit und Aufgeräumtheit.”

Jetzt heißt das nicht mehr “wie bei Hempels unter’m Sofa”, sondern “wie die Wahlzettel in Florida”!

Entscheidungen aus dem Bauch heraus

Wie war das mit den Entscheidungen ‘aus dem Bauch heraus’? Die Geo sagt zumindest, daß an den Entscheidungen was dran ist, weil wir ein zweites Gehirn im Bauch haben: Neurologie: Wie der Bauch den Kopf bestimmt.

Gut decisions

I found an article in a German magazine about a second brain in the stomach, and a Google search lead to these articles about the second brain (both in English):

Two brains are better than one, especially if you’re hungry – a short article from http://www.whyfiles.org.

The Enteric Nervous System:
A Second Brain, an article with more detail, written by Dr. Gershon, Professor at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, author of the book ‘The second brain’.

Planet Project

Today is the first day of the Planet Project. Go and participate!

(BTW, I think you need to accept cookies from the site in order for the thing to work. I tried without first, but got an error.)

Besides the initial general poll, there are eight other polls about different subjects. You can choose to answer one, all or none of them.

“You don’t have to take all the polls at one time but can come back and answer the questions at your leisure. Besides, it will be fun to see the results at different points over the four days as more and more people participate.”

Oh, and they are using a secure server so the answers you give can’t be seen by other people while being transferred.

They have some interesting questions… e.g. from the poll about sleep:

“If a machine were invented that could record your dreams and then play them back like a movie, which of the following would you probably do?”

“If there were a pill that eliminated the need for sleep, would you take it?”

Who is Tanj?

Oh my, Al, what a night. I hope you will recover soon! Best wishes!

As Jan-Willem said, “If everything goes wrong today, I’ll read View from the Heart again, and know it is nothing.”

Update: Al told me about Tanj.

Blivet

Hal says that his favorite meaning of the term ‘blivet’ is this one:

blivet – “It has also been used to describe an amusing trick-the-eye drawing resembling a three-pronged fork that appears to depict a three-dimensional object until one realizes that the parts fit together in an impossible way.” [Source; scroll all the way down.]

So a blivet looks this!

Funny to read all the things people posted as response to the link to Sounds of the World’s Animals I stole from Craig…

Gobble gobble

I’ll never understand how this weblogging and communication thing works. Sometimes I post something and expect lots of reaction from my dear readers, but nothing happens.

On other days, I post something silly just to have an excuse to flip the page, and what happens? Everyone comments.

So now I finally know what blivet really means.

Animal sounds

Craig points to Sounds of the World’s Animals.

Okay, here’s a little test for the Germans: Which animals does these sounds in German:

I don’t think I would have recognized these…

(Die Lösungen gibt’s hier.)

The most interesting animal is the rooster, I think. He says ‘Kikeriki’ in German and sounds very similar in most of the other languages, but English and American roosters seem to be more musical; they go ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’!

Hehe, und Truthähne machen auf Englisch ‘gobble gobble’.

Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble…

Okay, back to work now.

Internet für Kinder

Ende dieser Woche, von Donnerstag bis Samstag, gebe ich an einem Bonner Gymnasium einen Computerkurs für Schüler der 5. Klasse. Nach einer Einführung in Windows und Word steht – natürlich! – auch das Internet auf dem Programm. Nachdem die Schüler die Bedienung des Internet Explorers und die Grundlagen des WWW kennengelernt haben, sollen sie auch mal alleine lossurfen. Zu den Zweck habe ich einige Links zu Seiten für Kinder und Jugendliche zusammengetragen, auf Computerkurs.weblogs.com. Die meisten davon stammen aus der letzten Ausgabe der c’t.

Ich würde mich aber sehr über Hinweise zu weiteren deutschsprachigen Seiten freuen, die für Fünftklässler interessant sind! Wenn es geht, sollten die Seiten nicht das Akzeptieren von Cookies und nicht das Flash-Plugin voraussetzen.

Also, kennt ihr noch gute Seiten, die hier noch nicht zu finden sind? Ich bin für jede Hilfe, natürlich auch kritische Anmerkungen und andere Ideen, sehr dankbar!

Four days, eight languages, millions of people

About a month ago, I linked to Planet Project, and now I link to it again because the project starts the day after tomorrow, on November 15.

“You’re invited to participate in an event that may become a part of history. For four days, November 15 – 18, 2000, you and millions of other people around the world are invited to answer a series of questions about what it’s like to be a human being at the beginning of the millennium.”

There also is a parallel Student Underground version of the poll for students aged 13-20.

Vier Tage, acht Sprachen, Millionen von Menschen
Da dies ein internationales Projekt ist, ausnahmsweise auch nochmal auf deutsch – das Planet Project:

“Wir laden Sie ein, an einem Ereignis teilzunehmen, das historische Bedeutung haben könnte. An vier Tagen, vom 15. bis 18. November 2000 sind Sie und Millionen von Menschen in aller Welt eingeladen, eine Reihe von Fragen darüber zu beantworten, was es bedeutet, als Mensch am Anfang des neuen Jahrtausends zu leben.
Wir laden Sie ein, an einem Ereignis teilzunehmen, das historische Bedeutung haben könnte. An vier Tagen, vom 15. bis 18. November 2000 sind Sie und Millionen von Menschen in aller Welt eingeladen, eine Reihe von Fragen darüber zu beantworten, was es bedeutet, als Mensch am Anfang des neuen Jahrtausends zu leben.”

Parallel dazu findet auch ein Schulprogramm für Schüler von 13 bis 20 Jahren statt.

The Environment

The day before yesterday, Craig linked to a site that calculates your ecological footprint. “Worldwide, the biologically productive space available per person is 2.2 hectares or 5.4 acres.”

I just calculated my footprint: it is 3.3  hectares or 8.3 acres, one and a half times the amount. So that means that somebody has to live with one third of what I’ve got!

And yet my Eco-Footprint measures 32.8 % of an average American Footprint – one third of what the average American uses.

As Craig said, this is disturbing.