2009 is the international year of astronomy and as a part of that historical observatories in Germany have exhibitions this week. I pass our local observatory every day which was recently renovated to be a conference centre and house a graduate school. [The one event I attended in there in spring was very interesting and highlighted that they did a great job renovating but chose to ignore that great acoustics would help a conference facility.]
On the occasion of this special week they created a small exhibition about the history of the observatory and its relation to Gauß - who remains one of the city’s heros. A special lecture on the history was given by a retired astronomy professor today. It was a very interesting lecture (all talking, no slides) highlighting that astronomy, i.e. studying and mapping the skies, used to be strictly joined to subjects like mapmaking and study of the earth’s surface a few centuries ago. With mapmaking being essential for politics, war and other such pastimes, astronomy ended up in a position much more recognised than the ‘ivory tower’ science it may be perceived as today. Those in power didn’t see observatories as a way to gain maps of their countries, rather than fun for science nitwits. Hence, they were at least interested in building some.
As a consequence there was a plan to build an observatory in Göttingen even before Gauß - so it wasn’t ‘his’ observatory as I was told before. On the other hand he worked there for decades on many important things, so it became ‘his’ observatory over time. Despite making many measurements and baffling amounts of computations, it was Gauß’ aim to understand the bigger scheme behind the principles discovered.
Somewhat strangely, he got distracted from astronomy to map making and spent a decade of his life triangulating the kingdom of Hannover (then belonging to England) resulting in the famous map. While he developed cool tools like the heliotrope for that, his contemporary physicists and mathematicians saw his talent wasted in such menial tasks. A statement he apparently didn’t agree to.
Later on Gauß and his colleague Weber created what’s said to be the first electric telegraph. With a morse-style code they could transfer messages across town, without the need for good weather or opening the window. Gauß is said to have noted that he can imagine that once the technology has matured this could be used to transfer messages for several miles (I’m not sure about this, but from some other conversion I saw ‘miles’ seemed to be 10km or so back then). While he didn’t predict people twittering on the subway, this seems reasonably visionary for the web -5.0 era.
There were plenty of other discoveries made and tools discovered in Göttingen. One of Gauß’ colleagues, for example, invented a very precise way to determine your longitude on sea, winning a part of the prize for the longitude challenge that was big at the time. In fact, the time dependence of these things is amazing. Today people carry tiny GPS toys in their pockets which easily outdo the out tools. But that literally requires modern rocket science (and general relativity), compared to which the old telescopes and quadrants are amazingly simple tools. No black magic going on there. The skill consisted of knowing how to use them and knowing how to have the optical components made to a great precision.
As a final treat, one of the exhibits showed the odd black hat which Gauß is wearing on a number of paintings. Cool!
I have this long-standing history with Stereo Total which ranges from wanting to ignore their ill-sounding CD on my shelves, to starting to appreciate it, to completely clearing an Offbeat dancefloor (yeah those thankless indie-snobs) with one of their not-so-strange songs, to repeatedly missing opportunities to seem them play live (the most painful being a gig where they were opening for The Strokes ca. 2002 which was sold out before I could get tickets).
But sheer luck and discussing the virtues of the mighty Стерео Тотал after dinner recently, gave a spontaneous trip to Hannover to see them play at the Theaterformen festival. Amazingly the gig was free to watch and located a nice backyard in an area of Hannover which hides the city’s proverbial ugliness well.
They played plenty of songs for us, alternatingly using a guitar, drum set, some electro toys and an acoustic bass when a bassist joined them for a few songs. With their big ‘hits’, some old songs and quite a few of the newer ones, that made a great gig (even though didn’t play the - admittedly not particularly gig-like - Die Wäscheklammern which must be one of the most hilarious songs in existence.
The only thing irritating me was the fact that Françoise Cactus only stopped chewing her chewing gum for one of the very last encore songs - must have been a challenging one. And they had a chandelier on the street outside the venue - way to pimp your town!
Safari 4 was released last week. It’s unspectacular from the point of view of a web user and brings a lot of improved techno-wanker stuff beneath the hood. That’s probably a good thing as someone has to take the first step and Safari and other non-IE browsers seem to have enough velocity these days to help driving the development of web browsers and even dragging the Microsoft’s Internet Explorer along.
Bling
The more critical points about Safari 4 are the changes to its user interface though. Some of them, like ‘Top Sites’ are vacuous pieces of crap (enquire within to make me argue that it’s visual overload, much less effective than typing the first letter of the address and may waste your time by reminding you of the existence of websites you shouldn’t visit so often), but unlike many other types of crap Apple introduced in the past years, these can be easily and turned off and ignored without any problem.
Cover Flow and lost opportunities
The same uselessness statement could me made about Cover Flow bookmarks, I suppose, but to be honest I hardly ever use my bookmarks at all, so to me it seems mainly a waste of effort (and judging from what I heard others say, a rather unreliable one at that as Safari doesn’t seem to be good at actually fetching those images. Personally I also consider that feature a missed opportunity. Not only did Apple decide to litter our hard drives with hundreds of megabytes of web page screenshots (opening the folder of which may be a good way to visualise the privacy implications of web bugs - particularly Google), they also missed out on the opportunity to create a good solution for this that offers search and offline access as well.
To me the current implementation of Safari seems ridiculous. For each page you visit it stores a reference in your browsing history, it saves a file with the page’s text for Spotlight searches and it saves a screenshot of the page for its Cover Flow bookmarks. Yet, there seems to be no way to actually look at the screenshots Safari stores for you. They are not displayed by Quick Look when invoked on browsing history items and they are neither used to give you an impression of one of those history items when you are offline. To me, saving a web archive with the actual page in it (plus a screenshot, possibly, for performance) would seem much more logical. And it would make those situations when you discover a page you visited in a Spotlight search while you don’t have internet access much less frustrating.
Tabs
Another big debate among browser users was Apple’s re-location of the tab bar into the window’s title bar which existed in some beta versions of Safari 4. While I could appreciate the space savings of that, I thought it was more irritating than useful in the end. Simply because it made the window’s title bar look extremely busy and made things hard to click. In addition, that idea also ruined other subtle display methods in Safari: The unique lock icon location for encrypted sites and the full window width page title. Without the latter it’s quite hard to see the page’s name at a glance.
Surprisingly Apple listened to the loads of the feedback they must have received on this issue and the released version of the browser come with traditional style tabs. Those aren’t perfect either, but apparently they’re the best you can do when working with the ‘tab’ metaphor. In particular, they still suffer from horizontal overflow problems, as tabs to everywhere. And Apple’s insistence on only giving you an overflow chevron with no way to actually move between the tabs doesn’t make that any better. In fact, they added some fancy background colouring to the menu coming out of the overflow chevron, presumably to give you a better idea about the context you’re looking at. But I am not really sure it helps me figure out anything.
The following two screenshots are an example of that. I opened six tabs in a narrow Safari window which could only fit four of them in. In the beginning, with the fourth tab selected, it looked like this:
This makes sense to me, assuming that the light colour indicates the visible tabs and the dark colour indicates the hidden tabs. Then I paniced and switched to the last tab:
Now, with the same window width and tab arrangement, seeing three of both the light and the dark items suggests that my initial idea about the meaning of the colours was wrong. I guess I’ll just have to avoid looking at this. Tabs aren’t good for you anyway.
Progress
Another contentious issue was that of the progress indicator. Safari used to have a progress indicator which coloured in the address field according to the page’s progress at being loaded. While a progress indicator that gives quantitative information may be extremely problematic on a conceptual level for loading web pages - you have to display some progress immediately after the request is sent to let the user know something is happening but you have no clue at that stage how long it will take to complete everything - I think that Safari used to fake it reasonably well.
Nobody wants to read precise information from the progress indicator. Usually people just want to see that (a) their request is being processed and that (b) some progress is happening. That is, you want a bit of the progress bar to appear as soon as a click is made and then you wa old nt the progress bar to move at a reasonable speed as long as data are coming in. That way a stalled progress indicator may give you a hint that something isn’t working properly and that a reload may be in order. Particularly in low-bandwidth situations, which web sites and browsers don’t seem to be particularly good with, this is a useful feature.
Apple decided to remove the progress indicator in the betas, replacing it by a tiny spinning progress indicator at the very right hand side of the address bar in beta versions. This was very irritating as the visual impact of that tiny graphic was so low that you always had to consciously look at that tiny bit of screen space to see whether or not the progress indicator appeared. Definitely a change for worse, big enough to penetrate Apple’s bug reporters (perhaps people at Apple are even using Safari themselves…).
Their ‘solution’ to the problem was to not just display the progress indicator but provide an easily visible dark background around it which you’ll immediately notice without having to make an effort to look for it. That certainly solves the biggest problem with the new progress indicator seen in the betas. The other problem, however, of seeing whether there is actual progress in the file transfers or whether they have stalled, remains.
I’d certainly like to read the reasoning that went into putting engineering resources into making the progress indicator worse than it was before. Seems illogical to me, particularly as Apple missed out on what looks like the only potential advantage of an indeterminate progress indicator to me: The ability to let it spin when further resources are loaded after the page finished loading, like many of those fancy web 2 pages like to do.
Reload button
Another problem with Safari 4 is that Apple moved the Reload button to the right hand side of the address bar. Web browsers were born with the reload button at the left hand side of the window. More importantly, they were born with the Reload button close to the Back and Forward buttons, which not only makes sense but also keeps distances short when navigating with the mouse. Internet Explorer 7 broke that tradition and its wrongly placed Reload buttons remains the second most annoying thing about it (the first item in the list, naturally, being the rendering mistakes which make me need the reload button and non-trivially test in that browser in the first place).
Safari is keen to follow in Internet Explorer 7’s steps in this respect and moves its combined Reload and Stop button far away from the other navigation buttons. That irriates the hell out of me - and apparently a few other people as well. As there seems to be no point in holding one’s breath (and Apple’s software regime on the Mac hasn’t reached iPhone level fascism yet), a little bit of clicking yielded this:
It’s not as good as the Safari 3 original as it doesn’t reflect the state change from Stop to Reload but it may be a reasonable approximation until somebody discovers a better fix. You can grab a copy of the files here and use them at your own risk.
To promote science, people came up with the sweet idea of setting up a whole train with an exhibition on science topics. It’s named Science Express (I suppose Wissenschaftszug didn’t sound modern enough) and it’s stopping in Göttingen these days, so we had a look.
Each coach is designated to a particular topic ranging from abstract astrophysics to ‘life sciences’ to information technology and more engineering-centric topics. The exhibits themselves looked like they were made with a lot of effort and the train looked well done and cool in many places.
On the other hand, we thought the exhibition was rather superficial. No more than a quick blurb was given on anything, and even the interactive displays (fun, but not particularly useful touch-screen stuff going on in a few places) weren’t particularly deep. Wherever there was more detail, it seemed to be either be related to corporate sponsorship or to some scientist getting the opportunity to feature their pet project with too much detail and too little context.
Design-wise I am split. Things did look nice and carefully made but in a number of places it was very hard to read the text because of the light or - with a lot of the text being on nice transparent panels - there being a patterned wall that’s too busy in itself or too low contrast compared to the text to make reading easy. Seeing that most of the exhibits seem to be aimed at children in their difficulty and depth, making them more accessible to smaller people could have been an advantage as well.
Another problem was that even without any seats and walls a railway coach is quite small. And it seems pretty much impossible to run large or even medium numbers of people through it at the same time, as all the natural ways you can pass each other in other exhibitions simply fail in that constrained environment. Add a guided tour and a bunch of running children to it and the you could consider it a stressful environment.
A final negative was the fact that many of the interactive exhibits didn’t offer much in terms of meaningful interaction. A few had ‘out of order signs’ on them, but quite a few more didn’t work, either because their buttons didn’t cause any effect or because their speakers seemed broken. That wasn’t too helpful.
Fun bits were the mention of Calabi-Yau manifolds - with a picture even -, a nice small experiment with a ferromagnetic fluid and - in a wierd way - their take on our web future. According to them the ‘semantic web’ is not an absurd idea but coming really soon (I can’t wait for my Direct Brain Link…)
Next to that description of the future they ran a graphically rather nice video on modern life running from local living to work live to national drinking habits to time zones. Unfortunately I didn’t catch where that bit of Helvetica-loving came from. Any clues?
Many thanks to Carl and Paolo for pointing out in the comments that this is a Röyksopp video. Without music being played, quite nonobvious. But here we go:
After seeing Knarf Rellöm recently another ‘historical’ musician of the Hamburger Schule played in Göttingen tonight: Bernd Begemann.
He has a huge back-catalogue to draw from and played two bunches of songs just with his electric guitar. I thought the playing and singing was rather good and the lyrics are brilliant as well. But what made the show was that the guy is a bit of an entertainer who seems to enjoy interrupting his singing mid-line and reflecting a bit about his texts, feeling sorry for himself or commenting the state of the world. All this without being forcefully funny - actually he made fun of that as well - and just presenting it as a narrative in little interludes now and then and teaching us that Bionade is bad (I knew that before but the reason ‘with the huge amount of sugar, there’s really no excuse for the poor taste’ sounds somewhat witty at least), that spelt cookies and too little television make children of academics unhappy, expressing his happiness about not being minister of the interior for he’d need to re-educate everybody then and so on…
I have no clue whatsoever about team sports (with rugby being the only one that amuses me for its pointless violence) but somewhat strangely I ended up creating a new logo for my brother’s lacrosse team, Heidelberg Lacrosse. Lacrosse is a sport which is hardly known at all in Germany and whose ideas, techniques or even rules one is ignorant of.
As the German lacrosse championships took place Göttingen this weekend and the ladies’ team of ‘my’ club played there, I had the opportunity to have a closer look there along with a few hundred other spectators. The first impression to get was that the sport is very sexist. There are completely different rules and equipment for the guys and girls with nobody knowing the details of the others’ rules. The bottom line seems to be that the guys wear loads of padding and helmets and try to beat each other up as much as they can get away with while the girls don’t even have helmets and thus have to play ‘nice’ with the game being interrupted at all potentially dangerous times. For some very strange bit of legalese the Heidelberg team couldn’t even play with their usual player numbers (many of which are up in the 80s and 90s) while in the guy’s games people could play with those numbers.
Because I designed the club’s newshirts I had a look around at what the other teams were wearing. The vast majority of lacrosse shirts seems rather boring with a typical American college jumper style typefaces and two crossed lacrosse bats - or a single horizontal one - on the front and the name of the team joining them. Many small variations of that were seen and only the Bielefeld team seemed to have a nice execution with a lot of love for detail (and reasonably good printing) of that design idea.
Quite amusingly, my design now also decorates bedcovers they gave as a thank you to some of their leaving team members.
I won’t manage to watch all Dogme ‘95 films - the last time I looked at their by now dysfunctional web site, their number had grown beyond 60 - but I did manage to add #4, The King is Alive to my list of watched Dogme films. And while not outstanding it was still rather good and grabbing my attention throughout.
The film starts on a comfortable South American bus. Quite literally, it’s going nowhere. The driver is clueless, he is going South by compass and the compass is jammed. They end up in the middle of nowhere without food or the chance of anybody passing by soon. So one of them - apparently an experienced outdoor person - instructs everybody how to survive in the abandoned village they stranded at and starts walking for help.
The group of holidaymakers has difficulties dealing with the lack of comforts and service at first - and likewise at taking the danger of their situation seriously, but soon they get into a rhythm and to pass time one of the travellers reproduces the script of King Lear so they can perform it as a play. This gives plenty of opportunities to learn more about the people in the group, see them interact and struggle with one another as we know it from Dogme films. A more subdued drama than in some of the other Dogme films, but drama nonetheless.
Supertex is a 2003 German film playing in Amsterdam based on what apparently was a popular novel. It looks like a well made German TV film more than something created for cinema.
In the film the family owning the ‘Supertex’ cheap clothing company plays the main role. Their father built the business, is proud of it and has his sons joining him at the company. At the same time he doesn’t let them do any real work or take and decisions there. While one of the brothers, Boy, can happily live with that unsurprising life, the other, Max, one starts feeling unappreciated and decides to leave the company.
Add some family drama (discovering their father has a maitresse, his girlfriend having personal problems and thinking that going to Isreal helps them) for confusion, the father eventually dies, leaving everybody in a tumble. People have difficulties coping with the situation and eventually Boy decides to leave the company while on a business trip to Casablanca which he cannot handle (he opens a portaloo business later on - not kidding!) while Max is quick to return to the family and the company to keep things running.
The wonders of digital filmmaking! In 2001 people decided to let young filmmakers take a cheap camera and make a film for 99 Euros (possibly as an introduction to the Euro era?). The result is this collection of 12 short films. Northern German guys sitting on a car drinking Jever, a guy letting other people punch him with boxing gloves for a small fee, elderly German tourists complaining about shouts in a foreign hotel, and so on. The films are so short that they only need a single idea - and a dedication to putting them on tape for 99 Euros. Not world shattering but quite cool.
Primer is a fundamentally geeky films about some engineering types discovering a strange device with the quasi magic power of time travel. They can’t make too much sense for it but go for a trip anyway a few times, eventually changing little things here and there.
While the film may be clever because of the way it plays with things happening parallel, I ended up finding it a bit pointless. The film looking like a modern day TV series with wrong colours all over the place didn’t help either. It reinforced my idea that they started with a clever idea and then had to pull all sorts of ‘clever’ tricks to make it into a film because they didn’t have a good story.
Blood Brothers - a.k.a. Jiang Wu is a Hong Kongese gangster film, taking you along the story of the ‘blood brothers’ Hung and Left Hand who worked their way to the top of the local mafia down from the very bottom as clueless youths. By now Hung has a family and starts thinking ‘responsible’, while Left Hand suggests he should remain more relentless when people don’t do as they’re told. Not least because of the relentless attitudes people want to see them die, and they do. Ironically in a situation not unlike a crime from their own youths.
The Saddest Music in the World tries hard to defy description. When asked what it is about one could say that it’s about the 1930s depression along with prohibition, alcohol business and public entertainment (possibly giving a slight hat-tip to They Shoot Horses Don’t They? which at least I was reminded of epoque and public-contest wise). One could equally well say that it’s about a drunken doctor who amputated the wrong leg of his girlfriend while his son was watching - cue drama and hate there - and worked from then on to create replacement legs made of glass and filled with beer (beer legs - better than a beer belly!) which are wonderful but soon destroyed by the music of a depressed cello player. Or one could say that it’s about two brothers one of which claims to be Serbian, plays cello and carries the heart of his deceases son conserved in his own tears with him at all times, while the other works on broadway shows and dies at the piano with a piece of glass from his lover’s broken legs in his stomach (all that it a burning show-arena, naturally). Finally one could just point to the title and say that it’s about a contest to find the saddest music in the world (strangely a worldwide contest taking place in the U.S. in which ‘Africa’ competes as a single nation and yet Serbia is a full contestant.)
None of these descriptions would be wrong, but it takes all of them to get an idea about the film. And by the time you try to turn that into a consistent description, people are likely to consider you insane because that’s what it sounds like. However, it still makes quite a cool film on screen. Add an arty-farty look (mostly) in fake black-and-white with a hint of that early 20th century poor focusing and uneven exposure and it’s even interesting to look at.
Choice quotes: I’m not an American - I’m a nymphomaniac. • Sadness is just happiness turned on its ass.
Despite liking Tim Burton and Johnny Depp I had never seen Edward Scissorhands, that has been corrected. Nice film, even though it’s a bit too kitschy for my taste. Religulous[Google Video] is one of those modern mockumentaries taking the piss at religions. That sounds like a fun idea at first, but it’s quite simply boring and non-entertaining because obviously nothing interesting can happen in such a film.
Fun question that we stumbled across after deep-frying chicken for dinner today: How many sunflowers are needed to create a litre of sunflower oil. As with many straightforward questions that aren’t just scientific trivia, wikipedia’s entry on sunflower oil FAILs on that question (and arguably does so with even more gibberish in German).
With all the hype about Wolfram Alpha (we’ll just skip the bewilderment about whether greek letters or vertical bars are required to write about it) and the global wave of non-enthusiasm I considered this a perfect opportunity to add mine. Of course the question ‘sunflowers in a litre of sunflower’ oil seems tailor-made for their ‘scientific’ approach. And as the question is not computationally trivial, it’s also a request you’ll expect their engine to FAIL. No disappointment there - my expectations were met. The site recognises all of the search terms in the request but still isn’t sure what to do with my input.
Amusingly a straightforward Google search leads to a well hidden note in the German wikipedia entry for sunflower (rather than the separate entry for sunflower oil discussed above), claiming that the number I looked for is 60. I’ll leave figuring out whether that number is correct for another day. As ad brochures have already copied the wikipedia information, I’m sure people will be able to find proper, printed sources on that topic soon.
Safari 4 was released last week. It’s unspectacular from the point of view of a web user and brings a lot of improved techno-wanker stuff beneath the hood. That’s probably a good thing as someone has to take the first step and Safari and other non-IE browsers seem to have enough velocity these days to help driving the development of web browsers and even dragging the Microsoft’s Internet Explorer along.
