Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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This week passed really quickly, too quickly for my taste. Paul dropped me off at the airport this morning and after two hours of flying and two hours on the train I'm back home now, catching up with everything. Here comes a collection of links that accumulated.

Everybody seems to have known this, even on our Maths course: The order of letters in the interior of a word doesn't matter. That's for English to begin with. Attempts to do this in German look reasonable successful as well. But not quite as good as in English as you'd expect with the longer words. As you'd expect a scrambling script is already in place.
Logins at Feedster, including abuse of terminology usually used in the area of encryption. Unsuprisingly, I don't approve. Just at the face of it, this combination of wrongdoings even seems worthy of having been done by Microsoft. It's a search engine, not a portal or something. And we agreed that nobody wanted portals anyway a few years ago, didn't we? Feedster will catch typos now as well. Good.
Jason Kottke writes that there'll be a series on Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe broadcast. Nice to see that. While Jason, rightly, claims that the book is the most accessible on the topic of string theory, I feel compelled to add that that doesn't make it an easy read. My guess it that it's about an order of magnitude harder than Steven Hawking's A brief History of Time, which apparently many people found hard and never took further than their coffee table.
When linking to books, man and dog seem to use that amazon reward scheme these days. Does it really work? It seemed to me that someone has to order the book immediately after coming from the recommendation. As you'll want to buy at a different amazon depending on your location, linking to one of them may not be helpful at all for people following the link.
The highly successful Galileo satellite goes down tomorrow. Apparently quite an over-achiever.
Lots of bits from today's Guardian: Rescheduling of events to avoid clashes of live TV broadcasts. WTF?! Who cares for party conferences? Of the Lib Dems? Surely having a 30 second summary after the event will suffice.
In the travel section, a sentimental piece on the Concorde. Liking flying as much as I do, I'd surely have liked to go on it. I read that one on the plane – a shoddy 737 today.
A study confirms what we all knew: Binge drinking popular in the U.K.. The statistics suggest, that Cider is a rather new drink – I always believed it was quite traditional.
Disappointment about Simon Rattle. As everyone seemed so excited when he came to Berlin, this is a bit sad.
According to Identifont, the font used in the Guardian's Food Monthly that I wondered about recently is Enigma.
This photo and the others in its album are what I had in mind when saying the railway station at Frankfurt's airport looks like travel in the 21st century last week.