On Spreading Offensiveness

Posted on November 22, 2008 | by Markus Stocker

I use to think that if I just report something offensive I do not harm the audience, the people who are receivers of what I communicate. After all, the offensive message does not originate from my mind, I’m just a vehicle telling about it. (In the following, I do not strictly distinguish offensive messages from [...]

A Curiosity

Posted on November 18, 2008 | by Markus Stocker

Humans are usually good at interpreting (multi-dimensional) data visualized with shapes, sizes, colors. We can use this technique to aggregate and abstract the complexity of data and it helps us to discover patterns and relationships. It can be informative, interesting, nice to look at or just fun. Recently, I asked myself, how would the shape [...]

Madness Is …

Posted on November 13, 2008 | by Markus Stocker

$21 million is the amount the Pentagon spends per hour to produce new defense systems (IEEE Spectrum, 11.08). This seems to be nothing new, we all know it, right? Why is this still reality then? I think we cannot remind ourselves often enough how mad such a figure is. I’d also like to note that [...]

The Obama Post (Interactive!)

Posted on November 6, 2008 | by Markus Stocker

An American friend has been wondering what Europeans think about the new President Elect of the United States. This post is an attempt to answer that question. You, my friends in Europe, are invited to voice your opinion and discuss what Obama means not only for the future of the United States, but the world at [...]

Something Just Came to an End

Posted on November 5, 2008 | by Markus Stocker

It was an incredible experience to follow the unfolding of the U.S. Presidential Election 2008 live, sitting right in the center of Washington DC. After just a couple hours it was clear who won the race and it didn’t take long for people to step out their houses and start an improvised party on the [...]

The Chance of a Human Life

Posted on November 3, 2008 | by Markus Stocker

Today I read that “the chance of having a human life is something like being picked up as one grain of sand out of all the grains on the beach” (C. J. Beck). Statistically accurate? Which beach anyway? There are some questions but, at least to me and right now, they are irrelevant. The sentence [...]

 

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