Am Dienstag, dem 7.4.2009 sendete das ZDF eine interessante Dokumentation über die momentanen Handlungsräume in Sachen Datenklau, Rasterfahndung und Profilerstellung. Da der Sendeplatz reichlich dämlich eher unvorteilhaft war, habe ich mal einen Torrent [thepiratebay.org] dafür erstellt. Bei Bedarf kann man sich das ganze auch in ZDFs cooler Mediathek reinziehen.
via (netzplitik.org)
Geld ist für eine Großteil der Menschheit ein Tabu, ohne dass wir uns dessen bewusst sind. Wie man es verdient, wie man damit Transaktionen durchführt und, dass es unser aller Leben maßgeblich bestimmt ist den meisten bekannt, doch selten machen wir uns genaue Gedanken darüber, wie es überhaupt entsteht und ob es Alternativen zum bestehenden System gibt. Geld scheint so subtil aber tiefgreifend in unserer Weltanschauung verwurzelt zu sein, dass wir es kaum wagen es ernsthaft zu hinterfragen.
Bernard Lietaer hingegen wagt mit seinem Buch “Das Geld der Zukunft” von 1999 den Versuch dem Laien das Finanzsystem ohne den Gebrauch von komplexen geldtheoretischen Zusammenhängen verständlich zu machen um danach Alternativen zum momentanen Währungssystem aufzuzeigen, die der Überwindung der fundamentalen Problemstellungen der heutigen “zivilisierten” Welt dienlich sein sollen. Die Überalterung der Geselleschaft, die Informationsrevolution, die steigende Währungsinstabilität und die ökologischen Konflikte, die sich durch den technischen Fortschritt ergeben haben, sind seiner Meinung nach sich weiterhin zuspitzende Erscheinungen, die zwangsläufig zur einer Veränderung unseres Leben auf der Erde führen werden. Lietaer geht von einer Art Epochenübergang aus und schlägt zur Überwindung der “Zeit zwischen den Geschichten” ein neues, mehrschichtiges Währungssytem vor, welches aus den jeweiligen Landeswährungen, lokalen Komplementärwährungen und einer globalen Referenzwährung bestehen solle.
Mir persönlich hat das Buch insofern geholfen, als dass es mir eine relativ einfache Übersicht über das Finanzsystem verschafft hat. Lietaer nimmt Bezug zu wenigen wichtigen Ereignissen der globalen Finanzgeschichte, w. z. B. dem Bretton-Woods-Abkommen und lockert mit interessanten Einschüben die Trockenheit der Materie ein wenig auf. Die Zusammenhänge erschliessen sich auch jemandem, der keine VWL Vorlesungen besucht und ich war verblüfft, wie einfältig ich bisher den Begriff “Geldschöpfung” verstanden habe. Mit Hilfe dieses Wissens lassen sich dann auch seine Lösungsvorschläge relativ leicht nachvollziehen. Die Bewertung über die Wirksamkeit dieser Ansätze überlasse ich an dieser Stelle den Experten. Mit Sicherheit hätten einige Ausführungen ein wenig kürzer dargelegt werden können, zumal sich einige Aspekte mehrmals wieder finden lassen, trotzdem würde ich jedem Interessierten dieses Buch weiterempfehlen.
In this blog, ive already mentionend the great lucid dreaming site Lucidipedia.com, and once again i want to recommend this site to anyone who is interested in dreaming/lucid dreaming.
Actually i want to point to a great youtube video series by Tim Post, the founder of Lucidipedia.com. On the Lucidipedia blog, he recently announced that the site is undergoing another structural change and that he is working on a new video series focusing on more advanced lucid dreaming issues. The new series, as well as an older one for beginners, are now ready to watch on the Lucidipedia youtube profile.
While searching for an easy to use, yet powerful bittorrent client for Linux about a year ago, i found Deluge, which was pretty unstable and not quite ready for every day use back then.
Since then much has changed and it has become my favourite bittorrent client for Linux. Finally on July 15th the Deluge team released version 0.9.02 (1.0.0 RC2) of their software and I must say, i’m pretty impressed by what they did to this already good product. They totally renewed the GUI and made it very intuitive, it now looks very similar to uTorrent. Besides the fresh interface deluge still has all the features you need in order to properly download torrents, though most of the old plugins still have to be rewritten to be compatible with the new version, but this will only be a matter of time.
I recommend you to try this great client, if you are searching for a good piece of software to download your torrents. Since it’s mostly written in Python you can get packages for many different Linux distributions as well as for OS X and Windows on their download page.
After reading an ebook[german] by Paul Tholey about dream characters and if they have an own consciousness, i had an idea how i could become lucid in a more efficient way. In this book Tholey says that some people have successfully told their dream characters to make them lucid in another dream. They used them as little helpers to gain lucidity.
Now, there are two problems for me with reality checks. I’m very bad in remembering things i have to doin the future, so i often forget to do them on several occasions during the day, though i manage to do them from time to time. They quite often gave me lucid dreams, but those moments were very rare. So first you have to make yourself check reality while being awake and the other step is to transfer that behaviour into your dream life. For me this is quite hard and not very reliable.
So i thought about a more failsafe way to gain lucidity. Coming back to helping dream characters, i thought that those actually are visual representations of our subconsciousness. They represent inner conflicts, conflicts with other persons or something else. In order to tell them to make you lucid in other dreams you first have to become lucid in that very moment, which is a huge barrier to that great technique as you must be able to master lucid dreaming quite good.
Wouldn’t it be possible to create such an entity in our subconsciousness, that operates in the background and tells us when we are lucid. I’m no psychologist or something, but aren’t there many subconscious programs idling in the background of our psyche in our daily lives, telling where to look, what not to hear and where to go, without us being aware of it in that moment? I thought we could maybe create our own little program and integrate into our mind using auto suggestions, (self) hypnosis or whatever technique is most efficient for this kind of operation. The program would be like “tell me i am dreaming, when this and that happens”. Wouldn’t this be some kind of dream character without a visual presence?
Newcomers to the world of lucid dreaming might often ask themselves, why it actually makes sense to deal with it at all. Besides the fun aspect, most people who strictly differentiate between the waking life and the dreaming life find it hard to see any benefits in getting conscious in your dreams. That’s why i would first like to talk about these different layers of “reality”.
As a dreamer you might want to ask yourself, why you should actually make a difference between dream reality and waking reality. This has two advantages. Firstly, if you really “live” the presumption that dream reality and waking reality are equal, it becomes a lot easier to dive in the world of lucid dreaming. Secondly, it gives you a total new, more critical access to waking reality as you begin to realize that everything you experience is based on your own creation and how your brain deals with it. You will also notice, that you quite often enter dream like states, not only while actively day dreaming but even when you get from point a to point b or something like that.
In my opinion, both realities actually operate on the same layer. Things you do in waking life have direct influence on objects and persons in the real world, whereas things you do in dreams, in this case lucid dreams, might have influence on the real world later on. Still, on a neurobiological level dreams directly express themselves in reality under real physical laws, because they cause brain activity. What you do/feel/think has the same effect on those synaptic activity as it would in the real world. For instance, in very stable lucid dreams, you could train your soccer skills far away form anything that could interrupt you in real life and you might experience progress in real soccer as well. Many people also use it as an intelligent, productive way to work on psychological problems by dealing with symbols in their dreams that represent inner conflicts.
These examples show how you can direclty affect your real life by “hacking” your subconsoiusness. That’s why i see dreams as an important part of our everyday life. In an average lifetime, you would have spent a total of of about six years of it dreaming. So dealing with dreams in any possible way, not necessary lucid dreaming, might improve our way of life in many different aspects and i think that, if done the right way, it could improve whole societies. Though i don’t actually think it will be exercised on a bigger scale, as everything gets faster and working on lucid dreaming takes too much time, at least nowadays.
No, i couldn’t isolate myself from all that FF 3 fuss. After being a solid Epiphany user for quite a long time, i finally found my way back to this little memory slut (yeah, it seems to work better now.)
But there was a big problem with Epiphany and Firefox after the upgrade to Hardy. Both browsers crashed very unreliably when a flash application was loaded (youtube, …). It was a known bug that was related to Ubuntu’s switch to PulseAudio. Fortunately i found this helpful blog entry by Markus Thielmann which provides a deb package for Flash 10 beta. This has solved that problem for me.
After some days using FF3 (Release Candidate 3), i have to say that it is stable (has not yet crashed for me once) and all in all seems to run ”faster” than FF2, in respect to GUI stuff and browsing. The new Awesomebar is indeed awesome, and because of Newsfox, i have now abandoned my old news aggregator. Here you can find out more about the new features of FF3.
fuck Ferrero and their ignorance. They are not willing to change the shape of their stupid glass containers. “Yeah, it makes our product so original, blablabla”. Do they know how it feels to scratch out every little piece of that delicious nougat spread while soiling your hand and the grip of the tool you are using. Im doing that for almost 15 fucking years now!
Also fuck that stupid foil thing, which i never managed to remove at once! (This applies to all products with a foil on top). I’m demanding Ferrero to go and fuck themselves. They take my time and make me fat. Bastards.
We feed the World is an Austrian documentary by Erwin Wagenhofer about how globalization and industrialization have changed food production. For creating this film, Wagenhofer has visited different persons involved in farming, fishing and managment of food companies. There are only uncommented statements of the interviewees, but the viewer gets additional information through text flashes. Between the chapters Jean Ziegler comments mostly on current problems concerning poverty, starvation and food distribution and sustains his point with several numeric facts.
I like how Wagenhofer deals with this highly explosive topic in a very objective way. All persons involved seem to speak freely and can state whatever they wish without the film being cut in wrong moments. Furthermore, he doesn’t use any dramatizing pictures or video snippets, like it is often done in other documentaries. Due to the fact that he uncovers diverse parts of the food industry, the film delivers quite diversified opinions.
After some time watching this documentary, the viewer will probably develop a very discerning view on what he consumes in every day life and question if the consequences are worth it. In my opinion the main statement of this movie is quite simple and already well known, but still it seems like we can’t totally face it: Social and envoirenmental problems will become worse on a global scale when today’s “developed” societies will continue to demand for such huge quantities of food for low prices, which comes along with an enormous reduction of taste quality. Globalization made it possible for humans on many parts of the world to consume almost every possible piece of food at any given time, whereas a much bigger part of humanity is still starving and irreversible damage is done to nature. The consumers themselves have to take action, as corporations only follow the rules of the globalized “free” market economy and, unlike the individuals of a corporation, will not align their actions with things like morals as long as they don’t benefit from it financially.
Unfortunately the WFW DVD is currently unavailable on amazon.com, but I’m sure you know other ways to get it.
The Dillinger Escape Plan are well known for their incredible fast and brutal tracks with unpredictable structures and endless screaming. Nonetheless, from time to time, and more often since Miss Machine, they create music that you can actually listen to longer than 15 minutes. The last song of their latest album Ire Works is one of those rare DEP moments and it now belongs to the most acoustically arousing moments of my career as a music listener. Thank god, you can listen to the full track on last.fm:
Explosm.net
