Now I want to know it

On the right hand side you find a poll about a question I was discussing with a lot of people. I want to know your opinion so please vote, or if your opinion doesnt fit put a comment. In particular I would like to know if also on this issue (under which several people in my aquaintances are suffering) the general opinion diverges from the actual behaviour of people. Of course this is only a very limited approach, but I'm not a sociologist so I have to use what comes my way.
Thanks already for your cooperation!

And then?

Tomorrow CERN is planning to power up it's Large Hadron Collider, result of a project started in the 1980s. The objective of this experiment is not a trivial one - in fact, some physicists take it to provide key facts about the creation of the universe.
Now I wonder: what happens if it doesn't? For sure a lot of calculations were done so it is likely that some things can be observed. But in some sense I doubt that we will know the universe's deepest secrets in the near future. And I can't help imagining some irritated faces should the outcome of this experiment be: nothing?

Nachtrag..

it's been a while ago, but still i would like to share some impressions of my trip to the baltic countries with you.
on the map below you see the places we travelled to in these three weeks. i really enjoyed going with the flow and in my curiosity soaking up as many details as possible. however, i came to realise that i was bound to miss out on many things.. maybe some other time i will be able to complete the picture a bit more.



these pictures are a truly random selection from the journey (truly random as i must have exceeded picasa's limit for selected pictures so it dumped more than half of my selection :)
in this place i want to thank everyone for this great journey: Diana, Andrej, Valdemaras, Olga, Andreis, Martins, Marijn, and all their friends and families which i could meet and which were so friendly and caring. I hope to see you before long :)

How to make a top

about truth

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
Oscar Wilde

networking

aka continuously connecting with people that are actually no longer there? I was thinking what would happen if suddenly internet would not exist anymore, and maybe also mobile phones.. and I realised that a huge part of my friends would really be offline and lost to me, as nowadays landline numbers or physical addresses are hardly exchanged anymore. I wonder how I would find them again.
on the other hand I wonder what makes people want to build these networks. one reason seems to me the unability to accept that when leaving a place for good you probably won't meet many of these people anymore - except for the few that really became good friends and/or have enough time and money to travel around. maybe it is too hard to face to say these final goodbyes. so we rather delve into the illusion of really being in touch with everyone.
I am not sure we really gain from this, because in some cases it is simply not honest. Also, I guess if one does not expect to see people again one often tends to be more sincere to them (which I generally think is lacking in everyday life) and in this way goodbye moments - if accepted as such - have even the potential to be the most precious in the sense of truth. and they allow to distance oneself from the people that are gone, to open the way to the ones that actually surround us.

But nothing compares to you

I personally think that unneccessarily comparing oneself to others is one of the main sources of people's unhappiness. However, I never manage to make up my mind in wondering if on some occasions it is a necessary tool for motivation to change oneself. It's probably about the reasons we have for comparing ourselves as well as the grounds on which we base our comparisons (i.e. if it is things we can change or not).

Regarding things we can not change I found some nice quotes (as usual I apologize for my rather crude translation, it's not so poetic but I still hope it catches the essence).

The first one is by Abbas Paphnutios

"An welchen Ort du auch hinkommst,
vergleiche dich nicht mit anderen
und du wirst Ruhe finden."

[Wherever place you go to,
do not compare yourself to others
and you will find peace]

The other one is by Charles de Montesquieu

"Wenn man nur glücklich sein wollte, wäre es ja bald getan:
aber man will ja glücklicher als die anderen sein,
und das ist fast immer schwierig,
weil wir die anderen für glücklicher halten,
als sie wirklich sind."

[If one only wanted to be happy, it would be an easy task:
but one always wants to be more happy than others,
and this is quite difficult
as we tend to take the others for happier
than they really are.]

Both I think point out a spectrum of thought which I find thrilling and worth to be tried in real life. Happy experimenting!

Who owns the problem?

Very often it can be observed that people start to argue about something. Usually these arguments start off by some very basic remark of person 1, which by some unknown reason is taken very badly by person 2, who reacts unappropriately, and there we go..
If afterwards person2 is asked why they became so upset, they are likely to say something like: 'oh, this p1, he really irritated me with what he said! so outrageous!'
Of course it is possible that p1 said something wrong or in a wrong tone but: there is nothing p2 could do about it. On the other hand though, the feeling irritated by it actually is not p1's problem: it belongs to p2, who has to accept that this happened and then can start to draw constructive conclusions from that point. So to speak, p2 can change their own role from that of a victim ('it's all p1's problem, they were very rude!') to that of a person accepting the responsibility for their problem ('i got really irritated by this and this is my problem which i have to solve').
I find this approach very useful, as often in an argument or a difficult situation people tend to get stuck in mutual blaming but fail to see that there is the possibility that the other one actually did not at all intend things badly, but happened to push some unknown button on ones own 'panic-list'. Consequently, p2 could continue to ask: why does this irritate me so much? and also: do I really, honestly believe that this person wants to deliberately annoy me?
The first question might challenge p2 to face not so nice experiences they have made in their lives so far which have left a considerable mark on how they tend to look at things (which also implies that there is not one 'right' view of the world but rather that they are all right for one person but possibly complete nonsense for another, but that's another issue). We can not really expect another person to know about these things, which then also leads to the second question. If we can not assume another person knowing about our reasons for being annoyed about a certain way of behaviour, it might well be that these poor souls are completely unaware about the how and why they were causing a nuisance to us. Consequently it might well be that it was not the least their intention to get at us, but rather an unhappy series of events. Considering this, quite often quarrels can be condensed down to what lies beneath it. It might be nothing at all, or some corpses in the basement of p2's mind - but it is actually p2, accepting the ownership of their problem, who has the possibility to sort them out and thus break the circle of the argument.

Speed applying - aka JIT submitting

The new alternative of speed dating:
The trick is to wait with starting your online application just one hour before midnight and then submit 1 minute before, heavvily relying on your internet connection and all sending and receiving servers.
Some more adrenalin can be added by forgetting about some invalid data in some boxes which then have to be searched for in a fever.
Enjoy, but don't hold me responsible if it doesn't work out.

Soundless

Yesterday's ride on the underground left me very impressed and fascinated. Listening to my music, being completely cut out of my environment I witnessed a strange situation.
A quite fragile looking woman entered the coach, carrying a little suitcase, some child-painted cloth bag, and some sheets of paper. She sat down on the bench diagonal to me and started observing the people around. No sooner had we left the station that she bent over to the girl next to me, handing them the papers and pointing on it in a very urgent manner, but the girl didn't want to know anything about it.
At first I was startled as I wondered if she was actually begging; it's not usual here and also her simple cloths did not look ragged. Then she stretched out to me, so I felt I ought to have a look. So I took out my earplugs to ask her what it was all about. The answer surprised me: it was some ununderstandable sound, paired with the same clear body expressions she had showed with the other girl. The woman was deaf-mute. But she was not begging. Contrarily, she was campaigning for subtitles in television programmes! In fact, her sheets displayed statistics on subtitle coverage in various countries, with the US leading way ahead and European countries being all pretty bad.
I felt so much respect for this women: she seemed rather shy in her way of behaving, not at all intrusive, but at the same time she was fighting for being part of society. So she choose to overcome her hesitation and actually do something about the situation by bringing the problem to those people's minds who usually are not even aware about its existence.
In the end, she was more or less successful - all the people that actually gave her a chance to show her case signed her petition.