parallelization

seems it's not possible for win to install more than one app simultaneously.. :P could have thought of it before

beauty in transit

Washington DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approx 2 thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule.

4 minutes later:
the violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the till and, without stopping, continued to walk.

6 minutes:
A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

10 minutes:
A 3 year old boy stopped but his mother tugged him along hurriedly, as the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every parent, without exception, forced them to move on.

45 minutes:
The musician played. Only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace.
He collected $32.

1 hour:
He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before Joshua Bell sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.

This is a real story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people’s priorities. The questions raised: in a common place environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ….

How many other things are we missing?

For the full report check Washington Post online. I read the text on http://blog.coldewey.com/allgemein/2009/07/03/einfach-zum-nachdenken/

how to detect a hypocrite

seeing that so many people complain about hypocrites i was wondering how to detect them..

the first obvious step to me seemed to look up what the word itself actually means. here are my findings:



so, if i understood correctly, hypocrites are people whose behaviour seems to diverge quite noticeably from their stated opinions about how one should behave. of course this seems to be bad - especially in situations when a person is expecting things of others, which they are not willing to provide for themselves. so i understand people, who get very annoyed or frustrated by this behaviour.

On the other hand, i felt occasionally, as if people complaining most about hypocrites fail to understand that it can be very difficult to live up even to one's own expectations of a good life. even people having very high ideals in life and trying very hard to fulfill them might not be able to close the gap and perfectly practice what they preach. so i wonder if it is really possible for anyone to judge them for it?

i guess we are never really in the position of finding out how much someone is putting into being sincere in their behaviour, so i find it very hard to just hate so-called hypocrites so much.. especially as this hate could quickly turn the hater in a hypocrite as well (except in the presence of very low expectations to behaviour ;) and this really isn't helping. probably exactly the opposite - non-judging - behaviour could improve the situation: if somebody aware of failing his own standards still feels accepted by another person, they will much easier admit that they are not perfect, and maybe even reflect what is causing this gap. quite a chance for improvement, i'd reckon.

sharing is caring

recently we were cutting the jasmin bushes in our garden. as we had a ginormous amount of flowering branches, we put them in some vases on the street, to share them with the neighbours.
we felt very pleased as quite some people walked by carrying some branches. however, when my mum checked how much was left, not only the flowers but also one vase was gone!

we were rather annoyed, so i went to put up a sign: please take the flowers but bring back our vase. not long after, a woman stopped by to tell us she had 'found' the vase in some front garden round the corner. these guys were quite surprised when my mum came to see them; and they promised to bring the vase back once the flowers where wilting. mine are doing so by now, so i am curious when i will see that vase again!

"virtue is also if no-one is tempting you"

it is nice to have principles - as long as nothing challenges you to stick to them. i guess in many cases one then realises having missed out on half of the context of the situation (and every so-often also having judged people without having any idea about what they were going through).

so my question is: should one revise one's principles when realising that they were too narrowminded (ever heard of complicated principles??) or should one still stick to them (because it's a principle to stick to one's principles)?

complicated

"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated."
- Poul Anderson

-- reminds me of an old hypothesis of mine: only few people can allow themselves declaring problems as 'easy': the ones that have no clue about it at all and therefore can not estimate the difficulties involved, or the experts who know everything related to it.
i feel that for everyone else somewhere on the path from one of these states to the other anderson's quote applies very well. --

seminar

tomorrow will be my first ever seminar talk. weird feeling. i prepared about 12 pages as paper and condensed it to about 20 slides to be held in 30 min. about the rest i have no clue, i even couldn't decide on how to start my presentation. at least i'm not the first so i can see how things are done. but then, the location will be very nice and after my talk i can enjoy this place for 2 more days ;)


Größere Kartenansicht

it's in the system

there is an interesting point in systems theory: don't blame a person for behaving in a certain way - check the system first to see if they could act differently.
i quite like this approach; it kinda discourages blatantly judging someone without ever (mentally) walking in their shoes.

also putting this approach into practice could be interesting: if, for example, some people on your team behave not as expected it's not necessarily just them being terrible. maybe the team's structure doesn't leave them a choice to be different. only drawback: you might have to accept some responsibility and change yourself.

chrome

i really like this browser; however in the last few days it keeps getting stuck on random pages.. anyone knows anything?

decisions, decisions..

... and still more decisions! It's impossible how many things one has to decide during the course of a day or so.. And so many of them are really hard to optimize, so only attempting to make the best choice on some keeps blocking my thoughts for considerable time. So maybe 'any decision is a good decision'?

i guess many of them are not that dramatic - maybe can even be undone with some more hassle. but then, some aren't. strangely enough though, no one ever teaches how to deal with those. most people's strategy seems to be to treat them just as if it wouldn't matter, but are they right to act like this? or are they just shunning their responsibility and the possible consequences of their actions? or are they getting lost in trying to figure out the best choice? or even trying to define 'best'?