According to Samgmin Bae’s research, 70% of laundry-doers don’t read clothing care instruction labels. In response, Bae proposes an RFID label concept that replaces existing care tags on clothing and communicates directly with RFID-enabled washers, dryers, irons, presses, and dry cleaning equipment to determine proper levels for each garment/load.

It’s just a concept I found at [...]

After calling myself the Master of iTunes Smart Playlists, I’ve been asked to share some tips.

I can do so, even if I don’t know whether I can tell anyone anything fundamentally new. But then again I also made the experience that many people don’t use Smart Playlists at all or have no idea how they [...]

Oh, look what I found here! That looks pretty nice, clean and simple.

Maybe not all hope is lost on my search for a good winter jacket.

Update, several seconds later

Or maybe not. These things are fucking expensive. 1200$ for a jacket? Have they lost their minds? Jeeeez …

Only after the human race has slain all gods they will realise that they have not just slain their gods – but their paradise as well.

Excerpt from The Ravensburg Oracle, first published in 2064 on the Internet; this edition collected, edited and translated by Leela Strauss, Oxford 2185.

The paradise seemed always to loom just around the corner, and whenever they came around, it was still farther away – a Fata Morgana , or rather: an illusion of Fata Morgana, as “fata” is Italian for “fairy”, which translates the Fata Morgana into Morgan the Fairy – Morgaine la Faye , cast as a Goddess of Illusion and Deceit.

…As could be expected of Michael Ende, this place can be found in one of the blank spots on the world’s maps, and it is never clear whether this place has always been there or if it was the main character’s imagination or wish to have it placed there.

Welche Auseinandersetzungen – sei es um Wasser, Getreide, Lebensraum, Rohstoffe oder Energie – könnte ein globaler Temperaturanstieg von vier Grad Celsius in den kommenden 50 Jahren auslösen? Während zwischen Russland, Amerika und der Nato derzeit ein reichlich vordergründiger Streit um Abfangraketen und Mittelstreckenwaffen tobt, der sich aus Kalten-Kriegs-Denkmustern speist, haben die Sicherheitsstrategen in London, Washington [...]

A ficlet is a short story that enables you to collaborate with the world.Once you’ve written and shared your ficlet, any other user can pick up the narrative thread by adding a prequel or sequel. In this manner, you may know where the story begins, but you’ll never guess where (or even if!) it ends.

Ficlets: [...]

Let them dance Those empty headed porcelain dollsLet them dance With eternal smiles and glassy eyesLet them dance Pulled on strings They cannot seeLet them dance Until the strings snap Let them dropInto the abyss To shatter into A thousand piecesA fleeting memory Soon forgotten.

Language is never innocent.Prof. Dr. Margaret Bridges in a lecture.

I’m actually thinking about placing my brain in a nutrition fluid and migrating into the internet. Life would be surely far easier there. I could live in Second Life and build myself the perfect partner, which, according to some psycho test, must be some perfectly balanced being surely only existing as a theoretical role model [...]

Google’s new [Image Labeler][3] service is a game that asks you and a random partner somewhere on the Internet to come up with tags to describe an image. The tags you two independently create are applied to the picture.

Bei der jährlichen Studienwoche der Freien Pädagogischen Vereinigung kann man sich nicht nur zu Mistelpflanzen, Hexametern und Alliterationen sowie Lichtnahrung (sic!) weiterbilden, sondern findet auch Anregungen der besonderen Art …

What if, seconds before your laptop began stalling, you could feel the hard drive spin up under the load? Or you could tell if an electrical cord was live before you touched it?

But it started back when Google was just a thesis project, back when it was just a drop in the data sea…. What do you figure happens, when a site gets so big that it’s bigger than the internet?”—“It’s still a part of the internet, though.”—“No …

Ein weiterer Auszug aus Xeophins unvollständigem Lexikon obsoleter Definitionen ohne Begriffe.