Some recycled pictures from Oxford, England where I was on a conference last year. Since I had not much time and only my little camera with me, they are a bit random and fuzzy. However they still give some impressions so I decided to post them here.
The image of the women’s room in the youth hostel (see below) may look more uncomfortable than it actually was. That is luckily all the six women in the room were attending the conference and all of them were very considerate people that is the partying teenager stayed out of the room and thus we all had more or less rather quiet nights.
In the blogpost on the return of investments I proposed to use games for testing new economical scenarious. I currently try to make an article out of that.
In the draft I sofar have given an overview about games and roughly motivated why I think that it may be a good idea to introduce new economical schemes. In particular I talk about the limitations of this planet, design and in particular about something that I dubbed “recycling-run-away effect”.
Amongst others I also try to line out why I think that the nuclear waste problem may be a worse problem than the safety of reactors (see also the first post on Fukushima).
Comments are appreciated, here is the draft:
update (06072011) : This blog post is now used as a referrer URL for the game scheme article, thus newer versions of the article and comments will be uploaded more or less regularily. Please note that this offer to our randform readers costs our private money. Since randform is currently purely financed by Tim Hoffmanns income as a math professor, we may eventually be forced to reduce or close this offer, depending on download rate, inflation, etc. Most of the content of the article is also spread on the Azimuth project like the section about the Game environment. The Azimuth updates are usually more current.
In the image above it looks as if a boat ferries across to Isola di San Michele. However what you see there it is just Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore. Nevertheless in Venice you may still feel as if Tadzio from the famous film may lurk around the corner any next moment.
Below I make a little advertisement for Piazza San Marco and in particular St. Mark’s Basilica since there are yet not enough tourists there…;)
(old GDR advertisement of the electrical engineering industry)
There was a longer discussion on that randform post about oppression in the GDR. Within the discussion a randform reader called Ditta found my opinion that “part of all that huge mess of a wall through the streets of Berlin was plain economic warfare” absurd. This is still my opinion: there were surely people running away from East Germany for pure political reasons, but I dare say that a not to small part left for economical reasons. Moreover this reasoning doesnt justify the wall, I think it is clear that the wall was an inhuman mistake. The discussion just sheds a different light on the involved motivations.
I currently have not the time to discuss this in detail and since this is a different thread I hereby link to the comment which led to Ditta’s reaction and ask people who wish to discuss this issue to leave their comments here at this thread.
Blogwise – I am currently preparing a blog entry, which takes more time than I would have suspected…in particular I am not on vacation.
We managed our relocation. I overstrained my right hand a bit and had eye problems due to the dust, but finally everything got squeezed into the appartment so that we could hurry to Berlin in order to see relatives and solve some other problems.
The bad thing about germand appartments is that they usually have no built-in closets, so you have to move around all these big armoires (or live out of a suitcase).
We were lucky to find two rather antique closets, which you can carry in parts. One closet was in an attic and covered with cobwebs. The printed letters on its back indicate that it had been under a US Army Requisition Demand right after the war. Seems after it came back from the army the owner didnt like it too much anymore – given its abandonned situation in the attic.
a short personal note: We will leave the above beautiful garden sight by the end of the month. We were lucky to find a smaller appartment where the kids can still reach their school by bus. It is not easy to find an appartment for rent in munich without spending 2000-3000 Euros for a real estate agent. The appartment is at a rather big road. Unfortunately there is no traffic light in the vicinity and the traffic on that road is blowing too heavily for letting the kids cross that road by themselves. The architecture of the building and some buildings around it are similar to the one in the suburb of Neuaubing. We are on the forth floor so sometimes one can see the Alps.
