details of a global brain

Notes from Prof. Dipl.-Des. Oliver Wrede

  • Quorum sensing bacterial communication

    Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria “talk” to each other, using a chemical language that lets them coordinate defense and mount attacks. The find has stunning implications for medicine, industry — and our understanding of ourselves.

  • Thinking alternatives: From “Mobile” to “Mobility”

    Shai Agassi is the CEO of The Better Place to get rid of oil dependency (especially for running vehicles). The idea: Give away electric cars for free (like mobile phones) and make the batteries part of the electric grid system (instead of a costly component of the car). You basically pay for miles, thus the […]

  • 100 months to desaster

    Scientists and celebrities raise the alarm regard global warming. Prince Charles for example claims that there’re only 100 months left to act. On the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit 2009 the economist Nicholas Stern confronts politicians and scientists with a dire outlook of the future if politicians fail to act swiftly on carbondioxide emissions. Obviously there […]

  • Lovelock: One last chance to save mankind

    James Lovelock in The NewScientist about the ecology and global warming today: I don’t think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what’s coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing’s been done except endless talk and meetings.

  • NSA wiretaps like crazy?

    Former NSA analysr Russel Tice talks publicly about the wiretapping of the National Security Agency. Obviously the NSA patched into backbones of national telecommunication providers and scanned ALL communications. Complete organisations had their communication secretly copied and backed up for investigative purposes. See yourself: Update: There is a second interview with Mr. Tice the day […]

  • Competing with the iPhone

    Ingo Hinterding wants to have a Plam Pre. The multi-touch, turning UI is clearly attacking the iPhone market share. I think the Palm Pre will not succeed as an “iPhone killer”.

  • Seminar on »Slowness«

    Here is a teaser for a seminar next semester: Read a more detailed (german) description here. Also: Overview about my teaching activities with links to other seminar weblogs.

  • Fans on Technorati? How could I have missed that…

    I just noticed that there is a “fan”-feature on Technorati. It may be on for years but it never really drew my attention. I have four fans! Beside of Marian Steinbach (whom I know, “Hello!”) I see three other people that I do not know: Tom Roper who is a Information Resources Development Coordinator for […]

  • I finally switched to WordPress

    After a long time of consideration I turned over to WordPress for this weblog and I will not be using Tinderbox to blog here anymore. Tinderbox is a great software for thinking and writing – and I love to have a more graphical/visual note taking approach to weblogging. But it was getting too clumsy to […]

  • 3 components of good web design

    Actually the site PSDTUTS has great tutorials for Web Designers. But one of the recent articles about what design roles that constitute a good web design discipline did not convince me.

  • US officials flunk test of American history, economics, civics

    Yahoo News reports: “US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday.” You can take the 33-question quiz here. I couriously tried the test and scored a 60.61% as a non-US citizen. Doesn’t this qualify me […]

  • Fundamental changes ahead: petaflop barrier broken

    According to this WIRED blog entry IBM and Cray have both cracked the petaflop barrier. Computer scientist Mark Seager of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory claims that this will change the scientific method for the first time since Galileo invented the telescope (in 1509)”. The reason for that is that simulation and approximation can be used […]

  • Zeitgeist: Addendum

    Here is a two hour documentary by Peter Joseph from July 2008 explains so much of the backgrounds of a “corporatocracy” today, an unsustainable “monetary-ism” and religious deception that causes social and economic distress. »Zeitgeist: Addendum« is a sequel to the documentary »Zeitgeist« from 2007: Zeitgeist: Addendum, attempts to locate the root causes of this […]

  • Information Design and the Monetary System

    I am personally interested in how the lack of information or proper presentation of that information led to the current financial crisis. Obviously the information was available — but not well understood, not correctly aggregated or falsely interpreted by politicians that were responsible for phony policies and flawed legislations.

  • The political implication of YouTube

    YouTube allows people to make visible the failure of politicians. The way they remain clueless and lie about their cluelessness afterwards. This is very important. But unfortunatly a revealing YouTube video may not get the publicity it should.

  • Let’s play Bailout

    It seems US government is denying its responsibility for the financial crash — and even trying to get away with new mistakes by pushing congress to agree on a plan that is hardly removing the source of the problem.

  • Bailing out in the wrong direction

    US Government is suggesting a $700 billion financial package to prevent a chain reaction at Wall Street. The US national debt to over $10 trillion dollars with just a single decision. Interestingly there are many experts that tell their own story about what this all means on the long run. Someone may wonder where this […]

  • Two Red Dot Design Awards for Hobnox

    I forgot to post this here: Hobnox won two Red Dot Design Awards for the website and the Hobnox Audiotool. Unfortunatly the Red Dot website does not list the achievement – and there is no statement from the Jury either. The Audiotool also recieved the Flashforward Award 2008 – which is rewarding the best Flash […]

  • Zoot Woman as well!

    I am sorry to “spam” my music interest recently. But I am just so glad about what the Berlin team was able to pull up again. As my Last.fm profile discloses I have been listening to the britsh band called Zoot Woman recently. Now I am happy that Hobnox has the concert and an interview: […]

  • Jose Gonzalez Live – exclusively on Sly-Fi.com

    Hobnox is exclusively providing a recording of the live concert of José Gonzaléz in Admiralspalast in Berlin. Beautiful concert, excellent camera work, perfect sound. And we are investigating to deliver this in near-HD video quality soon (stay tuned). [See on Sly-Fi-Channel]

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