Subtitle: I don’t believe in miracles

When I was a small boy my parents took me with them on a day trip to a lake in the Black Forrest. As customary in many touristic places there were lots of souvenir shops along the lake side. We didn’t have much money, so window shopping was what we did most of the time. But this time we came along a small vending machine, just the shape and size of a chewing gum machine. It sold many different things, maybe also chewing gum. Each of us children got a coin and bought something from the vending machine. When I turned the lever a kind of a card ticket drop into the tray. It was a fortune card. I can’t remember much details but there were two numbers on it that were meant to be used in a lottery. Curious as we were we bought a lottery ticket the next week and combined the two numbers from the fortune card with four other numbers as required for the 6 out of 49 lottery.

My conception of the world and the laws that operate it were seriously shaken when the lottery numbers were drawn the next Saturday. The two numbers from the fortune card were right. How could that be? How could the miracle machine have know when to dispose that particular fortune ticket?

Well, we didn’t win much in the lottery. With 3 out of 6 numbers right, we more or less won the money for the lottery ticket back. Months later when we made another trip to that lake in the Black Forest we went to the miracle machine again. But no more fortune cards came out of it.

This is how I feel:

Just watched an episode of Star Trek - Next Generation, that one where Worf switches between quantum realities whenever Geordie’s visor is near. Maybe you know that view, like from a distance, I guess that’s what you could call symptoms of a trauma.

Not that I knew him very closely - a project partner from the UK. An admirable person with an Irish accent. He probably knew, for a month or so, that his illness was incurable. That’s not much time, not much time. Life is short. I’m listening to "Child in Time". And a line from a song by Emerson Lake & Palmer comes to my mind: "I carry the dust of a journey that can not be shaken away."

Been doing a sort of a market study. Well, finance you know. There is a really good book that explains the basics of high finance: "Der Nebel um das Geld " by Bernd Senf. Also "Atlas der Globalisierung" has some interesting facts. E.g. the volume of sold and purchased virtual goods is much larger than that of real goods: $700 billion on foreign exchange markets, $120 billion world GDP (gross domestic product), $17 billion world trading volume. All numbers are per day in 2005. - That’s virtual reality, or was that something different?

Spam bots again… 112 spam comments. If indeed someone wrote a comment in the last two weeks, please try again.

I just read that the coalition (current governement) wants to make it easier for highly qualified foreign workers to immigrate. This makes me mad. Are we Germans not only too upper class to do the dirty jobs but also too stupid to run our own business? With 5 million people unemployed, calling for workers from foreign countries is a shame for the governement. Is it too expensive to educate the people in Germany? Is it not fancy enough to keep the cities clean?

Not strictly related:

…and the Financial Times Germany writes: Vertrauen in große Koalition schwindet dramatisch (Trust in the great coalition decreases dramatically)

Yesterday I had a little guided tour through the town where I live. To the left you see the "Rain Tower", architected by Friedensreich Hunderwasser. Top right: the old town hall. You may notice the concrete foothold/poles the building is standing on. That’s because it wasn’t build where it is standing now. It was brought here when the train station was growing and the area where the house was standing before was needed for new tracks.

It’s very hot in Germany for weeks now. Some people are cooling their beer in the Fischbrunnen (fish fountain). The photo below shows a decoration on a very old house that used to be the public bath from 1350 to 1739.

Just deleted 141 spam comments. This is getting annoying. Until now the level of spam comments was about 10 to 20 per week. But 141 is something different. So if you really had posted a comment in the last 24 hours, … .

It’s not a tool actually, well. But it’s cool: