Friedlander @ SFMoMA

In the pantheon of photography, there is always room for someone that has spent the last 50 years taking pictures of America as it has grown and changed. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art decided to honor Lee Friedlander, just such an artist, with a giant exhibit. With an ouvre that vast, the gallery decided to go for a roughly chronological setup, showing the artist’s work from the 60es to present times in a series of walls that, mostly, each come with a thematic setup. Continue reading

Frustration = Opportunity

Thinking about it, people move into something new only if the old is not working for them any longer. If that’s the case, then frustration is the driver of innovation to a much larger extent than the realization of opportunity. The interesting thing about this notion is that frustration is measurable, while opportunity is not. You can ask people what they don’t like about the world around them. Usually they won’t give you accurate information, since they have no understanding of their own pain – but that still beat asking yourself what opportunities there are out in the world. Continue reading

Dreaming in Code (S. Rosenberg)

Confession: I had the hardest time understanding relativity. Not such a big deal for the average Joe, but quite a handicap for a physicist like me. I could certainly apply the equations, that was straightforward enough. The inner logic of it all, though, escaped me. Take the twin paradox, for instance: one of two twins leaves for an extended trip to another star, and the other one is left behind. When the traveling brother sees the other one on screen, the latter’s speech is slowed down, a relativistic effect. Continue reading

The Lost Painting (J. Harr)

I had the good venture of spending my high school years in Rome, just at the time when you get acquainted with the fine arts. My memories are still vivid with entering the churches of San Luigi dei Francesi and Santa Maria del Popolo and seeing the Caravaggios in there. They are an unforgettable sight. They hang high up, far out of reach, and you have to drop a coin to turn on the lights that allow you to see them. Continue reading

Open Services

Frustration is the mother of open source and has always been. You have a problem that is solved in a deficient way by the free market (which is not free as in beer or as in speech, it’s free as in fall). You think to yourself: I can do this better. You start working on it but quickly realize you really can’t do it by yourself. So you enlist a bunch of people to work on it for free (as in beer) in return for complete freedom (as in speech) to divulge what you have collectively built. Continue reading

The Game Players of Titan (P. K. Dick)

Get ready for a flood of P.K. Dick novel reviews, since I am getting caught up on old reading. I even went out of my way to order all the ones I didn’t buy yet on powells.com, and they are going to arrive any time soon. The Game Players of Titan is the typical P.K. Dick novel: an uncertain society after a catastrophic development, extraterrestrial life (in this case not imagined), a mystery to solve, and an unusual setting with a great many surprises. Continue reading

Anthem (A. Rand)

There you go: buy a 400 page book, and then discover that it’s a 100 page book plus 300 pages of “original material” with commentary and other stuff. Disappointing, not because it’s really only 100 pages, but because I had packed it for the beach – and I can definitely read 100 pages in under an hour, leaving me without much to do but counting grains of sand and waves crashing onto shore. Continue reading

A Maze of Death (P. K. Dick)

Some authors you just love reading because they transport you away into another real world. As a writer, you need imagination and creativity to create a completely new world, and it usually ends up being something that is entirely invented – the more bizarre, the better. Take Tolkien, for example, or even Calvino. Not so for Philip K. Dick. His science fiction novels mostly entail worlds that are “real” – they play in some distant future, but they have all the ugliness and baseness of our own world. Continue reading

Coffee places in SoMa

I’ve been living here for about two months, and I have now visited my share of coffee places in SoMa. The following is a brief summary of my recollections – constantly updated as I find new places. First of all, there is no dearth of choices here South of Market. The neighbourhood caters to two classical coffee addicts and is crowded with caffeine spigots. Yuppies need the jolt to get their head spinning all the time, and time wasters just have time to hang out, and coffee is just the excuse. Continue reading

Mediocrity

One of the things that has always puzzled me is just how adverse a reaction you can get to anything average. You’d think that something average would be ok – I mean, how could it possibly be bad to be like everyone else? Instead, in all languages I speak, there is a common thread: words that indicate averageness have negative connotations. Let’s see: mediocre (from Latin medius, middle); average; common; durchschnittlich (German for average). Continue reading