The Footnote the bane of my writing..

Yes, it happens that there are people that do not use footnotes in their essays. Now I used to be one of those people I wrote without a single footnote, but eventually my Comparative Religions professor protested and forced me to write Footnotes. Okay, well I did that but than the most horrible thing happened I started to use Footnotes to supply information that was either unimportant or just something that would have fit in the text a quite well.

It is easy to fall into that trap since it sometimes seems so much easier to use footnotes instead of integrating everything fully into the text. Yet, it is also important to retain footnotes for information that absolutely does not fit into the text but is still important to support your thesis.
The best rule that I have come across in this matter is very simple basically if it fits into the text write it into the text otherwise evaluate the information you intend to write into the footnote very carefully and ask your self if this piece of information is really necessary. Otherwise it is up to the judgment of your self and of course the judgment of your Professor and other readers.

One Speech many issues...

The Pope Benedict the XVI recently made speech, in this speech he argued against violence, and especially against violence in the name of a religion. This speech was well written and moving, but there was one single sentence that caused the Islamic communities to stir. This sentence caused the general issue by singling out Islam and by the unlucky use of words. Here is a link to some excerpts for this speech and a link to the full speech is on this page as well.

Key excerpts: The Pope's speech (BBC)

The language question...

Yes, as some might recall this Blog has been declared Bilingual in the article 'Bilingual'.
Now to the explanation why German and English are not switching steadily from article to article I have to give a very simple reason, the articles are written by me in the language in which the issue occurred to me or was discussed or brought forward to me. Since I prefer to remain in one language in such a case, this policy serves mostly to limit writing errors and mistranslations. Thus making it easier for me and anyone reading the articles.

Diese Seite ist Zweisprachig, aber ich wechsel niemals die Sprache in der ich auf die fuer einen Artikel komme oder Diskutiere oder nahe gelegt kriege, weswegen Englisch dominanter ist.
So lange ich in einer Sprache bleibe fuer einen Artikel kann ich relativ sicher stellen das tip-fehler so wie Uebersetzungs-fehler minimiert werden. Diese Directive macht es einfacher fuer mich und alle die Artikel von mir lesen.

Hero vs. Celebrity who truly remains...?

A hero in the more traditional sense is someone who is willing to fight and die for a good cause, for something just. Today hero's are either short lived or never noticed, while celebrities can be the center of all the attention as long as they do enough things that are interesting to the population i.e. the TV show 'Osbournes' and similar shows. The question remains what is truly amazing about a celebrity that they warrant such a great deal of interest? The hero of today can be anyone who does something socially responsible, something good, while a celebrity does nothing but please themselves, some do consider the benefit of others as was shown in the address made by George Clooney in front of the UN. But that action did not make him a hero or a celebrity he was a celebrity before he came there, he used his 'Celebrity Card' in the attempt of forcing the UN into action. Now what truly makes a celebrity? Is it charm is the roles they play, is it the fact that they can do what we want to do, is the true charm of the celebrity that they live in a dream like world?
Maybe in a millennia the archaeologists will write about the people in the year 2006 and how they revered a god called William Shattner, while others argue that the god Kurt Russel must be more powerful or was it Silvester Stalone that was the true master of the pantheon?
The hero on the other hand has become a very common thing every can be one, one just has to be at the right event and a week or a year later you suddenly become a international hero, for a week or two but than the hero slowly disappears again. Moving out of the light to make space for another hero or maybe for a celebrity.
Has the abundance of Hero's let to the understanding that it is easy to be hero but not a celebrity, since everyone knows what makes a hero all you have to do is find the right situation and than do the 'right' thing it is very easy right? But how do you become a celebrity someone that is interesting to millions and not forgotten quiet as fast.

History...?

It seems most interesting that we assume that all our technology and knowledge of philosophy, the world as well as the what happens. Has developed in the time since Jesus or even only the since the 1500 or 1600's. Now first of all we lost a great deal of knowledge after Christianity lost a great deal of knowledge due to book burnings or the simple ignoring of 'heathens' something that often happened over the course of history. The number zero was blasphemy in the eyes of the Christian church until the until the ealry 1800's (accounts may vary). The Romans used water supply and disposal that was beyond the ability of the Europeans of the until the mid-1800's since the greatest part of the European architecture was based on the trial and error system the dome in cologne for example partially collapsed several times while under construction due to mistakes that were well known to the preceding empires. The Chinese were far beyond anything that their European counter parts could offer in medicine, agricultural productivity and philosophy when they met each other. In fact many developments that were necessary for the European conquest came from China, like the compass. Now why is it that we often lack the understanding that we lost a great deal of knowledge during conquests and religious battles that we had to rediscover or find again, besides today's Math is based on a great deal of Greek theories, which were perceived thousands of years ago.
Why is it that some people still do not know or underestimate how dependent we are on the knowledge perceived long ago.
The same basic rule is true for religious account of the creation of the world, they often contain some event that actually happened maybe on a smaller proportion than displayed in the story but none the less.

Teraflops adieu...

Yes, the good old Teraflop is going out of service in 2008 there will be a new generation of Supercomputers, 1.6 petaflops, that is fast that is 1,600 times faster than 100 teraflops today's fastes supercomputer manages 280 teraflops. Both the present and the future top Supercomputer are made by IBM, now the reason for the enormous jump in computing power is simple and it is connected with the PS3. Yes, you guessed right they are going to build in this supercomputer CELL chips, 16,000 of them and a similar number of AMD Optron CPU's. The monster of for everyone unfamiliar with Tera and Petaflops here is the explanation. 100 teraflops equal about 100 trillion floating calculations, 1.6 petaflops equal 1.6 quadrillion floating calculations.
Now you wonder for what in the name of God will they use this number monster, well not for Space Travel or anything else that might be adventurous, they are going to use it at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory...
Think about the gaming potential...;-)

Brands and Symbols

Today it hardly possible to see people that do not wear some kind of advertisement on their body, it used to be that objects or symbols represented ancestors or maybe the believe in a certain faith. Today they represent certain companies or products maybe a sports team. With the assistance of those signs we classify the people in our environment, the guy that wears a sports cap with a teams name or symbol on it is most likely a fan of that team maybe he even has some kind of connection with the team. The person that wears cloth that have the brand of a expensive clothing line on it is most likely 'cool'. But is that really everything we try tell with the brands and emblems on our cloth? Couldn't just be that we have the need to tell others about us and maybe even something about out life? Now why is that brands can represent something like the love to skateboarding?
Well it is most likely that the brand that would be carried in this case is very active in the world of skateboarding, thus if you wear those cloth you will be most likely to be associated with that company and skateboarding. This basically means that the wearing is actually not about the brand but rather a way of being recognizable within your group, the companies of today's world seem to have realized that very thing and now they first think up a brand name and logo that might be appealing to their target group. Than they make this brandname and logo a symbol for something, for example playing PC-Games, once they made it a symbol for playing PC-Games it becomes a way of telling others that you like playing PC-Games.
This means that companies today use the need of a person to tell something about themselves by creating symbols and then selling them more expensive than regular 'non-symboled' cloth.

How Does the enviroment really affect us?...

Many say that the enviroment is not as important as we sometimes make it, that it does not strongly affect our personality that it does not change the way in which we develop. The truth is that if we move that one tents to loose sleep due to the changed sound background. It is also true that different enviroments offer different choices to the person in question, now it might not affect the development of the personality but I' am certain that it does help to create certain likes, dislikes as well as different physical abilities. If someone has to walk or swim everyday this person will certainly be fitter than the same person having the choice to use the bus, and sometimes using that. Thus making the person that has to swim and/or walk fitter, now the enviroment creates circumstances under which the person has to the abilities. The use of those abilities insures the increased ability to use those.
What all this rambling basically is saying that I do not believe that the enviroment has the small role that we often atribute to it. That the enviroment dictates how we use the abilities that we have available to us.