Avaaz has taken out this ad in the International New York Times. How can the Force not be with us after this?

+Frau M and I went to the #ClimateMarch flashmob in Nuremberg today, part of the global endeavour to push the Paris climate summit towards good results. The weather was crap but the people were great!

Alas, my photo leaves to be desired, but here's what happened: hundreds of people assembled in a heart-shaped formation. We were from the castle above, while producing hearty cheers. Then we held up shoes, as a gesture of solidarity with the thwarted Paris demonstration. The background to the shoe thing: because people aren't allowed to march in Paris, they just put their shoes there as placeholders!

About those Indonesian fires again. +John Baez, who spends a lot of time in nearby Singapore, wrote this great blog post about the situation. The problem has much to do with the corruption around palm oil. It's so bad that we probably should reduce palm oil use. Details about that are in the blog post. 

Abgeordneten-Email zur Netzneutralität, ins Deutsche übersetzt

Hallo G+-Freunde, in einem Tag stimmt die EU über einen Gesetzestext zu Netzneutralität ab. Dieser Text ist ein Problem, deswegen habe ich mich gerade an der Kampagne https://savetheinternet.eu/de/ beteiligt. Man kann da eine EU Partei auswählen, dann einen Abgeordneten, und dann eine Email verschicken. Ich habe den englischen Text der Email mal ins Deutsche übersetzt. Hier ist meine Übersetzung:

Subject: Bitte verteidigen Sie die Netzneutralität

Inhalt:
[ANREDE]

heutzutage können Internet-Nutzer Inhalte wie kleine Blogs, Nachrichtenseiten, und Regierungsseiten, ebenso leicht erreichen wie die Inhalte großer Firmen. Aber wir könnten diese gedeihliche Lage beschädigen, wenn wir keine klaren Regeln festlegen, die die Netzneutralität bewahren und Missbrauch ausschließen.

Ich bitten Sie, am Tag der Abstimmung die Zukunft des europäischen Internet nicht allein den Regulatoren zu überlassen. Der aktuelle Text der "Telecom Single Market" Regulation ist schwammig. Er könnte Interpretationen zulassen,die zu Diskrimination führen, zu Einschränkungen der Meinungsäußerung, zu Behinderung des Wirtschaftswachstums, und zu weniger Innovation,
 
Bitte stimmen Sie für Verbesserungen am Gesetzestext, um die Regulation klarer zu machen, und die Netzneutralität in der EU zu gewährleisten.

[GRUSS]

 

Some pictures I took along the famous Icefield Parkway through the Canadian Rockies.

The lake is Bow Lake, through which the Bow river flows from its nearby glacial source.

The image with the tree in the front shows the view from Howse Pass.

The image with lots of ice is the Athabasca glacier, with the Columbia Ice Field in the background, where the glacier originates. The Columbia Ice fields is a rare triple continental divide: the water that originates there flows into the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Arctic sea.

I've written a thorough blog post about using the language TypeScript to create quality web code: http://carstenfuehrmann.org/typescript-quality/. The post comes with a demo project on GitHub: https://github.com/cfuehrmann/GameOfLife and a hosted version: gameoflife.carstenfuehrmann.org.

Even if you're not interested in the blog post, you may want to play around with the hosted app. It's very plain, but trying out different settings can be strangely addictive.

The blog post discusses various aspects deeply: the rise of JavaScript, quality-assurance measures, the nature of TypeScript, module systems, and build systems.

The background to the whole enterprise:

JavaScript has long fascinated me, not because it is a great language (opinions on that differ), but because it is the only language that can be run by every computer owner. I myself would love being able to write great apps that everyone could run straight away. As a software engineer (mainly from the non-web world), I know that JavaScript lacks important features that help maintain code quality as the application grows. In particular, JavaScript lacks a static type system.

TypeScript is statically-typed language that "transpiles" into JavaScript. It addresses some of my woes. To learn more, I created the demo application. The point about the application, besides using TypeScript, is that it has a full blown build system (based on "Node.js" and Grunt), and uses full-scale test-driven design (using QUnit).

#typescript #javascript

+Philip Wadler


Großartiger Artikel von +Sascha Lobo​ zur wachsenden Irrationalität in der Politik. (Via +Frau M​) Am Beispiel der Attentäter von Paris: Sie waren mehrheitlich in Frankreich geboren, sie prahlten im Vorfeld in öffentlichen Medien mit geplanten Anschlägen, und sie kommunizierten unverschlüsselt. Statt zu fragen: "Warum haben wir die nicht gestoppt?" geht die Diskussion in Richtung Einwanderungsdebatte und mehr Überwachung.

Indonesia is burning at a shocking scale, and the media ignore it. This is the first time I read about it. (Via +Timothy Gowers​)

John Oliver, my media hero, works his magic in this presentation of the immigrant situation in Europe. The show includes a re-staging of the TV show "Days of our Lives", where a character is resurrected who is the favourite of a Syrian girl who learnt her fluent English by watching the show.

My only small complaint is that even John Oliver falls for the "crisis" rhetoric, not seeing clearly that Europe (Germany at least) took in a greater number of refugees in the early Nineties. (See https://plus.google.com/+CarstenF%C3%BChrmann/posts/azu4i3dkZdp.) Almost everyone seems to have forgotten that.

Moraine Lake, Banff National Park, Canada

The word "awesome" is overused, but the Rocky Mountains sure inspire awe. Right now I'm lucky enough to see the Canadian Rockies first hand: we're on an 11-day trip from Calgary to Vancouver. "We" meaning Monika and I and my fabulous mother, who invited us on this trip.

Right now we're in Banff, and we've seen a lot of Banff National Park and Yoho National Park. Jasper National Park will be next.

It helps that our Dutch-Canadian tour guide is loving the trip too, despite having been here often. He also tells us a lot about the Native Americans, who call themselves the "First Nations". Our guide counts some of them among his friends, and knows some of their language. Needless to say, the treatment of the Native Americans by the European settlers is a dark chapter. But fortunately, a considerable amount of Native American culture has survived, including some languages. (Alas, I know too little about the various tribes and their history to attempt a summary here.)