Weird coincidence
I went on a week holiday to Bad Wildbad in Schwarzwald, Germany. At one point driving there we wanted to call the family that rented the appartment to us to tell them we would be a bit later. Once I rang, my cellphone displayed the name of a colleague working in Germany. I remembered programming the number for that colleague months ago, but apparently I made a mistake in the number.

That wrong number was the number of a landlord, who was completely unrelated to that colleague and lived in a completely different town - somewhere in Schwarzwald instead of Hamburg. How weird is that?

Ode to my Corby 3300

Thou art my Corby trouser press

And trousers thou doth press

Thou presset trousers in 30 mins

That stay wrinkled none the less

Little creavages round the crotch

Thou never dost remove

Yet thou restoresth the fold on both my legs

And make my pants look smooth

I was here!

I went to the USA two weeks ago, to Miami for an assignment. Nice people, a nice city and good food. Here is some cool things about Miami you maybe didn't know yet.

1) The city looks like it's built with SimCity (see picture to the left). City blocks are always the same size and almost always square.
2) When you go to a restaurant you always get a free glass of water with ice, they fill it up every time you drank a quarter of it.

3) People working in shops might actually continue a mobile phone conversation from the moment you walk into the shop until they are operating the cash register.

4) They have got a way cool Coyote Ugle Saloon where you can listen to sleazy music and sleazy girls dance on top of the bar. We didn't stay there long of course. Ahem.

Here is a picture of the Miami Beach hotel I went to stay. Looks pretty cool huh? I'm going two more times this year but probably shorter so there is less time for fun stuff. Oh, by the way the airline lost my luggage so I didn't have anything the first three days. Good thing that we did a safari in the Everglades the second day and got completely soaked in a tropical rainstorm. Yep it's true... but I'm only telling you this to fill up the space next to the second picture. Good, I did it! Bye bye then!

Don't mess with my religion, Toyota!

Has anybody seen this commercial? It shows a guy listening to bland rock music in the car. He has to wait for a ferry and in the car in front of him someone is listening to kick-ass thrash metal. He shows a picture of a pussy to the dogs in the back of the heavy metal guy's car so the dogs go crazy and he can go first on the ferry. In the next image we see our happy #%(#4* driving his Toyota and listening to Coldplay again. This commercial would imply that people listening to thrash metal are usually outsmarted on the road by Coldplay fans carrying about a picture of a pussy in their car. I was extremely agitated by this commercial and now consider Toyota to be enemies of metal. "The enemies of metal, we can't forgive", quoth Manowar. I will not have them ridicule my religion! Instead take Sony, they are actually using a great heavy metal song in Do (Maiden - Can I play with madness) in their commercial. "If you like metal, you're my friend", quoth Manowar.

Let me make this absolutely clear, Toyota: I will never, ever drive your filthy false lightweight metal cars. Back to the original point: fear the wrath of the Metal Gods, Toyota!

Long time, no postee

Hi people, how was your summer? I've been back to work for about three weeks now but before that I had a nice holiday of three weeks in Italy. I've read a lot of books during my holiday so the time has come to write another philosophical story to answer your life questions. Holiday pictures will be in a different post, our digital camera broke so we had to use disposable camera's.

This brings me to the subject: what happens at the end of the universe. As you all know the universe started with the big bang and has been expanding ever since. We don't know what started the big bang, but that is what metaphysical discussion #1 was about. Nevertheless the universe won't expand forever, there are two theorems as to how it will end:
1. The universe expands until everything becomes so distant from everything else that the universe grows cold and everybody dies.
2. The universe expands until the pull of gravity of every object in the universe reverses the explosion into an implosion, the universe stops expanding and begins contracting. From this point opinions differ as to whether:
2a. During the contraction of the universe everything that has happended until the reversal will happen again, in reverse.
2b. During the contraction of the universe everything does not happen again in reverse, new things happen.In either case, after contraction the universe will implode into a single super heavy black hole and explode again in a second big bang! Note that theory one best expresses the linear view of time as in the western religions (creation, things happen, judgement day), while the second one appeals to the cyclic view of time as in the eastern religions (an endless circle of death and rebirth).The bottom line of the story is that it doesn't matter which way because we're not even going to be there to either freeze to death or get crushed. Planet earth will die when the sun becomes larger and larger until it fries everything in the solar system like a giant flame grill. Then again, you won't be there to witness that because you will be dead long before. Yes, dead, just like dr. Oetker!

Fields of Rock
Have you ever slept inside a Mitsubishi Colt? Well, I have. Last weekend me and Tim went to the Fields of Rock festival in Biddinghuizen. The festival was really very nice, very good music, OK weather (sun but also hail and rain sometimes) and a lot of fun people. The last evening however, after the Ozzy Ozbourne gig ("Show me your hands" / "Go crazy" etc.), people actually went crazy.

It started with guys burning their tents. Then they threw garbage bins, beer cans etc. on the fire. At first it was very funny, until it started smelling like something deadly from all the plastic. Since our own tent was just in the wind from the now ghastly disgusting smelling fire we decided to pack up in the middle of the night. And that is how you end up sleeping in a Mitsubishi Colt. My advice is, if you have a choice: 1) do go to Fields of Rock because it rocks; 2) don't sleep in a small red car.

Cheers, Ad

Karaoke...
This is me and a colleague on the training for work. It turned out to be a karaoke training, yeah!

View this movie at your own risk.

There is more kareoke footage... but you will not see it! Other than the karaoke bit the training was actually pretty interesting and I met a lot of cool people. Bye!

Metaphysical 'discussion' #1

I think I have survived Portugal. This morning I'm taking the plane home and before returning to civilisation. I did manage to think of something remotely intelligent. Any reactions were too late (you had multiple days) so theological discussions (well, monologue) it is ;-)

You might have heard of the obscure idea of Intelligent Design. It's a somewhat popular theory with some non-atheists. It's core idea according to me is that everything in the universe must have been created by a Creator because it so intricate and smooth running that there had and has to be a higher intelligence involved next to the evolutionary process. In nature, the social structures some species have could be very remarkable (ants, for example). An other case is that the biological function of a species could be strangely appropriate to the environment, like the way some animals have the ability to survive in the strangest surroundings. These cases are used as arguments to support that it is not sufficient to only have evolution as a way of adjusting species to a changing environment. There is must also be a blueprint for specific species which helps them evolve, or an intelligent design.
From the perspective of science these ideas are of little interest. It is just a way of filling in the gaps which can't be explained yet with(evolutionary) science. For the general public however the idea of intelligent design is rapidly catching on because it can't be properly rejected for scientific reasons. This is causing people to start believing in a Creator, which is not a good or bad thing in itself.
The bad thing about Intelligent Design however is that in my opinion it is a wrong reason for believing in a Creator. Just because some things are so fascinating they can't be understood directly is a rather primitive reason for believing.
To specify this, I now present a case in which intelligent design could be disproved, using weird logic and a part of the story from the Hyperion trilogy of books of sci-fi writer Dan Simmons. Ok, let's suppose future humanity creates an artificial intelligence which is able to think for itself. That possibility exists. This creation would not directly be a product of Intelligent Design, because it was a human design. The intelligent design reaction to this could be that the humans that created the thinking computer where guided by the creator or that the design was stored previously within the human mind. Mind that the first point supposes an interventionist creator. The artificial intelligence will start improving itself, if not being limited by thinking capacity, outside control or interfaces to percieve the world around it. Suppose the artificial intelligence will become so smart it starts understanding the very fabric of reality and the universe. With a few additional steps this system would have the same understanding of the universe the original creator has. It could uncover the original blueprints or 'intelligent designs'. It could start creating its own intelligent designs then, using whatever cosmic energy is used to distribute them because it will have uncovered that. This is where the Creator might notice something else has started playing the Creator and will have to either accept that or shut the new system down. Both of these would be strange, in the first case he would be jeopardising the consistency of his original creation and in the second case He would be correcting his own mistake. Which is not possible because creators are generally without error.
Ok, clear? Conclusion of the story is: living within a design seems a pretty boring idea to me. Why believe in a dry theory that takes remaining mystery out of the universe? My advice is that (if you believe in a Creator), you should just continue to like him or her 'personally' and stop trying to understand the works by applying 21st century logic to it.

Cheers, Ad