Musings

“I can sleep when I’m dead” and “sleep is overrated” Those were things a younger me said one in a while. Not anymore. If I find myself at the end of an all-nighter (those have happened lately), I’m toast the next day (at least). And now something else has come up, the last few days I have slept incredibly bad: waking up in the middle of night, heart pounding, feeling driven. Often accompanied by weird dreams or nightmares. (Tonight I first finished my song outline for the first assignment in the Coursera Songwriting class - sadly I can’t remember it, and then went on a killing spree with bow and arrow in a 100 vs 5 scenario in some medieval setting) ...

As I have nothing really to say today, I will use this space to make a meta tweet. I already have made it one third through the 100 day blog challenge. Some days it was easier, some days more difficult - especially when being tired. But all in all, its a lot less work than I thought it would be. Hopefully you, dear reader, have found one or two posts that have brought you something… ...

Tim Bray Out me onto reading Charles Stross with his review Robot Sex-Slave Blues of “Saturns Children”. In the meantime I have read most (or all) of Charlies books, and I love the different universes he has created (“the laundry”, “post singularity”, “near future” and “parallel worlds”) Unfortunately, Charlie only writes one book per year, so there’s always waiting for his next book. Fortunately, Charlie has a fantastic blog, and not only shares his insights into his writings, but also floats good thinking and interesting links. That and a great commenters community make that blog one of my favorite readings on the Internet. ...

My post on augmentation a couple of days ago felt kind of unfinished. I couldn’t really articulate how I feel about it - both very against and very excited about the possibilities of something like Google Glass. Thankfully, there are smarter people out there, and @zapgadget tweeted about this: Mark Hurst has written a good piece on the implications of something like Glass - not for the wearer, but for everybody else, not wearing it: ...

With many greetings to our Chinese intern, Chengchen, who spent the last couple of days at our house and was a wonderful guest. Totally amazing guy - he came to complete his studies in CS at the university of Montpelier, France, 3 years ago - without then speaking a word of french. Now he comes to Zurich from spring to summer and he has already learnt the correct pronunciation of Grüezi, something most Germans can’t handle after having lived here for several years. ...

Constraints set us free. Or at least they can stimulate creative energy and make us try to do things differently. In todays improvisation workshop, Omri had us work with a lot of constraints: Make 3 pieces of music, 1 or 2 minutes each, where you are not allowed to make a sound that sounds as if it comes from your instrument. Improvise on the piano (something that is interesting to listen to) using just 2 notes. … using just one note ...