What’s Up Wednesday #36 - Programming Music, Why is a birch white, How people get rich, Why most websites are so slow

Happy Wednesday everyone!

„This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best, and take what comes.” -Hannah Arendt

What’s Up Wednesday #35 - What matters more that yourself, Do not accept losses, Prions, Great Quotes from the Great Wave

Hey everyone!

When you have something that matters more than yourself you can go through the hardest discomfort.   

What’s Up Wednesday #34 - Always invert, brainpower and dexterity, travel to Mars & the Great Oxidation Event

Happy Wednesday everyone!

‼️ If you’re trying to gain a rapid understanding of a new area, one of the most important things you can do is to identify common mistakes people make and avoid them. - fs blog

What’s Up Wednesday #33 - Regrets of the dying, You are not behind, A dollar from 1980 to now

Happy Wednesday everyone!

☠️ Listening to what people regret when dying might be a good way to minimize your regrets in the future. The following bullets are from the book „Regrets of the Dying“):

What’s Up Wednesday #32 - Adding vs Subtracting, Backups & why you need them

Happy Wednesday everyone!

Adding vs substracting

➕ studied problem-solving and found that additive solutions are favored over subtractive ones, even when removing features is more efficient.

What’s Up Wednesday #31 - Ask better Questions, Shadow Careers, Long Term COVID impacts

Happy Wednesday!

Ask better questions

What’s Up Wednesday #30- What was obvious for Steve Jobs in 1984, How much should you save, digital hygiene

Happy Wednesday!

🤯 This interview with steve jobs in 1981 (when he was 25) is just great. He was very confident that everyone will use a computer in the future.

What’s Up Wednesday #29 - Who makes it work, Microadventures, Stepping through time

Happy Thursday everyone (yeah I am late this week)!

So here you go:

What’s Up Wednesday #28 - Illusions of time, How records shape our memory, saving your data when abandoning WhatsApp

Happy Wednesday all of you!

🤦‍ I am slowly abandoning all Facebook products (and there are many). With WhatsApp’s backslash of popularity (at least in Germany) I am now using Signal for 90% of my chats with friends. The main reason, for me, are the actions & reactions of Facebook regarding how they handle user data. They just don’t care about regulations because even a 1B$ fine is peanuts. They make way more money ignoring the laws. 


🧑‍💻 Being a bit of a collector, I needed a way to store my WhatsApp chats in a nice and readable format. WhatsApp, of course, will not do that for you. That’s why three friends and I worked on . (<- this is a special link allowing you to bypass our payment system which charges 2$ for a pdf. Just click on the „get sample pdf“ button with that link and it will download the full chat) 

What’s Up Wednesday #27 - Natural Head Stabilization, User Interface, Measuring the Progress of Work

Hey all!

Here is what I found this week:

🦅 Natural selection builds mechanisms that human engineers still struggle to match. Check out . Head stabilization has the same function as image stabilization in cameras: to maintain a steady view despite motion.

What’s Up Wednesday #26 - Mars & Our Universe, Spending your time, Art

Happy Wednesday!

Our Universe 👽

🚀 After the landing of Preservance on Mars on the 18th of February the first images taken by the rover are now on the internet. shows them. It is really astonishing . The rover has direct links which are up to 10 bits/s which are good for sending commands and checking its state. For images, the rover makes use of the ESA Mars orbiters. Then the connection is up to 1 gigabit per second! That’s way faster than my internet connection! Now enjoy a image of Mars:

What’s Up Wednesday #25 - Gamed Rankings, Cognitive Load, In Time Learning and what is going to stay?

Happy Wednesday everyone!

Rising all for the rankings

🤓 Some (all?) highly ranked schools and institutions fear losing their status. That’s why some .

What’s Up Wednesday 24 - Nuclear Energy, Marketing, On Building New Things

Happy Wednesday!

Is nuclear really bad?

☢️ In the current switch to renewable energy, the main problem is how to cover the base-load (everything that runs 24/7) when it is not sunny (no solar) and not windy (no wind energy). This is a big problem for countries not suitable for hydroelectricity (big dams require big rivers and mountains) because storing electric energy is quite hard. Germany and Japan have decided to ban atomic energy and use coal as long as the transition to fully renewable takes. This is extremely stupid and will cause many deaths from air-pollution induced illnesses. compares the death toll of nuclear energy per energy produced with coal energy.

What’s Up Wednesday #23 - Whats after your goals, Google and Privacy, Personal Finance, Apple Car, Smart Home Upgrades

Happy Wednesday everyone!

What happens when you reach your goals?!

What’s Up Wednesday #22 - Bullshit everywhere

Happy Wednesday,

This week I was arguing with a family member about Wifi-Security concerns. That’s why todays topic is Bullshit.

What’s Up Wednesday #21 - Wall Street Bets, Risk of Failure, Right vs Working

Happy Wednesday everyone!

💸 The Game Stop stock is going through a stock squeeze as individual investors hold onto a highly shorted stock (up to 300USD from 20USD in December). The subreddit /wallstreetbets is going wild with people sharing screenshots of their profits. Some big Hedge funds are losing billions on a highly risky bet while many small investors people make great profits. On Reddit many investors align their interest and hold onto the stocks, forcing the price higher and higher. One guy had so many balls to buy stocks for 50k USD over half a year ago and hope for the short squeeze. This is a really interesting thing to happen. People make big money and immediately financiers call for regulations because of the annihilation of the Hedge Fund Melvin Capital (losses in the billions $!). This is of course complete bullshit. To quote a : „Don’t sell naked shorts. Don’t take an infinite risk for finite profit. It’s just common sense and not our fault a hedge fund didn’t realize this. It’s not our fault they didn’t close their position and eat losses at $30. It’s not our fault they didn’t close at $40. They did this to themselves. No one held a gun to their head and made them make those trades. They did this to themselves and they are standing by their bad decision and are now faced with infinite losses.“ I am really curious how much the stock will skyrocket to this week.

What’s Up Wednesday - How to memorizes everything you want, A story about corruption

Great Wednesday everyone!

How to memorizes everything you want

🧠 My girlfriend started to read and is completely amazed by the techniques of learning and memorizing. In a couple of days, she remembered all US states. This was crazy. I never thought anyone „normal“ could remember this that early. She literally only spent a couple of hours on this. And she still knows them a week later. As knowing stuff is (especially in school) a very important part of our lives, I am stunned why this is not taught in schools. So, she was kind enough to give us all a summary of the most important points in the book. 1. You can memorize anything better if you create an image in your head. An emotionally packed image that will remind you of the actual word you want to remember. 2. Sequential things (e.g. topics you want to cover in a speech, any list of items, …) can be tied together by linking the images with a storyline (= linked list). You can also link multiple images together to create a tree-like structure of knowledge.

What’s Up Wednesday #19 - the US Democracy?!, Taking pictures with Math, Urgency vs Importance

Whats up with the US Democracy?!

🤬 In politics, the past weeks were intense and dangerous. The US Capitol was stormed by fanatic Trump supporters who were fed by lies of spineless, deceptive, and populistic politicians. The videos of that event looked like a civil war and finally, Twitter removed Donald Trump’s account, and Parler a right-wing social media platform was banned from the App Stores. Some people see this as an intrusion of freedom of speech. In my opinion freedom of speech has a limit. Lying about elections and supporting violence certainly is not free speech. It is spreading hate, disappointment, and actively eroding democratic principles. Check this video message from Arnold Schwarzenegger. I hope he is right in arguing that these problems and failures will make democracy stronger. A successful second impeachment would state that finally, the US democracy does not like to be fucked over.

What’s Up Wednesday #18 - Drive around, Air Pollution, Italians banning Pasta

Happy Wednesday!

Comparison is the primary sin of modern life. - Michael Ray 


What’s Up Wednesday #17 - New Year’s Edition, Dancing Robots, Top Three for 2021

Happy New Year everyone!

🤖 The flawlessly dancing robots from Boston Dynamics are stunning. Let’s see how long it will take that robots are used in mainstream entertainment. as stunt doubles for crazy maneuvers in the air.

Happy Wednesday and Merry Christmas to all of you! The internet turned 30 this week!

Quotes of this Week

What’s Up Wednesday #15 - A crazy story of the past, Three sides of risk

Happy Wednesday!

I hope you all are in good health! Last month a friend told me a story about one of his best friends and I want to re-tell it to you.

A story of the past

What’s Up Wednesday #14 - 555 in Thai, 7-up documentary, the scientific method and how companies treat your private data

💼 Find something that’s fun to you but looks like work for others.

😂 Ha” is 5 in Thai. And ‘555’ is ‘lol’. They then add a + to make it stronger like 555+++. Here is a link to the google translator reading that out loud.

7-Up - watch people grow up and change

🔓Using a third-party VPN or whatever to be more secure might be less private. This year it was revealed that a Swiss encryption company actually belongs to the CIA and Germany’s BND. Of course, the Swiss intelligence knew about it as well. Not sure how many politicians knew about this, but I assume most would have remained silent. Now, a member of the Swiss Green Party said this: “This banana republic behavior is unworthy of a constitutional state and must have political and personnel consequences.” Maybe he just wanted to pull Switzerland out of the puddle they fell into. But what if countries would stop spying on people? Nobody would at least not having to fear misuse of the data or any exposure of their secrets - or their terroristic, anti-democratic plans. There is always a downside. A party loyal to democracy and humanity reading all the data might not be that bad overall. It might just be really hard to ensure that it will stay loyal and can never misuse any information.

😃 Humans are bad at converting power into happiness. We are 1000x more powerful than people in the Stone-age. However, we don’t even know if we are happier. Maybe a bit. But not 1000x times happier. - Yuval Noah Harari

What’s Up Wednesday #12 -

Happy Wednesday everyone!

🚀 Did the question „What would you do if you would know you could not fail?“ ever help you in moving forward? I mean, I would come up with so many answers I have no idea how to separate them in importance. I liked the reframing of „What would you do if you know you would fail.“ Now the answers are way more focused. If you want to do something even though you think it will not work, it has to be VERY important to you. Further, often no one else is doing this because everyone thinks it will fail. So maybe doing something everything thinks will not work is more likely to succeed than something that everyone thinks is possible.

🙃 „It’s not about power. It’s about happiness.“ I think the focus on work is overrated. I am just reading a lot of Schopenhauer and the core message is something along the following lines. Your health is by far the most important. Focus your energy on yourself and all internal things that make you calm and happy. Don’t seek material items as they are a negative loop. Having more leads you to have even more. Escaping this trap of materiality is extremely hard, so be careful.

What’s Up Wednesday #11 - The downside of privacy, Explore our galaxy and how to download the Internet

Happy Wednesday everyone!

This week I published some book summaries from The Alchemist, and .

What’s Up Wednesday #10 - Hope in humanity, How to track your Co2 emissions & Cross financing genius Elon Musk

👿 My hope in humanity got a bit restored with Joe Biden winning the American Elections. Unbelievable that Trump is just not able to accept his defeat. I know that freedom of speech doesn’t protect speech you like, but it protects speech you don’t like. However, I think with such blatant lying from politicians (often from the far right) we will get some problems. An article of the NY times states that Trump’s dismissive attitude toward democratic principles could legitimize authoritarians.“ Trump inspired many dictators, many leaders who are interested in a dictatorship, to copy his style, and he emboldened them.” I hope Biden can reverse this dangerous trend again.

🌿 Tracking your CO2 footprint is hard. But it would be important for everyone to know in which areas of your lifestyle you can cut the most CO2. That’s why my brother and a friend coded for a hackathon. So far it’s just iOS. I recommend checking it out and tracking your CO2 for a week or so at least to get a better understanding. While building the app, we read a lot of studies and the one thing to change to emit less CO2 is switching to a plant-based diet. You don’t need to stop eating meat, just eat less of it. BIO products might sometimes have a higher CO2 output than normal ones. And locally produced stuff does indeed produce less CO2 but not that much that it is very relevant.

What’s Up Wednesday #9 - Democracy in decline, Apples environmentalism and why Googles new logos are bad

💻 Google got new logos for their services. I already dislike them because they are hard to tell apart, and someone even wrote a whole post about why the new Google Logos are bad. In this article there are a couple of great truths regarding google:

Security in the digital age

🔒 Stumbling about this post describing how the author got hacked and figged trough several security checklists. Here are the main things I noted:

The Scoreboard of Life

📈 I wrote an article about why judge our performance relative to others and why it would be healthy to stop this. Check it out.

Work and Passion

What’s Up Wednesday #6

Great Wednesday, everyone! This week I published an article about the irrationality of risk and how we often overestimate or underestimate possible risks depending on their nature.

Recycling

Programming

What’s Up Wednesday turns one month! To celebrate this, I launched my blog where you can find book summaries and more!

What’s Up Wednesday #4 - Cooperation, Climate and Quitting too Early

Thanks for being one of the 16 people who get my email. If you enjoy it today, I would be grateful if you could forward the email to your friends. 🙃

The need for cooperation

🧑‍🔬A called for more partnership between men of quite different disciplines, and no fear of incompatibility of them, after a geological wrong theory was adopted my mathematicians for a long time. Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of co-operation. I think now this cooperation would be needed between politicians and scientists (especially in tech and climate sciences).

What’s Up Wednesday #3

Flies and Forests

🦟 Flies seem to fly around in an uncontrolled manner. But, evolution tricked you. Their flight path is a pattern that “closely resembles a mathematical algorithm known as “Levy’s Distribution” in which the insect flies a straight path, makes an abrupt 90 degree turn, and then repeats. This method of movement optimizes their mission to pinpoint the source of the odor.” As with odor the fly does only know its distance but not the direction to the target. reddit thread

What’s Up Wednesday #2 - Trash, Climate Change and Earthquakes

This week I read a lot about plastic waste and how companies try to greenwash their products. In short: It is depressing how profit and greed drives (rational) humans to decide for short term success and long term disaster.

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Earthquakes

What’s Up Wednesday #1

This is the first edition of my newsletter! Please reply if you have any feedback!

Planning your life?

📜 “It doesn’t matter how good your plan is. It doesn’t matter how exciting your goals are. It doesn’t matter what a good thinker you are… If you are not responsible and honest, forget it.” is an article worth reading. Bob coached Michael Phelps and the advice in his speech is great. “Focus your time and money. Don’t let other people or things distract you. If you know where you want to go, then put your resources there.”