MICHA.ELMUELLER

For the largest part of February I was backpacking in Sri Lanka together with Valerie. Before going there I didn’t know much about the country and didn’t have much of an idea what to expect — always a very good prerequisite for travelling, I think. Sri Lanka is a small Island just below South India and has a lot of similarities to India; in my opinion the term India Light is surprisingly fitting. Everything is similar, but just less of everything: less hectic, less people, less over the top. The food is very similar to Indian cuisine as well and there is especially a lot of influence from South India (there are a lot of South Indian restaurants too). As in India the food was outstanding, very rich in flavor, spicy and hearty, yet still light. A lot of curries, vegetables and fruits; very easy to come by as a vegetarian.

It feels as if tourism is catching a lot more traction in Sri Lanka in recent years, this is mostly because a civil war occupied the country until nine years ago and the tsunami catastrophe in 2004 put a recession to tourism. This “non-touristic” thing was the main theme of our journey and we mostly stayed in small, local guesthouses or homestays. The most touristic places are mostly on the south coast and we tried to avoid them. We only went to Tangalle, which is probably one the most non-touristic places on the south coast, and that was already too much for me — long beach promenades with exclusively western food, english music, etc.. But a lot of other places in the country are not touristic at all, especially during the off season.

Especially in the east it often felt like experiencing the beginnings of tourism (especially in Nilaveli). The few improvised restaurants there were essentially people who put a few tables in their backyard and call it a restaurant. I have experienced the people as very ambitious and in many places you can really feel how much they are willing to get out of poverty. That was really great, to see these beginnings. I’m sure that in ten years time the country will be much more touristic. Even now we often read blog posts by people who visited a certain village a year before us and wrote stuff like “very secluded, only one guesthouse”; when we arrived there were already some guesthouses, restaurants, etc.. Still, in a lot of places we very often were the only tourists in the bus or the area. You can feel quite alien being the only foreigner far and wide, but it’s interesting to experience this from time to time. We also had the case of waiters in restaurants making a scene when we enter, taking photos, bringing us all kinds of food to try.

Funnily, I often had the impression that the country is still shocked by the increase in tourism and has not yet adapted. We often had the case that we negotiated for a price and actually got the local, native people price. Or we arrived at a place, got out of the bus and were packing things into the backpacks with tuk-tuk drives already surrounding us, but not yet interrupting us and waiting patiently until we were finished with packing before making offers to take us somewhere. This experience is totally different in e.g. India or South America.

I would even say that I have never met a culture this friendly in any other country which I visited so far. People were immensely friendly to us and it happened a lot of times that children would wave at us, that people would approach us and talk to us, or that we were e.g. offered food on a long bus ride. All of this has happened in other countries too, just not as often as in Sri Lanka.

Our means of travelling were mostly local buses. This is very easy in Sri Lanka and enormously cheap, buses drive all the time everywhere. It was a nice experience to see the country this way; it’s always a bumpy, loud, and raving ride, but a very authentic possibility to experience the local culture, see small villages which you would otherwise not pass through and observe the way how locals interact with each other. We often observed the friendly way how natives who didn’t know each other before the ride interacted during a couple hours of common bus ride — sharing food, chatting, making music, etc.. In many many local bus rides we encountered other tourists only very seldom; only on two occasions there were other tourists in the same bus for a short time, on most rides it was approximately sixty locals and we two :-).

The local buses are enormously slow compared to e.g. taxis, the main reason for this is that everybody can stop a bus anywhere. So besides the usual bus stops, buses get stopped at arbitrary places all the time. For example, a bus might stop at a bus stop, then 500 meters later somebody will wave the bus to stop, then another 500 meters later some other person does the same again :-).

The question we were most often asked by locals was about our jobs in Germany ‒ for me it’s always easy because most people have some rough idea what a software developer does, but for Valerie (a psychologist) it’s next to impossible to explain an occupation which is practically non-existent in Sri Lanka to a native.

One thing that I found very calming: Sri Lanka is very small and wherever you are you can always, very easily, pay someone to drive you to some other part of the island in a couple of hours. Nothing is ever far away. If your train would be cancelled you could still e.g. pay a tuk-tuk or a taxi to drive you to the airport for a very affordable price. To me it was just a reassuring feeling to know that if I’m ever stuck in a place that I dislike it’s very easy to just carry-on.

There are basically no foreigners working in Sri Lanka, working visas are practically unheard of. One consequence is that you won’t find emigrated people who e.g. run foreign restaurants. So the western dropout hippie cafes which are very common in India/Mexico/etc. are nowhere to be found, only locals operate restaurants/shops/cafes.

For me, a highlight of our trip was the train ride from Ella to Kandy. Most tourists do the route the other way around (Kandy to Ella), which is why the train is always very packed in that direction. A good tip is to do it the other way around, our train was much less crowded and it’s the same track.
The British built the railway in Sri Lanka to transport tea leaves from the plantations to the coast. Today this makes for a very idyllic train ride, as the train winds its way through the hills. Often there are tea plantations along the way and the hot air and the strong sun result in a nice scent of the plants when driving through a plantation. The train is very slow and bumpy, so the journey is always quite long (7 hours compared to ~2 hours via car), but it’s a beautiful landscape and there are a lot of things to see. Since the railway is quite old there’s also a unique system of physical tokens — whenever a part of the track can only be passed by one train at a time a large physical ring is carried by the train which passes the track. This token then gets passed to the next train which ensures that there is only ever one train on this particular track.

I have highlighted a lot of positive aspects of our journey in this post so far, but shortly want to describe one negative aspect as well. Let me prefix this by saying that experiences like the following are important to me when travelling as it broadens ones view on the world. The topic is of sexism — discrimination based on gender, typically against women.

I already wrote about this topic and the way we as a couple were treated in South America here, but the experience in Sri Lanka was much more intense. Women are often treated as people of a lower class compared to males there and this has become sadly apparent to me in the way how Valerie was often treated. I have talked to some other travelers and my impression is that this mostly comes to light when travelling as a couple of male/female (compared to e.g. two femals travelling together).

Some examples: We eat breakfast, I get asked ten times overly politely if everything is truly absolutely fine, she gets asked (or even looked at) zero times. She asks for the bill, I get it. She pays, I get the change. She asks for an info, I get handed a paper with the info. People talk about her in the third person, even though she stands right besides me (“she can wait here”). We talk to somebody and the person has solely me as a reference person, with the body completely oriented towards me. When we are approached, people always only talk to me. When we enter e.g. a store for textiles and it’s completely obvious that she is searching for something and that I’m just passively waiting around, it’s still me who gets asked what we search for.
This is immensely frustrating, not only for the female. We usually try to counteract this kind of behavior in such countries — Valerie always orders bills, pays for stuff, asks for info, etc.. This didn’t help much this time though.

I want to highlight that this negative insertion should not be put too much in the foreground of our overall journey and similar things can be expected in South America or India. Not everyone acted this way, there were also a lot of people who treated us both the same way. We still perceived the people there as enormously friendly, eager to help, and welcoming. I just hope that this changes in the next years and hope that tourism by western female travelers encourages women there to demand more rights.

Some things that I quickly want to mention last:

• As always, buying a local SIM card was one of the best decisions of our trip. This is just immensely useful for maps.
• A funny thing that I know from Mexico: in a restaurant we order two ginger beer (because they are on the menu). The waiter takes the order, goes to his motorcycle, drives away for twenty minutes and comes back with…guess it…one ginger beer! 😀
• Coconut Sambol: the Sri Lankan food is very good and eating vegetarian is very easy. Coconut Sambol is the specialty that I liked most and have also prepared at home now several times. Basically it’s freshly grated coconut with shallots, tomatoes, salt, chilli, and lime. This recipe is quite good and contains some more details (and pictures).
• I often fall for this: showing locals or tuk-tuk drivers a map when asking for something and after a couple minutes of pointless discussion I finally get it: they can’t read neither text nor maps, but don’t want to admit it and instead talk around it. Whenever this happens I’m once again reminded of how many elementary things we take for granted in Europe.
• We asked a local (who was 25 years old) to take a photo of us. Since we only had analog cameras with us, I handed him a small one. He took a photo and asked us to check if it’s fine. I told him that there’s no way, because it’s an analog camera. He didn’t understand what I meant and asked where the display was :-). That’s really interesting: he didn’t know at all about analog photography and probably never saw one of the old cameras or photo prints. I’m pretty sure that for him the age of photography starts with digital cameras and smartphones.

In total our three-week journey cost us pretty much exactly 520 Euro each with an additional cost of ~600 Euro each for the flight. We could probably have gotten the flight cheaper, but unfortunately Air Berlin filed for insolvency at the time when we booked, so many flights got a lot more expensive for some time.

Like in the last years here comes my yearly recap. Older flashbacks can be found for 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010.

When looking back on 2017 I realized that one of the main themes was that I finally had time to dive into some things. This was not a conscious decision, but rather something which just happened. In the previous years there was always too much work for university etc. to really get into some topics. But now I have e.g. mastered coffee, which is a huge enrichment for my quality of life. For the past year I got very much into brewed coffee, read a lot about it, visited barista courses, tried a lot of different coffee beans and ways to prepare the coffee. This happened basically each morning for the entire year and even whilst travelling I carried the Aeropress and a ceramic mill. At some point we ended up with the Chemex and a coffee bean from a little roastery in Porto which we discovered when travelling in Portugal and some other equipment (such as a very good coffee grinder). I’d say that I now have the best fitting coffee for my taste. It’s really nice to finally have time to put a lot of energy and passion into mastering something.

Cooking is another ongoing (probably life-long) project. For the last couple of months I have cooked for usually five evenings of the week. This has resulted in a constant optimization of some dishes and I am very happy with some things that I cook now. One of the side dishes that I usually do is a green salad in order to balance the main dish and I am very happy with the tweaks and ingredients I have established now. I can reproducibly prepare a salad that I am very happy with. The same goes for some other dishes and baking bread, which was also one project of “mastering” something.

In terms of technology, I think 2017 was a great year and I’m very excited about 2018 technology-wise. Just look at the myriads of use cases for machine learning which appeared in 2017. That’s crazy, at one point I had the feeling that there was something new and incredible each week (this youtube channel contains a lot of interesting works). The developments surrounding reusable rockets and SpaceX and some of the blockchain startups (I like Colony) are also very exciting. Of course a lot of stuff is overhyped, but it’s still exciting to be immersed in this scene.

Travel-wise I had a nice time in Israel, Portugal, Amsterdam and some nice parts of Germany/Austria. City-wise I have the feeling that I got a bit more comfortable with Berlin in our second year here. Some things which I really enjoy are the vast amount of different restaurants, fine-dining options, interesting people, international crowd (half of my colleagues are non-German), concerts of distinguished and non-major artists, theaters, courses, electronic music clubs (I can’t emphasize this enough), and conferences (I attended the TechCrunch Discrupt in December).

Good ideas
Placing a “Use soon” basket visibly in the kitchen and put stuff in it which should be consumed soon. For me this basket also serves well as a reminder to use up certain things which I always forget.

Developments
I finally became a vegetarian. This was a natural development and in the last years I ate less and less meat. A while ago I stopped cooking with it altogether. When travelling I was always eating vegetarian since a long time. My main reason for going vegetarian is of ethical nature. In the last months I even ate vegan most of the time, I stopped buying milk, butter, or eggs altogether some months ago.

Quotes which stuck

Some worry that an artificial consciousnesses could turn against humans. I am not concerned about this. […] It seems that intelligence and abundance comes hand-in-hand with empathy. Humans, more and more, are peaceful creatures. An increasing number are so empathetic that they avoid eating animals entirely. If a super intelligence could outsmart me, then it would also understand all that I’ve outlined above about how fragile and rare life is. A super intelligence would, I think, be super empathetic.
    —Ryan Dahl, Optimistic Nihilism

Interface is a metaphor for information.
    —(from an OP-1 presentation by one of the founders)

Intimacy is the process of […] inviting others in to have a look around.
    —Charles Foster, Being a beast

Statt uns ein Gefuehl von Sicherheit zu geben, koennen uns Gegenstaende belasten und hemmen.
    —Pia Mester, Flow from July

I continue to believe that we can be the generation that ends disease, ends poverty, and stops climate change.
    —Mark Zuckerberg

Minimalism isn’t about having less. It’s about having only the things that add value to your life.
    —reddit

In Wahrheit ist jeder Wunsch, dem wir nachjagen, eine Belastung.
    —Pia Mester

Ask yourself: What would it be simply ridiculous to not have in 30 years time? Then go make that.
    —Alan Kay on startups and ideas

In a world run by blockchains, decentralisation could be pushed even further, to include objects. Once they have their own identity and can be controlled via a blockchain, it is possible to imagine them becoming, in a way, self-determining. A few years back, Mike Hearn, a former bitcoin developer who now works for R3, a blockchain consortium, suggested the idea of self-driving cars which are also financially autonomous. Guided by smart contracts, they would stash away some of the digital money they make by ferrying people around, so as to pay for repairs or to replace themselves when repairs are no longer worthwhile. They would put themselves in long-term parking if not enough rides are to be had—or emigrate to another city. They could issue tokens to raise funds and to allow owners to get part of their profits.”
    —The Economist, Disrupting the trust business

Interesting articles
Ryan Dahl, Optimistic Nihilism

Oh My Gosh, It’s Covered in Rule 30s!

This section in the Wiki article on Survivorship Bias was an eye opener.

I really like packaging lists, such as this one.

Music
Oskar introduced me to Simpsonwaves — mashups of old simpson series enhanced with old VHS effects and underlied with Vaporwave music. Perfectly fits my taste of music & style :-). Here is one great example.

Spotify says that Nocow and Lorn are two very popular electronic music artists of mine in 2017.

Good Videos
Stephan recommended the Brothers Green cooking videos and I took quite some inspiration from them. I especially cooked the (vegan) stir fry described in this video a lot.

Movie which rang the bell most/Movie which reached me most
Weit. I got this movie recommended on festivals and from friends. The movie is emotionally capturing and really nice, it’s a documentation and all of it has happened that way. The story is that of a young German couple (from Freiburg) who decide to travel east for as long as they need to make it around the world. They hitchhike, hike, take the boat, etc. (but never the plane). They recorded a lot of this journey on camera and cut it into this movie. The movie is quite professional though and was a surprise hit in German arthouse cinemas. It’s definitely worth watching and will give you wanderlust :-).

Blade Runner. I re-watched the original and it’s impressive how well the movie still holds up.

Hell or High Water. Great movie with a great pace.

Best photos that I took
I’m happy with most of the photos that I put on this blog, these are some which I were very happy with in 2017:

I’m also very much satisfied with portraits I made of some other people close to me, but I don’t want to post them all here.

Last years new years resolutions
My new year resolutions last year were:

1. Buy maximum 5 clothing items. ✗
   Oh oh, the first resolution and I have to admit that I failed miserably :(. Unfortunately I couldn’t resist and bought way more new clothing items. This was mainly due to discovering some nice stuff when travelling, but also due to the discovery of a very nice custom tailor here in Berlin and the techwear brand Outlier. They both hooked me!
2. Cook a new meal each week. ✓
   I (and Valerie) did it! Quite often it was even more than one meal. My top new dishes were: homemade granola, vegan bacon (following this recipe), marinated champignons, hummus + baked eggplant + pomegranate, and marinated brussels sprouts.
3. Learn more Spanish and don’t lose all the stuff learned in South America. ✗
4. Finish up some old, half-finished projects. ✓
   I mainly had the video interview with Elf Pavlik in mind and I finally finished and published it.
5. Phone more with friends. ✓
6. Donate more. ✓
7. Make one publication. ✓
   I did, but this work dates back to my time at university and it just took a long time for it to get published. So hmm…I originally had in mind to create a new publication when I put this resolution up.
8. Get rid of more stuff, keep striving for minimalism. ~
   Hmm. Sold a lot of stuff, gave away a lot of stuff, threw a lot of stuff away. But also bought some new stuff. Ahh this is difficult. I really would like to be there: only own the stuff that contributes value to my life. I read so much about this and I admire the people who live out of one bag so much. It’s a journey and I’m making a constant effort to downsize. Still I own too much stuff and the worst thing this year was that I went nuts with clothing items.

New year resolutions for 2018

• Spend less money.
  I went a bit nuts in 2017, in 2018 I want to spend less and save more. That’s my number one new year resolution. As a first starting point I want to gather a detailed overview over all my expenses and want to meticulously document every cent that I spend in January.
• Consider meditation again.
• One additional, regular fitness exercise.
• Bring photography skills to a level that I am satisfied with (i.e. a more serious level). Specifically by thinking more about composition and getting better at it.
• Contribute more to open source projects.
  In 2017 I contributed a bit to two smaller projects on GitHub by fixing some issues and doing a bit of enhancements, it would be nice to contribute to more projects.
• Start a technically challenging new project.
• Develop my own clothing style further.
  I like it a lot to analyze clothing and think about the way others (or I) dress. Here in Berlin I very often see people which have found their unique style, it seems to me that some of those people really wear their look. They have found an idea which they want to convey and they just nail that. Especially in Neukoelln (where I work) I see a lot of people who fit this description. I also strive to achieve a level where I feel that every clothing item which I wear fits very well into the complete picture. I am not entirely happy with the status quo though, since I am currently very much interested in two different styles of clothing: the techwear direction with materials such as Dynemma and companies like Outlier and the — kind of opposite — direction of classical clothes which remind of the suits/skirts from the 60s/70s with e.g. pleats on the pants or rougher materials like wool or linen.
• Decide fast, don’t overthink.

Books I read in the last years: 2016, 2015, 2014.

2017 was a very book-intense year. It has the all-time high of number of books read since I write these posts. I think the only time that I read more was as a teenager. But at that time these were mostly easygoing works of fiction, so nothing comparable to the stuff which I read now.

One of the reasons for this peak is that I travel by subway to work basically each weekday. My workplace is not far for Berlin (~30 minutes from door to door), but in total that already makes ~30-40 minutes reading time each day for the round trip (with one subway transfer). I have heard from other commuters (at least from Markus) that they experience this reading peak as well. Another reason is that I am no longer occupied with university lectures. At university I always read a lot of papers and science literature as part of my studies. This is gone now and I read more books instead.

Ray Kurzweil — How to Create a Mind
Basically Kurzweil postulates that a lot of research on how the brain works goes into the wrong direction. He makes the case that a lot of elaborate findings (e.g. the relativity theory) were made by people sitting in nature and “just” making logical conclusions. In his opinion a lot of the brain research gets lost in details and fine-grained examinations of biological micro-details, thus missing out on the big picture. Kurzweil makes the case that a large part of the brain basically follows an elaborate pattern matching algorithm. The book was an interesting read.

Robert Macfarlane — Karte der Wildnis
The book is published by the German publisher “Matthes & Seitz Berlin” who has a series of natural science books. I discovered them by chance in a bookshop two or three years ago and wanted to buy one of their books ever since. The only problem was that this series consisted only of extensive books on insects, donkeys or e.g. trouts. As much as I loved the high quality and typography of the books, I just didn’t think I would be able to finish an extensive book on donkeys. But then I discovered that they published notes of Robert Macfarlane on his search for wilderness! Thus I immediately bought the book. The optical appearance of the book is immensely good. The typography is done very very well, the paper is of very high quality, the book is thread-binded, all pages printed in two colors, etc.. It really is a joy to just flick through the pages.

This book itself was a kinda strange read for me. It’s really different from other books. It’s not really a story, but a mere collection of descriptions of wild places which the author found. Instead of describing his inner feelings he mostly describes the places themselves and paints them with words. This is also reflected in plain chapter titles like “Moor”, “Forest”, or “Valley”. There is no climax in the book and I think it would go against the overall vibe and intention of the book if there were.

In the beginning I found the book very hard to read and get into. In the end it was easier for me. As Markus put it: maybe this is one of those books which I should read again in ten years time.

There are some really nice descriptions of wilderness which the author found, places in deep forest, untouched by humans, with lots of animal caves, wild nature, skeletons, etc..

Kein Ort hätte besser meiner Vorstellung von reiner Wildnis ensprechen können, wie ich sie zu Beginn meiner Reisen hatte. Eine räumliche Logik hatte mich hierhergeführt, der Wunsch, an einem Punkt zu sein, an dem sich physische und geografische Höhe summierten, ein hoher Gipfel auf einem hohen Breitengrad. Jetzt aber wollte ich diesen Ort nur noch verlassen. Mich überfiel ein noch stärkeres Unbehagen, als ich es, ebenso unerwartet, schon auf der Felsnadel von Coruisk verspürt hatte.
—p.145

Douglas Preston — The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story
The book is a bit like Jurassic Park in real life and tells the story of an archaeological expedition to locate a rumored city in the jungle of Honduras. The author is a journalist (for National Geographic) who accompanied the scientists. I can definitely recommend the book, it was a very thrilling and interesting read and one of my reading highlights this year. Besides the archaeological highlights it is an interesting account on corruption, grave looting, and the dangers of a jungle.

Brian Jay Jones — George Lucas
This is an unauthorized biography on Lucas. I don’t really like those unauthorized biographies, since they often tell “from hearing”. The same goes for this book. Overall, I think, he is not portrayed as a good filmmaker. To me, it was not really conceivable from the book why he made it as far as he has. I think the book portrays Lucas as a stubborn director who succeeded only because other people helped him decide what’s good and bad. There are often mentions of how he shot a picture or wrote something which was so chaotic (or incoherent) that other people had to help him sort things out.

The book was interesting for the whole history facts, but I was missing emotional insights or glimpses into his characters. But this is just typical for unauthorized biographies which lack access to intimate friends of the subject or, even worse, the subject itself.

Bov Bjerg — Auerhaus
I found this book by chance in a small hostel in Jisr az-Zarca in Israel (there is only one hostel there). It’s a German book and on the first page a “Beatrix” had placed a paper with a note that all of the book had actually happened in a small village near Stuttgart and that she grew up there. This got me interested and I started reading the first pages — three/four hours later I was finished with the entire book, it got me hooked so intensely on those first pages. I didn’t put it down even once and in the end my eyes hurt. But it was definitely worth it.

I really enjoyed the book. It retells a summer in the authors life. One of those summers which will never come again. The book captured me emotionally and I could identify a lot with some of the themes — especially the melancholic mood of looking back on a very happy time of living together with friends. The book captures this spirit very well. Also, it is set in a small village between Ulm and Stuttgart and refers to some places familiar to me.

Christian Rudder — Dataclysm
This is a book by one of the co-founders of OkCupid, he describes statistical insights which he gained whilst building the platform. OkCupid works in a way that you answer questions on all kinds of things…your view on the world, or character traits which you have and which you search for in a partner or friend. The main thing which stuck with me from the book is that even though you can answer thousands of questions on their website they could already predict astoundingly well how likely two people were to get along from these three questions: Are you interested in politics? Do you like horror movies? Have you ever traveled to another country alone?.

Rolf Potts — Vagabonding
Found this one on a flea market (the one in the princess garden in Kreuzberg). It’s a book on the authors experiences and tipps on vagabonding. The topic spoke very much to me, but I found the book bored me and it was a bit hard to finish reading it. I think this was because I am already quite familiar with the topic and most of the stuff from the book I had already heard or talked about a lot of times.

One thing which stuck was a suggestion of how to describe years of work-free vagabonding in a CV: honestly describing where one went and what one took from it — e.g. being able to look after oneself in a remote country, being patient, getting along with all kinds of cultures, etc..

Bov Bjerg — Die Modernisierung meiner Mutter
I was so enthusiastic after having read “Auerhaus” that I was eager to read the one other book by the author. The summary spoke to me: short stories on his childhood in a small, swabian village and on his “exile” in Berlin. However, I was very much disappointed by the book and finished it purely to get it over with.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — The Little Prince
A shame that it took me that long to finally take it up and read it. Very good book. I think despite of what the illustration style suggests it’s much more of an adult book then a childrens book.

Ramez Naan — Nexus
It’s hard for me to describe how exceptionally good I found this book. I think it’s an extremely visionary and outstanding book. The author really grasps some of the ideas surrounding transhumanism, their applications, and their influence on society. Some of the recent startups in this field (Neuralink, Kernel, opnwatr, ni2o, …) may very well end up building the described technology.

The book is science-fiction, but of a very near future, not too far away. It is set 15-20 years in the future and makes an, in my mind, very plausible extrapolation. I think the disruptive technologies described in the book are plausible and it is highly likely that this is how our world will look in a couple of decades. Be it two or ten decades, this technology will appear sooner or later. You can really grasp it! It’s a glimpse of a future that might well come to be. It’s not science-fiction of intergalactic space wars — it seems to be not that far away, but totally groundbreaking.

Whilst reading the book I often had to stop myself from consuming it too fast. I wanted to prolong the reading experience :-). Often I made pauses and thought a bit about what I just had read.

I especially liked the scientific base of his book. It is very much apparent that he is a computer scientist, his depictions of this realm are very accurate (the Unix stuff, the algorithms, the peer reviews, academic conferences, etc.). Also I liked that he mentions Vipassana meditation and a couple of places in e.g. Thailand where I had also been to. His depiction of Bangkok is pretty much how I remember it as well. I think some of the other stuff which he describes is also pretty authentic and he knows very well what he is talking about.

The book is written in a very visual way and it’s easy to imagine this being made into a movie at some point. Overall I was surprised that this book is so little known in the cyberpunk and trans-/posthumanism scene. I liked it a lot and it has become one of my favorite books. It re-ignited my interest in this whole topic of neocortex, transhumanism, neural enhancement, and brain computer interfaces. It provided a glimpse of a future that I haven’t seen prior to the book. I think it’s very probable that something like the technology he describes will be invented in the next decades.

Ramez Naam — Crux
Naam actually wrote a triology: Nexus, Crux, Apex. I was so very hooked and enthused by the first book that I immediately went on to the second one. The second book is fantastic as well and I liked it a lot.

Ramez Naam — Apex
The third book was also a nice read, it’s a good book, although as with most trilogies: the first one is the best.

Ramez Naam — More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement
The Nexus trilogy got me so hooked on the whole trans-/posthumanism scene again, that I immediately continued with this non-fiction book by the author. He describes the state of research in terms of genetics, cloning, neural augmentations, and related domains. He makes an elaborate argument for progress and enhancing human nature. He also describes counter-positions and typical arguments of opponents. The book was a very interesting read and in my eyes makes a valid and probable prediction of how the future will evolve. It was also nice to see counter-positions examined, he makes a very positive case of evolving humans and fostering scientific progress.

Helmut Herold — Linux-Unix-Shells
Markus lent me this book a while ago, when I was attending the course “Systemnahe Software” at university. I’m a bit ashamed that it took me quite some time to pick it up and read it. At some point the guilty conscience was too much and I took the opportunity of big-day-off to read through it. Big-day-off is a thing which we have at work each six weeks; I can do whatever I want for two days, as long as it is loosely related to the company — most importantly it doesn’t have to yield any business value. I decided to take this time to deepen my shell knowledge. I skipped the chapters on ancient shells. The rest was informative and brought some stuff up from memory again (null operators in bash, why certain commandos have to be built-ins, etc.).

Sam Williams — Free as in Freedom
Another book which Markus gave to me some (unfortunately) years ago. The guilty conscience was too much as well and I finally attacked it. The book is the biography of Richard Stallmann. It gave a bit more insight into his person and I think I now understand a bit better what his motivations are. The book goes into depth on for example the difference between the terms “GNU/Linux” vs “Linux” and “Free Software” vs “Open Source”.

After I read the book I found out that there is a derivative work in which Stallman — who was dissatisfied with some of the authors depictions of him — changed things around and wrote comments indicated with “RMS: ” below anecdotes, quotes, etc.. Hmm. I’m not really sure what to make of this, but I think it’s a bit over the top and only reinforces the impression of Stallmans urge to micro-manage. It’s a bit ironic that the book actually makes a point of describing this urge quite well.

Samin Nosrat — Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat
The book is a meta-cookbook. It consists mostly of four large chapters: Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat. Each chapter examines the impact of this ingredient on a dish with the authors main message being that these are the four variables that effect a well-done dish the most.

The books main impact on me was to buy the best salt and olive oil which I could find and to experiment more with varying these variables when cooking. It also reinforced my opinion that the best way to learn cooking is to cook a lot.

Airen — Strobo
The text on the back cover says “the book is experienced in ecstasy and written in ecstasy” and this is totally fitting. I mainly read the book because of my own wanderings in Berlins electronic music clubs.

Airen — I am Airen Man
The book is more mature in literary terms. Its content is the authors time in Mexico and it’s mostly a continuation of “Strobo”. There were some passages which I reflected on for some time.

[…] einer, der sich von so ziemlich jeder Erfahrung ferngehalten hat. (p.59)

[…] wenn all die Küsse und Umarmungen nicht zählten, dieses verschwitzte Lächeln nicht echt wäre, wenn das alles nur eine Dummheit war, ein paar Sünden am Wegesrand, dann sage ich Ja zur Dummheit, Ja zum Leichtsinn, denn nur diese Küsse zählten, nur dieses Lächeln war echt, nur dann und dort habe ich gelebt. (p. 145)

Alexander & Ann Shulgin — Pikhal
The autobiography of Alexander (& Ann) Shulgin. A couple years ago I took interest in his person and read a lot about him. At that time I had also bought the book and now finally took time to read it. The part written by him about himself was interesting to me, but I disliked the part written by his wife (which from my feeling is about five times larger than his part).

Following the death of his mother and griefance of his father:

Finally, I said Enough! Let’s all go on some sort of short get-away, to give ourselves a chance to repair. Where should we go? It didn’t matter, I said; I’ll take care of it.

So my father put a clean pair of socks and a change of underwear into a satchel, and all four of us set out for San Francisco, supposedly headed for San Diego. In actuality, unbeknownst to my father, I had arranged to have the house sealed off for a long absence, and I’d gotten tickets on the P&O ship Chusan for a trip, not just to San Diego, but past it to Panama, then to Trinidad, Barbados, the Canary Islands, England, and on to France, where we would stay for a year. […] The plan worked. My father had to buy a whole new wardrobe; he re-established contacts with Russian-speaking friends whom he hadn’t seen for a quarter of a century; he completely severed himself from his grief-obligations, rediscovered his identity and his energy, and he later remarried, opened a restaurant, and lived another fifteen years.

Hunter S. Thompson — The Rum Diaries
The book is a nice account of Puerto Rico in the 1960s. I liked the whole journalism lifestyle which is depicted in it. It was a nice read and I’d like to read more of his works.

So overall I get to 20 books, seven of them were written in German, the rest in English.

I have been experimenting with exposing film multiple times. The idea is that instead of winding the film forward after having taken a photo you take another photo (or multiple ones) in the same place — making the photos overlap. These are some of my results.