Just call me Chestnut Whiskers

So according to http://www.hanzismatter.com/ my nickname might be transcribed to 栗須 which are the kanji for Chestnut Whiskers. Well, I think it could be worse...

Michael’s Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena

Very much recommended: Michael’s Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena contains a big number of surprising optical illusions and also tries to explain them.

No more oxygen...

According to Heise Newsticker, telephone provider O₂ is trying to sue Weinmann GmbH, maker of mecidal oxygen supplies.

I am of course sure, that common-sense-impaired lawyers will find a perfectly logical explanantion why some corporation can own the symbol for a Chemical Element, especially as they use it for some abstract phone service while the other corporation uses it to name exactly what it describes since two hundred years: oxygen!

I think I will go ahead and start registering trademarks for hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, ... ununoctium, and their various isotopes.

Democracy could be so easy.

Ok, democracy is cool stuff, but it's so hard. You have to invade other countries to spread it, and when people have democracy they stop caring after some time. But it could be soooo easy! Just use DemExp. Freshmeat tells us: demexp is a client/server system for direct democracies