Dear Reader,

In Switzerland, “Musicstar“, the national version of “American Idol“, “Deutschland sucht den Superstar” or whatever the singing contest casting show is called in your country, is currently on TV. All the candidates seem to have one thing in common: They all claim, that they “live for the music”, that music means everything to them and a life without it, meaning as a musician, would be impossible for them to imagine.

Surprisingly, once the show is over, most of them are never heard of again. Some reappear in casting shows for some “TV-Game-Show-Host” or maybe even in “Big Brother”.

[Have a look here for quite an extreme sample of this species, called Julien. And don’t miss the gallery and the bio (note: it does not mention, that he tried to become the next “Joya rennt”, - or was it the next Nadja Zimmermann?). He is well above twenty! Not like you might have thought: a big-ego teenager without any ‘know-thyself’. No no…! - Oh I am sooo looking forward to his video: it is “coming soon” ].

But back to the topic. The reason for people to show up in the public eye on shows like Musicstar is, that the costs, that is the effort to sign up on a casting show is relatively small compared to the costs of going through the struggle of choosing “musician” as ones “one and only” profession right from the beginning and far from a more “usual”, more secure career path, one that is well embedded in society but less glamuros.
People who claim they couldn’t live without actively making music, logically have to take it the hard way, be it with or without any casting opportunities. They are forced to. What other choice would they have?

Sandra Wild is currently the big favorite in the Musicstar show. In her private life, she works for the state, she gets couples to sign their certificate of marriage. Although she is not an unexperienced singer, she has had some success with singing as a teenager, I still think she has too little ambition, guts and self-confidence to break out of the secure environment she is used to. This even in spite of the fact that she will surely win the show and become the next Musicstar-winner.

Here are two TV broadcasts I watched this week, where Sandra Wild was in (I tried to translate excerpts of some of her statements as good as I could):

From “TalkTäglich” hosted by Markus Gilli on TeleZüri (view):

Markus Gilli: “[…] if it won’t work out with you and the music-business, then you will have to do a private marriage company: ‘Marrying with Wild’ […] Let’s talk a bit about your future […] you are currently on a break from your marriage certifier job in Arbonne. Are you considering to pick your job back up again […] or is this option currently a bit endangered?”

Sandra Wild: “To be honest, I cannot yet really tell, because it depends a bit on how far I will make it in the show. Actually I plan to pick up my old job again later on. But if I had to suspend that a bit because of too many other appointments, then I don’t know, I have to check with my employer first. If it would be possible to take some time off and then restart my job again later on […]”

From “Club” hosted by Matthias Aebischer on SF1 (view):

Matthias Aebischer: “What do you want to do after the show? I didn’t ask yet. You said you already knew about some opportunities?”

Sandra Wild: “Well I just plan, of course I will have to see what offers will come in then…”

Matthias Aebischer: “You hope there will be offers?”

Sandra Wild: “I already know they will come. […] Well I wish, that once, that I can maybe, probably get a record contract. That I can record an album, where I can bring in my own wishes, I will try. If I somehow manage, I would like to do a lot of concerts with a real band. I would like to make real music and what I am also really exited about right now is: this morning I got and offer to give some singing lessons sometime. That I would like to develop a bit further in fact. I would also like to learn more and definitely teach singing and see that I can do ‘Music’ as a job, a bit. And live of it. [Because of the offers I know about…] I know what could happen and I am really glad I do. That I am not thrown into the cold water, that I don’t know about. This way I am not at the mercy of fate and can assess a bit what’s comming and prepare for it.

Carmen Fenk (a former winner of the show): “But you can also bet on the wrong horse. Have disappointed hopes.”

Sandra Wild: “Indeed, indeed. But I don’t do/have that. I just wait and see…”

I think she sings really well and I find her truly congenial. I don’t want to talk bad about her, I don’t mean to be personal (unlike I did intend to with Julien further up).

I think the impression one can get from her is exemplarily for the majority of a lot of people who go to castings. But the teenage dream of being famous, together with the ease of a casting sign-up is not the full story.

Without audacity to take some risks and a lot of diligence, everyone will eventually be caught by our all most common fear: The fear that makes most of us going to work everyday and live a boring, unspectacular, normal life without any risk or ambition.

When Roger Federer decided he wanted to be a professional tennis player at the age of sixteen, he told his dad, he would not go to school anymore…

I wish Sandra Wild all the best of luck and hope she proves me wrong

Thank you.

Update (8/14/2007): Sandra is giving it another try, see here.

Dear Reader,

I just did a skype video chat with my girlfriend Juky. She is on an airplane from Shanghai to Copenhagen RIGHT NOW. Picture and sound quality are just perfect!!!

Ever uploaded an MP3 to an aeroplane?

She travels with SAS. Definitly the coolest airline on earth!

Thank you.

Dear Reader,

I just came home from shopping. While queueing forever, I had plenty of time studying the goodies that are usually placed just in front of the cashpoint. There is stuff that is meant for little kids so they annoy their parents with: “If I don’t get this, I cry like hell until you are so embarassed of everybody giving you weird looks, that you WILL buy it!”. But then there are other things there: cigarettes and alcoholic beverages, the strong stuff. The things that usually are excluded from general rebates.

However today I found ALL the shaving blades of Gillette right there as well! Prominently placed in very big packages, so it is harder to steal them. Why should you steal them? They are REALLY expensive! A set of the cheapest was CHF 23 (USD 19). Gillettes latest toy for “the best in man”, the Gillette Fusion Power blades were available for CHF 46 (USD 38).

That is a lot of money! To get these razor blades out into the stores all over the country, the retailers have to hire security companies that usually pick up the money in their bullet proof vans. That’s HOW valuebal those little things are! The saffron of the 21st century. Had I gotten all my salaries in razor blades instead of ordinary cash, I’d be a wealthy man by now…

“It looks like the big razor companies agreed to from some kind of a cartel to keep prices high. Someone should make a business out of selling cheap blades that go along with the gillette and wilkinson handles…”, I thought to myself. This was when I noticed the Matrix3 to the left of myself. Many meters in front of the cashpoint and in an ordinary, less guarded shelf.

“Wow! How is the cheeky company that dears to threaten the cartel?”. On the package I could only find the branding of the retailer I was at, Coop. From a very quick googling/asking I also did not find out a lot more. But it looks like it is some american company and that the Matrix3 can be bought in 1$ shops in the U.S. Here it is sold for CHF 7 (USD 5.7) for the handle and two blades and the extra blades cost CHF 6 (USD 4.9).

The Matrix3 (His Way) has three blades and looks like a normal razor. The only uncool thing about it so far is, that it misses the sexy way of unloading the old blade: The Gillette has a button that ejects the blade right into the bin. On the Matrix3 you have to kind of “break” it off. But unlike in the adverts, there is seldomly a sexy woman around who watches me shaving, let alone watching me swap blades. So that should not be the problem.

The essential question is: “Is this a razor that delivers a nice shave? Or do I cut myself all the time?”. Those are the key questions.

On the “old index” of wesblog (search for “matrix”), I found a “user-review” with the promising title:

“So You’ve Purchased a Matrix 3! (Alternate Title: So you’ve decided to kill yourself slowly and painfully!)”

Excerpt: “Got bored and glued some rusty blades to a stick today. All at weird angles and stuff. Dared my assistant to shave with it. We will be having the memorial service tomorrow.”

Apparently, it was invented by the spanish inquisition! Oh my God! What have I just bought! - Yes, I bought it and I AM REALLY AFRAID TO USE IT NOW! Damn! My only hope is that the editors of the wesblog are paid by the razor blade cartel…

So I found the blog of Tom Doobie. He gave me hope, a lot of hope, here’s an excerpt:

“The first shave seemed decent. Not blow me away decent, but good. Of course, I had a two-day growth on my face, so that may have factored in. But after that it was smooth sailing. The shaves were as good as the Sensor, if not better. But that’s not the best part. My stubble can render a new Gillette Sensor blade inoperable after two shaves…sometimes three. Ever since I’ve been using the Matrix3, I’ve been able to squeeze out up to a *week* of shaves before changing the blade. A WEEK. So not only is the Matrix3 cheaper than the Sensor, the blades last about three times as long. And guess what? I ran out of Matrix3 blades the other week and had to resort back to my Sensor. It tore my face up, even with a brand new blade.”

I just hope Tom is a honest man. I will find out myself tomorrow and let you know…

Thank you.

Dear Reader,

Here in Europe, we have the weekly EuroMillions Lottery. As of today, 10th of November 2006, there were 243 Million Euros to win (That is USD 310′588′020, aka 310 Mio $). Of course everybody tried thier luck…

My lucky numbers for today were these:

14 22 35 38 44 - 3 7
01 13 21 37 40 - 7 8
21 25 36 47 50 - 2 3
18 23 43 46 47 - 4 8
03 21 25 43 50 - 5 7

My little EuroMillion Random Number Suggestion Program (see below) got these numbers for me and I was very exited. I filled out the lottery ticket already on wednesday and was eager to get my ticket down to the lottery counter and check it in…

However, things went terribly wrong, as I relied on this man:

This man was trying to get lucky too and also wanted to play the EuroMillion Lottery. But I should have been warned. That man is not quite a Michael Schumacher, nor does he own a Ferrari. In fact he is an “EL’ie”, a learning driver! He has one of these “L”’s on the back of his car and is only allowed to drive with experienced drivers in his passengers seat:

We drove up to the lottery counter and tried to find a parking lot. Because my unexperienced driver had not yet learned to drive backwards, we had to circle around a spot, like a roundabout, that had a traffic light in it.

My driving apprentice managed to stop in from of the traffic light in such a way, that the metal detection, built into the street never detected anybody that was waiting for a green light… And because driving backwards was out of question for the reason just mentioned, we had to wait for some other car to stop behind us and eventually make the traffic light realize that we in fact needed to get out of that situation immediately.

It was three minutes after half past six when we rushed up to the lottery counter to try our luck. - Three minutes too late - Three minutes away of my 243 million Euros!

Good bye my many Euros…

The guy who almost owed me the lottery jackpot did not get beaten up by me, just in case you think that that is why he looks so smashed up on the picture above. No, that happend three years ago, when he had an accident on his snakeboard. (Where he is professional at, I have to say here, just to stay fair).

But how high was the risk of my “only-forward-gears-please” driver to actually “owe” me my 243 million Euros really? - Let’s have a look:

The folks among you who still remember their combinatorics lessons will quickly find out, that chances to win are terribly low.

For those who skived school at the time, here is how we can figure it out:

In the EuroMillions Lottery you have to choose 5 out of 50 plus 2 out of 9, called numbers and stars. For the first cross we put on the lottery ticket, we can choose out of 50 numbers. For the second cross, only 49 possible free numbers are left. This goes on down to the last cross, where 46 unchosen numbers are left to choose from. Same story for the stars: here we choose out of 9 on the first draw and 8 out of the second.

Multiplying all those possibibilities gives us the total possible combinations of a fully defined lottery stake:

50 * 49 * 48 * 47 * 46 * 9 * 8 = 18'306'086'400

Now this is when the order of the draws matters, when 11 31 22 46 03 is different from 03 22 11 46 31 and so on. So there are some pairs that don’t have the same order, but the same numbers. How many?

1 * 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 = 120

for the first 5 numbers, and

1 * 2 = 2

for the stars and therefore 240 for all. By dividing we get

18'306'086'400 / 240 = 76'275'360

This number is represents all possible outcomes of the EuroMillion Lottery. Of course there is only one right answer. This gives the probability:

1 / 76'275'360

In a different notation this is equal to

1.311 * 10^(-8)

or

0.0000001311

or

NOTHING

We now know: the one and only correct answer tonight to win the lottery jackpot was: 14 21 27 30 36 - 2 3. But again, nobody won!

Well of course not, the probability to win this insane game is 0.0000001311 as we just found out. So why bother in the first place? How can anybody semi-intelligent throw his or her money away in such a game?

“Well - sometimes, somebody wins, right? So why not me?” you could argue…

Exactly! That’s just what my “almost debtor” and I thought as well. For professionals working with addicted people, this attitude is probably just about all it takes to be certain they are dealing with some serious cases… And in fact, if the lotteries jackpots were that high and were on every night, I truely think we would be bankrupt, stealing form ant Jenny, robbing kindergardeners and in jail by now…

Did I mention that in Germany, EuroMillions is illegal and the poor guys are not allowed to play in their country? Every German Hartz-IV receiver (that is almost everybody, cause you are better off that way than with actual work), who could somehow make it, took a trip into the coutries abroad where EuroMillions is allowed and spend all they had to play and hopefully win.

More on german invasions and politics that give the wrong incentives in another blog…

Because filling out the lottery ticket is so difficult for standard human brains, I quickly wrote a little Java program to take the burden of me to choose “pseudo good” numbers.

When a human fills out the tickets, evenly distributed patterns emerge, very often prime numbers are chosen. Therefore, the more prime numbers a win contains, the more people will have to share it.

Even when an individual knows these facts and tries to do exactly the opposite or some “random” way, it still is almost impossible. - That is, when a possible win is involved…

Test question: Someone puts down the following numbers on a lottery ticket. Do you think he or she is insane?

01 02 03 04 05 - 01 02
06 07 08 09 10 - 03 04
11 12 13 14 15 - 05 06
16 17 18 19 20 - 07 09
21 22 23 24 25 - 01 02

…get the point? - It doesn’t matter. Anybody playing is insane… These numbers are just as probable as any other.

So here is my little program that has no brain of its own and will just give you random numbers. (Caution: If you are superstitious and believe in lucky numbers, this program is not for you. After the test question above, probably no one is in his heart).

package org.theyellowmarker;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.util.Random;

/** from http://www.theyellowmarker.org - raoul */
public class EuroMillionGuesser {

private int[] computeLuckNumbers(final int howMany, final int max) {
if(howMany >= max || howMany < 0 || max < 0) {
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Get out of here, you jerk");
}
int[] numbers = new int[howMany];
for(int i = 0; i < howMany; i++) {
numbers[i] = getNextLuckyNumber(0, numbers, max);
}
inSituBBSort(numbers);
return numbers;
}

private int getNextLuckyNumber(final int offset, final int[] numbers, final int max) {
final int luckyNumber = new Random().nextInt(max) + 1;
for (int i = offset; i < numbers.length; i++) {
if(numbers[i] == luckyNumber) {
numbers[i] = getNextLuckyNumber(offset, numbers, max);
}
}
return luckyNumber;
}

private int[] inSituBBSort(int[] numbers) {
for (int i = numbers.length; --i >= 0;)
for (int j = 0; j < i; j++) {
if (numbers[j] > numbers[j+1]) {
int tmp = numbers[j];
numbers[j] = numbers[j+1];
numbers[j+1] = tmp;
}
}
return numbers;
}

private String results(int[] numbers) {
final StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
for (int i = 0; i < numbers.length; i++) {
if(numbers[i] < 10) {
sb.append("0" + numbers[i] + " ");
} else {
sb.append(numbers[i] + " ");
}
}
return sb.toString();
}

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
EuroMillionGuesser emg = new EuroMillionGuesser();
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
String str = "";
System.out.print("hit enter for next draw..., control-c for quitting");
while (str != null) {
str = in.readLine();
int[] mainNumbers = emg.computeLuckNumbers(5, 50);
int[] starNumbers = emg.computeLuckNumbers(2, 9);
System.out.print("You win! - Well, if and only if (aka iff): ");
System.out.print(emg.results(mainNumbers));
System.out.print("/ ");
System.out.print(emg.results(starNumbers));
}
}
}

Download: euromillionguesser.zip
You can use this little code snipped for other lotteries with different number schemes as well. Just change the arguments in the computeLuckyNumbers methods inside the main method and recompile. To run it, unzip the file and hit the start.bat file. Hitting enter will give you a new draw each time:

If you win with numbers from this little program, let me know and send some money over.

Nobody won this week. - Next week, 288 Million Euro will be in the jackpot. I will hand in my lottery ticket earlier this time. When blog entries about luxury goods and clever investment strategies start to appear here, you will know who has won it .

Thank you.

Dear Reader,

I just love the Japanese… Robots that help out elderly people. It’s lovely!

So whenever my girlfriend is not behaving “correctly”, from now on I start threatening her with “Robot Replacement”…

Hope that helps

Thank you.

Dear Reader,

Many people before me got to the understanding of one thing concerning peace: peace is not a product. You cannot make it. It is not a thing you could ever produce at any manufacturing site anywhere…

Peace is a consequence of freedom and selfunderstanding of societys, aka individuals.

Peace is not a thing.

You can use the word to increase your reputation (amongst dummies) by talking big about how to “make” it, “bring” it, “exporting” it, etc.

Even the bush administration doesn’t try such a simple strategy. They try to implement a democratic gouvernment e.g. in Irak. The plan is, that that will bring peace as a result. (However, there are other constraints that prevent all that, more on this on another post). But so far, so good. I don’t want to agree or disagree on any political move they do, simply beause I don’t know enough. I just want to point out: Peace is not a thing that could be exported, but a consequece, a function of x, y and z: f(a1, a2, …, an)

Therefore:

Please stop becoming noble peace prize winner candidate.

Don’t give us your wise ideas on how “it should be” when you didn’t yet manange to be at peace with your mother-in-law…

Change the world at your fingertips, if you think you are such a clever being.

Stop talking about “human diginity”, be an example yourself.

Compssion and Knowledge in Action is the only way to convince people…
So let’s shut up and instead start to act, to do, to implement.

Thank you.

I am currently in Shanghai and just listened to the Radio Energy Zurich news through the web: Apparently, Osama Bin Laden died of a severe case of typhoid. This is what the French secret service claims to be sure about.

I haven’t found it on the Google News yet, so let’s see what information is still to come on this…

New York… I was there… It looked like after an atom bomb. All colors were gone… Just grey, black, white…

It is hard, if not impossible for someone, who hasn’t been there, her- or himself, to understand how it was.

However, I finally understand why my grand-father, who was in the last big war, why he never wanted to talk about all that what had happend: It is because all of us, his grand-children, who just happend to learn history back in school or on TV, would never ever have been able to truely listen to him, to truely understand how it was, the know His-story…

Somehow, we whished nothing more than that the old man would finally start talking - at last… “it shouldn’t be that difficult? where’s the big deal?”, we thought - We were pretty wrong.

Dear Reader,

A friend of mine helped organising the Dropping Knowledge Event. It takes place right now at the time I am writing this. Hafsat Abiola and Willem Dafoe lead a round table of about a hundred people who answer questions of people from all over the world (People who are “online” that is).

A discussion among 100 people! Well, if they all have to talk to each other, the number of talks between each two people will be quite big: 4950 talks if all talk to all once.

For those of you, who don’t have a calculator or a brain to do the job, here is the Lisp “program” to calculate that number:

To accomplish that, organising 4950 talks, one day is just not enough. And in life outside maths, you are still not finished. So you would have to iterate the whole process, in order to have a final and “streamlined” version of the answer that everybody agrees with. And after all, that is what all the questioners would like to get, isn’t it?, an answer from all of the savvy folks down from Berlin.

It looks as if the organisers found that out too. They let different people answer different questions. So that problem seems to be solved: Nobody really had to argue with anybody! Leaving the questioners with pure luck of who got to answer their question.

My impression on what I saw so far on the live-stream, is that unfortunately it is just another feel good get-together for a bunch of people who consider themselves humanists.

Because that’s what they go on about. About how everybody should have respect for life, other human beings, animals, trees, toothpaste, et cetera… That everybody is the same in the end and the religons anyway, one god, the god a guy who has no religion himself and in some way has showed us how to live, I learn - interesting.

Nothing new here… what a pitty! There must have been quite a bunch of disappointed questioners who thought to themselves, they could have given that answer themselves just as easily…

In fact I cannot hear it anymore. I have seen it way too often. It is always so easy to look out into the world and find mistakes all over the place. Stuff other people do wrong, the system that is “unnatural” or the society that is ill and perverted and ah oh how good it was when everyone still run around half-naked, clubbing each others heads…

“What a nice and wonderful event that was today”, “How intelligent my appeal to world peace must have made me look!” - and then they go home and beat up their wives and children…

And why? Because they have looked out, into the world and had many ideas of how it should be, but they did not look inside. Into themselves. To where the negativity, they so much want to free the world off, actually lifes. It’s the inside of the individual where any change has to start.

Changing the world without first changing oneself will never ever work out. It is an uphill battle, a Sisyphean task.

I am not saying I am any better, but hey, I also don’t give the world such great advices (that any 1st grader could come up with, anyway)!

Thank you.

Dear Reader,

it looks as if in my first post, I have to jump right into hostile environment. But so be it… I just saw my favorite program on TV, its Kulturzeitnachrichten on 3sat. 3sat is a channel run by german, swiss and autrichian state TV stations all together.

Today they were talking about Karlheinz Stockhausen ’s [1, 2] controversial statement on 9/11: He said, 9/11 was “greatest work of art”.

What was disturbing to me was not what this guy thinks, but the way it was handled by the folks on TV. It was clear, that they didn’t dare commenting about it in a straight foreward way. They tried to interpret it: “What could the artist really have meant with that…?”

So his statement was not judged as if any “ordinary” person would have made it. (Imagine you had said it! Mea Culpa!). But obviously, the way we judge people, artists that is in this case, the less critical with our own instincts we are. Same holds true for politicians, physicians, philosophers and so on. Generally speaking: for anybody we hold for superior to ourselves.

I feel it is hard for me to get my point accross, so let me simplify: Suppose you think of someone as a lot smarter than you are. For whatever reason. Now suppose this person says something that you would normally disagree with (like “The world is flat!”). In this situation, you would probably hesitate to “act” certain, to tell that person right away, that he or she was wrong… There is a good chance, you would question your own knowledge and experience.

So, conclusion number 1 for tonight:

• Phrasing A: The higher people think of you, the more power you have to say just about anything you want, and they will kind of agree. If they don’t clearly agree (which would be dumb), then they go: “did not quite understand, have to think about that in the future again”.
• Phrasing B: The higher you think of someone to be above your own personal ability to think and feel, the more you will obey to his orders and will allow you to limit your natural intellect and human reason.

Well then, more on this at a later point in time.

Thank you.