I recently heard an interesting story that a greater stretch of Berlin's Kochstrasse was recently renamed after student activist Rudi Dutschke (1940-79). Kochstrasse is well known as the metro stop for Checkpoint Charlie, so the the change is not an obscure one.

Dutschke was a student leader in West Berlin. He was born in the East, but fled the oppression just before the Wall. In West he quickly became a charismatic figure of city's "1968" movement. In April 1968 he was shot thrice by a local redneck on Kurfürstendamm. Dutschke survived, but just barely and with severe brain damage.

The shooter attempted suicide but didn't succeed and was duly jailed. Dutschke and his attacker engaged in correspondence while the latter was in prison. The shooter took his life in 1970. Whether the correspondence lead into any redemption I have no knowledge of.

Dutschke lived for another eleven years. Because of his injuries he had to learn to speak again. He went to Cambridge but was eventually expelled from Britain as an "unwanted alien". He settled in Århus, Denmark and was involved in the foundation of the German Green party just before dying of consequential injuries in 1979.

The new street also meets the Axel-Springer-Strasse, directly at the offices of Springer publishing company. For decades the Springer newspapers and magazines have been seen as reactionary proponents of the German media and were thus spittoons for the left-wing activists and the Red Army Faction, who resorted to violence. Dutschke split from the violent faction (who bombed Springer's Hamburg office in 1972), but nevertheless the renaming of the street was of nuisance to the Springer company.

Together with some CDU representatives and other neighbours, Springer tried to halt the process, but eventually the residents of Kreuzberg went for the memory of Dutschke in a referendum.

Poetic, if twisted justice, that is.

Sent in a proposal for Art+Communication festival in Riga in October. This year's festival is about "artistic explorations within the invisible space of electromagnetic spectrum surrounding us" so I think an examination of RFID and passports could fit in nicely.

Here's a description:

Pimp My Passport

The project examines DIY and hacking prospects as well as control and privacy issues of RFID passports currently being rolled out throughout the European Union. It also plays around with the notion of nationality and its symbols - seeking new ways to signal identity by "pimping" personal travel documents.

Although dealing with heavy subject matter like electronic privacy, big brother and nationality, Pimp My Passport is a playful, hands-on project that anyone can take part of.

For Art+Communication festival we'd like to propose a 1-2 day workshop with following structure:

1. Probing sessions using RFID transceiver to read passports remotely
2. Crafting of protective "Faraday cage" passport covers
3. Pimping sessions e.g. working on re-interpretations of national symbols used on passports and other decorations

I've already talked about this to some of you long time ago, but now that I wrote that much down I might as well blog it and see how the forest answers!

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Some related links:

• DIY transparent laptop case (airport security)
• Pimp My Bible
• RFID Passport Shield Failure Demo
• SERIALL workshop in Antwerpen and Gent
• SimplySwiss: The Swiss Passport

Late 00's personal homepages under construction / on intermission / in stealth mode... Examples: viilee.org and mikameskanen.com.

Next Sunday – that's 20th April – mkk and I will talk and discuss the mikroPaliskunta project at Wonderbar. It is hosted by Freja and Lady Gaby and in the meantime we'll have a hearty and arty brunch. Invitation proper below. Come! Come!

Freja und Lady Gaby ladet Euch Herzlich ein:

A travel through Finland for Frühstück and to the Sekt a trip around Berlin with Mika Meskanen and Mari Keski-Korsu from the project mikroPaliskunta

Frühstücks Buffet (nicht nur Künst, auch Brot) ab 13Uhr am Sonntag 20.4. in Wonderbar Wiener Str. 45, X-berg.

A reindeer travelled from the northernmost point of European Union to the southernmost point of Finland. Among other things, he visited construction site of Ikea, national scenery in Imatra rapids and Koli, met many Finnish people and carried a camera in his horn to make a country long image line. And what happened in Berlin the next summer? mikroPaliskunta is a series of explorations made in eco-friendly way. The participants are in search for presented national identities (i.e. tourism), outcomes of global structural and ecological changes – to location, identity as well as to the culture. Expeditions vary and so far there have been two of them. They are present on location and in virtual world.
www.mikropaliskunta.net

The following is a brain dump I jotted down in the notebook two nights ago. It's about choice and preference.

Movement before direction
Perpetual before permanent
Friends before lovers
Sarcasm before joking
ADHD before sociopathy
Mercy before pity
Spirituality before religion
Sheldrake before Dawkins
Attitude before achievement
Leadership before management
Intuition before knowledge
Imaginary before objective

The form I have paraphrased from Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Spring equinox is a good week past now and the weather widget reports that backwinter's lost its grip. It was too little too late anyway.

Time to go down the memory lane until March 2005 and dust off the photographs from a grownups' winter party. Converted to a photoset on Flickr, naturally.

Assertiveness is a trait that can be developed for enrichment of personal and professional life. It's easiest to begin by identifying the wrong conditions. If you are in a situation which requires you to convince other people, avoid any and all of the following:

#1 Hiccup
#2 Foggy glasses
#3 Bleeding nose
#4 Dental anaesthesia
#5 Open shoelace
#6 Walking on Blitzeis

As each of these eventualities halves your assertiveness, having just three of them at the same time brings your potential to convince down to 12.5%. Such a cumulative effect is of course very unlikely.

(The list is by no means complete)

Just finished installing a new computer. The one I'm still typing this with, served three years pretty ok. There was only one wipeout hard disk failure.

It is a well-unknown fact that there's a secret program hidden in every computer. Its purpose is to make the computer slower and slower so that in three years it becomes practically useless. That program is called Angry Dave.

Mis-cited Moore's law states that computing power doubles every 18 months. Angry Dave counteracts that by halving the computing power every three years. It's been put in place by a luddite conspiracy to hinder us reaching technological singularity.

"Daisy Bell" (or "Bicycle Built for Two")

I've already grazed this idea over a year ago. A new wave of thought emerged when pictures of Russian / Ukrainian mobster tombstones surfaced on blog English Russia.

They're quite amazing. It's only that shameless showing off of wealth and luxuries in the context of transcendence looks very campy, to us non-mobsters in the west at least.

The desire to leave an earthly mark of one's existence has already left us with artefacts of perpetual design like the Giza pyramids and Taj Mahal to start with. The privilege to a memorial has democratised since. Yet, I've recently learned that even graveyard spots are actually leased and then subject to survivors' liquidity.

There are other cases to study.

This online document called "Excerpts from Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant" introduces some solutions to a very specific perpetual design problem – how to mark nuclear waste burial sites so that they will survive and deliver the message 400 generations into the future.

It's a heavy document but worth at least scrolling through for some insight. Interestingly the waste markers are also a special case of what could be called deterrent design. Usually design aspires to create or denote something beautiful and desirable. Now it must achieve something opposite.

The noblest and most elegant example I've found so far must be the Pioneer plaques. They are inscribed metal plates sent off in the early 70s with Pioneer spacecrafts towards Jupiter and beyond.

Designed by famous and late science populariser Carl Sagan and his wife Linda Salzman Sagan the plaques contained a specially crafted message to any off-world intelligence that might intercept the one and half man sized space probes. That is a very remote chance and the whole effort makes more sense as a symbolic gesture of uplifting ideals.

Some serious thinking was anyhow put into the designs. The bottom part of the plaque shows Pioneer's origin and trajectory out of the solar system. Figures of male and female human outline the physical appearance of our species against the silhouette of the probe itself for comparison. To their left converging lines pinpoint the location of the Sun relative to 14 pulsars and the galactic plane. The two connected circles at the top represent hydrogen atoms and as such establish a binary language that can be used to decode the plaque's information.

That's all pretty elaborate and I can share those details only because I've been told. In real life, reportedly, almost none of the human scientists originally shown the message could get it. Estimating the alien response isn't even an educated guess.

The initial question remains, how viable is perpetual design? The search goes on.

Pink Floyd - Echoes

Found a nice, alternative personal transport solution for the 30-3000 km range. Mechanic and engineer Jochen Sommer has discovered a market niche that addresses unconventional travellers. He imports classic Royal Enfield Bullet motorcycles from India and replaces original petrol engines with industrial Hatz diesels.

Besides the coolness of the machine, which is a subjective thing of course, it also runs on biodiesel. Fuel consumption swings around 2,5 litres per 100 km (over 110 mpg) so you can escape at least 500 km with a tankful. Top speed reaches just 100 km/h, but avenues are nicer than Autobahns anyway.

Kabel eins has a video feature in local language.

I've been to Wonderbar at an event where Claire Huot and Robert Majzels (left) presented their very interesting poetry concept called 85 letters.

It is fantastic on multiple levels. The output as simple as haiku – you have 5x17 characters in grid but written without gaps between the words and from top to down, right to left. Because of this awkward way of reading the recitals are quite odd from traditional.

For the material dimension of the concept they've made delicate prints on Chinese ghost paper. Some examples (and videos) are to be seen on authors' blog 285 Bungalow Drive.

The background of this project digs deep into Jewish mysticism, sinology and the art of translation in which the authors are both experts. It was also their response to the problematics of Chinese-English translation and notions of otherness.

Quite mental, right? Any questions, and I'll get into the details as far as I can in the comments...

Your house is a dangerous place. Most accidents happen at home. However, there is a discipline, that aims at better understaning of our interiors.

House Gymnastics is a cross breed of yoga, breakdancing, climbing and gymnastics in a domestic setting. House Gymnastics can be performed by anyone, at anytime, anywhere. The greater the height or danger, the better the move.

Like vertical biking this is a post-extreme sport where you accept that your resources are limited. And those of the humanity as well. Nobody's going to die. Nobody's going to get hurt.

Materialwise, balancing between mobility and the quality of life is juggling. One bottleneck is the books. Sound system is another.

I had been eyeing for Harman Kardon Soundsticks for a while, but eventually changed my mind and invested in a pair of reasonably priced Edirol nearfield micro monitors. First of all, being cubic in form instead of some alien design they fit better to a Türkenkoffer. They also offer some professionality placebo and compensate the lack of subwoofer with a smart technique that deals with the overtones of low frequencies. I have a wishful theory that psychoacoustically generated bass tones penetrate neighbours' walls to a lesser success.

Well, they are no Genelecs of course, but they do make some music sound better (and some worse) than it used to be. I had no idea that technology could have such an effect to the reception. It has a direct impact on playlist choices. In general, especially Norwegian music sounds really good with these.

Now playing: Nils Petter Molvær - Tløn

The streets are covered with frozen waterdrops. The intensity varies, so anything from a firm step in 1 g to a pedestrian powerslide to a can happen.

NP: Giant Robot - Breaking Bones

Update 7 Jan 2008:
I just heard this sort of ice is called Blitzeis.

Berlin's other city magazine Tip just ran a story on the raising chuch attendance especially in the district of Prenzlauer Berg. It also happens to be the neighbourhood I've used to live.

As for religious denominations, the population in Germany can roughly be split up in thirds: the Catholics, the Protestants and the Undenominational occupying almost equal shares. As usual, Berlin doesn't quite conform. Here 60% of the people (pdf) remain outside organised religion. Part of this can be explained by the legacy of the secular DDR.

The surge into the church and to its activities comes from migrant "middle-young" adults with families. Babycarts are more common than SUVs on these narrow streets. This can be cross-checked from reports, that books about baptism and guardian angels are bestsellers in Christian bookshops.

Lately they discussed the notion of miracle in my favourite YLE Radio 1 programme Merkkituote. In response to the in Sao Paulo, Matti Myllykoski closed the discussion with following words (translation mine):