The SmartS Club

Plagiarism is The thing these days. Powerful software sifts through scientific work of everybody (who has some visibility), it seems. And the software finds huge chunks of copied/re-used text and discovered quite a few rascals in the community and many examples of shady behavior. And there are consequences for the authors of many a scientific thesis. This is good. Now there are voices promoting some exception from scrutiny when writing a PhD thesis. They call it 'modular writing'. It would allow you to re-use existing text (from textbooks, published papers, news-articles...) in, e.g., the introduction, the paragraph on scientific background, etc. The argument is that those parts aren't scientifically original anyway, english isn't the native language for many PhD students and requiring them to wirte original text supposedly puts some unneccessary burden on them.  Well. No.  A PhD-thesis is *not* just another certificate you frame and hang over the TV to have something t...

Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer. Does anybody have an idea of what human intelligence (the non-artificial one) is? Over here in Germany Intelligenz is absolutely not the same thing as intelligence represented with a capital I in CIA, for example. That CIA-one was most probably the intelligence that was meant to be artificially emulated in the 50s, 60s, 70s... And quite successfully so. Today, AI is widely perceived to be an imitation, a parallel realization, or even a substitute of the human intelligence that suposedly sets us apart from every other rock. Remember the times when your science-inclined parents explained to you how the behavior of snails is nothing more than the output of a hardwired machine? Same for the canary, the turtle under you bed, and the dog. (It was hard to believe how the malevolent fits of my cat were hardwired and not real, genuine evil. But it was.) Intelligence was nicely reserved for us humans. That appears to get questioned. The definition of intell...

My son is 15 years old. He asked me what a FAX-machine was. He get's the strange concept of CDs because there is a rack full with them next to the bookshelf, which contains tons of paper bound together in colorful bundles, called 'books'. He still accepts that some screens don't react to you punching your fingers on them. He repeatedly asks why my 'car' (he speaks the quotation marks) is powered by 'rotten dinosaurs'. At the same time he writes an email to Elon Musks Neuralink asking for an apprenticeship and sets up discord-servers for don't-ask-me-what. And slowly I am learning that it is a very good thing to be detached from historic technology, as you don't try to preserve an outdated concept while aiming to innovate. The optimized light-bulb would be an a wee bit more efficient, tiny light-bulb. But not a LED. An optimized FAX would probably handle paper differently - it would not be a file-transfer-system. Hyper-modern CDs might have tenf...

Whoever has been there knows it: every day you try harder to understand what a malignant narcissist is doing to you. And then you try all night, too. You warp your brain, wrench your soul. You fail.  Why? Because you can't. There is no way to understand morally corrupt people which have the whole universe centered around their defective ego. This trying to do so at some point consumes all of your brain-power and it hurts, it starts consuming you. But once you got rid of them there is an enormous freedom and a new love for the good that is in most people. The windows swing open, fresh air comes in, you see the sun or smell the warm rain. The whole world appears to smile. One malignant narcissist will start to lose his grip on us. Tomorrow.

The air is clear and warm. No artificial lights anywhere. The moon is lingering lazily in the trees lining the river. Some fireflies are having a good time, switching their glow on and off rather randomly - in one group they seem to synchronize but then it is random again. It reappears: a few bugs are flashing simultaneously at first, then more of them join in, and then even more until a huge cloud of insects is flashing in tune. Are they doing this on purpose? Do they even know that they are glowing? Do they have a will to turn their light on and off?  Obviously they do communicate. But why? How do they do it?  Or don’t they? 

On a wonderful summer night you lie in the grass - gaze into the dark sky, and let your thoughts wander - that shiny thing over there is an airplane, this a distant star, ISS disappears in the earth’s shadow - what a tiny box to be in! - where are the planets, how far can I see? You observe falling stars that are whizzing through the atmosphere at a delightfully high rate.  Why are there so many of them that night? Why do comets return? When? What is this strange thing called infinity. And why does infinity only go one way - infinitely into the future, but not infinitely into the past; infinitely far away, but not infinitely close, infinitely hot, but not infinitely cold, infinitely loud, but not infinitely silent? Why do things never end but did start at a certain point?  Why? The air is clear and warm. No artificial lights anywhere. The moon is lingering lazily in the trees lining the river. Some fireflies are having a good time, switching their glow on and off ...