Active Shooter Situation

After the Vienna terrorist attack, my siblings across the Atlantic texted to check on family members who live in Austria. I reported that all were safe, but that one of my sons had been working in the immediate area and had heard the gunfire. My sister wrote back: “Active shooter situations are terrifying.” This short …

1,000 Day Streak!

Yesterday was a monumental day. Not only did Joe Biden and Kamala Harris clinch the election in the United States, but I hit 1,000 consecutive days on my New York Times crossword puzzle streak! Whoo Hoo! I thought something exciting might happen like a congratulatory email from Will Shortz, but alas the world took no …

Magic Cat Academy is back!

I’m taking a class this semester in Digital Ethics. Not surprisingly, much of the discussion revolves around ethical standards for online search engines and what moral obligations should/could/ought to be in meeting those standards. Back at the dawn of the Internet there were a number of competing search engines – Lycos, Yahoo, AltaVista – and …

It was early morning yesterday …

… I was up before the dawn. Actually, early morning yesterday I was not up before the dawn, but today I was. If Rick Davies was truly up before the dawn yesterday I don’t know. There is a decent probability that he was, however, because today at 3:00 A.M. we set the clocks back one …

Quoth the Raven “Corona more”

With a second COVID-19 lockdown coming to your town soon – Graz just went to warning level orange which is akin to Corona DEFCON 3 – you might want to think about what you’re going to read when you’re cooped up again. Sales of Camus’ The Plague spiked in the first lockdown. I highly recommend …

Because there just wasn’t enough plastic

OK Rewe, I’m confused. On a separate website that you operate, gemeinsam-nachhaltig.at (sustainable together), you laud and trumpet your “Raus aus Plastik” (Get out of plastic) initiative. You inform gullible consumers, like me,  that you are committed to “... 100% umweltfreundliche Verpackungen. Plastik so weit wie möglich aus den Regalen verbannen …” (... 100% environmentally …

Archimedes would bow before me

My people, I had an epiphany this morning preparing my porridge. I thought fresh ginger would give my daily warm grain-mix a new kick but didn’t want to spend time finely chopping the tasty but fibrous rhizome. Then it hit me. You can use your garlic press to finely mince ginger! Try it. It will …

WTF I need you to understand is…

Living languages constantly change. New words and phrases enter a language and old ones are forgotten. Often adaptations are gradual but occasionally a new phrase, like WTF (see the above Google NGram), quickly burst into a language and even infiltrate other languages. When observing the development of my first language – American English – I …

COVID-19 and memories

For millions of Europeans, COVID-19 containment measures created a longing for activities and daily routines previously taken for granted. Unfortunately, in Austria current infection rates are raising the specter of a second lockdown. During the initial lockdown, one of the hardest separations for me was the closing of my university's campus. I especially missed not …

And on the third day he woke up in a VR studio

In the last issue of the Die Zeit there was an interesting article about Vive Studios, a South Korean digital visualization and content creation company. Using VR technology and terabytes of data, they created an avatar of a seven year old girl who had died of organ failure and reunited her in a virtual world …