Infinity

Hmm, today seems to be a good day for discussions in philosophy. This lecture is a lot more fun than the previous, though: How to imagine the 10th dimension

(if you have Macromedia Flash 8, this link takes you directly to the animation)

God and Reason

Here is the link to Ratzinger’s original text that started the controversy if Islam hasn’t done anything but damage.

It’s a pretty elitaristic piece of text as you would expect it from a university professor. However, when one is the Pope and busy with intercultural dialog, elitarism becomes quite easily a problem. The reactions can be read in the news, for example in the NY Times.

Update: Now there is also an commentary in the Tagesanzeiger that wraps the whole thing up.

iScrobbler keeps asking for keychain password

iScrobbler works nicely with my iTunes, but it got annoying since it kept asking for my keychain password for every track it wanted to submit. I googled for a solution for a week but didn’t find any, iScrobbler only mentions bugs about the inability to add a password to the keychain.

The trick is to search more generically and I found the solution in Apple’s support for OS X Mail. Change number of minutes of inactivity to be a little longer than your average track length in the settings of your login key and you’re all fine again.

Nightly updates

This is what happens when you do nightly updates on a Mac – suddenly your computer looks like a real jukebox.

Some of you may have noticed you can also track my playlist at the bottom right. LastFM lets you easily add various statistics to your blog, like in this case my weekly top artists:

In the dotcom era it was predicted that the internet will be the revolution in our music consumption. This was seven years ago. Today we are still at the beginning of this revolution. So much about time to market.

Why women are the key to prosperity

Raschi blogs about a friend of his, a young mother, and her problem to unite parenting and her job. The problem: part-time jobs simply don’t exits for a software engineer with her qualifications.

In last year’s political discussion, the Society of Swiss students discussed in Berne about how to secure our old age pensions. The strategy is very simple in its core: let the women work fulltime and set more children into this world again. Here comes the reason why:

In Switzerland, the AHV is based on a contract of generations, that means todays working generation pays the old age pension of those who are retired. In return, the forthcoming generations will pay for today’s working generation once they reach retirement.

This works neatly as long as there is a sufficient net reproduction ratio in a given population. Unfortunately, it’s not sufficient in the case of Switzerland like for many other western countries. In other words, more children need to be born again.

However, social welfare not only depends on the number of young people who are able to sustain the other parts of the population. It also depends on the prosperity of that population’s economy. Aymo Brunetti of the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs repeatedly pointed out in his columns in the Weltwoche that sustained prosperity of an economy is only possible if it’s able to increase its production. One key factor in increasing Switzerland’s production is to have women pursue their professional careers just like a man would.

It is obvious that women are the key factor to our future. It is also obvious that the support for women isn’t where it should be (although it should be noted that with the redefinition of traditional roles men face similar issues). Instead, I increasingly observe (i.e. the Weltwoche increasingly writes about) voices calling for a restauration of the traditional roles. However, taking a step back isn’t the remedy we need. The next step forward starts with the insight that the combination of one’s job and parenting isn’t a neglectable problem that can e left alone to the respective couples.