Welcome and please look around!

Besides some personal information you can find:

• short references to zeolite catalysis,
• short items about China: characters, music, literature and history,
  Slide viewer: John Thomson's fotographs of China 1868-72.
  
• some software:
  Chinese tools: Lookup tool for CEDICT Chinese-English dictionary New 2011-8 version!
  and script to convert pinyin tone numbers to tone marks ,
  references to astronomical software: free planetarium programs HNSKY, XEphem,
• and also links to many news sites.

NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN OR FOXNEWS

Just Say ‘No’ to ACTA

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which has already been signed by several countries, poses a dangerous threat to the inherent freedom and openess of the Internet. Under ACTA, ISPs and websites will be given more power to track what we do online, while forcing them to turn over our information and reporting our activity to the authorities -- all in the name of copyright protection! While we respect the rights of creators, ACTA's ill-conceived provisions will have chilling effects on free speech everywhere.

The European Parliament still has to approve ACTA for it to go into effect around the world. If they vote NO, then ACTA will be effectively dismantled -- even in countries that have already signed it. We helped bring down SOPA and PIPA, now let's turn the fight to ACTA.

Call on the EU Parliament to take a stand and vote “NO” on ACTA!

Let your voice be heard, and send ACTA to the dustbin of history:

Sign the petition!

Access, in conjunction with European Digital Rights, and the Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue, has put together an overview outlining the human rights, trade, innovation, democracy, and legal implications of ACTA.
Read it here.

"We need to get rid of the seventeenth-century categories. Forget about Descartes's categories of res existence and res cogitance, that is, the extended reality of the material and the thinking reality of the mental.

We've inherited this vocabulary that makes it look as if mental and physical name different realms. And it's part of our popular culture, so we sing songs about your body and your soul or we have saying about how your mind is willing but your flesh is weak, and sometimes the other way around, the flesh is willing but the mind is weak. And we have inherited, not only philosophically but in our religious tradition, we've inherited the idea that there are two quite distinct realms, a realm of the spiritual and a realm of the physical. And I'm fighting against that. I want to say we live in one realm, it's got all of these features, and once you see that then the philosophical mind-body problem dissolves."

"Brains cause minds. All of our mental life is causally explained by the behavior of neuronal systems."

John R. Searle, Mills Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley.
© Copyright 1999, Regents of the University of California

Human Evolution

Have a look at your distant cousin !
The emergence of our ancestors, the story of Human Evolution, on BBC Science & Nature: Prehistoric Life.
New! That´s how our early hominid ancestor Ardipithecus ramidus may have looked 4.4 million years ago:


click here to see full size

BOINC is a program that lets you donate your idle computer time to science projects like Einstein@Home, Climateprediction.net, Rosetta@home, World Community Grid, and many others. After installing BOINC on your computer, you can connect it to as many of these projects as you like.

crunching numbers on my PC!

Catch a Wave From Space

Einstein@Home is a program that uses your computer's idle time to search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors.
The Einstein@Home project now has more than 100,000 users with computing credit and is currently searching the most sensitive 840 hours of data from LIGO's first science run at design sensitivity (S5).
Please ask your friends and colleagues to sign up!