Dr. Claus Volko

Yesterday I spent 6-7 hours studying without interruption. I'm currently studying for my psychiatry exam. This is the first subject that interests me. (Imagine: I've already taken the pains of studying medicine for more than five years, and now finally a subject has come that interests me! What should this be called? Masochistic personality disorder, perhaps? ;-)) In addition to the standard textbooks, I've borrowed yet another book focusing on personality disorders only. Since I know a lot of people with peculiar traits, I can relate to this subject well and therefore it's especially interesting for me. Let's see if I've already memorized the 9 diagnostic criteria of schizoid personality disorder: 1. enjoys only a few activities 2. emotional coldness, flat affect 3. inability to display warmth and anger 4. no apparent reaction to criticism or praise 5. little interest in sex 6. loner 7. prefers dealing with his/her phantasy world 8. lack of social contacts 9. p

Von den Überlegungen, ein Mehrheitswahlrecht einzuführen, wie sie etwa in http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=2638464 geäußert wurden, halte ich nichts, aber auch gar nichts. Die Proponenten dieses Systems vergessen ganz darauf, dass die Verfassung eine "Gewaltenteilung" vorsieht. Das heißt, dass Exekutive und Legislative zwei verschiedene Gewalten sind. Warum muss die Regierung unbedingt die Mehrheit im Parlament haben? Das bedeutet doch nur, dass Exekutive und Legislative praktisch in einer Hand sind, was dem Geist der Verfassung widerspricht! Andererseits ist das Wählen von Listen mit der Vier-Prozent-Hürde zu überdenken; ein Personenwahlrecht, das auch Außenseitern Chancen gäbe, wäre begrüßenswert.

I watched "Hero", a Chinese Wuxia movie, on TV today. Last week the same channel presented "Zatoichi", a Japanese sword-fighting movie. I guess the channel will continue broadcasting films in this style. They're very interesting since they depict the Asian culture of former centuries. Much of the way people in these films think seems strange to me. But this has made me come to the conclusion that human existence is simply not exactly only what we've been told from our parents and the older people in our community. Human beings are wild animals, and only law and tradition made them peaceful. These films from Medieval China and Old Japan show what people are like if the ethical and judical systems are still less developed. The two assassins' decisions not to kill the Emporer in "Hero" when they had the opportunity to showed the power of intuition - "Calligraphy has taught me", one of them said. The king's dismayed approval of the pe

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.  - Aldous Huxley I'll add this one to my list of favourite quotes.

I've added some of my ideas (there are many more lying around on my harddisk) concerning a strategy role-playing game of the kind of Shining Force to my homepage. If I'm really bored, I'll perhaps try to implement the game, but currently this isn't the case. BTW, I've already coded a 64b intro for our competition myself. Due to optimization, it's only 59 bytes in fact. I guess the winner of the compo will be somebody who has the idea to try to implement an interesting algorithm in just 64 bytes and succeeds at this enterprise.

The 64b intro competition has now been launched, the deadline is December 24th, 2006. Let's see how much sucess it will be! http://www.hugi.scene.org/compo/

Today the Austria 06 award ceremony was broadcast on TV. In the category "research", mathematician and game theorist Karl Sigmund of Vienna University was awarded the prize. That's interesting! I'd have expected the Med-Austron guy to get the prize, as it's related to medical research, but apparently, even basic, pure theoretical research with no obvious practical application is also something many Austrians consider prizeworthy. (The prize winner was chosen based on public voting.) Interesting. The main editor of "Die Presse" (the newspaper that hosted the ceremony) behaved in such an unlikeable manner when awarding the humanitarian prize that I decided to stop reading that paper.

The Wikipedia page about Hugi is getting better, but there's still a lot that hasn't been mentioned yet. Anybody please feel free to make (serious, constructive) suggestions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugi