Dr. Claus Volko

Today, I have had an ingenious idea that has helped me a lot find out what I am really striving for. Here is the result of this idea: This image shows the three branches of creative activity humans perform: Engineering, Art and Science. There are, of course, many other things human beings do (e.g. healthcare, politics, military,...), but those things are not creative. Being creative does not mean that you have to draw a painting that looks good or compose music. That is only one branch of creativity - Art, where aesthetics matter. But Science and Engineering are fields of creative activity, too. So you can actually be creative - create something - without having an aesthetic intuition, e.g. by writing a scientific paper or working out a mathematical proof, or by creating a mechanism or building a machine that works. Engineering is the Generation of Working Things. That means, what matters is that the result works. The difference to Science, which is the Generation of Knowledge

I purchased this book out of curiosity, and after reading the first couple of chapters I can conclude it has been worth it. It is of high relevance to my own life. In the introduction, Gladwell talks about an American town of Italian immigrants with a far lower rate of heart diseases than anywhere else in the country. The physicians who studied these phenomena came to the conclusion that this was neither due to genetics nor to nutrition, but due to the community (and, as Uwe Rohr and I would say, due to the lack of stress these people experienced in their lives, in spite of working hard). This made this town an outlier. In the first chapter, Gladwell explains why people born in particular months have an advantage in being selected by (sports) talents scouts: if they were born short after the cut-off date, they are more mature and developed than their peers, and so they are considered more talented. This has the effect that many young people who are actually equally talented genetic

As I have been talking about it to a fellow Doctor of Medicine, I would like to point out that my most important scientific publication so far, "Model approach for stress induced steroidal hormone cascade changes in severe mental diseases", can be accessed free of charge here . The publication has not gained the attention it deserves yet. Basically it proposes a model how changes to the steroidal hormone cascade might be the cause or at least a symptom of several mental illness. What this publication does not mention is that we have found out that applying high doses of isoflavones alters the steroidal hormone cascade, which has a beneficial effect in severe mental illness. Direct link to the PDF file

The wonderful German-language book "Digital Art Natives: Praktiken, Artefakte und Strukturen der Computer-Demoszene" by Dr. Doreen Hartmann is now available at Amazon and other online book stores. It mentions Hugi several times, e.g. on page 111: Drei der wichtigsten Diskmags sind: ZINE, das von 1989 bis 1991 als Amiga-Diskmag und erneut 2007 und 2008 für Windows und als Online-Magazin herausgegeben wurde ( http://zine.bitfellas.org ) sowie PAiN, das von 1994 bis 2007 produziert wurde ( http://pain.scene.org ) und Hugi, ein PC-Magazin, das seit 1996 herausgegeben wird und mittlerweile 38-mal veröffentlicht wurde ( http://hugi.scene.org ). (Three of the most important diskmags are: ZINE, which was published from 1989 to 1991 as an Amiga diskmag and again 2007 and 2008 for Windows and as an online magazine, PAiN, which was produced from 1994 to 2007, and Hugi, a PC magazine that has been released 38 times since 1996.) On page 125: Bis heute fehlen in den Publikationen

I have noticed that you can gain huge speed optimization by doing calculations involving powers of two in a clever way. Originally I had several passages like this in my code: for (int j = 0; j < n; j++) i |= Math.Pow(2, j); When I replaced the generic Math.Pow call with a call to a new method, I already gained a lot of speed. private static ulong Math_Pow2(int j) { return (ulong)1 << j; } But that was not all I was able to do. I gained yet more speed by doing the loop this way: for (int j = n, ulong Math_Pow2_j = 1; j > 0; j--, Math_Pow2_j <<= 1) i |= Math_Pow2_j; From originally 5 minutes, I managed to improve the run-time of a calculation to less than 30 seconds. Bit shifts can help getting your code a lot faster.

When I grew up there was a rivalry between Basic and Pascal programmers. Most people who started programming in the 1990s either started with Basic or Pascal. Those who used Pascal often conceived themselves as being superior to Basic programmers. That was mainly because it was so easy to program in Basic. You did not even have to define variables. Thus you were not forced to keep the number of variables low and your program might become bloated - bad coding style. However, some of the resentments were based on misconceptions. For instance, Pascal programmers who had no experience with then modern Basic dialects thought Basic meant that you had to use line numbers and write spaghetti code. That was not the case with dialects such as Quick Basic - you did not have to use line numbers and there were control structures such as do/loop which made the usage of the goto statement obsolete. I was one of those who started with Basic and I do not regret it. In fact I have decided that I will

The Internet enables every user to express their views and ideas and get them published. In the years prior to the advent of Internet access for the general population, it was almost impossible to get heard unless you were a professional journalist. Diskmags were a way to get published - almost the only way. While nowadays this aspect of diskmags is obsolete, nothing beats the charm of a good diskmag. Yet nobody really cares about releasing new diskmags. In the years 1992 to 1995, there were several diskmags for IBM-compatible PC that issued in the German language. Six of them were pretty good, the others are not worth mentioning. The six decent diskmags were: Blackmail, Platinum, Skyline, MicroCode, HotMag and Suicide. All of these mags ceased to issue in 1996 or 1997. In 1996, two new mags were founded, Hugi and Cream. Cream stopped issuing after two years and Hugi became an English-language magazine in 1998. After 1998, there were only two short-lived German diskmags, WildMag and