Adolf Hitler suffered from uncontrollable flatulence. Intestinal gas, ironically. Against this, his doctor gave him special Anti-Gas pills, and every morning a cocktail containing vitamins, testosterone, amphetamines, liver extracts, laxatives, sedatives, atropine, glucose and opiates - with a bit of cocaine for the eyes. Read the full funny story here.

Maybe a little late, for the problem at the Berghof, but scientists designed a mouse that cannot smell fear anymore - it has to learn it the hard way.

Here you can find the beautiful drawings of Ernst Haeckel. They digitized his monumental book “Kunstformen der Natur” (Artforms of nature). A vast amount of stupendously detailed drawings of plants and animals, some of which you will never have seen before.

A brain like a rainbow. Scientists modied the neurons of mice with genes for fluorescent proteins that originally come from jellyfish. When you now slice the brain, it looks like a Pollock.

When I went to the hairdresser I skimmed through their new-techniques book, which inspired the girl in the painting. But there is more to it: When men see blond women, they get stupider.

Anti-war protesters in Washington and New York are now spied on by small, dragonfly-like robotic insects with cameras.

In India a girl that looks like the god Shiva, with four legs and four arms undergoes surgery, successfully. I was moved by the way she looks on one of the pictures: so deeply puzzled about her condition, her incarnation.

In Georgia the police now looks like Mickey Mouse. Aesthetics in the age of terror part 436. But where is the cat?

Students build a balloon and let it rise almost into space - with great pictures and videos.

The Yellowstone chaldera, a magma reservoir of the size of Los Angeles that sits under the Yellowstone Park, rose 9 inches in the last three years. If it would erupt, it would destroy large parts of the U.S. Imagining such an event triggers our ever escalating desire for catastrophe.

Much in the same way, its always delightful and gratifying to watch an intricate piece of technology dissolve to dust. See this Phantom jet crashing into a wall. In a crash like this ashes turns to ashes. A way of humanizing technology.

And over our heads comet 17P/Holmes expands, becomes the largest object in the solar system, and glimmers faintly in the night sky (see Hubble images here) .

Garrett Lisi, an impoverished surfer dude comes up with an “Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything”(link to the paper). A theory that attempts to unify quantum mechanics and relativity. The beauty of it lies in the fact that it is based on E8 an intricate eight-dimensional mathematical pattern that’s only fully understood by mathematicians this year. If written out in print, it would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

All his life Arnold Odermatt was a police photographer who documented traffic accidents in the Swiss canton of Niwalden. His delicately composed photos have a wonderful calmness and unique atmosphere. Some crashed cars look like they were kissing, or a wounded doll. The tenderness of crash. Only after his retirement his photos were discovered by the art world.

And finally, some beautiful photographs of deserted Chinese factories.

And here is the video of the painting with a bit of music I did the other day.

It’s been a long time since the last post and painting. Here are the fragments that accompany and inspired the painting that developed over the last couple of weeks.

The surgeon says: Now I give you some “beer” to relax. He says: Ok, I give you some shots. Ah… maybe one more. Things become fluffy. The surgeon opens the hand, screwing-out the titanium. The screwdriver breaks. He says: I’ll be right back. He puts on his clothes - a nice three-piece suit. He takes the subway. It’s Friday afternoon. He borrows the screwdriver-set from a hospital across town. He takes the subway. Changes the three-piece suit to a more greenish garment. And two and a half hours later the titanium is removed. The patient enjoys the improved mobility of his hand and the amnesia.

Late “summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee, with a shower of rain“.

The kilogram got lighter, a bit. By definition, nothing changes. Just like it’s length.

Visited the documenta in Kassel. The city’s atmosphere is beautifully transformed by thousands of visitors from all countries and backgrounds. The art, a massive pile of average stuff. Iconic: An installation of guitars triggered by a wheel. The gain and volume of the amps glued to the 4 o’clock position. No feedback, no force. - And I never in my life want to see rugs from Afghanistan - or feminist rugs again. The tribal aesthetic of so many objects is nauseating. There is a market on a street nearby, showing the same globalized kitsch. Every room is clogged by people gathering in mindless herds around guides explaining the art. Contaminating the area around them with explicitness and the slime-like art jargon of the 80ies. So little stuff that reflected the spirit and problems of today’s art. Nothing that had to do with computers, media, information, the brain, the gene, terror and anti-terror-terror. But the security personnel was recruited from local high school graduates. Mostly girls. And people used them as their mediator, which added a nice naive and lively flavour.

Sometimes art is a hoax. Sometimes a serious hoax-device, that gets you arrested and nearly killed.

A guy from Florida is asking John Kerry questions. While Kerry answers them, the guy is tasered by the security personnel. But nobody around cares. Tasering somebody seems to have become part of our social fabric. Almost imperceptible, below the threshold.

With delight we watch a new bomb explode, we call her “father”, and point out that this weapon of mass destruction is environmentally friendly. A few thousand kilometers away, a new kind of fungi adapted to feed on nuclear radiation. And also neutrons are not so neutral anymore. While peeping toms peep peeping toms. But aren’t you too?

Open your ear-lids and listen to the new Modeselektor, Thurston Moore and Ween albums!

And the Pope may live in hell, by his own standards, ironically, by receiving a bit of euthanasia, that he decreed a sin and in a quite inhumane way denied others.

Gerhard Richter’s fantastic abstract stained glass window in Cologne Cathedral is revealed. We see the spiritual world as a field of random pixels, and we cannot get them into focus. A catholic cardinal is afraid of it: The window could be in a mosque too. And ornaments are dangerous. A beautiful demonstration, that randomness can be quite political. Like Poisson distributions, that may be a way the brain uses information.

B.F. Skinner, the behaviourist psychologist once made an experiment rewarding pigeons randomly. The pigeon reasons: ah, I guess I tilted my head a bit, when I got the reward, I guess I’ll do that. Hm… no reward…maybe I make two steps to the right…and there comes a reward…so it tilts the head, makes a few steps…and is disappointed…and makes three steps back, and is rewarded…and so on. And after a couple of hours of random reinforcement the pigeon dances in a most bizarre, frantic limbo. Consult these dance instruction manuals! But unlike the pigeon, some birds see true magnetic north.

And the facial expression robot grins his silicone smile. But actually faces are everywhere.

G.B. Shaw was asked: How do you spell “fish”? And he answered: “ghoti”. “Gh” like in “tough”, “o” like in “women” and “ti” like in “nation”.

Radiohead “sells” their beautiful new album (all videos plus bonus songs here) for free. And I face the prompt and wonder what I should pay - what do I expect others expect me expecting others… - where is the game theory book when you need it? What is permissible, when everything is permissible? The beautiful thing seems to be: not everything. Or in Dollars: 7$. But some pirate and some make money. What would A. J. Jacobs say to this? He lived a whole year according to the bible, wrote a book about it and gave an funny interview.

You meet a girl, she smiles. She has a website. You know her poems, her paintings, her stories, sense her infatuations. Infinite possibilities. A hermetic love-letter from me.

Enjoy the hermetic and open the pandemonium!

All links:

Tetris, Tetris effect, Simpsons-Tetris, Tetris story, bow-fishing, no incarnation, Guantanamo poems, grand tour 1, grand tour 2, treehouses, global duck, little duck, nude posture scandal, living with strangers, empathy causes similarity, slow dancing, memory and DNA, faces and shoes, Elvis sandwich, post a secret, tail-star, laughing rat, deleted images