According to the Basler Zeitung, the Swiss Post bought the Swiss search engine search.ch in order to offer an all-embracing range of online services. They already offer email and e.g email-to-snailmail services.
That's a very interesting development for a traditional institution with their national monopoly.
There does not seem to be an official statement by the search engine guys yet, but you can read the statement of Swiss Post. I guess the Bernhard Seefeld blog -he's one of three associates of the company and probably quite wealthy by the time- will soon have enlightening explanations, too.

I was told today that the old rainbow-colored Apple logo is a homage to Alan Turing, as you know one of the icons of computer science.
He was homosexual and died from the effects of a poisoned apple he left half eaten. A half eaten apple in the rainbow colors of the gay community flag. Self-evident, brilliant. Strange to surprisedly see something this apparent you didn't see for a long time..
Google found this reference.

Yesterday I attended a lecture quite unrelated to my regular studies for no other reason than amusement: Rechtssoziologie (sociology of law) by Fribourg's dynamic duo Niggli/Amstutz.
And it proved to be amusing indeed. The topic was Max Weber, although the two disgressed a lot while doing their lecture in a funny dialog, Niggli always interrupting his apparently good friend Amstutz.
In their dialectic style they talked e.g. about the dichotomies of rational/irrational and formal/material and demonstrated them using real cases (and lots of tongue-in-cheek remarks), explained how a decision of our supreme court, the Bundesgericht is plainly indistinguishable from magic.
All in all it was a worthwhile experience, the two young professors' teaching was great fun, though a bit chatty and redundant at times.
Anyway, I definitely should attend more of other faculties' lectures, the contrast to what I in everday's computer science courses was amazing: rhetoric is much more a part of their game, they seem to be much more confident in what they say than our average computer scientist, although it does not seem as if this difference is inherent to their subjects. Well, perhaps it's because the science of the jurisprudents is just much, much older.
So I hope to attend their lecture again next week, perhaps I'll even find the courage to ask the questions and doubts I had about their theories.. but that's a topic for another post.

The New York Times writes about blogging role model Gregor.
He might well be the most famous person I ever talked with :)
But what a pity they misspelled the URL of his blog.

[ via Greg, of course ]

Ok, I might be among the very last bloggers subscribing to the del.icio.us social bookmarks manager.. but now I did, the link is down there in the right hand column now.

Among today's links:

• Hypermedia Design Pattern Repository
• DatabaseStyles

Silvan's del.icio.us blogmark plugin would be nice now, of course..

2 Minutes ago, my hacking was interrupted by a guy ringing the doorbell as if his life depended on reaching me. I went down to open and *TADAA!*, it was a nice surpise indeed: A DHL guy delivering my review copy of "Hackers and Painters" by Paul Graham!
First impression: Seems well done, O'Reilly quality. The tagline "This book will force you to rethink your ideas about the nature of computer programming" sounds a bit too pompous.. but never mind :) Will start reading ASAP.

The Wire's newsletter on Bad Bonn Kilbi, a festival right around the corner:

Co-sponsored by The Wire, this festival in the small Swiss town of Düdingen is now in its 14th year and once again hosts a protean line-up of sounds from the outer limits.
Performers include Circle, Motorpsycho, Haco, Alog, Maja Ratkje, Bo Wiget/Alex Buess/Michael Werthmüller/Massimo Zu/Marino Pliakas, Chicks On Speed, DAT Politics, Spunk and more.

Düdingen, various venues, 10-12 June, www.badbonn.ch

Music and Lectures, Sports, fine Food and good Movies: UniNacht Basel, 2004/06/18. At the university. At night. Good idea.

Danny Ayers: ms:WinFS rdfs:subClassOf w3c:RDF
"I get the impression that Microsoft have spotted the “unstructured” data problem and applied 'simplest thing that could possibly work' (on an MS platform). The result certainly looks like a narrow subset of the RDF model."

Weird thoughts in my head these days. Are mathematics as a whole a system in the terms of 'Systemtheorie'? If so, how is this compatible with Gödelian externalization/metaization? If I only had the time to explore such issues.. I don't even know where to begin reading. This is on my list -just to get a grip-, can anybody make recommendations?