[ via Wilhelm Tux ]

As the ETH is celebrating its 150 years of existence, they are actively collecting visions -essays- for the next century.

One of the winners of their essay competition is Markus Dapp with his contribution "ETH Zurich -A Pioneer in Digital Sustainability!", a fictional keynote by the ETH president in the year 2030.

In its 5 pages the essay tells the future history of a successful Free Software Movement, of thriving Creative Commons and ETH's (fictional) active role in promoting and creating open knowledge accessible to all. Being rather short, the essay/speech doesn't go to the ground of all issues discussed, but it's a great political pamphlet in the cause of sustainability in a knowledge society. The closing remark about the UN as a globals government wouldn't have been necessary, though. :)

All winning essays will be published in a book and are available online - under a CreativeCommons "by sa" license.

Just got a mail (by Thomas Nicolai) that the University of St.Gallen are launching their research platform "Alexandria" today.

While it doesn't look spectacular at first glance, from the inside there's supposed to be some sweet pieces: They use the inofficial MySQL5 XPath support and query Wikipedia through some secret web services interface! The PHP sources are to be published under the LGPL. Now that sounds sweet.

Update: The WS interface to Mediawiki is not a secret, but it ain't active in Wikipedia. Nicolai just adapted it to PHP5 and runs his queries against a local mirror. He will tell about the experiences in this project in an upcoming PHPUG Meeting.

Today I bought back, or rather compensated, 736 kilograms of carbon dioxide.

Myclimate will compensate the climate effect of my last flights:

«Zurich (CH) - Dublin (IE) - Zurich (CH)

This flight covers a distance of 2'476 km.
One myclimate ticket costs 27.00 Swiss Francs and compensates for the emission of 736 kilograms of CO2.

In order to save this amount of CO2, a solar collector from the myclimate project in Eritrea must be run for 9 months.»

Well, this smells a bit like good old catholic indulgence selling ("contritio cordis, confessio oris, satisfactio operis"), but after all there's nothing wrong with a healthy bit of idealism, I guess. 736 kilograms sounds like a whole lot of CO2, after all.


By the way: If you're a reader from Fribourg you most probably know what missionary made me do this ;)