chaosworks.org

16 January 2023

Data Science with Doctor Who (2005)

As a long time fan of Doctor Who (2005), I hit a wall watching the show around 2020. I really wanted to like the new (Thirteenth) Doctor, but somehow the show just wasn’t as magical anymore as it used to be in the old days. After I suffered through Orphan 55, I glanced over the IMDb Ratings of the show, and realized that I did not seem to be alone. The ratings had gone down significantly, and I wondered why this might be. So I created a spreadsheet and plotted the data of the ratings. I considered more advanced methods […]

5 December 2022

What makes a great teacher?

I recently had cause to reminisce about my experience in #teaching undergraduate classes at university, and especially about what makes a great teacher. My background in this is that I taught tutorials starting in 2015 and undergraduate seminars starting in 2018, I attended plenty of ‘train the trainer’ courses, and worked closely with a wonderful team of academic teachers for years. Aside from my teaching experience, I have obviously also experienced a vast variety of academic teachers as a student. Here’s my humble opinion on what makes a great teacher: Show enthusiasm for the topic. If you’re truly passionate about […]

5 October 2022

Delving into the past of this blog

This blog has existed in various forms, with a few breaks, since March 2005. There might even have been earlier versions of this blog, but probably in the form of some cringey “personal website”, as they were all the rage from 2000-2005, before blogs were a thing. Since I didn’t really blog much the last few years, I took my blog offline for a while. Reasons for that are varied, one of them is that I was definitely too busy with other things in my life, and another is that WordPress has become a UX nightmare for the casual blogger. […]

3 October 2022

Read Dead Redemption 2

Rarely have a been carried away by a video game as I have been by Red Dead Redemption 2. What an absolutely amazing, outstanding, and somewhat heartbreaking game. Admittedly, Arthur and I had a rough start, I really hated Chapter 1 because learning the controls in this game (and learning to not accidentally shoot people) takes way too long. But once that was over and the story truly began, the game really grew on me, and I enjoyed just riding around this breathtaking, pristine landscape, back when times were simpler and the world was not quite insane yet. Just Arthur […]

1 September 2022

Dissertation defended!

Yesterday five years of hard work finally came to a conclusion in the defense of my dissertation. Being a PhD student was the most challenging thing I ever did in my professional/academic career – all the memes are true. While you’re doing it, you feel like you are climbing a never ending mountain that just keeps getting higher and higher. And when you finally think you reach the end (submitting the dissertation), there’s another mountain waiting for you (defending the dissertation), and then another small hill (publishing the dissertation). And only then it’s finally done. How do you even compress […]

29 April 2022

From the Pacific Northwest to California

Have you every planned a journey really badly? I certainly planned this one really, really badly. The plan was to go to Portland, Vancouver and San Francisco. But due to ridiculously more expensive single flights, I decided to fly to San Francisco, stay a night, and then fly to Portland from there. Well that was a bit of a nightmare. But let’s start from the beginning. I left Germany around 10am, and after a brief layover in Copenhagen, entered the 11 hour flight to SF. It was alright but the flight gave me a headache, and I was exhausted by […]

4 April 2022

Remembrance

I am standing in this big, bright room, surrounded by windows on three sides, and with skylights on the top. Next to me is the big, open kitchen, the floor shining in dark brown, I can see it through the two big archways and the window. All around me is the biggest sofa I have ever seen, in a somewhat worn light blue color, inter-spaced by little tables and lamps. The walls are decorated with trinkets. I can feel the soft carpet under my feet. The sun is shining, and I can feel its warmth and brightness. When I look […]

4 March 2022

My very own “face book”

I have been participating in the daily photo project dailyfratze.de for over 15 years. My profile there is not public anymore, so sorry if you were excited about checking out the past 15 years of my life. I used this milestone to create a printed version of my profile there, with one month per page being displayed in the book. And actually, here is your quick flip-through opportunity to take a look at the past 15 years of my life:

10 January 2022

The Firs

The streets are littered with the corpses of the firs. These proud, defenseless creatures are subject to a gruesome ritual that repeats every year when the days grow shortest. They are brutally severed from their nourishing roots, disconnected from their homeland and their families. Then, as death slowly creeps up on them, they are abducted and put into the residence of their worst enemy, the human. In a ritual manner, the human decorates the dying fir with shiny trinkets for its own amusement, all while the fir is slowly and painfully decaying, its body dehydrating a bit more every day. […]