In case you don't already know these, here are a few of the Youtube channels that I can wholeheartedly recommend, not just for their recent videos but also they backlog. List in no particular order.

Two Minute Papers, enthusiastic computer science paper summaries.

Kurzgesagt, fantastically animated science topics.

Stuckman's film reviews.

Welch's Intro to Machine Learning covers both the math and the hands on implementation.

Nerdwriter, more about film.

CGP Grey, fast-paced knowledge about things you never thought you wanted to know.

I added my twitter timeline to /twitter.

This obviously violates my principle to not embed external content, for speed and privacy reasons. But it only affects that one page and I don't want to code a more sophisticated integration right now.

I no longer carry my laptop home most days, just an Android tablet. To be able to blog with that setup, I installed Termux which provides a nice self-contained Linux environment with Apt to install more software goodies. The "Hacker Keyboard" makes vim and the command line more usable on a tablet and now I can quite comfortably edit blog entries in Markdown, commit and push to the server where Pelican re-builds the HTML site automatically.

For blogging pictures and URLs, they can be shared to Termux from other Adroid apps, I just had to drop a small script that writes the URL from the clipboard to a text file.

Germany is about to get a new president. He — yes, the position has been male-exclusive so far — does have mostly representative duties and not much power, and gets elected by an extended parliarment. Since the majority parties already have agreed upon a common candidate, current foreign minister Steinmeier, he is most likely to succeed president Gauck.

The reason I write this is the question asked by SpiegelOnline in their pay-walled section (not worth a link): Can Steinmeier's wife keep her job as a judge when she becomes "first lady"?

What the hell, SpOn? Well done propagating the antiquated norm that women should give up their careers whenever it fits the husband. What about asking whether Steinmeier can take the job, if his wife's profession really poses a conflict of interest?

Uppsala university recently published this Festschrift that lists all newly installed professors. As cover they chose an image that made me stop short: a single male surrounded by a flock of females. Not exactly what one would expect in usually quite gender-aware Swedish academia. It gets worse once you read the description that enlightens us that there is indeed only one professor in the picture, the man. And that the others are a "group of women from the Orient". Oh, dear!

However, I think there is a way to read all this sympathetically. The caption tells us further that the chaired professorship held by the man in the image is about semitic languages, which explains the connection to "oriental women" shortly after the second world war. Also, this chair is one of the positions newly filled by a women included in the booklet. So, benevolently, the message of the cover image can be read as "Look at how things were a few decades ago, and look inside for how much more equal they are today."

I remember it blew my mind a little in high-school, that loudspeakers and microphones are the same thing, in principle. A membrane with a magnet and a coil that you either use to drive or to measure.

It should therefore maybe not come as a surprise that the headphones that you plug into your computer can be used to spy on you.