Newsletter

Week 02/2025

Aufstehen, rausgehen

Nikolaus Forgó

03 Jan 2025 — 4 min read

Christmas and New Year Decoration in Céfalu (Sicily) on Dec. 31.

NSFW (Nikolaus’ Song For the Week)

This week’s song is from Elen and I am really planning that this should become some kind of a motto for 2025.

A nice live version with Ina Müller is on YouTube.

I hope that all of us will have the time necessary to relax.

Retrospect

I spent a week on Sicily. What I hadn’t expected was that there is quite some snow here - an not only on Aetna. What you see below is the Madonie, with Piano Battaglia.

I learned that there are several ski resorts on the island (but didn’t go skiing).

The other thing I hadn’t expected is the size of the waste problem and waste crime. When you leave the touristic centers it might happen quickly that you end up in a street covered with plastic trash everywhere.

Outside Céfalu (that is very beautiful and touristic) the countryside and also the villages are much poorer, rougher and emptier than I expected.

Streetview in Piazza Amerina. Hundreds of houses to be sold here.

Traces of depopulation and rural exodus are visible almost everywhere off the coast. The economic recession is obvious and climate change will increase the economic pressure. Regional politics look very ‘complicated’ from the outside, as well as individual political careers that might sometimes - also in the higest ranks and also today - still come with alleged mafia relations.

However:

I saw some old art

Unknown Sailor by Antonello da Messina

and some very old.

“Bikini girls” - athletes, actually - in Villa Romana del Casale.

And there’s lots of light here and the sea is beautiful and temperatures are gorgeous.

Although food is as great as expected (Arancini!, Cannolli!), Sicilian cuisine in Vienna (such as in Casa Borbone or in Cucina Ballerini) remains more than just competitive.

I will return to Vienna on Monday and will jump right into a very intense week on Tuesday (let’s start with Elen’s motto in week 3, then).

Prospect

We will have three #arsboni sessions next week, two of which are special editions. Tuesday at 18.00 is about the Legal Literacy Project that tries to communicate legal knowledge to the general public, in particular in schools.

Wednesday at 18.00 is a conversation with the head of Austria’s federal competition authority, Dr. Natalie Harsdorf.

And Thursday, at 17.00, will be wih Prof. Dr. Jana Lasser who works on hate speech and counter speech from a computer science background (and whom I mer in Graz recently, see Weekly 47/2024).

Look and Feel

I am (somehow) back to (some kind of) slow morning running.

I heard two interesting podcasts then that I want to recommend. The first one is from Übermedien.

It’s about how much digital content gets lost and how difficult it is to archive data. Not surpeisingly, copyright is one of the reasons why things are dificult. One of the more prominent examples for this kind of ‘going dark’ is given by Telepolis, taking everything from before 2021 offline.

I followed one of the recommendations given there and currently read (with an ebook reader, ironically)

which is nice.

It’s somehow very ironic that one can chose nowadays to publish either in formats that are not read but will remain (books, printed journals) or in formats that are (hardly) read but will not remain (everything digital). Things will be worse soon with all these petabytes of AI-generated content nobdy will be able to reproduce and to distinguish from human work.

First internet archive snapshot from juridicum.at - dated February 29 2000. Everything before that moment is (presumably) lost forever, as well as everything apart from the title page itself - that was (as I remember vividly) beautifully designed by Dr. Florian Philapitsch, probably in late 1999.

The other interesting podcast I heard is, again, from Die Dunkelkammer - a science (communication) series with Matthias Farlik.

There’s a lot to think about in there, in particular on everything that is not yet said (such as the total absence of the humainties and social sciences - in particular science and technology studies).