I have been nominated for an award by a true philosopher despite the cartoon I have posted recently. More precisely, I have been nominated by Daniel who runs The Unemployed Philosopher’s Blog!

The award comes with some really tough conditions, I try to rise to the challenge:

(Italics: Questions designed by the unknown originator)

1) Thank the blogger who nominated you and share a link to that blog.

That’s easy. Thanks Daniel – I feel flattered to be nominated by someone who is a professional in deep thinking and whose blog is really highly recommended reading. Dan manages to link philosophy – a so-called ancient academic discipline – to the workplace and basically to real life, the universe and everything in an entertaining and informative way.

2) Attach the award icon to your site.

That’s more difficult but feasible.

(Comment from the future: As per 2019, it is super difficult! Dan’s article is offline now as well the original link I had hot-linked from somebody else in this playful award nomination chain. I removed the dead links, and I hope Dan would be OK with the link from archive.org I added above!)

I am re-using the image link on Daniel’s blog, but it hurts the perfectionist in me. I am not sure if this is the original or if the image has probably undergone some mutations already when being forwarded from blogger to blogger, such as resizing or screenshotting (screenshooting?). Searching for images  seems to confirm the mutation theory. Also the questions seem to be subject to mutations. So for now I do not need to respond to: Have you ever Googled yourself and been shocked at what you found?

3) Answer some specific questions. Unlike many awards which just ask for some random things about you, this asks specific questions as follows:

• Your favorite color?
  Light with a wavelength of 555nm – glaring green. This is a) an appealing number b) the wavelength the human eye is most sensitive to, and c) very near the wavelength of the Argon Ion Laser (520nm). These geeky Star-Trek-/Star-Wars-like beams had once triggered my decision for specializing in laser physics.
• Your favorite animal?
  The particular cute little mouse I currently share a house with. It’s too quick and too shy for a photo, unfortunately – so I need to add a generic Wikimedia mouse image. The mouse is clever and perseverant, and it has managed to invade the house again after having been cast out once (gently). I learned from Wikipedia that mice are active in the day only when they feel really save. Since I hear it during the day I take this as a compliment. Affection is mutual.
• Your favorite non-alcoholic drink?
  I am a self-proclaimed nerd and geek. The answer should be self-explanatory.
• Facebook or Twitter?
  “None of the above” though I have a placeholder twitter profile in order to reserve the nickname nobody wants to use anyway (Just google for “elkement” and you know why – “Did you probably mean element“?)
• Your favorite pattern?
  Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities at the interface between liquids. I guess patterns in my favorite drink are also of this kind.
• Do  you prefer getting or giving presents?
  “None of the above” – I can’t deny it: I am an Christmas / presents / consumerism denier.
• Your favorite number?
  84. I have just generated it using this random number generator in order to avoid any resemblance with sensitive data such as passwords.
• Your favorite day of the week?
  Wednesday – in the middle of the week – because I am fond of symmetry (which contradicts the statement on irregular instabilities as my favorite pattern. Probably I am not that honest here.)
• Your favorite flower?
  Flowers which do not require any service, such as Hen and Chicks.
• What is your passion?
  Trying to find out how stuff really works, trying to understand all kinds of fundamental physics from original works and text books, and trying not to be overwhelmed by the futility of these efforts. In addition: Playing with my ancient non-blog websites – editing text files directly is my true calling.

4) And finally, offer “pay it forward” nominations, advising those bloggers that they have been nominated and how to accept. I’ve listed my nominees for the award below. This is the best reason to accept blogging awards — to spread the word about other blogs we enjoy!

This is the biggest challenge.  As I said in my first response on the About page: If every blogger nominates 5 other blogs and the delay time is about a week, then in about 15 weeks everybody on this planet will have been nominated. I owe to milleniumconjectures.com for pointing out that you always have a choice.

But I think I found the loophole to beat the system of exponential growth. The conditions as forwarded through maybe thousands of blogs do not state that there is a minimum number of blogs you need to recommend. Probably this is due to an unfortunate mutation of the nomination text, but I will use it to my advantage. I will stop inflation here and turn the ever increasing number of bifurcations into a single, 1-dimensional world line:

Since I have been nominated by a philosopher I do nominate a single blog written by another pensive blogger:

The nomination goes to:

Who Is Bert