Zuckerberg did not get it

Formal written question to our Newell Road neighbor, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Edgewood Drive:

Describe how your business philosophy distinguishes the harm to individuals from the harm to society.

The officially recorded answer for posterity:

We recognize that we have made mistakes, and we are committed to learning from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward. As our CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said, when you are building something unprecedented like Facebook, there are going to be mistakes. What people should hold us accountable for is learning from the mistakes and continually doing better—and, at the end of the day, making sure that we’re building things that people like and that make their lives better.

Particularly in the past few months, we’ve realized that we need to take a broader view of our responsibility to our community. Part of that effort is continuing our ongoing efforts to identify ways that we can improve our privacy practices. We’ve heard loud and clear that privacy settings and other important tools are too hard to find and that we must do more to keep people informed. So, we’re taking additional steps to put people more in control of their privacy. For instance, we redesigned our entire settings menu on mobile devices from top to bottom to make things easier to find. We also created a new Privacy Shortcuts in a menu where users can control their data in just a few taps, with clearer explanations of how our controls work. The experience is now clearer, more visual, and easy-to-find. Furthermore, we also updated our terms of service that include our commitments to everyone using Facebook. We explain the services we offer in language that’s easier to read. We’ve also updated our Data Policy to better spell out what data we collect and how we use it in Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and other products.

Obviously, he did not get it. A net worth of $77.6 billion does not make you smart. Rejoice, there is hope for you.

洋、お誕生日おめでとうございます。

Lakota Waldorf School Fighting Poverty on an Indian Reservation

If you are still looking to give a Christmas or year's end gift that can make a big impact, consider a school in one of the poorest counties in the USA. It is the Lakota Waldorf School in Kyle, SouthDakota, the only Waldorf School on an Indian Reservation.

Swiss native Isabel Stadnick is one of the founders and current administrator, and her husband Robert Stadnick is a tribal member. In 1992, they traveled to the Goetheanum with two additional Lakota tribal members, when Dr. Heinz Zimmermann—the head of the Waldorf movement—encouraged the founders to incorporate the Lakota language and culture.

The Lakota Waldorf School's mission is to empower the children and initiate their educational process with creativity, positivity, community and Lakota culture. The Lakota Waldorf School is a small school, surrounded by never-ending prairie, in the midst of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. This reservation is one of the poorest counties in the United States, with an unemployment rate of 75% to 80%. Many of the local people suffer from severe alcohol and drug abuse, and much of the reservation is considered a food desert.

Because of these circumstances, the Lakota Waldorf School is an incredible support system for the 24 children who attend the school. They provide the children with wholesome meals and send them home on Friday afternoon with a weekend pack filled with healthy snacks since many of the families do not have the resources for a nutritious meal.

Each morning, the children are greeted with the wonderful smell of a healthy breakfast of oatmeal, scrambled eggs from their chicken or rice pudding with honey and raisins. Lunch consists of only organic food, vegetables from their garden and bison meat from a local store. All meals are cooked at the school.

The sixteen kindergartners and eight first and second graders that make up the Lakota Waldorf School, begin their day with the morning verse in the Lakota language, Lakota songs, music, and stories. The curriculum includes language, arts, math, science, and social studies as well as handwork, flute music, painting, drawing and modeling classes and storytelling throughout the day.

Currently, the entire school consists of one small building which houses the kindergarten, kitchen, and office. There is a separate small building for the first and second grade. To continue supporting students and their families, they are planning to add grades 3, 4 and 5 and up to 8th grade in the coming years. Plans are also underway to build an urgently needed additional building, housing a bigger kitchen, three or four additional classrooms and a healthy café shop. The new building would be built with only straw bales and solar and wind energy. Jeff Dickinson, well known as a Waldorf and a clean energy architect, is involved in the addition of the school.

Not only is Waldorf education important for these children, but the support they receive is crucial to their overall well-being. The families cannot afford to pay tuition. Therefore, the school is 100% donation-funded. The Lakota Waldorf School, the administration, current and future students and families would appreciate any donation, small or large, to sustain Waldorf education on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

People who volunteered and spent a week working with the students, who are growing up in severe poverty and some in traumatic circumstances, can personally attest to the positive impact the school has on each of their lives. The sincere hope is that the Lakota Waldorf School will continue to thrive and educate young ones for years to come.

Please visit the website www.lakotawaldorfschool.org and consider making a donation to ensure the survival of this extraordinary school.

Compression on Newell Road

Silicon Valley's Newell Road starts at West Bayshore Road in East Palo Alto. After crossing the narrow bridge over the San Francisquito Creek into Palo Alto, it continues south-southwest then dead south to the public library and the art center. After crossing Embarcadero Road, it proceeds southeast and terminates at David Starr Jordan Middle School.

Jordan had become famous around 1977 because Xerox PARC gave it an Alto—which it called "interim Dynabook"—catapulting the pupils in a new world of windows, icons, mice, and pointing (WIMP), as described by Howard Rheingold.

Maybe, the most famous person to live on Newell Road was Dr. Norman J. Lewiston, a professor of pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine who had three legal wives and whose life was made into a movie (The Man with Three Wives, his last name was changed to Grayson). Newell Road was where he lived with his original wife and three children.

Late Spring 1994, Yoko held one of her BBQs on her patio on Newell Road, which was attended by the group of researchers working on color fax. In this technology, the page images are compressed with JPEG. At the receiving end, the pages looked fuzzy, and the group was discussing how to improve the image quality.

The usual sharpening kernels could not be used because they would sharpen prominently the compression artifacts and the image quality was worse. Maybe, it was the Chardonnay that made the group come up with one of those crazy ideas: why not do the sharpening in the compressed domain, where the artifacts are explicit. Essentially, the original is boosted, and this is accomplished by using different DQT tables for compressing and decompressing, a trick that made the operation computationally free.

The method, described in US 5850484 A worked like a charm and other algorithms working in the compressed domain ensued, for example, to change the lightness or the contrast. Konstantin optimized the Huffman code and got an additional 14% compression for the color fax protocol.

This method improved the image quality, but it did not sufficiently reduce the file size, which was a showstopper. Indeed, it took 6 minutes to transmit an A4 page, but the upper time limit was considered to be 2 minutes. Optimizing the Huffman tables was not enough.

A few of Yoko's BBQs later, the group realized that visually lossless compression was too strict and made a run for perceptually lossy JPEG compression. The idea was to compress the image much more, but to move the artifacts to where the image would admittedly look bad, but this would not affect the readability, i.e., the reading performance for a human.

The heuristic process behind this method is interesting because it is the same that is behind today's deep learning algorithms for image recognition. In 1994, the hardware was not ready for that.

This led to patent US 5883979 A, finally making the new color fax technology viable. However, the employer was not convinced of the product and pulled the plug, only to resuscitate it a couple of years later. By then the momentum had been lost and the market window was closing. At the end, the only thing that came out of the Newell Road BBQs was the book Image and Video Compression Standards: Algorithms and Architectures.

All this work was on lossy compression. The work on lossless compression was a couple of years later, 3.1 km further northwest along Middlefield Road, in Menlo Park. There, the work did not take place on a patio but at Peter's kitchen table. The issue was that Unisys was enforcing its LZW patent. Peter used LZ, which was not patented, and followed it by Huffman encoding, obtaining a better compression rate than LZW.

In compression, it is customary to standardize the decoding of the signal, not the encoding. This leads to the somewhat funny name of FLATE for the method, although the RFC calls for DEFLATE. File formats like PNG and PDF use FLATE.

There was a related event on Newell Road in 2002 when in Yoko's garage the US National Body's proposal for color preference semantics was written (references USNB-CD-DIA-044 to 051). This became part of the MPEG–21 standard for color vision deficiency in the digital item adaptation (DIA) part. However, although this is part of MPEG: it has nothing to do with compression.

This being Palo Alto, people are running all kind of stuff in their garages. For example, at one point a neighbor was running Napster from his garage for a couple of months. However, that was at the time Palo Alto was running its Fiber to the Home (FTTH) pilot and about 100 houses in our neighborhood had 100 Mbps symmetric Internet connections. Legal action was taken by the private industry and the conduits many of us ran from the curb to the utility entrance in January 2000 remain empty and the fiber under Newell Road is dark. In our case, we get by with a 6 Mbps asymmetric VDSL line with 300 GB data cap that costs us $77.44 per month for a double play including VoIP. On Newell Road in Silicon Valley's Palo Alto, Internet access is pretty miserable and expensive.

Newell Road was named for Dr. William A. Newell, a prominent physician in San Francisco, who bought 47 acres from Henry Seale in 1864 for a country estate. Parts of his house, located at 1456 Edgewood Drive, date back to 1866. In 2011, Mark Zuckerberg bought 1456 for $7 million. The updated carriage house and "cow barn," once part of the estate, remain next door at 1450.

Henry Seale, like John Greer, came from Ireland and started a contracting business in San Francisco with his brother, Thomas. In 1853 the Seale brothers acquired a large part of Rancho Rinconada del Arroyo del San Francisquito from the Soto heirs. The Seales at one time owned most of the land on which early Palo Alto was located.

Big Dada

If you mistyped and where searching for "big data," try this other post. Here we are on 5 February 1916 in the Cabaret Voltaire on the Spiegelgasse, just a few steps from the apartment where Lenin was living in exile and not far from where I lived for a couple of years under a gaslight.

Dada represents the total doubt about everything, the absolute individualism and the destruction of ideals and norms hitherto cast in concrete. For example, in Hugo Ball's Lautgedichte (sound poetry) the utterances are decoupled from semantics. This is how a century later naive users misuse Internet search engines and then wonder their queries just return millions of dada, much to the chagrin of the computational linguists trying to design semantic search engines. This is dada. No, it is a trigram. Can a second order Markov model help? Not for this trigram: Google Books thinks, it does not exist. Coming up with a new sentence is so dada.

The dadaists were displeased with science, which they judged to be elitist and far from any comprehensibility and sensuality. Maybe they were not completely right, considering what was happening in theoretical physics around that time. But certainly, today science is more dada, when fresh laureates dance their Ph.D. You can win a trip to Stanford and visit me, just a few steps away, under an LED lamppost.

Architecture vs. baling wire and chewing gum

Over thirty years ago, I was working in the Dragon project. The full-custom VLSI chips were so complex, that we were not able to use the commercial tools of the time. Thus, part of the team was working on the development of a set of tools design the chips; I was working on the design rule checker.

Since we were concomitantly writing the tools, designing the chips, writing the compiler, and porting the operating system, we all had to work in parallel. For the tools, this was made possible by having each tool have its own file format and the data was moved from one workflow step to the next in a file. For example, the design rule checker parsed in the layout file and emitted the files for the logic and time simulators.

The challenge was, that this was not really a development project but a research project: we were inventing the algorithms while we were implementing the tools using them. One consequence was, that the file formats kept changing and this broke the parsers. This was painful, especially because we had hard deadlines with the MOSIS service we were using.

One day, during another no-so-happy meeting, I asked the question: "why are we using files at all, we are just dealing with different representations of the same chip. There should be just one data structure and the design tools should decorate it, analyze it, or render it."

The idea stuck and two colleagues designed and implemented the Core data structure. The layout editor would add geometry to the Core data structure and the various design rule checkers and simulation programs would analyze the data structure elements and add their own decorations. Almost immediately, a designer added a schematics editor and we wrote a program to generate the documentation by traversing the Core.

In a way, the original system with the parsers was built with baling wire and chewing gum, while the Core data structure introduced a sophisticated architecture. The various programs became simpler and so we were able to do nightly builds of the entire system. The entire design process became much more efficient and the tools more powerful.

Today, it has become very easy to quickly rig up a system based on open source software. A large number of powerful libraries is available and many produce very compelling eye candy.

Not too long ago, I had to build a prototype where a user could take a mobile phone picture of a store receipt and see on the display the receipt with the prices of a competing store. Since the demo for the customer was imminent, I had to work like a beaver to set up an OCR server, figure out how to get through the firewall, build a price translation table for the two stores, and set up a website to display the doctored receipt.

It took me two weeks and the wabi-sabi result looked like a prototype. Concomitantly, over a weekend, a bunch of young programmers rigged up an app that took a picture, replaced the top quarter with the bitmap of the top of the competing store's receipt to change the store block, leaving the item list unchanged, and displayed the result. This was even worse than bailing wire and chewing gum. However, they spent time making the GUI look slick.

At the end of the day, they got lot of compliments, but since there was no architecture, they would never have been able to implement a working system. In particular, doing the price translation is difficult. They would not have been able to build a real system.

Unfortunately, today's plethora of libraries makes it not only possible to write good applications, but also to quickly rig something up without understanding what is going on. There is much less interest in well-architected powerful software than used to be. Fortunately, the economy works in waves and the next downturn will flush out the system. The smart samurai does not fight his enemy: he patiently sits downstream the river to wait for the body of his enemy to float by.

Multilayer networks

Monday last week, on the 13th of April 2015, the 1999 Nobel laureate Günter Grass passed away. He grew up in what was then the free city of Danzig. Although Königsberg was farther east in Eastern Prussia, many of the memories of his youth he describes in the Tin Drum are familiar to me from my relatives' reminiscences. In fact, my grandfather emigrated from the Bernese Oberland to Königsberg to work as an agrarian engineer, ending up marrying a local girl.

A couple of centuries earlier another Swiss—Leonhard Euler from Basel—had also emigrated to Königsberg. Downtown, the river Pregel forms two large islands and seven bridges cross the river. In 1735 Euler posed himself the problem of whether it is possible to follow a path that crosses each bridge exactly once and returns to the starting point. In the process of tackling this problem, Euler invented graph theory.

Back in February 1996, I was given a week to write a blurb on what a company could do in terms of technology to monetize the freshly commercialized Internet. You can make money by making people more efficient, which can be achieved by allowing them to do their own work, or by allowing them to do new more valuable work. My employer lost interest and published the blurb, another company picked up the idea and ran with it.

The idea was that the World Wide Web is based on hypertext and therefore is a graph. You add value by adding weights to the edges of the digraph (Fig. 4 on p. 16). Once you have added the weights, you can build the minimum spanning tree (Fig. 5 on the following page). While it is very easy to get lost in a graph that is not minimally connected, resulting in tedium and frustration, in a tree there is a root (you can always go back to the beginning) and between any two nodes there is just one path. As opposed to a list, you can categorize the nodes by putting them in the same subtree, thus reducing the cognitive load.

At the time, I thought that you would have many instances of the graph, each one with different weights representing different criteria, like reading difficulty, subject matter, detail level, etc. Each one would yield a different minimum spanning tree and depending on what you would want to accomplish, you use one or the other.

In 1998 Brin and Page published their paper on "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine." Pregel is Google's system for large-scale graph processing. There is an open-source counterpart to Pregel in Apache Giraph, although you would not expect to encounter a giraffe on the Pregel in Königsberg, not even in the zoo opened in 1896.

The following decade, as an associate editor for Optical Engineering, I often read papers where data from various frequency domains was fused to obtain much more useful images from remote sensing. Also in my activities at the Interactive Multimodal Information Management (IM2) Competence Center I learned that when dealing with hidden Markov models, by fusing various modes you could build much more powerful models.

Therefore, forget simple weighted digraphs. What you want is a multiplex network and you want to look at the trajectories of ergodic random walkers on multiplex networks. If you thing this is difficult, go back to the Baltic Sea where at Umeå University on the Gulf of Bothnia (more romantically, Bottnischer Meerbusen in German) they have developed Infomap, which makes it a child's play to reveal community structure by taking random walks.

Compared with conventional network analysis, multiplex Infomap applied to multilayer networks uncovers interplay between network layers and reveals smaller modules with more overlap that better capture the actual organization. Shoehorning multiplex networks into conventional community-detection algorithms can obscure important structural information, and earlier attempts at generalizing conventional community detection methods to identify communities across layers have proven problematic. In contrast, thanks to the map equation’s intrinsic ability to capture that sets of nodes across layers represent the very same physical objects in multiplex networks, the framework generalizes straightforwardly.

Hakone sakimidareru

咲き乱れる (click to enlarge; pink azaleas are completely out of gamut)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Risotto, move over

We have been using saffron to make risotto and paella yellow for centuries. Saffron, though, is very expensive. Now there is a new patented process to make rice in red, yellow, green, and purple, with the caveat that green does not survive cooking. I wonder if an orange risotto, which in addition to saffron would use ang-khak rice mold, would be less fattening, given the statins in Monascus purpureus.

Here is the article from Focus Taiwan.

A government-assisted farmers' research group in eastern Taiwan has developed "colorful" rice — no longer rice in white, but in four different colors — red, yellow, green and purple. The Hualien District Agricultural Research and Extension Station — which is dedicated to helping local farmers improve their earnings from farming, including by coming up with new products — said it has spent seven years developing the technology to add natural colors to rice using vegetables. "The colorful rice can add interest, enrich your visionary sight and increase your appetite, especially for children," the station said. It said that Southeast Asian countries and India have used natural colors to cook rice since ancient times, mostly using turmeric (a plant of the ginger family) and herbs to give rice color. It said that using the natural colors of vegetables to produce colorful rice is both "safe and delicious." The four colors developed by the station — red, yellow, green and purple — are derived from using anka (red yeast, Monascus purpureus), turmeric, chlorophyll (green pigment derived from green vegetables) and anthocyanidin (plant pigment). The station noted that rice colored with anka, turmeric, and anthocyanidin will not change color during the cooking process. The green color, using chlorophyll, however, tends to turn into an olive color after cooking. "The best ingredient is using something that is natural," the station said. It said that it is not only targeting families as the main consumers of colorful rice, but is also eying hostels or leisure farms, which may want to use it for creative dishes. They could also make it a souvenir or gift for visitors, he said. In the earlier days of research into making colorful rice, the technology could only produce a small amount of colorful rice, according to the station. But after further development, it has come up with the technology for mass production, and has obtained a patent. The station later transferred the technology to the private sector, which can now produce two metric tons of colorful rice each day.

Global Innovation Index

For the first time since 2009, the U.S. has been ranked among the top five nations in the Global Innovation Index 2013 (GII). The U.S. placed fifth behind Switzerland, Sweden, the U.K., and the Netherlands, ranked first through fourth, respectively. The annual report, released by the World Intellectual Property Organization, Cornell University, and INSEAD, is a key benchmarking tool for businesses, policy makers, and others concerned with the relative status of nations in the global innovation environment.

The GII relies on two sub-indices, the Innovation Input Sub-Index and the Innovation Output Sub-Index, each built around pillars.

Five input pillars capture elements of the national economy that enable innovative activities: (1) Institutions, (2) Human capital and research, (3) Infrastructure, (4) Market sophistication, and (5) Business sophistication. Two output pillars capture actual evidence of innovation outputs: (6) Knowledge and technology outputs and (7) Creative outputs.

Each pillar is divided into sub-pillars and each sub-pillar is composed of individual indicators (84 in total). Sub-pillar scores are calculated as the weighted average of individual indicators; pillar scores are calculated as the weighted average of sub-pillar scores.

from apprentice to master

When I grew up on the western edge of Lugano, life in the old country was not very mobile and people tended to spend their life at audible distance from the church bells they heard at birth. The most exotic person you could come across was that wiry old man in a tattered white suit hiking in the woods of Collina d'Oro that was Hermann Hesse, often carrying a drafting book and a box of water colors, totally absorbed in his thoughts.

With this, when Ravi Shankar came to town for a concert sponsored by Migros, it was like a little prince coming from an other planet. Indeed, he and his daughter were wearing traditional Indian clothing, something that had never been seen before on the streets of Lugano. I had the chance to spend a full day and an evening chatting with him, while conducting an interview for the youth radio and helping setting up the recording equipment for the concert.

I was amazed by the difference in personality between him and his daughter. The latter was distant and exotic, but Ravi Shankar was immediate and approachable. It was easy to talk casually with him. I had never seen a sitar before and started to talk with him about the complexity of the instrument. Since he was classically educated, I asked him how long it had taken him to become a master, compared to the piano or the violin. He countered he was not a master at all. When I noted his total command of the sitar and how he appeared to be one with it—even citing Jimi Hendrix and his electric guitar—he rebutted that he was just an apprentice. He continued that the sitar is an instrument that takes a whole life to learn to play, and it is only after reincarnation that one can play it as a master. He pointed out, that when performing on a complex instrument, total mental concentration was necessary and mastery of the sitar takes two lifetimes.

During the concert, I was at the left side of the first row and soon noticed that he was not only in constant musical contact with the other players, but he was also conversing with me through his eyes. Indeed, his protocol was to fixate a member in the audience he thought had an interesting posture, then fixate me, return to the first person to guide my gaze, and when I followed his gaze and looked at that person, he acknowledged with the hint of a smile. While Herman Hesse was totally absorbed in his thoughts, Ravi Shakar was involved concomitantly in three conversations—with the sitar, the orchestra, and the audience—meaning he had full awareness of his surrounding while he was also fully absorbed in the music.

Yesterday Ravi Shankar reached the end of his apprenticeship and today—12/12/12—he is a master sitar player.

war of currents

Power distribution is a key technology for increasing the efficiency of work, thus increasing life quality and improving the human condition. Early factories had extensive belt systems to transmit the mechanical force of a water wheel to the workstations in a plant. In the industrial revolution the water wheel was replaced with the more predictable and powerful steam machine, but the inefficient and inconvenient mechanical distribution through belts remained.

Happy B-Day Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Today is the 300^th anniversary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, philosopher, pedagogue, author, composer and botanist, born in Geneva on 28 June 1712. Rousseau became famous in 1750. The Academy of Dijon held a competition for academics to answer the question whether the boom of the sciences helped to "improve morality."

The answer Rousseau provided in his essay Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts shocked Europe and instantly made him famous. He won the competition with the disturbing notion that the development of civilization was in truth a story of decline and decay: in his "natural state" man lives independently and freely, but in society he is like a slave in increasingly tight chains — the evil lies in the essence of society. This provoked a scandal in this age of Enlightenment that celebrated the continuous, indeed inevitable, improvement of life by science and technology.

At age 50 he published his novel Emile on pedagogy (and the profession of a religion without a church) and his philosophical treatise Contrat Social on the reconciliation of human nature with political rule. He wrote: "The problem is to find a form of association in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before." Only the law should be above the individual.

The books were burnt under a parliamentary decree in the courtyard of the Palace of Justice in Paris, and on 9 June 1762, Rousseau fled from Paris to his native Geneva, where this time his books were burnt in front of the city hall and he was declared persona non grata.

Rousseau did not propose solutions, he unveiled paradoxes. His arch-enemy Voltaire summed it up with a marginal note he wrote in one of Rousseau's books: "You always exaggerate everything." It took until his 200^th anniversary in 1912 to be accepted with Dunant and Calvin as one of the embodiments of the esprit de Genève. Today he is considered a forefather of environmentalism and the occupy movements, but his main message is that we continuously fail to meet our own expectations. Society has changed: Rousseau's estate is now part of UNESCO's world heritage.

Where did they end up?

Sometimes people are in the news so relentlessly, that we almost think of them as close acquaintances. The American media system is so hyperactive, that except for people who are famous for being famous, these people disappear from the media's radar screen and go back to their normal lives after a short while. However, sometimes they make a career change and end up in unexpected places. I am always surprised by high tech people ending up in epicurean posts.

The Milky Way to AIC 2011

If you visit the European headquarters of the Mostly Color Channel (MCC), just a short 10 minute train ride with the Südostbahn (SOB) up the mountain takes you to Einsiedeln, which translates to hermitage.

Although Einsiedeln's lush landscape today consists of fat fields on which cows graze, filling the air with the tolling of their bells, in the year 835 when the hermit monk Meinrad from Reichenau settled here, it was a dense forest.

If you walk up to the St. Benedikt vista point shown above, you will have a beautiful view of the monastery. The original Benedictine monastery was built in 934, but the building you see today is the sixth replacement, whose construction began in 1704.

As the towers suggest, this is the view from behind. One of the tricks the architect liked to play, was that of perspective. What is the difference between the image above and the one below? 85 mm vs. 66 mm focal length and about 960 m vs. 939 m elevation.

Anyway, many people do not approach the abbey by SOB but on foot, because their motivation is not MCC but a spiritual journey. Indeed, Einsiedeln is one of the major monasteries on the Milky Way, or Jakobsweg as it is called here.

Milky Way is the old Roman name, when this was a trading route, because it followed the Milky Way to the Atlantic Ocean. Today is has become in fashion again and is often called by its Castillian name of El Camino de Santiago. The branch through Einsiedeln feeds from Austria and Milano and has an unusual feature in that it crosses the lake of Zurich with a footbridge just a meter or so above the water. From the bridge from Rapperswil to Hurdensteg, which is at 410 m, you climb straight up the mountain to cross the Etzel Pass at the chapel of St. Meinrad, which is at 950 m, and enjoy this view as you approach the monastery towards the Baroque and Rokoko abbey church (Klosterkirche):

Given this physical exertion, it is no wonder in front of the esplanade the pilgrims find the Lady Fountain (Marienbrunnen or Frauenbrunnen or Liebfrauenbrunnen) where they can enjoy some fresh alpine spring water.

The importance of the monastery becomes clear from all the gold used in its decorations.

Looking up the abbey, the building is quite imposing, which is very surprising considering we are in a small alpine village distant from the metropoles.

Ora et labora governs the day of the Benedictine monk, hence there are innumerable clocks and other time pieces everywhere.

The pilgrims are welcomed in front of the main door in a serious but warm atmosphere.

In general, the natives are quite friendly and do not mind posing for a tired wayfarer from half a world away, made poorer every day from the relentlessly dropping Dollar.

The most well known native of Einsiedeln was Paracelsus (1493–1541), the inventor of modern medicine and pharmacology. For now, let us get ready to sway from the Milky Way and make a detour to the original goal: the Midterm Meeting of the International Colour Association (AIC) at the Zurich University of the Arts.