7/4

A happy Fourth of July to my American friends!

Reason #37 why I carry a multi-tool

I had just made myself a cappuccino (no, not that kind, this, albeit less sophisticated) to go with the two slices of bread for breakfast and needed some milk. There was no opened milk carton, so I retrieved a new one from the fridge, unscrewed the cap, pulled the ring - I actually like this pull ring design, it's so martial - when it just came off without taking the membrane with it.

No problem, instead of going to the storage room to look for a pair of pliers, I just reached for the SwissTool on my belt, grabbed the membrane and pulled it off.

Ok, I did that after going to living room to get my camera and take a picture of the torn off pull ring.

The duality of man

Or maybe the Jungian thing. A few days ago I saw a car with two stickers on its rear window. One said:

nuclear power - no, thanks!

The other said:

coal-burning power plants - no, thanks!

Now, which shall it be? If you don't like either, why are you still driving a fossil-fuel-burning car?

10 signs...

...you might be living with a Chinese woman:

1. You find thick, black hair everywhere.
2. You got no idea what half of the books on her shelf are about.
3. "But feng-shui says we need plants on the eastern wall" is a valid excuse/reason to get an aquarium.
4. You buy rice in 10lbs sacks.
5. There are just a wok and a rice cooker in your kitchen but no other pots or pans.
6. There are more spoons in the dishwasher than knives and forks combined.
7. There are enough chopsticks in the drawer to start a small campfire.
8. You have to eat tofu - and it actually tastes not so bad very good, very good. *ouch*
9. You don't know most of the other ingredients but it still tastes good *ouch* very good, I meant VERY GOOD, how-cheh, how-cheh!
10. A re-education camp looks like a holiday resort.

Not in Germany!

I somehow have the feeling that this is an ad I'd never ever see from a German arms manufacturer.


And NO, it's not because I'd think that rifles Made in Germany aren't good enough.

The misfortune...

...of dying on the same day as someone more known.

Goodbye Farrah Fawcett!

Michael Jackson, well, I expected to outlive him. Actually I'm surprised he made it to the age of fifty.

Farrah Fawcett on the other side, damn, cancer is a cruel and mean way of dying. I'm sorry for her. :-(

paranoid country - an insider's look of Germany

Prime Example - Evil Nazi Abbreviations

Regular German car license plates consist of a regional prefix of 1-3 characters, a middle part of 1-2 characters and a 1-4 digit number at the end. Theoretically their format is between 'a b x' and 'aaa bb xxxx'. Registration authorities usually let you choose the middle part and the number to create kind of vanity plates, like initials and year of birth. In my case it's the name of a certain aircraft.

Some day a coworker and I talked about his car and his license plate. When he told me that he could get his initials and had to use his middle name instead, I first thought, "ok, maybe it was already taken?" It took a while until I realized that his first name starts with an N and his last name with an S and that 'a NS xxxx' is blocked. As are any prefix-middle-part combinations that give other Nazi abbreviations like HJ, KZ, NPD, SA, SD, SS.

AH, HG, HH, JG and such are allowed. Which means that people with names like Steven Spielberg or Steven Seagal (or Konrad Zuse) cannot have their initials on their license plate, while Hitler, Himmler, Göring and Co could, which is kind of ironic, isn't it? BTW, when I checked for available combinations in Esslingen, ES AH 1889 and ES AH 1945 came back as 'assigned', not as 'blocked'.

Just to be fair, Düsseldorf blocks DKP, too, as it is an anticonstitutional organisation. Regensburg and Rastatt allow RAF, possibly on the grounds that it could mean Royal Air Force, and Pinneberg allows PIRA. Well, don't ask for logic and consistency.

Encrypted Evil Nazi Abbreviations

Some other day at work a coworker told a story about a friend who wanted to buy a jersey of a local soccer team for his son who was born in 1988 - and was denied one. The reasoning is as follows: H is the 8th letter of the alphabet and 88 is a way to encrypt HH which in turn is the abbreviation of Heil Hitler. Ok, a quick google-search shows that there seems to be a real problem with neo-nazis abusing '88' as an ID or VDM. Yet HH is not among the blocked middle parts for license plates. How could it be? HH is the prefix for Hamburg...

Bending Orthography to avoid Evil Nazi Abbreviations

Ever tried to find the Kongresszentrum (Kon|gress|zent|rum, conference center) in a German city? Don't look for signs leading to the 'KZ', that would not be pc, so orthography gets bent a bit and city officials remember that a 'k' can sometimes be replaced by a 'c', just as the 'z' (cf. Karl/Carl, Konstantin/Constantin, Zirkus/Cirkus, Zer/Cer, zirka/circa, etc.), and Kongresszentrum becomes CongressCentrum, which can be abbreviated to a very pc 'CC'.


Offtopic: I still wonder whether there's a Ford Galaxy in Nuremberg with the registration N CC 1701...

getting into shape

I gained quite some weight since I left the uni. No longer having a forest just outside the house to go jogging was my usual excuse, though the quality of the canteens of the companies I worked for compared to the uni's canteen or my own cooking is of much more relevance.

Anyway, now that I moved to the featureless plains of Northern Germany, where they put up warning signs at the autobahn when the slope exceeds freaking 4% (!), I thought I could make use of my bicyle again. So today I got a new lock for it to make sure it stays mine when I use it to go to the supermarket.

I still have to get used to the idea of having a bikeway on the sidewalk. For me it just complicates things. I'd much more like to drive in the street with all the cars than on the sidewalk. My speed is much closer to that of the cars than that of the pedestrians. Speed differences or ratios between speeds is what's dangerous. That's why autobahns are safer than country roads - Delta V.

if it weren't for the children

Every now and then the news report about people who deliberately endanger themselves.

Now, that's okay if you only put your own life at risk. Thinking you should also risk the lives of your (young) children is what ticks me off.

It doesn't matter whether it's parents who deem child safety seats to be unnecessary or parents taking their kids on a sailing trip near the Horn of Africa - or parents taking their children to Yemen.

Just a few days ago nine foreigners were kidnapped in Yemen. The bodies of two German nurses and a female South Korean teacher were already found. A British engineer and a German couple with three kids (two girls, one boy) are still missing.

From German news sites I could gain that the boy of four years old. From his and the parents' age I guess the girls are somewhere below ten.

Who in his right mind would take young children to Yemen? Yemen! A country I'd only visit if the rest on the 10th came with me!

I hope the missing will make it out of there alive but the parents should face charges for wilfully putting their children's lives at risk.

G1-4

I was looking on wikipedia for information about the Mercedes W31/G4, when I was reminded about a different G4 and how it related to a certain G3 that we all know. So here's the list from G1 to G4:

G1 - FN FAL
G2 - SIG SG510-4
G3 - HK G3
G4 - Armalite AR-10

but it's unfair!

Every time there's an election in the USA, I meet people pointing out (or complaining) that the US elections are unfair.

"But [insert Democratic candidate*] won the popular vote, he ought to become president!"

Well, that's not the way it's supposed to be done. Actually, that the individual states hold elections to determine how their electors shall vote, is just a nice gesture towards their people. They could just as well codify that their electors vote accordingly to the party affiliation of their governor or draw lots.

Remember, the United States of America are a federal constitutional republic. Not a democracy**. With a great emphasis on federal.

Think: "The majority of the adult citizens of my state support candidate A. (S)He should become president." What would be wrong with that thought?

If the way the United States assemble the electoral college were unfair, so would be the way the German Bundesrat is assembled. But which German is aware of that?

The scoring in tennis would be highly unfair, too. Who wins a tennis match? The one who scores more points? No. Not even the one who wins more games. It's the one who wins more sets.

Three sets to win, player A and B, A has a weak start:
0:6, 0:6, 6:4, 6:4, 6:4
A wins 18 games, B wins 24 games - and loses.
A wins all his games barely with 4 to 2 points, B wins all his games 4 to 0.
A scores 18x4=72 points, B scores (24x4+18x2)=132 points - and loses.
A wins by winning 60% of the sets but only 43% of the games and by scoring only 35% of the points. Highly unfair, isn't it?

H/T to Tam for inspiration.

PS: barack Obama won 52.9% of the popular vote but 67.8% of the electoral vote. Isn't that unfair, too?

*) it invariably is a Democratic candidate
**) note that "democratic" in a country's name doesn't mean much anyway, see GDR

28 years ago

Just a little reminder for my favorite fashion disaster.

The IAF proved they can do it before and maybe they'll prove it again.


Actually I can't wait to see it in the news.

Anniversaries

• Sixty years ago the Federal Republic of Germany was founded and the constitution-like Basic Law was proclaimed.
• Twenty years ago the Volks arrived in the USA.
• Today Horst Köhler was re-elected as President of Germany. It seems that he is one of the few German politicians of today who has indeed served his country - two years in the mechanized infantry with the final rank lieutenant.

Angels and Demons - a review, kind of

My girlfriend and I spent yesterday evening in Hamburg. We started with a hotpot-session in a Chinese restaurant, something I get to like more and more. Then we went to watch Angels and Demons or - as it's titled in Germany - Illuminati.
Among the cast I only recognized...
Tom Hanks as Prof Robert Langdon
Ewan McGregor as Camerlengo McKenna
Stellan Skarsgård as the Commander of the Swiss Guard
Armin Mueller-Stahl as Cardinal Strauss

Tom Hanks played the leading part in some of my favorite movies - Forrest Gump, the first time I actually cried in a cinema and Saving Private Ryan, the movie with the most intense scenes I EVER saw. I have to say I like him and would really like to drink a few beers with him.
Casting Skarsgård, a Swede, as the Commander of the Swiss Guard at first appeared a bit off but reminded me of a chat I had with a friend from Australia. Somehow we started talking about rifles:

Me: "I like my Enfield, it's so practical, high capacity, fast sights and the fastest action of all bolt-actions. Maybe the Swiss straight pulls are just as fast - for the first six rounds."
F.F.A.: "Oh, I once shot a Swiss Rifle, too. Looked like a Toblerone."
Me: "You mean, it had a triangular receiver?"
F.F.A.: "Yes."
Me: "But with a flat top?" (thinking of a Sauer then, IIRC, though that isn't Swiss)
F.F.A.: "No."
Me: "Did it have knobs on the sides?"
F.F.A.: "Yes."
Me: "That was an AG42, that's a Swedish rifle."
F.F.A.: "Ah, Swedish, Swiss, whatever."
Me: "And it's a semi-auto. Semi-autos are banned in Australia!"
F.F.A.: "It's a big country!"

Anyway, I have seen Skarsgård in Red October, Ronin and Mamma Mia. He was good then and is good in Angels and Demons.

There be spoilers!

Ok, as evident by the title of this post, it's only kind of a review. A review from the point of view of an engineer. So actually it's a list of goofs.
1) The scene in the archives, when the power is shut off:
- Ever slept in a small room with the window closed? Did you suffocate? No.
- Ever fired a handgun in a room without hearing protection? A full mag even! I hope not, otherwise your ears would have suffered quite a damage. At least you could forget about hearing for the rest of the evening.
2) The assasin's suppressed Glock is much too silent.
3) The maximum rate of climb of a helicopter is around 10 m/s (maybe 12-15 m/s if it's a good attack helicopter). The maximum rate of climb is not achieved in a vertical climb but at an angle (bathtub-curve of necessary power dropping to a minimum at the speed which shoudl also give maximum endurance). A pilot should know that. The doctor from CERN says the bomb had an equivalent yield of 5 kt. With just a few minutes left, say three, the maximum altitude that could be reached is between 1800 and 2700 m or 6000-9000 ft. A bit close, isn't it. And I have yet to see a helicopter that has emergency parachutes on board.

But overall a good and entertaining movie that again proves the first rule for assassinations: Kill the assassin!

TEOTWAWKI in Kuwait

First a black becomes POTUS, now there are WOMEN in Kuwait's parliament!

What's next? Shall-issue concealed carry in Germany? Gay rights in Russia?

What next? Global warming?

Jews have been accused to be responsible of almost everything, as long as it was something bad.

Now anti-Judaism* has proved again how idiotic it is.


*) Not all Semites are Jews and not all Jews are Semites. An anti-Semitic Arab would be suicidal. Actually some of them are. Oh, nevermind...

meddling ministers

In his book Military Blunders - The how and why of military failure Saul David dedicates the third of five chapters to examples of politicians messing up military operations.

Bannockburn, Sedan, St Valéry, North Africa '40/'41, Stalingrad, Goose Green.

At the moment people in Germany can witness politicians messing up economics.

The automotive industry is among those that are suffering from the global recession. Fewer people were buying cars and our government came to the conclusion that they had to do something about it.

Now, when a certain product is not bought, what can you do about this?

First you have to analyse why it isn't bought. Is it because the product is unattractive or too expensive or because the people lack the money to buy it? Well, right now there's not a single car in the showrooms that is as good as mine as far as my requirements are concerned. But most people in Germany are less picky, so we can rule out 'unattractive'.
That leaves 'too expensive' and 'lack of money' which are not interchangeable. People could have the money and still not buy German cars, because other makers offer a comparable product for a lower price. On the other hand, German cars could be cheap and the people could still lack the money to buy them. Ergo, either they are to expensive teh people are lacking the money.

Both is true.

Too expensive: Compare the price of a Audi/BMW/Mercedes/VW made in Germany on the German and the American market. Compare the price of comparable German and Japanses cars on the German market.
Lack of money: Raising unemployment and short-time work, increased taxes and social contributions with the need to take private precautions for health care and pension.

Logical solution

Lower the prices of the goods: lower VAT, lower wage costs.
Leave the working people more of the money they earn: lower income tax, lower social contributions.

The government's solution - a scrappage premium

Scrap a nine-year-old car, get a €2500 subsidy when buying a new one!
Of course it's the usual 'take from all, give back to some'-plot. It's funded by all tax payers but its benefit is limited to those who...

• have a car that's at least nine years old
• and was registered to their name for a certain time (to prevent abuse)
• and is worth less than €2500
  and who have the money to buy a new car
• which is at least EU4-clean (no maximum CO2 emission, as in other European countries with similar schemes)
• and who are willing to buy a new car

My car is just five years old and I wouldn't be willing to scrap it anyway, so in fact I'm subsidising someone else's car and thereby have less money to spend.

Drawbacks

Besides this very personal drawback of the scrapping premium, there are several more:

• How sensible is it to give people money for destroying value?
• Producing a new car uses more resources than using an existing one.
• How many people will buy a new car in the next years, now that many people advanced the purchase of a new car they'd otherwise have bought in 1,2,3 years? Will we just have a bigger problem later?
• What kind of car will people buy to replace a used car that was worth less than €2500? Probably not an expensive German car but rather an inexpensive Italian, French, East European, Japanese or Korean car.
• What is the effect on the used-car market?
• What about independent garages?
• What about criminals forging the papers needed to document that a car was indeed scrapped and not sold to Africa?

5 billion Euro have been allocated for this - or an average €61 from each of the 82 million living in Germany. Assuming an average family size of three, that means that thirteen families will have to pay to subsidize the car of the fourteenth.

Shouldn't thirteen fourteenth of the people vote against the government in the next election? For taking their money away to give it to others who are definitely not needy (if they were needy they couldn't afford a new car).

Well, they might soon BECOME needy. How many do you think will raise a credit to buy a new car, just to take advantage of the scrapping premium? How many will overreach themselves?

Dear politicians,

Congratulations for screwing up again! Next time, just leave me and my money alone!

Sixtyone Euro, hmm, four mags for my x-esse, 400rds of 9mm Geco, a nice evening with my girlfriend, 60L of diesel,...

new definition of 'long'

In July 2008 two men murdered a 55-year-old unemployed alcoholic (if that's even relevant) by beating him to death.
Now the two were sentenced to 'long' prison terms: a 19-year-old to ten years for murder and a 22-year-old to nine years and three months for assistance.

Wow! That long! I know of a country where you might serve longer terms for killing cats.

No wonder it's not acceptable in Germany to arm yourself to be able to kill someone who's trying to murder you.

Hell, if I were already mortally wounded and about to die, I'd want to take that guy with me. But I wouldn't be too surprised if his next of kin would sue mine for killing him though the act was no longer covered by StGB §32 (2).