Page flip to keep up with the links I found elsewhere and need to check out more closely…

Science Toys – “Make toys at home with common household materials, often in only a few minutes, that demonstrate fascinating scientific principles.”

Die Allgemeine Relativitätstheorie, “leicht verständlich erzählt als Bildergeschichte – eine kleine Einführung in die Ideen Albert Einsteins”.

Links via Schockwellenreiter.

NY Times: A German Voyager’s Bold Vision for Tibet’s Blind. (No registration required; this is a mirror on Heidi Connal‘s site.) Sabriye Tenberken is a German who studied Tibetology in spite of being blind. She developed a Braille alphabet for Tibetan and has started a project to teach blind children in Tibet. I recently read her book My Path Leads to Tibet: The Inspiring Story of How One Young Blind Woman Brought Hope to the Blind Children of Tibet (deutscher Titel: Mein Weg führt nach Tibet – die blinden Kinder von Lhasa).

Fotos

Imagine Germany heißt ein Projekt der Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit. 15 Kinder aus sieben Nationen fotografierten in Deutschland und bestätigten Klischees – oder widerlegten sie.

Buchstabensalat

Die Meldung kursierte schon auf englisch und deutsch durch sämtliche Weblogs: Afugrnud enier Sduite an enier Elingshcen Unvirestiät ist es eagl… – aber welche englische Universität war’s? Der Frage ging die Telepolis nach: Unlguailbch!

Selber Text verzwirbeln kann man z. B. hier.

Link via Schockwellenreiter.

Gieriges Gehirn

Spiegel online: Das gierige Gehirn. “Sie sind geistig behindert, aber sie können zwölfstellige Zahlen multiplizieren, perfekt zeichnen oder 30 Sprachen sprechen. “Inselbegabte” nennen Forscher solche Menschen und wollen das Geheimnis ihrer Genialität ergründen – damit Normalbegabte klüger werden.” Von Ralf Hoppe.

Community

Congratulations, Dr. VanDyk!

Personal

Too busy with school to do much weblogging… are you noticing a pattern here? I managed to survive my last two exams (i. e. visits by my advisors who like to dissect the lessons I teach), and now I have approximately two months to prepare for the final exams. They consist of teaching one lesson in each of my subjects, mathematics and physics, and an oral exam that takes an hour.

Updates are likely going to be sporadic until I’m finished.

The holidays are over…

On Saturday, André and I went to an aquarium, last night we played Carcassonne.

Today I had to get up early for the first day of school after six and a half weeks off. Why is it that, no matter how long you’ve been away and how well relaxed you think you are, it feels like you never had a day off after the first lesson?

It’s back to the old routine, and it’s two more months until the big exam. I can’t imagine to be done with this whole studying and training thing, but I will be done if I pass the exam at the end of November. And I will hopefully have a real, permanent job in February next year.

Und ja, mich hat auch das Spielfieber gepackt. Die Siedler von Catan spiele ich nicht sooo gern, aber Carcassonne schon. Das macht nämlich auch zu zweit viel Spaß, wohingegen man für unser absolutes Lieblingsspiel mindestens drei, besser noch sieben oder acht Leute braucht: Roborally, aber bitte das amerikanische Original. Die deutsche Version ist ziemlich vereinfacht, was den Spielspaß leider auch mindert. Das Original wird meines Wissens aber nicht mehr aufgelegt.

Between Bonn and Bad Münstereifel

There are many small villages between Bonn and Bad Münstereifel that I pass on my way to school. Many of them still have a lot of old buildings – half-timbered houses and traditional farm houses and buildings arranged to form a quadrangle. Here are a few impressions:

An old building with a new satellite dish – they don’t seem to have cable TV in that village…

A rich farmer probably once owned these buildings.

I like the look of this old house with the weathered shutters.

This is a much smaller, poorer farm than the one above. I took a closer look at the inside:

The photos were taken in Iversheim and Rheder.

Science is Fun

Do you know the names of all the chemical elements there are? I once had to learn all the abbreviations at school, but I only remember the ones that you need frequently. Tom Lehrer knows them all, and he can even sing them! In case it’s too fast to understand every word, the lyrics are availabe, and there also is a great flash version by Mike Stanfill that offers both the song and the lyrics.

Wow, I wish I could sing that! (It would be even cooler if the elements were in the correct order, though.)

Und ganz nebenbei habe ich gelernt, dass tungsten der englische bzw. schwedische (tung sten = schwerer Stein) Name für Wolfram ist.

Link via Schockwellenreiter.

Two years ago

It’s 12:30 am in Germany, half an hour past midnight. Two years ago, two planes crashed into the towers of the World Trade Center. Fray: missing pieces.

Happy belated birthday, Al!

And good luck on defending your doctoral thesis, John!

Happy 20th wedding anniversary, Scott and she who must not be named!