Comparing political systems

Scott has some comments on my musings about the elections in the US and how elections work in Germany. He’s right – voters don’t always get who they voted for in Germany as well.

Thanks, Scott!

November 9

November 9 is an important date in German history. In 1989, the wall came down on November 9. But there’s much more to the date than that:

• November 9, 1848: Execution of Robert Blum, a member of the German National Assembly, despite his parliamentary immunity. This has been said to be the beginning of the end for the German revolution of 1848/9.
• November 9, 1918: Proclamation of the Weimar Republic.
• November 9, 1923: Hitler’s attempt to take over the government fails.
• November 9, 1938: Kristallnacht
• November 9, 1989: The GDR opens its borders; the Berlin Wall comes down.

I tried to find some pages with information on these dates on the web, but most are in German…

In English:

November 9 in German History, with links to sites about the Kristallnacht

Auf deutsch:

• Historisches Institut der RWTH Aachen: Der 9. November in der deutschen Geschichte
• Rüdiger Löster: Der 9. November in der deutschen Geschichte

Today, on November 9, 2000: Deutsche Welle News:

“Tens of thousands of people are expected to take part in a demonstration against far-right extremism in Berlin later today (Th). Calls to participate in the rally on the 62nd anniversary of the Nazis’ “Kristallnacht”, when thousands of Jewish businesses were destroyed, were made by all parties represented in the German parliament, as well as trade unions, employers and initiatives. The country’s political leaders will also be present. President Johannes Rau and the Leader of Germany’s Jewish community, Paul Spiegel, are due to make speeches. “

The Schockwellenreiter and others are going to participate. I would go as well, but Berlin is too far away…

Comparing political systems

The elections and the possibility that Gore might not become president although he got 200,000 votes more than Bush made me think about different political systems.

I’m always wondering why so few people vote in the US. It’s supposed to be a free country, where everything is possible, everyone can fulfil their dreams… and people are not interested in who is their president?

In Germany, we last voted for a new chancellor two years ago. No, we don’t elect a chancellor; we vote for a candidate that gets send to the Bundestag, and for a party. The chancellor is then elected by the Bundestag. This is somewhat similar to the US system, but I don’t think it’s possible that the candidate of a certain party can be elected for chancellor when the party (or coalition) does not have the overall majority.

But things in Germany are a little more complicated than in the US. We have six different parties in the Bundestag, so coalitions are necessary.

And we had a voter participation of 82.2 percent! (In 1994, it was only 79%.)

Here’s the official provisional result of the election to the 14th German Bundestag held on 27 September 1998. (In case you are wondering, “overhang mandates”, or Überhangmandate are additional seats a party get if more of their candidates are directly elected into the Bundestag than the number of seats they get because of the percentage of votes for the party.)

Lego!

Zannah had another cool lego link: The Star Wars Trilogy – all made from Lego! (The only strange thing about it is that I see ?@?@?@ here and there. Although the site is in English.)

Space Cowboys

Gabi und Jörg haben gestern im Kino Space Cowboys gesehen und geben ihm zwei Clowns. Dann können André und ich ihn ja beruhigt ansehen gehen. Und zwar in der Originalfassung!

When I grow up, I wanna be an astronaut!

More voting

I voted 2000 – { fray }:

“The following pages hold 14 different voices telling 14 different stories about politics, elections, and America. […] But you won’t find any political diatribes or partisan rants here. These are stories about the thing that connects us to the talking heads on television, the thing that makes it all work, the thing that keeps us coming back to the polls year after year. – The thing otherwise known as hope.”

US Elections – Update:

So maybe Bush has not won after all? I just came back from the university, only to hear on the news that the vote counts for Gore and Bush are much closer to each other in Florida than was thought, and that the votes have to be counted again.

Heh. On the nine o’clock news this morning, our radio station had a quote from the latest CNN news:

“CNN declares George Walker Bush the 43rd president of the United States!”

Oh yeah? So they actually think the media declare someone president? Now that it turns out he may not have won after all, it seems even more ironic.

I do still hope that it’s the people that elect the president, not the media.

Have any elections ever been so close?

Näheres gibt es auch bei der Zeit zu lesen – aktuelle Meldungen jeweils hier.

US Elections

So Bush has won. Ugh!

Results are here in the NY Times (link via Garret) – oder hier beim Spiegel (Link von Jörg).

I’m going to the university now. See you later…

The meaning of weblogging

Hah! And once again my weblog has proven very useful! Well, at least for myself.

I was just trying to figure something out for my thesis and needed a graph of the Weierstrass pe-function. Normally, I would have looked at Eric Weisstein’s World of Mathematics, but as I learned a few days ago, it’s no longer online.

Luckily, I posted the graph on my weblog a while ago!

But I really do hope they are able to sort out the copyright problem and bring Mathworld back to life.

Electrinos?

I searched for more articles on the possible division of electrons:

• Physics News Update: Can electrons split up into smaller fragments?
• Brown University News Service: Brown physicist proposes that electron may be split in two
• HowStuffWorks.com: Physicist Proposes Way to Split Electron
• George Street Journal: A look into the lab: exploding electron bubbles
• Here is Humphrey Maris’s home page.

Physics

While people at CERN are desperately trying to find the Higgs particle (the last missing elementary particle of the standard model of physics), a physicist elsewhere might have discovered that the electron can be divided into several parts?! Read Double or quit in the New Scientist:

“‘Electron fragments behave to all intents and purposes like entirely separate particles,’ says Maris, who is based at Brown University in Rhode Island. ‘I call them electrinos.’

Pause a moment to consider what Maris is saying. The electron is the lightest subatomic particle and the one with the greatest claim to being absolutely fundamental. In fact, in the 103 years since its discovery, there has been no other evidence whatsoever that the electron is divisible. It is the modern incarnation of Democritus’s ‘uncuttable’ atom.

The claim that electrons are divisible is therefore nothing short of a bombshell dropped into the world of physics. ‘If Humphrey is correct, it means a Nobel Prize,’ says Gary Ihas of the University of Florida. Nobel prizewinner Philip Anderson of Princeton University thinks Maris must be wrong. ‘But it’s not obvious why,’ he admits.

Maris does not have definitive proof of his hypothesis. But earlier this year he published a paper that put it on a firm theoretical basis, and marshalled supporting evidence from past experiments. Now he is doing his own experiments, trying to break up the electron.

Whether Maris succeeds or not, he may have found a large crack in one of the foundation stones of modern physics. ‘Humphrey has succeeded in exposing a fundamental flaw in the framework of quantum theory,’ says Peter McClintock of the University of Lancaster.”

The article claims that electrons can be divided if they are put into liquid helium at 1.7 K – or at least, their wave function can be divided. Physicists are still arguing about whether that really means the electron is being divided or merely that one doesn’t know where the electron is.

If the propositions of Humphrey Maris are correct, quantum phsyics is dead.

Link via BookNotes.

Snow?

What?? I just went over to dangerous meta – to see photos with lots of snow in them! Whoa! I always thought New Mexico was still nice and warm at this time of the year.

But the snow didn’t stop Garret from voting.

Speaking of voting – I’m nervously waiting for the results. They said on the news that the first calculations are expected around 3 a.m.. I guess I’ll have to wait till tomorrow, then. Sigh.

Ganz schön alt…

Congratulations to Sheila and Brent – their weblogs turn one year old today! For a blog, that’s pretty old, I’d say.

Weise, weise

Der Schockwellenreiter beglückt uns heute mit folgender Weisheit:

“Es gibt Leute… […] …die wissen alles (besser??). Die wollen wohl Lehrer (leerer?) werden. […]

Der liebe Gott weiß alles, Lehrer wissen alles besser. “

Genau, darum studiere ich ja Lehramt. Aber weil ich es noch besser weiß, werde ich mich auch mal umschauen, ob ich mit meinem Studium nicht was besseres anfangen kann, als Lehrer zu werden.

Late flip

This afternoon, I’ve been busy giving math lessons to several middle school students. Normally, a friend of mines teaches them, but she is at Physics on Stage at the moment (Infos in deutsch), so she has asked me to do it for her.

Now I’m pretty exhausted…

Short story

Lotto, a short story by Douglas Coupland, author of “Microserfs” and “Generation X”.

Link via ronsens.

I just realized I didn’t put “Microserfs” into my Ten Books list. I should have. It’s great and really fun to read!

Election

Finally! Tomorrow is election day in the USA.

“Think about what you know and what you have heard, look inside yourself and make a decision, then please vote for who and what you believe best represents your view.”

Says Craig – and returns to regular blogging. I guess the fans of Bush are happy to hear that!

Craig had a link to the Museum of Soviet Calculators on the Web. Interesting site!

In Bonn, we have a whole museum dedicated to calculating machines, which also has some very interesting machines: the Arithmeum. Click here to view some of the exhibits.

Accomplishing time

Yesterday, Mollie Elizabeth mused about what she has accomplished in her life so far, and what could have been if…

At 22, she thinks she should not be studying anymore, maybe even have gotten married and had a kid. Whew! Since I’m 25 already, this got me thinking…

I’m three years older, and I’m still at the university. I’ve been studying for six years now, and it will be another year until I’m finished. If I go on to become a teacher, I’ll have to do two more years of training on the job before I’m able to get a “real” job as a teacher. I’ll be 28 by then.

The difference seems to have something to do with the different countries we live in. In Germany, few people get married before they’re 25, and for most people who go to university (after 13 years of school), it’s common not to marry before they’re 30. The average German woman is 29 years old when she gives birth for the first time (source).

Of course, I sometimes wish I had done something else instead of going to university that didn’t take as long as what I’m doing right now, and I’m thinking of not becoming a teacher and apply for a different job next year (after getting my first degree at the university) because I think I should start to make my own living, but I certainly don’t think I’ve wasted time in the past.

I started out studying physics and aimed for a diploma, and it took me almost three years until I realized that was not what I wanted to do with my life. I switched subjects and studied phyics and math for another three years in order to become a teacher, and I’m about to take the first sets of exams (which take a year), and I’m still not sure that I want to be a teacher for the rest of my life.

I don’t know whether that is of any help to you, Mollie, but I don’t think you wasted any time. As long as you like what you are studying, don’t consider it as a waste of time. Who knows, it might be useful some day! (This is what I keep telling myself when I start wondering if I could have done this university thing in less than the time it took me so far… ;-) And to me, what you are doing now sounds a lot better than a “convenient” marriage and kids.

Anybody out there?

What a quiet and uneventful day… André and I went for a walk this afternoon. It was sunny, but quite cold. You really can tell it’s fall now.

I’ve spent the rest of the day checking out web sites for children, for a computer course a fellow student and I are going to give next week. It’s a three-day introduction to Windows, Word and the internet for pupils in fifth grade who supposedly never used a computer before – what fun!

Since the course is for fifth-graders, who started to learn English only a few months ago, I only looked at German-speaking sites. (Falls es jemanden interessiert: In der aktuellen c’t gibt es dazu einen Artikel, aber nur auf Papier. Die Links daraus gibt’s auch hier.) There are a few good ones out there, but some horrible sites as well. Now let’s see if we can get the fifth-graders excited about some Harry Potter fan pages…

Die Wahlen in den USA

Etliche interessante Artikel gibt es bei der Zeit, die ab Mittwochmorgen (d.h. sobald der Ausgang der Wahl bekannt ist) Diskussionen, Meinungen, Interviews und anderes bringen wird.

Ein sehr erschütternder Bericht ist dieser: Zwei Millionen Verdammte – Amerika sperrt seine Kleinkriminellen weg – auf ewig. Der Artikel behandelt die Regelung “Three strikes and you are out ” – drei Verbrechen, und man wird zu 25 Jahren Haft bis lebenslänglich verurteilt! In einem der erwähnten Fälle brachte der Diebstahl einer Pizza einen Mann für mindestens 25 Jahre hinter Gittern.

Das ist schon ein krasser Gegensatz zu Deutschland, wo man gerade fieberhaft versucht, den zum sechsten (!) Mal entflohenen Straftäter Schmökel wieder einzufangen – der mehrere Vergewaltigungen und jetzt einen Mord begangen hat.