Smart car?!

Slow day. I didn’t do much, except for going jogging this afternoon with a friend. But… I saw this car in our street. I thought it might be interesting at least to my dear readers from outside Europe. It’s a Smart!

Looks pretty cool, huh? But does it look like a real car?

The Smart is fairly new (available since October 2, 1998). The car is designed especially for people who drive in cities a lot. It’s small (two seats in the front only) so it needs very little parking space. I’ve seen Smarts using half a parking space perpendicular to the inteded parking direction. They also use little fuel and are not too expensive. I think a new Smart is about DM 18,000 or around US$ 9,000.

Most Smarts are also very colourful. They come in bright colous like pink, yellow or blue, and each smart has two colours on the outside. (This one is fairly plain, just light and dark grey, but then – it’s a convertible, a Smart Cabrio.) For the interior, you can choose red or orange with blue and other combinations. This one is red inside!

They met on the ‘net

Yes, I have read this story, too. And I liked it! (Link via Al.)

Harry Potter

Heute bin ich zufällig auf eine Leseprobe aus dem dritten Band von Harry Potter gestoßen. Wird Zeit, daß ich ihn mir kaufe!

Für Leute, die Harry Potter noch gar nicht kennen: Es gibt auch je eine Leseprobe aus dem ersten und zweiten Band. Ich finde allerdings, daß die deutsche Übersetzung nicht so gut ist wie das Original auf Englisch (auch wenn ich “nur” die US-Ausgabe kenne).

Sunscreen

Yeah, I know this song is old. I like it anyway, and if I don’t post the URL here, I won’t find it again.

Baz Luhrmann: Everybody’s Free.

Summer

You know it’s summer when the pianists take their grand pianos outside and play in the streets…

Well, I admit that this is the only pianist I know of who does this. His name is Reiner Weiss, and I’ve seen him several times here in Bonn in the last years. He plays classical pieces on the Münsterplatz and talks about them with whoever is there to listen to him. (Yeah, he sells CDs, too.) And the most famous son of Bonn, Beethoven is listening critically (see below).

I wonder what Weiss does while he is not touring cities with his grand piano. Surely he can’t play the piano outside in the wintertime.

Here is a photo of the Münster and of a mosaic above one of the doors of the Münster.

Click on any picture to see a larger version.

Yeah, Sheila, I know the Münster in Bonn is not as beautiful, as impressive or nearly as huge as the Dom in Cologne, but I’m afraid it’s all we have. BTW, I’ve never been inside the Münster, although I have been into the Dom several times. I also climbed one Dom tower at least four or five times; you have a great view from up there when the weather is good. Since there were no elevators 750 years ago, you have to climb more than 500 stairs. I guess the people who ring the bells stay in very good shape!

Apparently, Garret likes the cathedrals as well. The highschool he went to looks pretty old and dignified. I imagine schools in England to look like that.

If the weather stays sunny, I’ll go and take some photos of our two castles and maybe some other sights. The castles both belong to the University nowadays. (I had a picture of the smaller one a couple of days ago.)

Math lesson

Thanks, Craig, for the math lesson today!

Craig points to the tesseract, a four-dimensional cube. Cool animation, it’s very illustrative. And here are the Quaternions for the Masses. I learned about the Quaternions in Linear Algebra II, a few years back. A fascinating mathematical object! (I liked the complex numbers when they were first introduced in my last year at school, and the quaternions seemed kind of like “complex numbers for advanced students” to me.)

The tessaract and the quaternions are only a few pages of Harry J. Smith’s Fun with Mathematics!.

Craig had another interesting link, but I’m afraid it will take me a while to look through The Geometry Junkyard.

One thing I found there is this page of 3D Strange Attractors and Similar Objects. Mathematics can be beautiful!

New Design

Sheila has a new design, which I think is great! I especially like the ‘Buglight’ font.

Wann kommt der Sommer?

The weatherforecast has been promising that it’s going to be warm and sunny today. Nope. It was cloudy and even rained a little. Not very warm either.

I went to Cologne today to do some shopping. I also had my camera with me because I thought this was a good chance to take some photos of the wonderful cathedral in Cologne (“Dom St. Peter”) in the sunny weather. But since the weather was everything but great, the photos don’t look very good. This one shows the upper part of a side entrance. Here’s another one of the towers.

The cathedral is more than 750 years old, but it took a long time to build it: It was finished in 1880 and needs constant renovation, nowadays mostly because air pollution destroys the sandstone it is built of.

The WDR (West German Broadcasting) has a webcam that shows the cathedral: Domcam.

If you want to see some more pictures of the ‘Dom’, go here. Click on any link to see some pictures. A click on the pictures leads you to a larger version, and click on ‘weiter’ to see the next picture. ‘Abschnitte’ brings you back to the overview.

Der Dom hat auch eine offizielle Homepage (auf deutsch): Kölner Dom online.

P.S.: Sorry, Jörg, heute gibt’s keine geklauten Links von Dir!

Trautonium

Ever heard about this instrument?

“The Trautonium is an electronic musical instrument invented by Friedrich Trautwein in the thirties in Berlin, Germany, with enhancements made by Oskar Sala in the fifties which led to the well known Mixtur-Trautonium. The Trautonium can be divided into two logical sub-units: the control unit and the sound generation unit.”

The Schockwellenreiter has a link to the Trautonium Project. (Die deutsche Version ist hier.)

Just in case you were wondering – no, it’s not my new strategy to translate Jörg‘s whole weblog into English… It’s not my fault he has more than one interesting link today!

Calculate different

The Schockwellenreiter reports about a Computer Algebra System called MuPAD. He says it’s as good as Mathematica or Maple, but it’s free for private or educational users. There are MuPAD versions for Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac and some other systems.

Der Schockwellenreiter hat auch eine nette kleine Geschichte geschrieben und mit MuPAD illustriert: Die Reise nach Fraktalien.

Danke für den Tip, Jörg. Ich werde es mal anschauen.

English is not always English

David Singer and I are having a conversation about the differences between British, US, Canadian and Australian English that started with his comparisons between the US and the British edition of Harry Potter. Today, David writes on his weblog:

Andrea and I are having a chat about the differences between various national dialects of English on her weblog. I find it intriguing that differences which are so obvious to me are invisible to her.

David, the differences are not invisible to me. I know there are certain differences between British and US English: some words (pavement – sidewalk) and the spelling of some others (many words have a single “o” in US English, while the British spell it “ou”, e.g. labo(u)r). We even learned about that at school and took vocabulary tests in which we had to “translate” words from British to US English. However, nobody told me about Canadian or Australian English. Since US English is referred to as “American English” most of the time, I assumed Canadian English was the same as US English – which seems not to be true.

By the way, there are different kinds of German, too. You can tell whether someone is from Northern Germany, Bavaria, Austria or Switzerland. There are Rheinländer, Schwaben, Sachsen, Berliner…

I recently read that the “ß”, which is a sharp s-sound, is not used in Switzerland at all. They write “ss” instead, which is the common way to write ß if Umlaute are not available. I think they do use the other ones (ä, ö, ü = ae, oe, ue), though.

In Lower Saxony, the part of Germany where I grew up, Plattdeutsch (literally: flat German ) is still spoken. It’s kind of like a mixture of German, English and everything in between, close to Dutch in some ways, too. There are very subtle differences in pronounciation depending on the village you’re from! So if you grew up in the area, you can tell whether someone is from your village or the one 5 miles away, and you certainly know if you’re talking to someone from around Bremen or Hamburg – if they do still speak Plattdeutsch, of course. Sadly, it’s becoming more and more uncommon, and few young people speak it. I understand it and can speak it if I must, but I’m not really used to talking in Plattdeutsch. But it was my parents’ first language! They had to learn Hochdeutsch, the “normal” German, at school.

Weblogs are incestuous

Serious Instructional Technology:

“Staying afloat on WEBLOGS (7/17/00; 6:46:45 AM)

Quote: ‘Sites are water wings for surfers sinking in sea of cybermadness’
Comment: via Blivet (Hal) via John via Andrea about John (the Curmudgeon). And they say weblogs are incestuous…“

Susan’s Trip to Pasadena

Susan:

Andrea commented on my trip to Pasadena on Saturday. Somehow her wording implied that it was a big deal. Actually, it’s a pretty quick trip–just a matter of three freeway exits to get within Pasadena’s city limits, and 8 exits to get to my destination. By the way, I love that Monet painting at the Norton Simon museum; I will stare at it just about every time I go there.

I didn’t mean to imply her trip was like a trip around the world. It just made me remember my trips to Pasadena, which certainly felt like a big deal. But I was only 17 then, and the student exchange was the first time I went to another continent; everything was new and thrilling!

Susan mentioned she has a membership to the Norton Simon Museum so she can visit any time and even for only half an hour to have a quick look at a few pieces. It’s great to be able to take your time and don’t feel you didn’t get your money’s worth if you don’t spend hours and hours in the museum at a time.

Loose socks and Miniskirts

Wanna know what really cool Japanese teenager girls wear, do, like? Read The Japanese Teenage Girls’ Manual of Style. It’s a site with little essays written by Japanese girls for a student exchange with the USA, complete with photos. (The loose socks and miniskirts are in the clothes section.)

The manual is part of a website about the Kyoto Nishi Highschool’s Course of International and Cultural Studies.

Point of View

Yesterday, Susan had some interesting thoughts and a little story about changing one’s point of view.

Egosurfing

Here’s the search engine for all you egosurfers: www.egosurf.com.

Sports with an office chair

This is a really cool story…