A Reflecting Diamond

The old university library (1978-2008) was considered "not-refurbishable."
due to the energy consumption of its air conditioning (©Wikipedia/Klaus Graf) 

The other day Red Baron took part in a guided tour of Freiburg's new Universitätsbibliothek (university library) that should open in spring 2015. The tour was organized by the Badische Zeitung, and the number of participants was limited to 25.

The new glass and stainless steel diamond in November 2013  (©joergens.mi/Wikipedia) 

Many people in Freiburg consider the new library building made of glass and steel atrocious. Red Baron, however, likes those technical things, as my neighbor once commented when I had placed a satellite antenna with a diameter of 1.5 meters on the balcony of my house to capture German television in Geneva. Concerning the new library, I even go a step further and regard the building as enriching Freiburg's architectural heritage.

Not to mention the innovations built into the new library. The latest developments in electronic reading and the Internet have been incorporated. Although the building has triple glazing, it is not zero energy. Solar panels on the roof will support the heating system in winter. Cold water from deep wells will ensure that the interior temperature in summer will not exceed 22 degrees centigrade. Red Baron was impressed and looks forward to visiting the public café inside the library overlooking the Platz der Alten Synagoge (Square of the old synagogue) as part of the university campus.

Reflecting the late April sun (©Badische Zeitung)

Already in spring of this year, with the sun shining at a low angle, drivers approaching the building from Rempartstraße were dazzled by the light reflected from the glass surface. This came as a surprise to the architect, builder, and public. The university officials promised to span a sail over the glass surface so the driving public would no longer be perturbed. 

With fall approaching, a black cover went up for the first time yesterday. This "sail" does not look so great. However, the university officials plan to make a virtue of necessity by using the veiled surface as a banner. In the future, people passing by will probably see announcements of special lectures or other university events.

The "sail" is in position, waiting for the rising sun.

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Deposit Rings for Freiburg?

Since 2003 Germany has recycled containers for liquids. The system distinguishes between Einweg (one way), like plastic bottles and cans, and Mehrweg (multiple uses), mostly glass bottles. While an Einweg container will add 25 euro cents to your bill when you buy your bottled drink, the deposit for Mehrweg varies between 8 and 15 Eurocents per container.

It needed quite an investment in machinery to accept all those empty cans and bottles customers carry back to retail stores and supermarkets in return for vouchers. The receiving machines had to be made foolproof and will now reject any bottles from neighboring France or Switzerland not being charged with a deposit. There is one positive effect of Germany's sophisticated deposit system. Our environment is kept relatively clean from empty bottles and cans.

However, for some people, especially tourists, it takes more work to carry their empty bottles to a collecting machine, receive their vouchers, and claim their deposit of 8 to 25 euro cents waiting in the checkout line of a nearby supermarket. They simply throw their empty bottles into public waste bins. 

This behavior opens a market for mostly penniless collectors. Equipped with their bare hands or specially made hooks, they pick the empty bottles out of the bins. The pan-German collecting of bottles is so impressive that Sebastian Moser at the University of Freiburg even wrote a thesis about this phenomenon.

A bottle collector searching a waste bin (©ap)

Considering rummaging the waste as humiliating, a design student, Paul Ketz, developed a Pfandring (deposit ring) while on a university course titled Für ein sauberes Köln (For a clean Cologne). The deposit rings are placed around public waste bins and take all empty bottles and cans. Paul got the Federal Prize Ecodesign, and several newspapers wrote about his idea, but its implementation left something to be desired.

A Pfandring in Bamberg (©dpa)

This is why two city councilors of the Social Democrats sent a letter to Mayor Salomon asking him whether

- the city and the municipal waste management had already thought about the installation of Pfandringe in Freiburg,
- they regard the installation as helpful considering ecological, social, and ordnungsrechtspolitische (what a terrible word that I translated into regulatory and political) aspects,
- Mayor Salomon could imagine a testing phase for deposit rings in the inner city.

So far, only the city of Bamberg has introduced Pfandringe on a trial basis. The experience is positive as the rings are sometimes full but suddenly empty again. Such a system will allow bottle collectors to recuperate most plastic bottles, which are subsequently not burned with the other waste but recycled.

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A Crocodile, Done For?

Most visitors to our city know the crocodile made from Diorite that embellishes Freiburg's industrial canal. Wait a minute. There is no industry on the clear stream flowing through a charming part of town.

Well, there used to be in the Middle Ages and up to the 19th century. Lapidaries, dyers, and tanners - the street running along is still called Gerberau (Tanners Lane) - used the waterpower and cleaning properties of the canal that takes - like Freiburg's Bächle ( brooklets) - its fresh waters from the river Dreisam upstream at a place called Sandfang (catching sand).

Today the area around the Industriekanal is a tourist attraction. Red Baron took the photo below in April, showing a pair of ducks misusing the crocodile's head as their landing and sleeping site. Around this place are a couple of restaurants, a chestnut-shadowed beer garden, and a coffee shop called Stehcafé am Krokodil.

On August 22, the Badische Zeitung ran a story about the head of the crocodile that had been turned nearly 180 degrees. Already the evening before, Red Baron had seen the shocking photo on the Internet. Yesterday I went to see the turned head myself. Is the crocodile done for?

I read that Ole Meinecke's masterpiece will be turned back to its original orientation but only in October during the Bachabschlag (closing of the industrial canal for cleaning).

It is a mystery how the sculpture of 400 kg could be turned. Red Baron discovered another mystery by reading the following text somebody had written in white chalk on the pavement along the canal: Des canards imaginaires, le dernier obstacle à franchir (Fantabulous ducks, the final obstacle to overcome). In turning the sculpture, did the mystery person want to make it more difficult for ducks to land on the crocodile's head?

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Innovation

Whenever I read about innovations, I immediately think about South Korea, Singapore, or even the US, but I never consider Germany. My country may be good in technology and refining what others have invented, but new ideas from scratch?

It came as a surprise to me when the other day, the Badische Zeitung published an article about a new idea put into practice just two blocks away from my apartment. The innovation of Der Wortautomat (the word vending machine) may not be comparable to the iPad. Still, it is a new idea to reuse old cigarette vending machines that no longer fulfill modern youth protection standards.

Since last week two ladies from Freiburg have been selling words in such an old machine where you may select from various categories. Red Baron is too old for words für Verliebte (for young lovers) and choose the more appropriate category "Nostalgiker" for a price of 5 euros (roughly 7 U$).

Here is what I got:

A printed box.

When I opened the box, it contained the word Badeanstalt (public swimming baths) in laser-cut wooden letters and correctly painted in blue.

Unboxed

Nowadays, everybody in Germany uses Schwimmbad (public swimming pool) and no longer Badeanstalt. One day the word will be lost, for it lacks all appeal. It contains the word Anstalt (establishment), better used in words like Erziehungsanstalt (borstal) or Irrenanstalt (nuthouse). A famous German political cabaret on TV even bears the title: Neues aus der Anstalt.

Without a shower in my student digs in Göttingen in my early days, Red Baron frequently went to the Städtische Badeanstalt, where it was more for cleaning than swimming. We, students, spent hours under the hot shower with a strong jet hitting our bodies, not just the trickle of modern showers. The energy was cheap in those days.

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Little Rose

9

Ursula in a jeans suit seeing off Germany's first relief flight to Iran
in support of the people suffering the IS invasion (©AP)

When I saw the photo above in yesterday's press, I decided to write a blog about Röschen (little rose), not to be confused with Goethe's Röslein, that Little Rose on the Heath. Röschen is the nickname of our Minister of Defense Ursula von der Leyen. 

She measures only 161 cm (5' 3'') ist klein aber oho (is small, but what a performance)! Ursula is the daughter of Ernst Albrecht, former governor of the state of Lower Saxony. She was raised in a family of seven siblings in Brussels and Lehrte near Hannover, and she decided not to opt for less. She is a mother of seven children too. 

From the grandstand in the Bundestag (House of Parliament):
Seven children and a husband observing Ursula taking the oath of office as Minister of Defense (©dpa)

She became a medical doctor and spent four years at Stanford University, where her husband, a physician too, was a faculty member from 1992 to 1996. No wonder she speaks English and French fluently in addition to German.

She only joined the Christian Democrats (CDU) in 1990 and, in 2003, became Minister of Social Affairs, Women, Family, and Health in the state of Lower Saxony.

In 2005 Chancellor Angela Merkel made Ursula Federal Minister of Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth. Elected into the Bundestag (Federal Parliament) in 2009, she became Labour and Social Affairs Minister. Following Ursula's re-election in 2013, Merkel made her Minister of Defense. What a career!

Ursula on a visit to the German ISAF troops in Afghanistan.
Feeling well among her boys and sometimes girls (©Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images)

When Ursula took over her new function, many a soldier feared that he/she had to style his/her hair as the boss, vokuhila (vorne kurz, hinten lang = short in front, long in the back). In the meantime, she did a good job. Today rumors have it that some soldiers even pinned up Ursula's photo.

©Found on Twitter

Is she interested in becoming Angela's successor? Here is a quick comparison:

	Angela Merkel	Ursula von der Leyen
Age	60	54
Religion	Protestant	Catholic
Education	Doctor in Physics	Doctor in Medicine
Family Status	Divorced and remarried	Married
Husband	Professor of Physics	Professor of Medicine
Children	0	7
Languages	German, Russian, English	German, French, English

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The First Georgians

Entrance to the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace

Before serious work started at Wikimania 2014, I visited two special exhibitions in London. One at the Queen's Gallery was titled:

commemorating the 300th anniversary of the accession of George, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, to the English throne establishing the House of Hanover. 

George's position as Prince-Elector of the Holy Roman Empire made the situation politically delicate. When in 1692, Emperor Leopold I attributed a ninth elector's dignity to the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg, it comprised the honorary title of Archbannerbearer of the Holy Roman Empire. Imagine the English King voted for the German Kaiser.

The exhibition had nice pictures but was short on historical facts. Here are some details:

Queen Ann

When Queen Ann died in 1714, her more direct heir to the throne was the Catholic James Stuart. Already on his father's death in 1701, James had declared himself king, as King James III of England and VIII of Scotland, and had been recognized as such by France, Spain, the Papal States, and Modena*.
*Texts in italic are from Wikipedia

Sophia of Hanover, presumptive heiress to the English crown

In the same year, the English Parliament, fed up with the Catholics, laid down rules of succession in the Act of Settlement: No Catholic should access the English throne. The crowns were to settle upon the nearest relation of Queen Ann, "the most excellent princess Sophia, electress and duchess-dowager of Hanover," and "the heirs of her body, being Protestant."

George I

James, deprived of his titles, tried to invade the British Isles in 1708, but the admiral of the French fleet, fearing a battle with the British, refused to let James go ashore. The fight between the Stuarts and the Hanoverians continued when in 1710, Sophia's son George announced that he would succeed in Britain by hereditary right, as the right had only been removed from the Catholic Stuarts. He retained it in 1714 when Queen Ann and his mother Sophia died in the same year.

Two major Jacobite Risings launched in 1715, and 1745 failed to remove the House of Hanover from the British throne. Therefore the next room showed boring sketches and drawings of the battles the Georges fought against the Scots.

George II as Prince of Wales

Other Georges followed the first with the result that Parliament acquired more rights throughout the 18th century, moving England to become the motherland of democracy.

Showing the Georgean Dynasty:
 This Plate is Dedicated to all true Britons, Lovers of Liberty, and the present Succession.

Another room was devoted to engravings by William Hogarth, the 18th-century English moralist. My favorite physics colleague Georg Christoph Lichtenberg frequently traveled from Göttingen (Kingdom of Hanover) to London. 

Being devoted to his one king George III, Lichtenberg admired the cosmopolitan English way of Life. As an Anglophile, he also admired Hogarth's genius and described his engravings to his German compatriots not only detailed and in his aphoristic spirit but, as my former boss used to say, he rubbed the message in.

Here are two of Hogarth's engravings describing the virtue of beer and the devastating effects of gin (The engravings are found in Wikipedia):

Beer Street

Beer, happy Produce of our Isle

Can sinewy Strength impart,

And wearied with Fatigue and Toil

Can cheer each manly Heart.

Labour and Art upheld by Thee

Successfully advance,

We quaff Thy balmy Juice with Glee

And Water leave to France.

Genius of Health, thy grateful Taste

Rivals the Cup of Jove,

And warms each English generous Breast

With Liberty and Love!

Gin Lane

Gin, cursed Fiend, with Fury fraught,
Makes human Race a Prey.
It enters by a deadly Draught
And steals our Life away.

Virtue and Truth, driv'n to Despair
Its Rage compells to fly,
But cherishes with hellish Care
Theft, Murder, Perjury.

Damned Cup! that on the Vitals preys
That liquid Fire contains,
Which Madness to the heart conveys,
And rolls it thro' the Veins.

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What a Wonderful Crowd

Announcing Jimmy Wales, the man who started it all (©Wikipedia)

As I announced last week in March, Red Baron attended Wikimania 2014, the 10th world meeting of the Wikipedia Community in London. My readers know I am an active author and editor in Wikipedia Deutschland, although the number of my "edits" has decreased with time. 

The main reason is our relatively active local scene - we meet monthly for a Stammtisch - so over the recent years, my peers and I have written and thoroughly edited many missing articles about Freiburg's people, buildings, and history.

The decline in the number of active contributors to Wikipedia is felt worldwide. Therefore, the Wikipedia Foundation is making significant efforts to "recruit" new authors. Before I dig into this topic further, let me briefly mention other subjects discussed in London.

Free Access to Information

Jimmy presenting the state of the Wiki (©Wikipedia)

In his opening speech, Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, congratulated the Community, i.e., us, the contributors, for building the most excellent encyclopedia the world has ever seen. Everybody should have free access to all knowledge everywhere.

More than 2000 crammed into the Barbican Auditorium.
Red Baron knows where he sits (A hint: Look for ample legroom) (©Wikipedia)

Thus, by providing substantial human and financial resources, the Wikipedia Foundation is helping developing countries write their online encyclopedias. Here, Wikipedia's idea of making all information available to everyone is seen in the context of education.

Education, yes, but not like this (©Wikipedia)

In South Africa, pupils and students can now access Wikipedia on their cell phones (everyone seems to own one) for free. The project, called Wikipedia Zero, will be extended to other developing countries.

Copyright

(©Wikipedia)

(©Wikipedia?)

Wikipedia's call for open access to all information is permanent. One of the biggest problems is copyright, e.g., with pictures.

As an "illustration, " an ape's by-now-famous selfie was the running gag at the conference. A curious female macaque had snatched the camera of a wildlife photographer. The camera found later was loaded with several weird photos the ape had shot. One of the pictures was a selfie that a Wikipedia author later used to illustrate an article, prompting the photographer to request royalties for "his?" picture. Even the Badische Zeitung ran a column about the story.

Wikidata

A big topic discussed at the conference was Wikidata. The system of storing and, particularly, finding pictures in Wikipedia could be more convenient. The photos are stored in a Commons database, organized into categories (or sometimes not), from which they can be drawn to illustrate articles. 

When I need a picture, I upload a photo I took myself to Commons (hopefully into the correct category) and then place it in my article. Some community members prefer to shoot perfect photos rather than write articles. However, finding excellent photos in Commons can be difficult for me and others, particularly if they are labeled only in a language like Danish or Greek, or uploaded without a description.

Here, Wikidata should help by focusing on structured data called items, which can be abstract concepts like love and hate or concrete objects like a kitchen or a broom. Each item has a unique identifier across all Wikipedias and a page where all item data is collected.

For a demonstration of Wikidata, you can go to https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page.
Search for the item Edison by typing the name into the search field. A list will open. There, you chose Thomas Alva Edison (identifier Q8743), and his page of collected data will open. When you scroll to the bottom of the page, you will see all the Wikipedias that have an article about the inventor.

You may be disappointed. Wikidata is a database, not an encyclopedia like Wikipedia. Data extraction from existing sources is mainly handled by bots. These robots are small computer programs that search for specific information about items across various sources. Although they will not err in their search, the information they find may be inconsistent, wrong, or incomplete. 

Here is where human intelligence must come in. The Community is asked to correct and complete the data. You see fields on the page for this, and you may be tempted to use them. But didn't you read somewhere that Thomas Alva Edison was a Freemason?

Red Baron in a red polo shirt (what else?) in the back, trying to keep his mouth shut
 in a discussion on Commons and Wikidata (©Sebastian)

As one speaker said, "Wikidata is only at its beginning; it is fascinating, unpredictable, and full of unexplored potential."

New Authors

You will encounter a couple of hurdles when you want to join the Community and contribute to the open encyclopedia. Creating or editing articles on Wikipedia is not straightforward. Presently, you will compose your article in Wikitext, a typing platform that contains elements of HTML. As a beginner, you sometimes learn the hard way, but hopefully you will learn by doing, as Red Baron did.

One way to overcome the entrance hurdle is to introduce a Wikipedia Visual Editor. Although this looks promising, its implementation could be improved because people use different platforms. Experienced Wikipedia writers use only Wikitext; others even hate the Visual Editor because, in their opinion, it compromises the fine-tuning of articles.

Another way to attract new people into the Community is to address their gaming instinct. Newbies should consider creating articles as a game and editing as fun. Over time, they encounter experienced colleagues and receive medals for their participation in Wikipedia.

Give 'em medals (©Wikipedia)

For me, the most promising approach to attracting new authors is the automated creation of stub articles containing minimal information, using bots. Let me explain: a bot will go through lists of all villages, including the smallest hamlets, and place formatted stub articles on Wikipedia for those uncovered places. People frustrated that their place of living does not yet have an article on Wikipedia can now sit down and add the missing information to the existing stub article.

Conclusions

In closing Wikimania 2014, Jim Wales honored some people, especially the organizers, for a job well done.

Wikipedian of the year is Ihor Kostenko, a Ukrainian student who was shot in the head at Maidan Square in Kyiv. He has written 280 articles for Ukrainian Wikipedia.

(©Wikipedia)

Red Baron, swimming in a sea of Wiki freaks, learned fascinating new things at Wikimania 2014. I had a good life in London with the Community. What a wonderful crowd!

... and my morning delight

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Saltz's Donut Philosophy

Two weeks ago, Jerry Saltz, an art critic from New York, posted his donut philosophy on Facebook. By chance, I came across the photo of his whiteboard:

©Jerry Saltz

Once he had published the photo on Facebook a storm of comments and new definitions broke loose. Here is a non-complete list of the additional definitions in the order they came in. I only did minor editing to shape the contributions into the same form.

Generally, I do not like to write blogs using the work of others exclusively however, most of the attributions are just too hilarious not to be shared. Nevertheless, two of them I contributed to myself. Enjoy!

Martin Heidegger: The donut leaves crumbs.

Martin Heidegger: Future donuts cannot maintain their utility in our minds and are therefore the sum of their holes.

Erwin Schrödinger: Until the box is opened, the donuts inside are simultaneously glazed and plain.

Karl Marx: The donut is a device to extract labor out of workers (value) for the possibility of extracting profit for the owner (class)

Basho (Zen philosopher) topped this: A flute with no holes, is not a flute with: A donut with no hole, is a Danish.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy: Ich bin ein Berliner not a donut.

René Magritte: This is not a donut.

Adam Smith: The market decides what the donut is.

Hamlet: To eat the donut, or not eat — that is the question.

Andy Warhol: I'm afraid that if you look at a donut long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

Immanuel Kant: Kant eat a donut. (missing comma?)

Richard III: My kingdom for a donut!!!

Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Plein glazed is natural.

René Descartes: I think, therefore, I am...eating donuts!

Macchiavelli: Donuts justify coffee.

Lao Tzu: The hole makes the donut.

Friedrich Nietzsche: Donuts are superfood for the overman.

Bill Clinton: I did not eat that donut.

Jesus: Forgive these donuts; they donut know what they are doing.

Stephen Hawkin: A donut with a black hole will eat itself.

Socrates: The unexamined donut is not worth eating.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Whereof one donut speak, one must be silent.

Marie Antoinette: Ils veulent du pain? Qu'ils mangent des donuts.

Plutarch: Which came first, the donut or the hole?

Karl Marx: On the Jewish Donut/Bagel Question.

Ferdinand Lassalle criticising the Gotha Program: Donuts from each according to their ability; donuts to each according to their need.

Samuel Beckett: I must eat the donut... I can't eat the donut... (pause) I'll eat the donut.

William Shakespeare: The quality of donuts is not strained.

Seneca: I don't need donuts.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The world donut is gradually becoming aware of itself.

Martin Heidegger: The donuting donut.

Michel Foucault: The donut is a source of power.

Sigmund Freud: You will never fill the hole.

Carl Gustav Jung: Every body is born understanding donuts.

Milton Friedman: Without trust, it's worth donut.

Levi-Strauss: The donut brings fatness to the community. 

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Germanization of the US?

The guy is named ET, sorry, Eric T. Hansen, and writes for the German weekly Die Zeit. According to Eric, the T. stands for Terrific; this is how he feels and writes. 

From March 2009 to July 2013, you only found an article about Terrific Eric in German Wikipedia, but not in the English version. You learn that he has studied in Germany and written several books in German. Both books and articles are based on solid research but are characterized by satire and absurdities. He is exceptionally provocative when he holds up the mirror to the Germans.

Presently the European Union and the States are working on a trade agreement called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). There is a lot of fear in Germany that we will become Americanized by eating chicken imported from the States treated with chlorine instead of European bio (organic) poultry full of salmonella.

Eric, however, fears that TTIP will result in just the opposite: he advocates the Germanization of the States when he writes in German: We Americans buy any shit of European origin, whereas Germany is the most challenging market in the world for foreign products. 

Let me ask here what Eric would call the goods the Americans import from China. Even a baseball cap I bought in the States the other day was labeled Made in China.

Eric keeps on moaning that there are less than 2000 hamburger restaurants in Germany (McDonald's and Burger King combined), but there are 3500 China restaurants and 12,000 döner places. KFC only has 120 chain stores. Following massive investments in the 1980ies, Wendy's even withdrew from the German market.

In Freiburg, the downtown Burger King restaurant threw in the towel on November 30, 2013. Will the Döner now invade the States?

No Whoppers anymore but lots of döner shops
 in Freiburg's Bermuda Triangle near the university(©BZ)

Well, fast food may not be the best parameter to use when describing mutual commercial interactions. Eric notes with some bitterness that America's most prominent publisher Radom House now belongs to the Bertelsmann Group. 

Is this so terrible, considering that the German Gutenberg invented movable type printing? Does Eric remember the 1970ies when the Japanese bought real estate and firms in the States with their accumulated dollars? And why does he not criticize the Chinese who use their surplus dollars to invest them in the States rather than selling all their greenbacks on the money market, thus devaluating the anchor currency?

At the end of his article, Eric states that America is a domestic market with only ten percent of its national output based on export. In contrast, Germany, with a small domestic market, necessarily is an exporting country where the relevant figure is thirty percent.

I just read an article that ice sandwiches made in Berlin according to an old US recipe are the latest hit in our capital:

©Die Zeit

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