A friend likes to tell the story of flying Lufthansa and hearing, in a "But, mein Fuhrer, Deutschland cannot fight a war on two fronts" accent, the announcement "Vould ze passenger who ordered ze kosher meal please report to ze galley? Ze passenger who ordered ze kosher meal, please!"
Also, didn't Hamlet attend Wittenberg? Is there nothing worth walking around even to observe?
... leaving him stranded for a few hours in Wittenberg with nothing to do and no stores open other than to post as David Lloyd George.
re: 1
'Klasse' photonerdery:
The Fuji Klasse is a truly excellent camera. Right at the end of the period when 35mm compact cameras got really really good [before everyone went digital].*
http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Fujifilm_Klasse
* Fuji still make 'em. So they haven't been completely replaced by digital.
2: I think the train people were being uncommunicative about when the next train was going to show up, so everyone had to wait nervously in the station to avoid missing a chance of getting to Berlin.
All those electronics, yuck. Rangefinders are the way to go. For a while there were also handheld light meters that required no battery.
http://camerapedia.wikia.com/wiki/Kodak_Signet_35
http://www.cameraquest.com/conrf.htm
Hamlet went to Wittenberg before it existed.
7: Hamlet was/is/ a time-traveller!?
What a great/terrible idea for a TV show or comic!
Like Quantum Leap except Hamlet won't ever be able to decide whether he should change history or not. That "cursed spite" line will be his catchphrase.
I once thought I had a cursed Sprite, but I guess they all taste like that.
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VRA Section 4 now unconstitutional.. OK in the '60s but now.
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Hang on, I'll do an SC thread. So that no one has to violate thread-jacking etiquette, hmm?
Or Bonzo.
10 is the funniest thing ever.
The appropriate response to the German's question is "Linux just hasn't been the same since they put in those patches after kernel 2.6.18."
Buck is well qualified to answer that, no?
Vaguely. I assume he had some visible supercomputer conference-related swag about him that made the question not completely random.
I once had the idea of writing a series of detective stories where the lead character is a literary theorist. I had planned for him to have a dog named Spot, so he could yell "out, damned Spot!".
I then discovered that pun already existed all over the internet, and accordingly abandoned the idea, but also formulated a Law: every possible Shakespearean pun has already been made. I'm happy to see that "cursed Sprite" conforms. Apart from that, it's great!
It's not Shakespeare, but there's a moment in some Michael Innes mystery where blood from a corpse has dripped through the ceiling into a sculptor's studio below, and he complains that the block of marble it's dripped on is ruined: "You can't get blood out of a stone." It's a terrible joke, and I've loved it for decades.
11,12: Yes. That was meant as an alert, not an attempt to threadjack. ... as if you would not hear from other sources. In short, I have poor posting impulse control.
re: 6
I have several rangefinders.* The oldest from 1930 [which I still use]. I also have several working lightmeters of the no-battery-required variety. But the Klasse is a really excellent camera as a functional tool. Good metering, excellent lens. Just not as pretty as something older, cast from solid brass.
* although less than I once had, as I've been selling/dumping everything I don't use regularly.
re: 6
Further nerdery. You can still buy lightmeters that don't use batteries. New. Cinematographers use them, sometimes.
Niche market, but:
http://www.sekonic.com/products/l-398a/overview.aspx
http://www.sekonic.com/products/l-208/overview.aspx
It's not nerdery, it's a perfectly normal appreciation of well-designed and well-made objects.
One possible subsequent step is lens obsessions-- a lot of fundamental glass chemistry was developed in Germany in the 30s so that multiple element lenses with minimal chromatic aberration could be made.
There's a working Linotype machine in Baltimore.
http://25.media.tumblr.com/e7699a4a805f800e1e719a3a192208b9/tumblr_mo8xruJCJK1qf0aafo2_1280.jpg
re: 24.2
Yeah. Although, ttbomk, the big changes in the 1930s were more to do with the development of glass coatings, so that you could build lenses with more glass/air interfaces without loss of resolution and contrast to excessive flare. Most of the core lens designs we use, even now, are pre-WW1.
This post is so awesome. I bet they were in the Pirate Party. I met some Pirate Party kids in Germany and holy crap they were the most lovable nerds. Actually all the German nerds I've met have been great, super engaged and thoughtful. Why? It's mysterious.
This post is so awesome. I bet they were in the Pirate Party. I met some Pirate Party kids in Germany and holy crap they were the most lovable nerds.
I might be moving to Germany in the nearish future to live with my partner who studies Pirate Parties. This makes me very happy.
Only slightly unrelatedly, my mother has a collection of Lutheran cookbooks, and the "best" is a WWLE type cookbook, only filled with recipes popular in 15th century Germany. About half of them are various forms of beer soup.
What did he think of Linux, and how did it bear on the beer?
Actually all the German nerds I've met have been great, super engaged and thoughtful.
I guess physicists don't count as "nerds" by this standard.
28: Not having informed opinions on Linux myself, I don't recall. He said the beer was good, though.
29: I have not met any german physicists. But yeah I was mostly thinking "hackerish computer nerds", since that's who I've met.
German physics culture is very focused on doing extremely complicated, impressive, tedious calculations, but kind of fuzzy on the big picture of why anyone should care about the fourth-order correction to something-or-other someone might have measured once.
I've mentioned before that when I went to this yarn shop in a little town in Bavaria to buy a large quantity of wool, I saw a bunch of teenagers hanging out in a picnic area by the river with Piratenpartei Bayern stickers on their laptops. It was super charming.
German physics culture is very focused on doing extremely complicated, impressive, tedious calculations, but kind of fuzzy on the big picture of why anyone should care about the fourth-order correction to something-or-other someone might have measured once.
But surely that's not true of Austrian physics culture, right? Family honor is at stake here.
I guess I mostly mean "particle theory" culture, anyway, but I think there is a pretty big difference between Austrian and German.
Checked with Buck -- the answer was "Beats the proprietary alternatives."
German physics culture is very focused on doing extremely complicated, impressive, tedious calculations, but kind of fuzzy on the big picture of why anyone should care about the fourth-order correction to something-or-other someone might have measured once.
Translate this into terms of literature studies, and you've pretty much got academic Germanistik culture. I really dislike German literature scholarship.
Actually all the German nerds I've met have been great, super engaged and thoughtful.
I guess physicists don't count as "nerds" by this standard.
I rise in defense of my BIL: a German physicist who is nerdy, fun, thoughtful, etc. Since BIL did his grad work in the UK, essear may well say he isn't a true Scots German physicist.
(My n for German-trained physicists is 0.)
Seriously, the Hundertwasserschule in Wittenberg is worth the walk away from the Lutherisch quarters if you've ever got time to kill in Wittenberg and no more these to nail on doors.
