Category Archives: Higher Education

Have A Wonderful Stresstest

December 16, 2011 By in Habitudes, Helections, Higher Education, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , 4 Comments

As you may have noticed, Germans are always stressed out about stuff, even stuff that isn’t particularly stressful. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the Society for German Language has just chosen “Stresstest” to be the German word of the year (you didn’t know it was a German word, did you).

You name it, the Germans have stress tested it this year (or have been stress tested by it). Whether banks, nuclear power plants, train stations in Stuttgart, rained out summers or having patience with the euro (not), this term has become a “firm component of everyday language.”

I don’t see what all the fuss is about, though. Ain’t nothing new. I remember when they used to call stress test life.

Der ursprünglich aus der Medizin entlehnte Begriff sei im Laufe des Jahres “auffällig oft” verwendet worden.

Dumbass Computer Gamers

November 14, 2011 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Health, Hi-tech, Higher Education, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

As everybody out there knows… All this computer game nonsense (not to mention the violence) is dumbing down our kids and ravaging our European cultural identity (or at least yours).

“Scientists at the Berliner Berliner Charité medical school have made a surprising discovery: Moderate computer game players have a great deal more brain volume.”

Von wegen, Computerspiele machen dumm – Untersuchungen mit Magnetresonanztomografen ergaben, dass die Hirnstruktur von moderaten Computer-Spielern ausgeprägert ist.

Evil Internet Giant Now Within City Limits

October 26, 2011 By in Habitudes, Helplessness, Hi-tech, Higher Education, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Google Inc., that highly mistrusted and ruthlessly vilified corporate world dominator and spy on all things German (I got two words for you here: Street View), has just done an end-run around sleeping data privacy officers stationed at Berlin’s city gates and bought its way into Humboldt University itself by funding a new so-called Institute for Internet and Society, supposedly “based on a philosophy of openness and open access” which will “explore the impact of the digital age.”

Yeah, right. We all know what they’re really up to (or at least you do, I assume). Just don’t come crying to me later and say that I didn’t warn you. The next thing you now Googlezilla will be “approaching the power plant.”

Google Inc. has committed €4.5 million ($6.26 million) to the institute for the first three years as part of its recent push to invest in Germany, which has often been critical of the Internet giant’s practices.

99% Plus 53% Makes How Much Percent?

October 24, 2011 By in Hard Facts, Heconomy, Helections, Higher Education Tags: , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Now that it’s getting cold and wet on Wall Street (and elsewhere) the 100% of the 99% are beginning to reevaluate whether or not they will be able to continue whining at 100% or whether it might not be better for them now to just shut up already and start biting the bullet like that ugly 53% does.

There could never be a 53% movement in Germany, you know. Germans are always in the upper 80s to lower 90s.

53 Prozent, weil dies die Menge derer sei, die mehr Einkommensteuer zahlen, als sie an Abschreibungen und sonstigen Entlastungen zurückbekommen. “Wir sind diejenigen, die für diejenigen zahlen, die sich gerade über dieses und jenes und irgendwie alles beschweren.”

 

ROSAT Soon To Become ROASTSAT

October 21, 2011 By in Habitudes, Helplessness, Hi-tech, Higher Education, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The defunct and smashingly successful 2.7-ton German ROSAT satellite will finally be making its fiery, uncontrolled and less than successful re-entry into our planet’s atmosphere sometime within the next 48 hours.

Important questions to answer here are (there is actually only one): What are the odds that a piece of ROASTSAT debris will hit someone?

Unless you are a German, the likelihood of getting injured as a result of ROASTSAT’s re-entry is extremely low. The probability of a non-German speaker somewhere on Earth getting hit is about 1 in 2,000. Those odds are for any one of the nearly 7 billion people (minus 80 million Germans) on the planet.

The odds that debris will hit you in particular — or your dog, say, unless he or she is a German Shepherd — are still just one in several trillion.

Experten warnen: Teleskop-Spiegel wird zur Bombe.

Nice Mellons, Mom

October 17, 2011 By in Health, Higher Education Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Mother Knows Best (Father Knows Best got cancelled long ago)? Well it sure ain’t Leave It To Beaver we’re talking about here.

German sex experts (and there’s a whole bunch of those, let me tell you) think that parents’ porn fears are exaggerated and that online pornography is actually a wonderful and thoroughly wholesome way to change the way young people learn about sex.

Well hot diggity dog, it’s still changing mine and I’m as old as the hills.

Carl’s mother holds a PhD in cultural studies. She has done research on pornography herself and now writes erotic novels.

She explained to her son that he shouldn’t worry if his first girlfriend didn’t moan loudly during sex and that the actors in porn movies use lots of lubrication.

“My mother told me that the positions they do are all just for show.”

“I learned some things from porn,” Carl says, “like licking, for example.”

Hire Learning

May 19, 2011 By in Hard Facts, Higher Education Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

This gives sex education a whole new meaning. A new survey shows that one in three university students in Berlin would consider sex work as a means to finance their education (which is basically free here, by the way, but that’s another dirty story).

And although no official numbers are out on this yet, I will have to assume that the other two out of three Berlin students would just prefer to watch (the lazy bums).

According to the study, about 4 percent of the 3,200 Berlin students surveyed said they had already done some form of sex work, which was defined as including prostitution, erotic dancing and Internet shows.

7.5 Million Germans Don’t Read Write!

February 28, 2011 By in Hard Facts, Higher Education Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I mean read right, of course. But is that really all that bad? The other 70+ million apparently believe everything they read. So like what’s worse?

They believe at first glance, for instance, that 7.5 million Germans are completely illiterate (nearly a tenth of the population?). Then they might look a little closer and find out that “only” 300,000 Germans can’t read at all, which is bad enough, but still.
 
Of course that two million Germans “can only read and write individual words” (whatever that means) and another 5.2 million are really, really poor at reading and writing doesn’t sound all that encouraging either, but it’s still a long way off from “7.5 million Germans can’t read.” But hey, somebody has to right this stuff.

Rund zwei Millionen der Betroffenen könnten nur einzelne Worte lesen und schreiben und weitere 5,2 Millionen Menschen scheitern an kurzen Texten, könnten aber mit einzelnen Sätzen umgehen.

What do you expect from a country obsessed with academic titles?

February 21, 2011 By in Habeas Corpus, Higher Education Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

Or do you know any French, English or American academics who place much value on being addressed “properly?” I didn’t think so.

The strange thing about this whole Guttenberg thing (he’s being accused of plagiarizing several sections of his doctoral dissertation), I find, is that he had already had his way cool title to begin with. He’s a freakin’ blue-blooded baron, for crying out loud. Why worry about some additional academic title?

But like they say, you can never be too thin or have enough money. Or, if you’re German, you can never have enough titles, I guess.

At least they’ll be some good jokes to come out of this: Minister Copy and Paste or Googleberg or he graduated “schummel cum laude” (schummeln means to cheat), you know, stuff like that.

The German public takes such charges seriously.

Now if they could only get the Bundeswehr to misbehave this badly with the Taliban whenever they come around

January 25, 2011 By in Higher Education, History, Hurt Feelings, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

The German Navy has this quaint little training ship called the Gorch Fock with this quaint long tradition blah, blah, blah but now it’s coming out that these sailor/soldiers are acting quite scandalous these days (like sailor/soldiers in other countries are actually expected to act) and so Defense Minister zu Guttenberg has pulled the plug on the ship’s captain way down in Argentina and has ordered an investigation and holy shit let’s call the whole thing off.

The Gorch Fock (some are now calling it Germany’s biggest floating brothel) appears to have become the one place where modern German military types have lost all sense of inhibation and political correctness and where all kinds of bad misbehavior (of the non-German kind) is taking place big time. Scandalous, never-heard-of-things-happening-with-German-sailors-at-sea before have been hitting the fan. Here are just a few to name just a few:

The sailors on the Gorch Fock drink lots of alcohol on board.
The boy sailors are always hitting on the girl sailors really hard, sometimes on the other boy soldiers too.
The officers yell at the sealors a lot and often hurt their feelings, sometimes even “insulting” them.
Then there’s that bizarre ritual of eating raw pig’s liver and washing it down with even more alcohol.
And the drop-the-soap games in the shower.
And the freakin’ Aryan Brotherhood dudes on board.
Oh yeah, and mutiny and stuff like that too.
And, of course, the two women who have recently died on board under somewhat mysterious circumstances.

I think all of this is being caused by having to sail around the world in an old ass ship like that. But maybe that’s just me. Or maybe they’ve just got scurvy or something.

Today a 70-page annual report on the armed forces criticised the “inexperienced” officer class for not possessing “the knowledge and intuition to realise when the line has been crossed into criminality.”