Rätsel (nicht) für Mathematiker

Ich denke, ich habe diese Woche einen jungen Arbeitskollegen, der mir spannende Rätsel stellen wollte, etwas enttäuscht:

Er: "Stell dir vor, du hast 25 verschieden schnelle Pferde und keine Stoppuhr, und --"
Ich: "Wieviele Pferde pro Rennen sind erlaubt?"
Er: "Kennst du schon? Okay, ein anderes. Nehmen wir an, du hast 9 Säcke mit Münz--"
Ich: "Weiß ich, um wieviel die gefälschten Münzen leichter sind?"
Er: "Na gut, ich hab noch eines! Stell dir vor, es gibt drei Türen und --"
Ich: "Zwei Drittel wenn man wechselt."
Er: "Stimmt. Okay. Du hast 100 schwarze und 100 weiße Kugeln und zwei --"
Ich: "Eine weiße allein in den einen Becher."

Neulich in der AVL: Eine Teekanne voll Weißwürste

Neue Anredeformen...

Nachdem man mir seit Jahren beizubringen versucht, welche Anredeformen in emails wann akzeptabel sind -- von "Sehr geehrter Herr Müller" über "Lieber Max" und "Servus Antonia" bis hin zu "Guten Abend Frau Hofer" und "Liebe alle" --, habe ich heute eine kennengelernt, die ich in dieser Form bislang noch nicht kannte. Das email begann mit:

"Sehr Schmidt,

..."

Zahlen ansagen ist gar nicht so leicht

Kürzlich gelernt: Zahlen am Telefon ansagen ist gar nicht so leicht. Zum Beispiel: "fünf hundert drei hundert dreißig" kann, bereits unter der Nebenbedingung, dass man eine 6-stellige Zahl sucht, sein:

• 503130
• 500330

Lässt man die Nebenbedingung weg, gibt es natürlich noch viele weitere...

Bitte um Missverständnisse

Stilblüte des Tages:

"Ich denke es ist am Besten diese Tatsache offen anzusprechen damit es auf meiner Seite zu einem Missverständnis kommt."

Rätsel: Richtig oder falsch, was soll's, i wüll a goa nix vastehn, ...

Aus der Playlist einer Software-Testerin:
(Aus welchen Liedern sind diese Textschnipsel? Lösungen gerne als Kommentar.)


1. Richtig oder falsch, was soll's,
i wüll a goa nix vastehn, ...


2. It's time to see what I can do
To test the limits and break through


3. Hoping for the best, but expecting the worst,
Are you gonna ■■■■■■■■■ or not?


4. Und er kennt seine Grenzen
Und geht trotzdem zu weit.


5. But there's no sense crying
over every mistake.
You just keep on trying
'til you run out of cake.
(...)
Now these points of data
make a beautiful line.
And we're out of beta.
We're releasing on time!


6. And so I'd thought I'd let you know
That these things take forever,
I especially am slow.


7. Your faults I will proclaim!
(...)
What is right, what is wrong?


8. Neulich hab' ich einen ■■■■■■ installiert,
Der hat gut und gern' zwei Tage funktioniert.
■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
Na da hab' ich gar nicht lange repariert,
Sondern sofort einen neuen installiert.


9. Now did you ever realize
That your mistake had a prize?


10. Will your system be alright
■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ tonight
There is no message we're receiving
Let me know, is your heart still beating?


11. ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ you'll see
There is so much that we
Don't understand
And the only thing we know
Is things don't always go
The way we planned


12. I don't know what I was doin'
But suddenly we fell apart.


13. It's not the way I hoped or how I planned
But somehow it's enough.

Left is right

Listening to an older Austrian lady (AUT) who speaks very little English and a young woman from New Zealand (NZ) making conversation about what side of the road cars drive on:
AUT: "You drive on left side."
NZ: "Right."
AUT: "Right? You drive on right side?"
NZ: "No, left. You also drive on the left side, right?"
AUT: "Yes, right."
NZ: "So left."
AUT: "No. Right."

Paranoia

-- Birgit

Linux vs. Windows (part 2)

-- Birgit

Tux logo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and authors Larry Ewing, Simon Budig, Anja Gerwinski: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tux.svg

Windows logo used in accordance with fair use regulations.

Verschiedene Grade von Pedanterie

Frage des Tages: Bin ich pedantischer als meine Nachbarn?

-- Birgit

Die Lehre schöner Dokumente

Mit freundlicher Genehmigung des Autors darf ich die folgende höchst amüsante Abhandlung über die korrekte Anwendung von LaTeX-Befehlen aus einer email-Diskussion zitieren -- ich finde, so schöner Humor sollte nicht ungehört verklingen:

=================================================

Lieber Herr X,

Frau Y hat mich aufgeklärt, dass Sie ihr erklärt haben, dass die
Punkte eines Dreiecks als $\mathit{ABC}$ und nicht einfach als $ABC$
zu setzen seien.

Bitte auch um entsprechende Erklärungen, damit ich auch verstehe,
warum Sie das vorziehen.

Ich hätte ja gemeint, dass A B und C drei verschiedene Punkte sind, die
eben --- wie bei einer Multiplikation --- ohne binären Operator
nebeneinanderstehen, und damit bin ich bei $ABC$.

Z

=================================================

Lieber Herr Z,

> Frau Y hat mich aufgeklärt, dass Sie ihr erklärt haben, dass die
> Punkte eines Dreiecks als $\mathit{ABC}$ und nicht einfach als $ABC$
> zu setzen seien.

Sollte das tatsächlich zutreffen, will ich nicht ruhen, ehe sämtliche Dreiecke von der gemeinen Tyrannei durch \mathit befreit worden und ihrer rechtmäßigen Multiplikation wieder eigen geworden sind!

> Bitte auch um entsprechende Erklärungen, damit ich auch verstehe,
> warum Sie das vorziehen.

Ich kann es mir kaum anders erklären, als dass ich von bösen Geistern geritten ward. Inzwischen habe ich jedenfalls, Knuth sei Dank, diesen schändlichen Pfad der Unterdrückung unschuldiger Punkte hinter mir gelassen.

> Ich hätte ja gemeint, dass A B und C drei verschiedene Punkte sind, die
> eben --- wie bei einer Multiplikation --- ohne binären Operator
> nebeneinanderstehen, und damit bin ich bei $ABC$.

Sie können in dieser Sache mit meinem uneingeschränkten Vertrauen und vollster Unterstützung rechnen.

Sollte zu Unrecht Platz unterschlagen worden sein, sei dieser hiermit inklusive sämtlicher Zinsen, Zinseszinsen und Kollateralschäden bei Vier- und Fünfecken umgehend zurückgezahlt:

\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad

Für eventuell zu viel beanspruchten Raum sollte ein

\hspace{-16em}

zu Ihrer freien Verfügung für gerechten Ausgleich sorgen.

Ich hoffe inständig, dass darüber hinaus kein seelischer Schaden angerichtet wurde, der nicht durch einen angemessenen Kaiserschmarrn und entsprechenden Zwetschkenröster wieder gut gemacht werden könnte.

Mit schuldbewussten Grüßen

X

Kopien ergehen zur allgemeinen Information, Begutachtung und Beglaubigung an weitere Verfechter der Lehre schöner Dokumente.

=================================================

Late night musings

Time machines would actually be damn useful. Let's say it's 3:40am and you really need to make that phone call at 08:00am (i.e., as soon as the office opens) to make an appointment. Of course, setting your alarm clock to 07:55 am is tantamount to torture, and having to get up for a mere five minute phone call adds insult to injury.

And now just imagine there was a time manipulation device that would allow you to make a two-way phone call four hours into the future, i.e., link your time from 03:40am to 03:45am with the receptionist's time from 08:00am to 08:05am. How awesome would that be! It wouldn't affect the receptionist at all, you could make your phone call right now and go to bed, and heck, how much harm to the timeline can four hours do?

Of course, as a next step I'd call myself in the future to ask what will happen in the next update of my favourite webcomic, and by recursive usage of such phone calls (i.e., asking my future self to call its future self) I could even look arbitrarily far into the future, thus reading every single issue of the comic that will ever be published, so that if I ever have a car accident, I wouldn't need to be sad about never learning how the story ends.

I guess it's time to go to sleep before I produce even more profound insights.

-- Birgit

Bad hack

Reading your old code comments -- always a source of fun:

// Bad hack, n.: A piece of code that arguably

// fulfills its purpose, but does so in a very

// crude, inefficient and/or instable way, usually

// due to having been written with great haste or

// little care.

// An example of a bad hack:

Life -- A review

Life is a game, some people say. Well, if it's a game, then it has deserved a review.

I shall assume that most people are familiar with the basic rules, so I'll skip directly to the discussion about some concepts, some strategies, and replay value.

Some flawed concept

There are various concepts that are frowned upon in games, and for a reason. Unfortunately, life sports quite a few of them.

One big factor is randomness. There are various game elements that appear to be completely random (in spite of actually following certain hidden rules), and, worse than that, unnecessarily random, and not adding much to the game play.

Let's start with random starting positions. While random setup helps to keep game play varied, in this case the random starting positions just have too much influence on the kind of options a player has and their winning chances. Some starting positions are just too strong and others too weak. A player starting in certain regions of Africa for example has low chances of going for an academic career, and almost no chance of getting far ahead on the money track. Also, in many cases, the starting position already more or less determines the entire strategy and outlook of a player, and sometimes leaves very little choice. The most egregious cases here are of course those where a player is forced into a certain role and possibly even killed before even getting old enough to take own decisions, let alone reach age of consent. Child soldiers, child pornography and child prostitution are the worst (and unfortunately not exactly rare) cases here. But even those aside, for example players starting in conflict regions or very religious societies usually have very low chances of completely staying out of those things, even after reaching adulthood.

Closely related to that is a certain running leader problem, especially in terms of power and money. Players who are at some point ahead in one of these fields usually will gather more and more, while players starting low have almost no chance of catching up.

Similarly, random player attributes have an unduly large influence. The most prominent example here is gender, which is randomly assigned to players when they start playing, and even though there are some special rules that will allow changing it later, they have so many drawbacks that few people will actually use them. Closely related to that is sexual orientation, though that is one random factor that I personally find quite interesting, because it gives some players a kind of side quest without completely spoiling the game experience for them if they don't complete it. Still, depending on the starting position it might be too much of a disadvantage in some situations, especially in those where public display of queer orientation is threatened with severe social consequences and even death penalty.

Another completely unbalanced random player attribute is disability, both physical and mental. Physical disability such as blindness or dwarfism can have a huge impact on the options available to a player, like for example career choices. As far as mental disabilities are concerned, I wouldn't dare evaluating how much they really influence the player's game experience for the better or the worse, but I certainly find the concept unnecessary.

One more very random element is love, a game mechanism that more or less randomly adds strong emotional connections between players. Worse than that, these connections don't necessarily go both ways; In fact, they surprisingly often don't. Which wouldn't be so bad, if one-way love connections didn't have such detrimental effects on affected players. Reciprocal connections on the other hand usually offer a very big boost to both involved players. Not surprisingly, many players therefore consider this concept one of the best things about the game, even though it reduces predictability. But given how random everything is already, a little bit of extra randomness is probably a small price to pay.

The one concept that truly sucks however and makes playing utterly unpleasant at times is player elimination. Interestingly though, in contrast to other games with player elimination that I have played, the big problem with player elimination in life is not that the eliminated players sitting out are bored -- at least not that I'm aware of --, but rather the negative effect that the elimination of a player has on the players remaining in the game.


Discussion of Strategies

As with many complex games, the best strategies are often very hard to figure out. It's already quite complicated to find the reasonably good ones.

   Pure strategies

As far as life is concerned, many players seem to go for money as their main winning strategy. While that strategy by itself is not horribly bad, I personally have the feeling that those players are missing quite a bit of the game play. Also, looking at the outcomes of players who go for that strategy, it seems to stagnate at some point rather than going infinitely upwards, and can even genuinely backfire in some cases.

Another popular but in my humble opinion very much overrated strategy are drugs. They might give a very short immediate boost, but on the long run the strategy always shows an overall downhill trend. So far I haven't met a single player for whom the strategy ever worked out.

Love is a third strategy that is used often, with the player concentrating all efforts on finding and retaining a permanent love relationship. Given how random the concept of love is (as described above), this appears an ill-conceived idea, and while it goes well often enough, it indeed also often goes horribly and painfully wrong, to the point of players dedicating more resources than reasonably justifiable or even comprehensible to gaining, preserving or regaining love. The possible end results are stalking, pathological jealousy, erotomania, suicide, and a whole branch of psychotherapists making a living of it.

Escapism is the fourth of the big strategies, usually achieved through excessive computer gaming and/or submersion in imaginary worlds. In combination with the drug strategy it can lead to long phases of almost complete loss of connection with the outside world. In combination with the love strategy it is expressed through excessive intake of mediocre literature such as Rosamunde Pilcher and soap operas, combined with the firm belief in their realism. It can also lead to sickly sweet plans of marrying in white and living happily ever after, usually without ever accomplishing them. While many players go through a phase of escapism during their transition from childhood to adulthood, continuing the strategy beyond that age can lead to drastically reduced chances of actual accomplishment in the game. Disturbingly, the strategy is just good enough that most players who get stuck in it at some point decide to actively try to perpetuate it. And indeed abandoning the strategy at a later stage often comes with rather severe consequences -- such as realizing how many years of their life they already wasted with it --, which ironically makes continuing the strategy a very tempting choice.

Closely related is the strategy of complete submersion in work, with the only exception that instead of imaginary worlds and problems, real ones are used. The most important positive factor here is constant positive feedback from the immediate environment. The big drawback is that the strategy requires a lot of time and energy and leaves little space for change or even choice. Again, the strategy is just good enough that many players choose to stick with it, even though it stagnates soon and has little chance of achieving high results. On the upside, it has also a low risk of complete failure and can thus be considered a rather safe strategy.

A strategy that is almost diametrically opposite to the previous strategy is trying to enjoy life as it is without putting any effort into changing anything about it, or even into maintaining the status quo. As mentioned in the discussion about random starting position above, some strategies are not available everywhere, and this one can only be used effectively in regions with a strong social support system, i.e., Europe. In those situations, the main drawback of the strategy really is that it is frowned upon by other players (because it drains their resources) and might therefore lead to rather adverse reactions by them. Also, it gives very little positive feedback or direct reward. For those two reasons, the strategy is only usable for players who have a thick skin amongst their random attributes, as well as a rather strong self-esteem that doesn't need positive feedback for retention. For players who have those attributes and live in a suitable region, the strategy can work out very well, though.

Diametrically opposite to that (and therefore again close to the work strategy) is the constant strive for approval, respect and/or attention from the environment. The "disease to please" is one form, another one is the "disease to impress". Different as those two might seem, what they and all related strategies have in common is that they heavily depend on positive feedback from the social group. While those strategies work well as long as this positive feedback can be achieved, they drain quite some energy, and on the long run heavily erode self-esteem. Given that many of the other strategies presented here require self-esteem to work properly, it's often hard to get away from this strategy after having used it for some time. But also using this strategy for a longer time has many disadvantages, because it needs a constant increase in intensity to work. This is mostly due to the environment getting used to the player's behaviour and requiring higher dosages of it in order to still give the same amount of positive feedback. For example, people might compliment someone on being slim, but after a while they get used to it, so in order for them to still notice it, the person in question needs to become even slimmer. For someone depending on this strategy, this might well be a jump start into anorexia nervosa. Other frequently found extreme forms are codependency (also known as helper syndrome), workaholism, plastic surgery (taken to the extreme by certain celebrities), various forms of attention seeking, and of course loss of any kind of individuality.

Adventure seeking finally is a strategy that is popular especially amongst younger players, and usually pursued either by extreme sports or extensive traveling. While a good addition to any of the previous strategy, it's barely usable as a stand-alone strategy, mostly because the world at some point runs out of [reasonably safe] sports or [reasonably safe] places.

Many other popular strategies are very similar to those already described. Going for power for example is very similar to going for money, with similar advantages and drawbacks. Religion is mostly a more community oriented version of escapism. Excessive partying doubles as drug usage and attention seeking. Focus on learning is similar to the working strategy. Extreme altruism is another variant on the approval seeking strategy, and can double as working strategy (in social work) and even triple as escapism by concentrating on other persons' problems instead of the own ones. Gambling and other behavioural addictions are close to drug usage, both in effects and outlook. Spending a lot of time on the Internet can slide between escapism and approval/attention seeking, depending on the online activities. (Bloggers such as me seek approval, trolls seek attention, and youtube watchers seek distraction from their own lifes.) Intense sex seeking behaviour [outside of relationships] can either be a very cynical form of the love strategy, or a variant of approval seeking. Hopeless romanticism is a mixture of the love strategy and escapism. Strategies based on friends and family are closely related to the love strategy. And so on.

   Mixed strategies

Now that I've presented a bunch of strategies that don't work, let's look into strategies that do. As with many games, the strategies that work best are mixed strategies. Looking at all the strategies above, they all only go wrong in their extreme forms, but can give good results as long as their drawbacks can be absorbed somehow.

Take love for example. The big problem here is not that the strategy is inherently flawed, it's just that it can go down very far in unlucky circumstances. It's therefore very dangerous as a pure strategy, but can work very well if combined with another strategy to fall back to in case things go wrong. Indeed some of the strongest strategies I've seen put a very strong emphasis on love, but always have a backup strategy ready and can pull out when things go badly. In short, love can be a very valuable part of a mixed strategy, as long as a player "knows when to fold 'em". Admittedly, most of us probably need to fall hard once or twice before learning that hope is not a strategy (though hopeless romantics will argue about that).

Similar to a good finance portfolio, a good life strategy therefore contains a lot of very different aspects, which might well mean combining all of the pure strategies mentioned before. A good portfolio might for example contain some "safe" strategies, such as work or learning, and some risky but profitable ones like love or adventure seeking.

   Tactics

Reminder for the not so game theory savvy people out there: Strategy is the long term plan, tactics is the short term procedure used to carry out the strategy. Some of these tactics could also be considered smaller strategies, since they are not broad enough to be used as pure strategies, but are rather long-term for tactics.

Other than strategies, the available tactics in life are rather manageable, but often underestimated. Some examples of notable tactics in life are:

• Health care. Almost obligatory part of every strategy.
• Humour. Very valuable for almost all strategies (except maybe religion), but often underrated.
• Self-confidence. Also valuable in virtually all strategies.
• Relaxation, inner calmness. Popular especially in eastern traditions, useful in almost all strategies.
• Distraction. Basically a short-term version of escapism, and as such quite useful in some situations.
• Self-pity. Efficient for cushioning setbacks, but counterproductive when used excessively.
• Social interaction. Almost all strategies involve a lot of interaction amongst humans and therefore benefit from interaction skills.
• Empathy. Closely related, it is also valuable in virtually all strategies.
• Honesty. Roughly balanced between positive and negative effects. If used consequently, the positive effects will after some time start to prevail, and can therefore be part of a long term strategy.
• Arrogance, devaluation. Frequently used as a counter mechanism in strategies that drain self-esteem. Helps to create a false feeling of self-esteem by looking down onto others, but causes enough other problems on its own, especially in strategies dependent on positive feedback from other people.
• Passive-aggressive behaviour. Wide spread, though not very effective.
• Denial. Prevents some of the negative effects of realizing that a strategy went wrong, but also prevents or at least reduces motivation for change.
• Copying. Imitating another player's strategy as a substitute for developing one for your own. Requires similar goals and player attributes in order to work at all, and is dangerous even in those cases. Can also be played as a stand-alone strategy, or, more precisely, as a tactics without a strategy to serve. Depending on whether one or more persons are copied it's either akin to following someone else home after having forgotten one's own address, or randomly following people in a shopping mall hoping to find what you are looking for, without even knowing what you are looking for.
• Perfectionism. While it sometimes can improve things, it often is just a huge waste of time. (For example, it just made me spend a lot more time onto this posting than I had planned.)
• Last but certainly not least: Reflection. Helps evaluating the current situation and fine tuning or modifying both strategy and tactics.

One game option that should not go unmentioned at this point is suicide, i.e. a voluntary premature opt-out of the game. I generally wouldn't consider it a good option unless you don't mind missing a significant part of the game, your current game score is already below zero and it's very likely that from that point it will only go further down, or at least stay significantly far below zero for a significantly long time. Of course, "significant" here is a very subjective measure. Suicide certainly doesn't give a positive end result, but I acknowledge that in some situations, the best thing to hope for is to end non-negative. That being said, I personally have the feeling that many people are opting for it too quickly as a fast way to reset their score to zero, rather than trying to go through the negative phase and getting back into the positive region again.


Replay value

What kind of replay options are available depends a lot on the religious system used. In some systems, for example Christianity and Atheism, there is basically no replay possible. Christianity offers a kind of follow-up game though that I haven't tested yet.

Other systems offer replay, either with or without preservation of information. While some players fancy the idea of starting over new while keeping all the information gathered in the first play, I personally think that making up your strategy as you go along is part of the fun of the game.

The alternative is starting over without the gathered information (or simply in an environment where the gathered information is useless, which can be achieved quite effectively by random starting positions and values). The second game would therefore start basically with the same preconditions as the first. While I wouldn't mind another round under these conditions, I don't really see the point.

Rather interesting however is the karma variant, in which the starting position in the next game depends to some extent on the performance in the previous one, making it somewhat similar to card games like Career Poker.

Verdict

Life is an extremely complex game, and figuring out good strategies is in fact one of the most interesting things about it. As with many other games, how much fun you have playing it depends a lot on how you play it and how well you play. Let's face it, Chess is no fun either when you have no idea what's going on, and/or when you throw a tantrum about every lost piece.

Still, there is a lot of randomness and a lot of unbalanced concepts. Even things that follow rules often appear to happen randomly. Don't get me wrong, randomness can very well keep a game interesting, but in this case it's just too much for my taste, especially because there is no effective mechanism to level it out. Also the imbalance between randomly assigned player attributes is just gross.

I very much like the basic idea of the game and most of the time enjoyed playing it so far, but at this stage I'd consider it an early prototype at best.

-- Birgit

BarbarenOder: Fahrstil

Ich war ja immer der Meinung, Fahrstil sei etwas, das nur die Steirer besitzen, und das mit zunehmender Entfernung von Graz quadratisch abnimmt. Woran erkennt man auf der Autobahn, dass man sich Wien nähert? An der freien ersten Spur. Warum hat die Autobahn ab Baden vier Spuren? Damit man die erste freilassen und auf den restlichen drei halbwegs normal fahren kann.

Entsprechend natürlich auch mein anfängliches Entsetzen über die Schweizer Fahrkünste: Oh diese Barbaren! Rechts überholen! Herausschneiden vom Beschleunigungsstreifen! Trotz Nachrang in den Kreisverkehr einfahren! Fußgänger, die ohne zu schauen auf den Zebrastreifen springen!

Und dann habe ich vier Monate lang dort gewohnt und bin jeden Tag 40km zur Arbeit und gleich weit wieder zurück gefahren.

Und habe nach meiner Rückkehr nach Graz entsetzt festgestellt: Oh diese Barbaren! Drängeln und kriminell dicht auffahren, statt einfach rechts vorzufahren! Nervöses Herumzuckeln am Beschleunigungsstreifen! Rücksichtsloses Durchsetzen vom Vorrang im Kreisverkehr! Drängeln und Lichthupe geben, wenn jemand vorm Zebrastreifen langsamer fährt, um auf Fußgänger zu achten!

Und die Moral von der Geschicht: Fahrstil definiert sich wohl nur dadurch, woran die meisten Leute in einer bestimmten Gegend gewohnt sind. Es mag wie bei Dialekten mehr oder weniger ästhetische geben, aber solange alle ungefähr denselben Regeln folgen, funktioniert alles bestens.

(Und nein, die Straßenverkehrsordnung erklärt nicht alles. Zum Beispiel hat ein Auto am Beschleunigungsstreifen Nachrang gegenüber dem fließenden Verkehr, darf also nur dann auf die eigentliche Fahrbahn wechseln, wenn dabei kein dort fahrendes Auto behindert wird. Aber was man diesbezüglich unter "behindern" versteht, ist regional sehr verschieden. In der Steiermark zum Beispiel stehen Autos zur Not so lange am Beschleunigungsstreifen, bis auf der gesamten einsehbaren Strecke kein einziges Auto mehr in Sicht ist. In der Schweiz dagegen gilt es durchaus auch noch als "nicht behindern", wenn ein auf der Hauptstrecke daherkommendes Auto noch problemlos von 90km/h auf 40km/h abbremsen kann. Reine Ansichtssache.)

lG Birgit

Drei Affen

Man findet Affen an den seltsamsten Orten. Hier zum Beispiel beim Werkzeughersteller LUX, wo jemand bei den Warnhinweisen auf einem Steinbohrersatz besonderen Humor bewiesen hat:

-- Birgit

Learning English for German natives

(It's a quite embarrassing moment though when you realize that you are making the mistakes that are usually reserved for English speakers learning German.)

-- Birgit

Autofahrer vs. Fußgänger

Betrifft: Antrag der Autofahrer dieser Welt, alle Fußgänger und Jogger, die im Winter mit schwarzem oder dunklem Gewand und ohne Reflektorstreifen unterwegs sind, zu erschlagen.

Der Antrag wird hiermit abgelehnt.

Begründung:
Ausschlaggebend für diese Entscheidung waren vor allem die folgenden beiden Argumente:
1) Um die beschriebenen Fußgänger und Jogger erschlagen zu können, müsste man sie zuerst einmal ausfindig machen. Auf Grund ihrer schlechten Sichtbarkeit gestaltet sich dies aber als schwierig.
2) Bereits jetzt wird ohnehin jedes Jahr ein gewisser Teil der beschriebenen Fußgänger und Jogger bei Autounfällen getötet. Im Gegensatz zum vorgebrachten Vorschlag ist dies zusätzlich selektiv gegenüber denjenigen Fußgängern und Joggern, die zusätzlich zu ihrer schlecht sichtbaren Kleidung auch noch ohne aufzupassen auf Zebrastreifen steigen oder sich auf andere Art im Straßenverkehr gedankenlos verhalten.

Hinweis:
Der Antrag, die beschriebenen Fußgänger und Jogger stattdessen zu teeren und zu federn, wird noch geprüft. Auf Grund der weißen Farbe der Federn, die hierbei zum Einsatz kommen würden, wäre bei diesem Verfahren neben der pädagogischen Wirkung auch eine direkte, sichtbarkeitsverbessernde Wirkung gegeben, die die Sicherheit des Straßenverkehres erhöhen würde.

Comic: Innocence

There are two questions to which most of us are at some point in the process of growing up very eager to hear the answers of our peers:
* How old were you when you did it for the first time?
* How large is yours?
Engineers aren't any different -- except that for them, the first question refers to signing an NDA and the second to your codebase.

Since I know you are all dying of curiosity, I'm willing to share my answers: I had my first time at the tender age of 18. It was with a very interesting genome research project, and back then their codebase appeared huge to me, mostly because I didn't have any comparison yet. Even though I was a bit anxious at first, it turned out to be a great experience.

The by far largest one I've seen so far is of course that of Google. Even after two years it still feels immense every time I touch it; It's in fact so large that it can be quite a pain in the ass at times.

I've seen and even played with some others, and came to the conclusion that skill matters a lot more than size. Indeed, if something is too big, it really requires a lot of skill to avoid it being painful to deal with. Small size and lack of skill on the other hand always leaves you with the feeling that you'd probably be better off doing it yourself.

And of course, things only start to get really interesting once you are in contact with several at the same time (or watch their more or less deft attempts of uniting with each other).


Okay, enough bawdy jokes for today. Also excuse my complete lack of ability to draw nice stick figures.

-- Birgit

World Aids Day

-- Birgit