Impressions from a trip to Germany
Dear fellow resident German citizens!
Is it really and completely normal for you that
- the stamp vending machines of the German Post still return the change in worthless stamps only?
- a post counter hosted in a supermarket and tended by the personnel of the supermarket closes at 18:30, even though the supermarket itself is open until 20:00?
- many shops don’t accept card payments even for larger purchases?
- half of the shops which do accept cards only accept certain cards, but no VISA?
- you are looked at stupidly when paying with counted cash down to the cent?
Are you Schüßlering already?
This article is about German tv advertisements for sugar pills according to the teachings of Wilhelm Heinrich Schüßler. Since this is a German phenomenon and superstition I will not translate it to English. (more…)
PISA – what’s wrong with Sweden
The Swedish education system used to be a good example, but looking at the new PISA results, Sweden is among the countries with the strongest deterioration in school education in reading, mathematics and science. The only thing Sweden has achieved is to narrow the gap between top and low performers – obviously by lowering the overall average.
It is also notable that in spite of worse performance the belief of the students in their abilities is increasing in Sweden.
I cannot say that I am completely surprised by these findings…
(Internal server error? – Try again in a second, the PISA server appears to be heavily loaded right now.)
Pandora’s Promise (The movie)
Yesterday I had the opportunity to watch a screening of the movie Pandora's Promise at Uppsala University. After the movie there was a panel debate including the director of the…
Magic lights in Uppsala
Today the art festival “all lights on Uppsala” ended and Christmas season officially started with the 23rd annual fireworks by the local newspaper UNT.
During the festival, the artists and the city officials wanted to emphasize why LEDs will be the light source of the future. At one of the installations the efficiency of the humble incandescent light bulb was compared to the LED. There everyone passing by could read that the incandescent light bulb “converts 75% of the energy into heat and only 25% into light”.
I tried to reach the responsible people already in the first week of the festival, but only got a reply after 2 1/2 weeks. At that time it was considered too late to correct it to the correct number: an incandescent light bulb is much better than pointed out. Not only 75% of the electric energy is converted into heat, but rather 97.5%. Only about 2.5% of the electric power is converted into light!
But in the believe of their 25% efficient incandescent light bulbs it is probably understandable that the city of Uppsala even this year continues to use incandescent lights in their Christmas illumination – while Stockholm has abandoned the use of incandescents for this purpose two years ago.
I myself continue to use LEDs in my Christmas decorations. Last year the LED conversion bulbs for the 7-lighted window decorations were only sold in packs of 4 – kind of stupid, unless you had enough of these decorations or wanted to take apart some of the bulbs. This year at least Biltema is selling packs of 7 in two different versions: one with two 3mm LEDs inside the bulb, and one with a single diffuse 5mm LED inside. Both of them appear to be even better than last year’s versions – both in light color and manufacturing quality.
City of Stralsund flogs unique library collection
Money has to be saved everywhere these days, but should a public entity be allowed to flog the family silver? The city of Stralsund, UNESCO world heritage site, has recently silently and covertly sold off a unique library collection.
An online petition was started with the aim to revoke this action:
https://www.openpetition.de/petition/online/rettet-die-stralsunder-archivbibliothek
