German village with 3.000 residents to host Bundesliga team

Ralf Rangnick thinks Germany needed more Hoffenheims. I don't need even one of those...

And another options goes down the drain...

Sad, but true. Just another German political party managed to be dropped from the list of parties I might consider to vote for in an election.

Going up with Jimmy and Willy...

Microsoft gave away 20 tickets for the BlueSquare Premier League's Playoff Finals at Wembley next Sunday. I didn't win, but a fellow intern is so kind to take me with him. I'm really starting to get excited about seeing the stadium as well as Cambridge United playing Exeter City in the struggle for a place in the 4th League.

Cool thing: United already sold out its 21.000 tickets for the match - I wouldn't expect that in German 5th league...

The song for the game is another good example, why you should not record football anthems with 20 people, because they only sound cool if sung by thousands.

So true...

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1015

Understanding English Bathroom Culture

If you come to England, you will notice that in many English bathrooms, there are two separate taps on each basin, one for the hot and one for the cold water. Neal had warned me about this and I couldn't believe that this could really be so annoying. Now, after living in the UK for 5 weeks, I know that it is.

So, trying to understand my host country's culture and the reasons behind their way of live, I asked someone English why this was the case and the first answer was: To annoy foreigners. However, that guy had to admit that this sometimes also annoyed him and he gave me the real explanation, too. Years ago, hygienic conditions were not as good as today and someone introduced a law requiring every cold water tap to dispense water at a drinkable quality. However, back then this was connected with some effort and as it was only required for cold water taps, no one was willing to put in the same effort for the hot water, too. Therefore, people started having two separate taps on their basins. Unfortunately, it is pretty hard to get rid of things you once get used to, and therefore this separation is still in place, although you are probably safe to drink warm water from the tap, too, these days.

Plain old tourism

I start to gather a backlog of things and photos and it's time to write more stuff in order to catch up.

On the weekend of April 26th, four of us took a train to London and did not much more than what a common tourist would do. We took the tube to Westminster and visited the Houses of Parliament. However, we did not find out how to get in - normal visitors where rejected and obviously you had to wear strange choir or clerical costumes in order to get in. This might have been the reason for some people to show their protest in front of the building.

Sadly moving on, we crossed the road and stood in front of Westminster Abbey. First shock - they take a 10 pounds admission fee. However, my English Heritage Young Persons Membership card helped me here, as it was accepted as a replacement for my missing student ID and I got to pay the reduced fee.

We figured out pretty soon that the admission's height was legitimate. The church is really astonishing. It was the first time I got into contact with the British way of building a church and I realized that buildings of prayer in Britain always also are buildings of worshipping the death. Large English cathedrals (and I should later see that this was the case in Ireland, too) contain tons of monuments erected to remember some dead officers who lost their lives fighting for the honor of their Queen/King and their country at some weird places all over the world.
Interestingly, Lord Wellington is known to have said "It's victory or Westminster Abbey for us!" at the beginning of the Battle of Trafalgar. Poor Wellington was wrong. He won the battle, but was shot by a French sniper - and they buried him in St. Paul's Cathedral.
On we went through St. James Park, where (as a matter of signposts allover) you are allowed to feed the ducks, the swans, and the pidgeons, but not the pelicans. Probably pelicans are a pest and they try to get rid of them this way - sucessfully, as we didn't see any pelican there. Our way lead us to Buckingham Palace, where we were to take the usual photos, although anyone will agree that there are much nicer palaces in the world.

After all these touristic activities we spent one and a half hour to search for a reasonable place to eat and then kept walking along river Thames. We lost Malo for a while as he went to see Tate Modern, while the others of us decided the weather was much too nice to lose time watching some blue rectangles over green circles on a white canvas. (Yes, I'm prejudiced...) Walking along the river we learned that museums close pretty early here. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre hat just admitted the last group of people at half past 4 and when we finally reached St. Paul's Cathedral, we only were allowed a quick glance at the inside before being thrown out by the security.

Question: How many Starbucks cafes are in 3-minute walking distance of St. Paul's? Answer: Three! After this experience I wrote a sad e-mail to Starbucks Germany and requested a shop to be opened in Dresden, too. However, they thanked me for my interest and had to admit that there were no such plans for the year 2008.

We finished our touristic tour by visiting the Barbican Music Hall that evening, where we heard the London Symphonic Orchestra Wind Quintett play 4 pieces by Krommer, Beethoven, Seiber, and Mozart.

Back from Hibernia...

Just back from Dublin (pronounced Dubb-Linn if you'd like to be local), capital of the beautiful Republic of Ireland (pronounced: Oi-Länd). Will take some time before I write more about this. Just one thing for short: I know now, why Ireland is not that good at football - they don't seem to have enough dogs.

Copyright in a modern society

Richard Stallman gave a talk in the Cambridge University Computer Lab yesterday. Since this is right next door to the MS building, quite a few of us went there to see the icon of the Free Software movement in person. Stallmann's talk was about copyright and what alternatives he proposed in contrast to the ever more restricting copyrigh laws that get introduced allover the world.

The talk was extremely well prepared and even though in between I found myself wondering, what exactly makes this guy over there, with the scrubby beard, the long and greasy hair and the round belly so impressive - this guy definitely has charisma and he has something to say. It's not quite easy to outline his views in short here (his talk took more than the allocated 90 minutes), but basically he was arguing that since making copies has become easier over the last centuries, we should not impose copyright laws in the private area, which probably most people will agree - if you buy a CD or a book you should have the right to borrow it to your friends. You should be allowed to read the book as often as you want and to resell it or give it away, if you don't want to have it anymore.

The other part of the talk focussed on the kind of media that is distributed because of someone making a living of it. Selling books or CDs does not contradict Stallman's philosophy. However, he argues that currently, publishers make the most of the money while the artists, authors and musicians can barely survive from what they get out of it - except when they are real superstars. That's why his proposition is that every musician should let people download music from the web and just ask them to give as much money as they would like. Some examples show that his might work.

All in all, Stallman argues towards a socialist/communist society. His ideas would work, if every human was good and contributed his part to the global good of the world. I'm afraid, history has shown us, that this does not work. In his examples, the people supporting the musicians would always be the same ones. Might be, that this raises enough money for the artist's survival, so that he does not need to care. But this system is extremely unfair to the ones paying, because those who don't get the same value out of this system as them and thereby encourages people to be assholes.

You could even advance this argumentation by comparing private households and businesses. If I buy software for my personal purpose and pay according to Stallman's scheme, I might pay the true worth to its authors and feel fine. However, a company will never pay for software just for the sake of feeling good, if they can get the same thing for free.

All in all, the talk was great. The world needs radicals like Stallman. Maybe not because his ideas can directly change the world to a better place, but because they spawn discussions that may lead into the right direction.