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29-Sep-2024
Near the end of my 73 km cycling tour in Böblingen, spectators blocked the street, and police controlled the traffic. But it apparently wasn't about any celebrities, but the cars themselves! Many were tuned and modded, and sounded like they were broken, producing very loud and unhealthy engine noises. One car that had stopped next to me actually had severe suspension problems; it bobbed up and down like crazy! The (mostly young and male) drivers seemed to have problems with smoothly engaging the clutch. The police could have made a fortune handing out tickets for noise pollution and reckless driving, but somehow they didn't. Or maybe I just didn't understand the purpose of that whole brouhaha ;-) Apparently, they had problems with the behavior of the visitors beforehand: Deshalb gab es bei vorherigen Motortreffs teilweise lange Rückstaus auf die Autobahn mit Gefährdungen für den nachfolgenden Verkehr. Das war in der Tat nichts und bitten alle Fans um Entschuldigung!
Die Behörden haben uns eine gesittete Abfahrt ohne Gefährdung von Fußgängern und Carspottern auferlegt. Auslöser waren die einzelnen, aber unvernünftigen und heftigen Vorfälle. Eine „gesittete“ Abfahrt ohne Gefährdung von Fußgängern und Carspottern hat oberste Priorität. Safety first!
Although I don't understand the worship of needlessly overpowered and expensive cars, I'm not advocating a ban on them. I'd be in favor of exponential taxation; i.e. make it much most costly to own SUV, muscle- or luxury cars, and use the proceeds to fund affordable, clean transportation. Personal mobility is a basic human right, an arms race on the streets because our public transportation is broken is just stupid (but very lucrative for our industry). 28-Sep-2024 Realization of the day: The number of members of a religion isn't a measure of its strength or "goodness". It just means that its properties makes people more susceptible to it. We also wouldn't say that a virus that infects many organisms is "better". The real measure of success is whether it does more good to the entire population. 26-Jul-2024Right next to the city hall of Altdorf (where one of my favorite cycling paths leads me to), there's a nice old house with a lion mural painted on the wall. I can't help it but the style reminds me of the botched Ecce Homo restauration in Spain. Makes me smile ;-) 12-Jul-2024 I ordered two paperback books from Amazon Warehouse; they sell returned or slightly damaged items at a discount. I often buy used or returned books, and I don't mind a battered cover, creases, or occasional markings. What I take offence at here is the randomness of the seller's description of the books' condition. I have a huge stack of books waiting to be read, so these purchases aren't impulsive or time-critical; I want a good deal. The condition is the main qualifier for judging that. (With Warehouse deals, the description text has always been a very generic categorization and says nothing about the actual faults.) Look at this book, designated used, very good: Though all pages are readable, I think that's pretty much the worst condition to sell a contemporary, non-antique paperback. The big kink in the book's spine complicates the turning of pages, and long-term might even threaten the stability of the binding. Tiny bits of paper will flake off the "bite marks" all along while reading. Compare that with another paperback, purchased shortly thereafter: Designated used, acceptable, it looks close to new! It definitely hasn't been read (the spine doesn't show any signs of opening it), and the only fault is some light wear at the corners of the cover (which would have happened once it's picked up for reading, anyway). I contemplated sending back the first one, but it would have been a hassle not worth the low price (a few Euros) and effort (handling and transportation costs), and I guess Amazon would then have just sold it back to the next unsuspecting customer (hopefully with a more qualified rating, though). So I kept it, but it further eroded my trust in the otherwise reputable seller. I had experienced similar incidents already, but this time it's been so blatantly wrong that I felt compelled to write about it. When I started buying from Warehouse (many years ago), I really valued them for their good deals, and felt that they frequently overstated the problems, and I was very satisfied. That's why I'm so sad that apparently the consistency of their ratings has taken such a hit. 05-Jun-2024 At the Learntec '24, a Chinese company (apparently partially state-owned and linked to surveillance technology linked to Uyghurs) presented smart displays and boards on an impressive booth. What struck me and my colleagues was their logo, however. For selling in the West, this didn't feature any Chinese ideograms, but the typical designer's play with Roman characters. I do think that the designer had a far-Eastern background, though, and that the practice of composing Kanji characters out of and around smaller radicals had too much of an unfortunate influence here. All the people I've asked read the company logo as alhua; although the a is embedded inside a blown-up d character, for Western eyes the proportions of those lines are too different, and this is rather recognized as a lowercase l, with a (silent) swoosh attached to it (like the @ that can be seen as an a with a circle around it). Roman characters read strictly left-to-right; we don't have any rules for characters contained inside another one. So even if the circle + l is recognized as a disfigured d, it would be unclear if the order is a-d or d-a. It might have worked a bit better if the following characters were less regular and more disfigured and ill-shaped. That would have primed the reader that this is a very "stylish" logo, with its characters "hidden" inside, and maybe caused a mental switch from "reading" to "solving a riddle". I see this as an unfortunate L10N fail that highlights the cultural differences; at least, they got some free publicity out of it! |
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