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Longest Physics Lecture in History?
gfrege writes "Perhaps you remember some long physics lectures from your days at school. But as part of a general strike of students at the Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin concerning cuts in funding for the city's universities, some physicists are in the middle of what could be the longest physics lecture in history. It started at noon on Monday, and is planned to run to noon on Thursday. Check out the topics, and if you're in Berlin, come on down. The Babelfish translations of the lecture titles make for some fun reading, too, if you can't make it there yourself."
...by a single professor, rather than a series of lectures on different topics by different people. Or am I missing something?
Back in the days when I went to school (up hill both ways) we had lectures that lasted all winter. We got to school on day, it snowed 30 feet, spring came, snow melted then we got to go home. And we LIKED it. back in the day.
Ride recklessly only when safe to do so.
Again sorry, but you know it's funny.
why? forty-two.
Students at Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin will simultaneously break the world record for sleeping in class.
I remember many 3 day physics lectures -- unfortunately most were only one hour in length!!!
This sheds new light on the old "look left, look right, look left again" rule when crossing the street: In quantum, by looking at the cars, you can affect their positions!
Doesn't apply to me (I tried, nearly got run over). Maybe it works if you're blond...?
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
Maybe I am way off in thinking from the status quo, but I believe universities have a responsibility to inspire students, not just "sell a product". I believe this because what happens to people during their college time effects all of society, not just the student. The imagination and creativity of these graduates will determine how much we advance with space exploration, computers, and all sorts of technologies. These new graduates just have to dream it. Just look at the past 40 years, and what graduates have accomplished. Good for the physics faculty to have this lecture marithon. I bet they will be helping themselves recruit more students.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Also, since a student strike does not hurt as much as a worker strike, the students have to revert to more spectacular means. The one described in this article is one of them. Another media effective action was the demonstration at IKEA last week where many students occupied the beds there and "applied" for educational asylum in Sweden.
You could say it is a kind of demonstration, but a very specific one.
BTW: I am not a student, but work as assistant at a German university, so I am familiar with the current situation and the student protests.
Sebastian
1.) Here in Germany, higher education comes mostly for free, including attending University. This is paid for by state taxes, mostly.
2.) There is a huge financial crunch in local communities and the states (Laender), of which Berlin is one, due to prolonged blissful ignorance of reality (tax revenue down) in crazy public spending. Berlin is one of the worst candidates with huge debt, kind of like CA in the US, even suing federal gvt. to bail them out and unfortunately winning.
3.) Berlin has three full universities plus N colleges and such, sucking up money.
4.) what's an avg. politician to do? Slash university funding big style, amongst other things, potentially closing one of them down for good
5.) what's a university student to do? go on strike (IMO not very creative either, but I digress....) and generally raise awareness that higher education is worth its money.
6.) what's a prof to do? help students out (after all they're in the same boat), by e.g. holding a 3 day continuous physics lecture in the middle of Berlin, for everybody to attend.
That's why they're doing it. If you or I agree with it, is another question...
Plus, there is a reason society should pay for students to go to school. Over the long run, the country will get back more money in taxes than they paid for the tuition. Think about it, if government paid $8000 a year for tuition and another $5000 for room and board, heck make it a cool $15,000 a year for the student, then that would be $60,000 for the 4 years. Now a college graduate will probably make at least $20,000 a year more than a non-college graduate on avarage, and probably much more later in life as they advance in their careers. If government taxed 20% of this extra $20,000 a year, then government would get $140,000 back over the next 35 years. And those are lowball estimates. Consider the extra money would probably push the person into a higher tax bracket (more than 20% taxes, probably closer to 40%), and they will probably be making $50,000/year more than non-graduates after 10 or 15 years of work.
I do not understand why country's do not offer free college education for all.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
are the apparent showing of pornography the 12 hours before the lecture begins and the 12 hours after it ends. If you look at the schedule, you'll note in those time slots, it does say XXX. :)
There is also something wrong with the idea that if someone comes out the right vagiana then they everything for free, while others have to struggle for the same oppertunity. Isn't education something everyone has a right to? It is the only thing I can think of which by itself can take a person and improve their quality of life, their job, the amount of money they make, and their happiness.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Yes, it's about "modernization" of universities here in germany, especially Berlin, which means to drastically cut expenses, close faculties, adopt a tuition fee model (studying is free until now in germany). And also funds for profs are dropped. So it's in there interest, too.
You might get some more information on indymedia germany (http://de.indymedia.org), but until now the whole movement is not too much related to social movements in general, more about academics getting a bad future like everyone else does.
I do not understand why country's do not offer free college education for all.
Simple. Because educated people are harder to control. Those in positions of power want those who are not to be easier to control, easier to turn into mindless consumer zombies, easier to get to vote for whoever puts out the best commercials rather than has the best platform, etc.
Universal education challenges the new aristocracy, who believe that you shouldn't get anything unless you can pay through the nose for it. Of course, they can afford to, but no one else can.
And the society goes to hell for it, with them leading the way. Gotta love it.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
That's not true.
In Western Australia, for example, university student's can not be forced to join a union. They actually have freedom of association and aren't forced to pay large amounts of money to an organisation they do not support.
They also have *better* student services, but simple economics would tell you that would be the case.
It's mentioned on page 130 of Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid..
"The proverbial German phenomenon of the "verb-at-the-end", about which droll tales of absent-minded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherance, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping. The confusion among the audience that out-of-order popping from from the stack onto which the professor's verbs had been pushed, is amusing to imagine, could engender."
What the fuck are you talking about?
...).
Not everybody can get a higher education - you have to earn it first by, you guessed it, getting good grades. This is called the "Hochschulreife". Without it, you are not eligible to even apply to a University. There's ALSO this thing called "Numerus Clausus", which basically says "only people with these grades or better get even LOOKED at" for degrees with a limited capacity. And furthermore, if you don't spend effort to study, you'll get kicked out - if you don't manage to pass the exams in the given time-limit (if there is one) or flunk twice, you'll lose your right to ever take another exam in that discipline again. Forever. For every University in Germany. This means, that if I manage to flunk twice in Mathematics, I'm not allowed to study anything where Mathematics is a part of the degree (Engineering, Computer Science,
There's also no studying forever: you get one and a half times the specified time of study for that particular degree (in BW at least). After that you'll have to pay tuition fees. But this is different from state to state.
Who told you that bullshit anyway? Take it from someone who actually studies in Germany...
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
American students get tuition raise after tuition raise, and they do nothing. Same thing for American workers--we just bend over and take it. But Europeans know how to organize and act together. That is why they have taken their countries to a place beyond what America is or may ever be. They have free or low cost universities. American students have to go into debt $20K even for a public school education.
American workers now work more hours per year than any other country, and our pay just keeps going down.
Brainwashed and politically isolated by the media, we are each like baby wildebeest stranded midstream in an African river, while the investors, business owners and corporations feast on our carcasses.....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I believe what you're referring to must be Schachtelsatze, or "nested sentences", which indeed is a (quite obsolete) rhetorical style in german.
It's not used much, and if it is, it's generally in literature. Probably 95% of its useage is simply to show off, I'd assume.
It works basically more or less like this: you start a sentence, and at some word, where you'd like to add additional information about it, you start a subclause. In that one, you can do the same again. Effectively, you're embedding sentences within sentences. Since in German, the verb often comes at the end, once you're through, you must clean up by adding all the verbs at the end. So it's a bit like pushing and popping indeed.
An artificial, exaggerated example was taken from here:
german:
Schon immer mal wollte ich einen Satz, der zwar grammatikalisch richtig gebildet, jedoch durch die Anfugung von Nebensatzen, die durch ein Komma, welches das Verb bzw. das Hilfsverb, das dieserart jeweils erst nach dem Schachtelsatz, der eigentlich den Zusammenhang, der ebenfalls im Nebensatz, der kurz vor dem Verb, welches das Satzende, das das Verb bzw. das Hilfsverb, das durch das bereits genannte Komma, das ja die Nebensatze, die eingeschachtelt worden sind, abschachtelt, ineinander verschachtelt wurde, endlich bringt, wieder entschachtelt, verschachtelt worden ist, erklart wird, erklaren sollte, genannt wird, somit einschachtelt, getrennt werden, verschachtelt wird, ist, formulieren.
english, (almost) german word order:
I always wanted a sentence, which however gramatically corrently formed, but through the addition of subclauses, that are with a comma, which the verb or the auxiliary verb, which in this way each time only after the nested clause, that actually the context, that also in the subclause, that shortly before the verb, which the end of sentence, which the verb or the auxiliary verb, which through the previously mentioned comma, which now the the subclauses, which have been nested, nests in, has been nested in each other, finally mentions, de-nests again, has been nested in, is explained, should explain, is mentioned, therefore nests in, are separated, is nested in, is, to formulate.
english, understandable (sort-of):
I always wanted to formulate a sentence, that is formed gramatically correct, but that is nested in through the addition of subclauses. These subclauses are separated by a comma, which nests in the verb or auxiliary verb, which then gets only mentioned after the nested clause. The nested clause should explain the context, which also is explained in the subclause that has been nested in shortly before the verb, which de-nests (the sentence) again before the end of the sentence. The subclause thus relates to the verb or auxiliary verb.
The verb nests sentences through the use of a comma, which marks the nesting of the subclauses that were nested in.
Hope that helps or at least doesn't confuse more than before...
Indeed. In fact, the US public education system was designed to keep people uneducated and docile.