Women, physics and veils
A long time ago I complained
here about Germans and fear of islamic veils. Here in Germany the widespread believe is, that no woman would ever choose to veil herself by her own will, rather all of them are forced to do it by a bunch of violent and fundamentalistic brothers, uncles and fathers.
So a veiled woman isn't regarded as demonstrating publicly her religious belief and affiliation to Islam, rather she must be pitied because she is not allowed to do what she wants and live the way she wants.
Therefore banning the veil amounts to bring salvation to all these poor creatures.
So what we need is a bunch of women confessing publicly their islamic belief but nevertheless taking an active part in public life.
(Of course, I think that laws banning veils from public places
work very much against this goal. If there are many suppressed woman within the muslim community then who have to fight this in a very different way.
Maybe the percentage of veiled women will decrease as a consequence but it certainly won't work the other way round.)
There is a exchange student from Leeds in an
experimental particle physics group here. She covers not only her hair but also her face.
Whatever might be her reason to dress this way, her family certainly does allow her to do something which is very unusual even for us "free" European women, namely studying physics, which is, as everybody knows, a very much male dominated area.
If it ever happens to you that after upgrading your OS (Debian Sid) you can't connect to the internet (via an analog modem) anymore, you should just
remove "
brltty". Never heard about? Then you are probabely not a blind Linux user, because brltty is a deamon for running a braille display on Linux. This guy grasps the first serial port of your system on booting. So when you later start a utility that uses pppd, that port is already occupied.
The stupid thing about it is, that it is quite hard to find out who is the bad guy.
You can't find any messages of brltty on your system logs
(/var/log/syslog /var/log/messages)
telling you what devices it is using.
At least I couldn't. ps -A only tells you that a programme called brltty is running. But there are so many programmes you never heard about.
The way I identified the guilty guy was only by noticing
that in /var/log/syslog after every exit of pppd, there was an error message of brltty, so I decided to figure out what that is.
I definitely never installed that programme. It must be one of these thousands of questions you have to answer when you are installing Debian. And where after a certain time you just decide to follow the suggestions. It's kind of a silly default to install it at all, since I doubt wether there are that many blind Linux users out there.
And they are probabely clever enough to install it on their one.
Well, there aren't probabely that many Linux users using an analog modem neither, I must admit.
"N'avre-bous bas bris un pastion?" demanda un Suisse qui buvait du rhum dans un verre a biere.
"Oui, Monsieur", dit d'Artagnan, "nous avons eu cet honneur;"
(...)
"Le bastion de St. Gervais", repondit d'Artagnan, "derriere lequel les Rochelois inquietaient nos travailleurs."
"Et l'affaire a ete chaude?"
"Mais oui, nous y avons perdu cinq hommes, et les Rochelois huit ou dix."
"Balzampleu!" fit le Suisse, qui, malgre l'admirable collection de jurons que possede la langue allemande, avait pris l'habitude de jurer en francais.
"Mais il est probable", dit le cheveau-leger, "qu'ils vont, ce matin, envoyer des pionniers pour remettre le bastion en etat".
"Oui, c'est probable." dit d'Artagnan.
"Messieurs", dit Athos, " un pari!"
"Ah! woui! un bari! dit le Suisse.
Alexandre Dumas, dans "les trois mousquetaires"
Je suis desolee de supprimer les accents mais j'ai un clavier americain qu'apparemment je ne peux pas modifier.
En tout cas ce n'est pas cela qui est drole.
