Quel
horreur! Together with
Wo I have been trying to make such a list some weeks ago on the occasion of the memorial day for the Armenian genocide.
Interesting is nr. 9. I wouldn't have expected the expulsion of Germans from Eastern European countries to appear on this list.
I don't want to defend any of these "Landsmannschaften" and "Vertriebenenverbaende" (associations of those people and their descendants) here in Germany, most of them are far right wing, but I guess almost nobody except for them and some historians would place this event on such a list, this clearly shows a bias on our view on the history of WW II.
There is something else.
Germans are responsible for the holocaust. Even nowadays post war born Germans still are Germans and as such they carry a responsability for what their ancestors did. Being German, you are sometimes blamed for the atrocities even though you personally didn't do anything. I mean, Germans are confronted by a kind of suspicion which they have to fight all the time. This German=Nazi topos just survives and comes up from time to time. But you would never think of a Russian or any other former Soviet Union citizen of being responsible of the millions that were killed in the Gulag. Why not? In the perception of the people there seem to be genocides with culprits and such without or with one person, like Stalin, who takes it all.
I guess the reason is, that in the case of Germany, it were the Germans who killed the others, the Jews. (These two groups are then taken to be disjoint.) But in the other case, it were the Soviets who killed the Soviets. As (non-jewish) citizen it was a much more quiet life in Nazi Germany than in the Soviet Union, since not being Jew and keeping quiet, they would let you live (except of course for dead in the battlefield) but with a Regime who kills more randomly like for instance the Khmer Rouge, your life is permanently in danger.
Enorm
innovativ und auch noch
soooo freundlich. Sogar fuer ne eigene Webseite hats schon gereicht, potztuusig!
I haven't read
this (via
preposterous) and I admit in advance that I am completely biased. But have you ever thought about, why those people claiming that female underrepresentation in science is due to a inherent cognitive difference in male and female brains are themselves mostly men?
The reason for that might of course be an inherent cognitive difference between mal and female brains. Women just aren't capable of thinking something like this. This thought is incomprehensible to them.
Seriously, I believe, that
some men just don't
like the idea that their personal behaviour could be under attack.
They just don't want to be criticised. This is not malice I guess, it's just laziness. It's a behavioural topos all over, if there
is a fact which threatens your self-conceptions, you try to do away with it by finding an explanation for it which you can't influence.
The less people participate in a game the less competition you face.
Now, science is already very competitive. So, just imagine, if all these smart women out there would come and join...
Maybe men feel offended by the claim that there is a gender bias in science because they
don't intend to discriminate against women. The thought a girl might be less apt to do science than they are just because she is a girl never came to their mind. This is fine.
Personally I never met any such kind of obvious discrimination except for maybe one case, but this person is by herself so unimportant that I didn't care. But what might really make women turn away from science is the completely male dominated environment you have to face every day. The way people treat each other is just more rude than women, at least myself, would choose to do. And there is another point: man tend to be less humble on what concerns their skills than women are (again at least myself). So sometimes
you find yourself surrounded by a bunch of moderate intelligent men acting up like hell. This is ennoying.
This brain-difference- stuff is really completely silly.
Come on, face it, most of the scientists out there just are no Einsteins, no Newtons, no Noethers and no Curies. What at least 90% of all scientists do in their daily life can be done by any reasonably intelligent person.
Most of my fellow students are male, (since I study physics in Germany, which is at the lower buttom of any female physicist's statistics.) A few of them are more intelligent than I am
but most of them aren't. They just aren't and that's not because I am a Einstein or a Noether or something, I am just a reasonably intelligent person.
Please don't get me wrong, I know some very intelligent physicists who are very nice and decent persons and whom I highly appreciate.
And, of course, they are all men, because I hardly know any female grown up physicist. And I get along quite well, although I often try to show off, despite of myself, which aswell is very tiring.
Max Goldt calls this letter "Y" "üptsilon" (with a German Umlaut as first letter) the umlaut is quite common in German but that t really stroke me yesterday when I listened to him spelling "hyppytyyny"(which apparently means something like <swiss german>Gumpiesel</swiss german> in Finnish.)
That's completely uninteresting, like most of the things I write about most of the time. I plan to write some more serious and
therefore longer postings, but until now, I was either too busy or too lazy. But they keep buzzing around in my head.
We teach a one years course on
computational physics here at HU. It's a nice course, in fact it was one of my favourites. It covers quite a lot
from root finding, numerical linear algebra technics, integration methods to Monte Carlo simulations. There are some very nice exercises where you send a satellite to the moon or play around with non linear diffusion. We do most of it in
MATLAB.
In principle MATLAB is really a very nice tool and it is definitelly easier to start with than a real "hard" programming language like C or FORTRAN. But unfortunately it does encourage people to write messy code.
