I confess, yea, there is a misunderstanding (sometimes) between generations. A new mindset list like the Beloit College List is therefore very handy as it explains

Most students entering college for the first time this fall [...] were born in 1992.
2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail. [...]
7. “Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo. [...]
20. DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed. [...]
46. Nirvana is on the classic oldies station. [...]
52. There have always been women priests in the Anglican Church. [...]
65. They first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus. [...]

Maybe I should reserve some time to rewrite that in German with my children, yea, yea.

Being hit by some recent turns in science politics I remember a quote by Freud

“I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something you can not say aloud, or perhaps even think, though your experience of life can hardly have been different than mine.”

The source, however, is difficult to find – a letter to Oskar Pfister on Oct, 9, 1918 published in: Psychoanalysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister, eds. Heinrich Meng and Ernst L. Freud, trans. by Eric Mosbacher. New York: Basic Books, 1963. The German version is being published in Sigmund Freud, Oskar Pfister, Briefe 1909-1939, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1963, 2. Aufl. S. 62.
(Show me more…)

Great tips from Hugh MacLeod

1. Ignore everybody.
2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours.
3. Put the hours in. (Show me more…)

Being currently in London, I am combining the visit to an allergy congress (and work about a new review on evolutionary origins of immunoglobulin E) with some practical photographic experience at the river Thames.

I am reading currently about Tyndall scattering (Show me more…)