The German Ball Game

Source: Games to train and relax body and mind by Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths, 1796
Translation by: Beate Brockmann
For further understanding and terminology check this out.

2. The German Ball Game

This game which has not yet been described anywhere merits very well a detailed description. It is not my goal to be entertaining in this endeavor – try just to understand these dry explanations, entertainment will be found in practicing.

Inside Job

Inside Job, a great documentary about the financial crisis by Charles H. Ferguson. The film won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature yesterday.

Crises of Capitalism

Here is a cool animated talk about the Crises of Capitalism. While the talk gives a quite surprising perspective on the current crisis, it starts with a very cool review of the explanations others have given for it.

Bert’s Fish Soup

Ingredients:

• Vegetables: Bell peppers, parsley, fenel, celery, leek, chives, garlic
• Fish stock (you can make it yourself by cooking some fish heads for a couple of hours)
• Rouille (you can find it online or in French supermarkets)
• Fish fillets without bones and skin (cod, whiting, plaice, flounder, tilapia)
• Scallops
• Shrimps or prawn
• Croutons
• Grated cheese (e.g. Emmentaler, Gruyère or Parmesan)

Preparation:
Wash, cut and boil the vegetables in a big pot with not too much water. When the vegetables are boiled, pan sear the fish and scallops with butter and Cogniac in the pan and add them round after round to the pot. If the shrimps are red then they are already cooked, so add them like that to the soup, if the shrips are gray then sear them first until they get red. Add the fish stock to the pot, and make it hot but without boiling it. Serve hot with croutons and grated cheese. Dissolve the Rouille into the bowl or spread it on the croutons.

Here are more photos.

Mișcarea Verzilor

Un nou partid pentru o Românie mai curată: Mișcarea Verzilor!

Poze preluate de pe: remuscernea.ro

Mobility of Young People in Europe (Questionnaire)

Young? Fond of traveling abroad to boost your education? What exactly do you expect to gain when studying abroad? Or when doing an internship abroad? Or when just doing a trip in some other country? Which advantages and disadvantages does a young person have when being mobile?

The Young European Federalists (JEF) want to study these questions and need your support. Their online questionnaire contains questions about mobility during education & training and requires approximately 10 minutes for filling in:

English Version/ German Version / French Version

Evaluation is anonymous and the results will be published after the 1st of August 2009 on the JEF website. JEF will use the results to make suggestions to politicians in order to achieve equal opportunities, to provide support and information for young people who want to travel abroad.

EU Profiler

Discover your position in the political landscape for the 2009 European Parliament Elections with the EU Profiler. Works for any EU country. All you need to do is to answer 30 general questions, and then you can compare how close your answer is to the official doctrine of the parties in the country you choose.

One thing that I still need to find out is the position of the different German parties on software patents. Does any of the readers have a clue?

Junior Research Groups at Saarland University

Saarland University is seeking to establish several junior research groups within the recently established Cluster of Excellence “Multimodal Computing and Interaction.” Here is the official announcement.

Warsaw

Holidays

They say a picture is worth 1.000 words, so here is a 2.000.000-words-worth collection of pictures I took in the nicest holidays I had for a very long time.

Disclaimer. The quality Picasa displays online is absolutely horrible, for which I apologize. I usually scale down the pictures myself at reasonable quality, but this seems to no longer help — Picasa now scales them one more time and compresses them so much it destroys them. One thing that might work is downloading the albums you want to see as a whole using the Picasa client for Windows.