An e-mail came around from the Vice President for Studying and Teaching here at the University of Not-Bielefeld the other week informing us about the increasing number of student reports reaching her office about examinations, and final exams in particular, being scheduled during the 14-week lecture periods instead of immediately after them like they should be.
As always, any e-mail coming from central admin from the University always raises more questions for me than answers. For starters, what ever happened to memos? Admin always used to ruin your day with memos, not e-mails. Is there even such a thing as memos anymore? What about e-memos? (Or the Apple equivalent in the form of iMemos?) Sadly, the answer would appear to be no. A bit of exhaustive research later (i.e., my usual quick and dirty Google search) revealed that e-memos are really only being offered up by Microsoft these days with their only apparent customer being the Turkish Armed Forces, which tried the app out the one time way back in 2007 and then very unsuccessfully so.
Slightly more to the point, but still not really relevant, does the title Vice President for Studying and Teaching strike anyone else as being more than a little stilted? Granted, it is the literal English translation of Vizepräsidentin für Studium und Lehre, but I still feel that something like learning is the more appropriate counterpoint to teaching than studying is. Even “studies” would be an improvement. But, given that we are talking (eventually) about examinations here, let’s just run with studying for the time being and return to that e-mail.
Now, in addition to pointing out all the regulations that are being broken by holding final exams during the lecture period, the e-mail also goes beyond this simple and normally sufficient appeal to authority to actually and unusually explain why those regulations are there in the first place. The key reason here is that all the studying that is being done for those finals means that the students aren’t showing up for the teaching in their other classes, something that I’ve experienced many times firsthand in my lectures. And if the studying isn’t keeping the students away, then sometimes it’s the writing because those other teachers sometimes set their exams outside of the time slot of their course and inside of yours. But, fortunately, our VP for Cramming and Droning has promised to crack down on this slightly rude practice starting in the Fall.
It all sounds good, but then again this is exactly what lip service is supposed to sound like …
For starters, this problem is by no means a recent phenomenon and has been going on since I first arrived at the University of Not-Bielefeld over 15 years ago now. So either those reports have been really slow in arriving or the realization as to what they mean has. Take your pick.
And, just like with many other administratively illegal activities on campus, it is possible to get around this one too so long as you write a simple letter of justification as to why it’s necessary. So much for those regulations.
Most importantly, there’s no possible way that the President’s Office could not have known anything about all this until those increasing number of reports blew the lid off the “scandal”. You see, although we teaching staff set our own examination dates, we also still need to register all those dates with and have them approved by the central Examinations Office. (Well, we should be registering them all. Technically I also need to do this with eachand every one of the graded presentations I make the students do during the lecture period too but somehow I have better things to do than registering dozens of examinations per year. Like, for instance, actually teaching. Or grading those presentations.) In other words, there was no need to wait on those reports from the students because the profs were already dutifully reporting all their illegal activities for them. For years now. And the Examinations Office was equally dutifully rubberstamping it all for just as long.
All of which means that your guess is as good as mine as to why this issue was now suddenly worthy of such vice-presidential indignation …
We all know that the internet is a dangerous place, with lots of bad actors trying to scam us, spam us, doxx us, phish us, and troll us. And then there’s Facebook. In many ways, however, the real cyberthreat comes instead from all the IT people ostensibly trying to keep us safe.
It all started out innocently enough with IT advising us to use stronger passwords before forcing us to use those ones with an LSD-induced mixture of big and small letters, digits, and random punctuation. You know, the ones that you can’t possibly remember without writing them down? (Or that Elon Musk is tempted to use to name his next kid?) And then you invariably do forget because you’re not supposed to write them down anywhere or can’t decipher the piece of paper that they’re on anymore in your paranoid attempt to sort of keep them secure? And then it doesn’t matter anyway because you’re forced to change them every three months? And the ones that you’re still being advised to use even though the guy credited for pushing that system on us publicly acknowledged it as being wrong (long passphrases being more secure than shorter gobbledygook) and apologized for it way back in 2017?
And then it goes downhill from there …
Another invention that someone probably should also be apologizing for in 20 years is two-factor authentication (2FA), where login attempts need to be confirmed through the use of a secondary, time-limited code that is sent to you via e-mail, SMS, or some authenticator program.
It’s not that 2FA is a bad idea as such but the implementations of it often seem designed more to frustrate legitimate users than any would-be hackers. Often, the codes simply don’t work. Or they get sent to you by e-mail when you have no access to it at that time. Most often, however, the frustration derives from having to wait an inordinately long time to get the code, making you unsure if the code was even sent in the first place. (So you ask for another. And another. And then they all arrive simultaneously.) Or the code gets sent by default precisely to that app you’re trying to log into and for which you need the code. But, for a prime example of a really moronic implementation of 2FA, we need only turn—rather unsurprisingly—to the University of Not-Bielefeld.
Slow to the game but nevertheless eager to still play along, the University’s IT Department has been steadily tightening the cybersecurity thumbscrews on us. So we too have those impossible-to-remember passwords as well as those banners inserted at the top of external e-mails warning us that they originate from outside the secure ivory walls of University, banners that have long since faded into background noise. We also get regular e-mail updates informing us of the latest cyberthreats (usually phishing e-mails) and that always end with the same sign-off of “Stay alert” that gets about as much attention as those warning banners.
But, in the wake of a cyberattack that almost took over the University’s servers in 2023, IT decided that it was time to install 2FA to log in to the University’s most critical of online services (e.g., webmail, VPN, or the teaching platform but not those for downloading copyrighted, licensed software or any of the millions of admin forms). The first step in implementing this late last year was to divide the single login pages into two separate ones, one for the username and a second one for the password. I still have absolutely no idea how this increases security. Is the guiding principle here that hackers (or their computer algorithms) are somehow inherently lazy or give up easily?
(Interestingly, it would also appear that hackers only speak English. For instance, say your passphrase is something stupid like “Mypasswordispassword”. According to the Password Monster website, it ranks as very weak because it can be cracked in 0.02 seconds. But, use its literal German translation of MeinKennwortistKennwort and you won’t have to think up another password for the next 650 billion years. Hell, just use Kennwort alone and you’ll add 17 hours to the 0 seconds needed to crack “password”. Now, it’s widely said that German is not one of the easiest languages in the world to learn but really?)
The more defining step of true 2FA recently went online and, as proudly announced by IT’s “2FA Team” (and, yes, they are officially known as that), will be in full force as of this month. To avoid the hassle of constantly having to use an authenticator app, permanent staff were blessed in receiving a special dongle, to which the Mac person in me can only say, and then from the very bottom of my heart, “Great. Another fucking dongle.” We’re expected to keep this dongle safe and with us at all times, if not continuously plugged into our computer when we’re working with it. (Which is not easy when you’re using a laptop like me that only has two USB-C ports to begin with. Fortunately, however, my Mac somehow virtually swallowed the dongle so that I can access its functions via my password. This is actually very, very handy because plugging the dongle into my iPhone disables the keyboard from being shown in some apps on it and which is necessary during the whole process for typing in things like usernames. As such, the actual dongle is now languishing somewhere safe but not really with me, with its exact location entrusted to those same portions of my memory that I use to forget all my impossible passwords.)
So, with authenticator of your choice in hand, what was a comparatively simple two-step login—open the web page and have your device securely autofill the information—suddenly bloated to six: open the web page, fill in your username, select the 2FA method, fill in your password, get informed that you will be about to use a 2FA method, and finally really use that 2FA method.
And for our electronic teaching platform (StudIP, an anagram of stupid, BTW; just saying …), you can add a seventh step on top of that because the login page now defaults to one where you can select your status group for the login procedure: admins, people outside the University of Not-Bielefeld, or the 15 000+ members of the University for which the platform is actually designed (you know, those who actually do or, even more incredulously, receive the teaching?), who now have to click an extra box to even begin their official, patience-straining, but fabulously secure login journey.
Given those back-to-back home runs, it’s obvious that the IT Department recruited that 2FA-Team from the IT beer leagues. Seriously. How did anyone ever come up with that system and how did anyone else ever think that it was a good idea? Exactly none of the many other 2FA systems I have to use these days even use separate pages for the username and password because at least their IT people realize that it’s that secondary verification and not an endless number of webpages that is providing the security. Forget hackers, I don’t even want to log in to my own account anymore.
And the fun continues …
After that same hacker onslaught, all staff were required to install a sentinel program that apart from being a normal antivirus program also automatically monitors our computers for threats or other suspicious activities that are then blocked both on the computer and also centrally if need be. The former actually happened to me recently because of a threat that was menacingly identified as “persistence_deception” and which was severe enough that the sentinel program blocked my computer from accessing the internet anymore. But not to fear because the same program also provided me with the e-mail address and URL of our IT service desk for help, both of which are incredibly handy when you have no internet.
Fortunately there was also a phone number provided and it was quickly determined that the culprit was a program that I had just updated to its most recent version, namely Nextcloud. You know, Nextcloud, the program for file sharing and group documents that the University is forcing us to use instead of Google Drive? In any case, the IT person just sighed and said that they’d white flag it. (Probably again given that sigh.)
And then it all started from zero a few weeks later with the next Nextcloud update. In the end, my permanent solution was to simply stop using this University-approved program, which I always found to be a general pain in the ass anyway, and to go back to using Google Drive. I mean really. Let’s think about which is more likely to occur: a data breach at google or a(nother almost) successful hacking of the University’s servers, probably because someone wasn’t staying alert to that stupid e-mail banner and got reeled in by a phishing attempt in a split-second brain fart.
I heard on the radio yesterday afternoon that experts are predicting that this summer will see an insect plague in Germany, especially when it comes to ticks and tiger mosquitoes. Now, I can’t find any real support for this statement on the internet apart from all the conspiracy sites that have been making it for 10 years running, but it’s not an unlikely one to be made, even from serious sources, and the general point still stands.
First off, I know exactly who is to blame for any coming plague and I’m looking right at all the University of Not-Bielefelds with all their biodiversity-boosting, budget-balancing bits of bug bliss in the form of insect meadows. On our campus at least, these things are everywhere and are in full bloom right now, the plants having grown so high that you can’t even see those little signs justifying their presence anymore. (All except for a lawnmower-width stripe next to the sidewalks that is mown down to a biodiversity-lacking dog meadow on a regular basis. I have no idea what for. To keep the insects from crossing the roads? Nevertheless, it apparently hasn’t occurred to the University that they could use those stripes for us to see their little signs.)
But, more importantly, was everyone seriously expecting that these meadows would only be visited by the “nice” insects? (Or, as this working paper puts it, the “beneficial” ones?) As I said before, we can’t judge biodiversity because it just is. There is no such thing as good vs. bad or less vs. more biodiversity and we don’t really get to pick and choose exactly what kind we want to have. We don’t really get to choose what kind we don’t want to have either for that matter, with many of our efforts to wipe out pest species either failing miserably (think releasing genetically-engineered mosquitoes) or also taking out a lot of other “good” biodiversity as collateral damage (think insecticides).
Want some more food for thought? While looking for that online support for the coming plague, I found a summary of a scientific paper that found that insect biodiversity might still be decreasing not despite the insect meadows but in part because of them.
Apparently the argument goes something like this …
One of the major causes of global warming is the increasing levels of CO2, chiefly from our burning of fossil fuels. Plants (and thereby insect meadows by extension) are supposed to be our saviours here because they breathe in CO2 and, via photosynthesis, use it to grow. More CO2, more growth, more food for some insects.
But …
Although there’s more vegetation, it’s actually pound-for-pound less nutritious than before because it’s mostly just more cellulose, the plant fibre that’s difficult to digest and not very nourishing to boot. The other minerals and nutrients are present in about the same overall amounts as before meaning that the insects are chewing through more cellulose but building up less cellulite. In other words, the plants have become the equivalent of plain rice cakes: you can live off them but why would you want to?
So forget that insect plague. As that same summary puts it, we might be heading for an insect apocalypse anyway …
As a prof, you quickly learn to deal with half-filled classrooms. I can, of course, understand student absenteeism to a certain extent. I mean, did I faithfully attend all my university classes? (Ok, I did. But then I’m a nerd. But also a prof. So there …)
(And just to further support my nerdiness, I should explain the title of this post. Lehrgang is German for a course or a course of studies, whereas Leergang revolves around the concept of emptiness. (Interestingly, however, Leergang does mean a course of studies in Dutch, making them once again that little bit more down-to-earth than the Germans.) But, given that it’s Father’s Day today in Germany, a bad pun seems more than appropriate.)
In any case, the individual reasons contributing to the mass absenteeism are many, diverse, and not mutually exclusive:
the class is too early, too late, or to day;
it’s Tuesday;
either you or the material is too boring;
too many other (stupid) profs are scheduling their exams during the lecture period; and, when all else fails,
Deutsche Bahn.
To counteract this tendency and to help whip a little education into the students despite their worst intentions, we were able to designate certain types of courses as having compulsory attendance. This, of course, is patently retarded for any of number of additional reasons:
the mere fact of having to treat grown people as children,
only being able to do this for practicals and seminars when lectures are by far the more important (for the students) because that’s where all the profs draw all their exam questions from; and, not to forget,
the utter meaninglessness of it all because any attempt to check it is illegal.
That’s right. Because of the GDPR and data-privacy concerns, we’re can’t take attendance in our classes, even to the point of sending around a sign-up sheet or, presumably, making our own secret lists.
What makes this last reason so insidiously stupid is that the students all tend to know each others’ names anyway. (Or at least far better than I do.) More to the point, their names are all listed in the course-management software used by the University anyway, a list that every student has access to by default for each course they’re enrolled in.
Yet, somehow, having written documentation that a student attended a particular class on a particular day—something that those other students who attended the same class on the same day would already know—does more to violate their data privacy than having all the other students in the course know their course of studies and even which semester they are currently in, two pieces of information that are also readily available through that same course-management software?
Sounds more like a Spülgang (meaning, among other things, flushing of the toilet) to me …
Sometimes, you just gotta ask yourself, what the hell?
During a recent trip to more southerly German climes (Bonn), I noticed a lot of the following signs while taking a stroll one evening:
Despite their different wordings, shapes, styles, and colours, the basic message in all the signs was identical: don’t block the driveway. My first thought was whether pointing something like this out (explicitly and very repeatedly) was really that necessary. Germans tend to be pretty law-abiding folks, especially when it comes to their cars. (Put it this way, Germans not only understand the concept of right of way, they also tend to adhere to it. Voluntarily.) And basic common sense would seem to dictate that you shouldn’t block a driveway.
But, common sense—or at least parking spaces—would appear to be in short supply in Bonn …
One thing you can say about Germans though, they don’t tend to fart around when it comes to their signs. Take the one above on the left. Not only does the no-parking restriction apply both day (Tag) and night (Nacht), but you’re also not allowed to block either the entrance (Einfahrt) or the exit (Ausfahrt) to the garage, even though both are the exact same thing. (The proper, direction-neutral word would be Auffahrt.)
My favourite of all the signs, however, was the one in the middle. Because if you pan back from the garage door, you can see that a very large tree has indeed parked itself right in front of that driveway. Now given that trees, like meadows, are not widely renowned for their reading and writing skills, it is possible to forgive the tree (or perhaps the tree is simply blocking the exit and not the entrance), but you still have to wonder what thought processes, if any, were involved here.
Given that both the sign and the tree are fairly old, it’s obvious that some form of detente has been going on for quite some time now. Decades in fact. Although it’s mum on the age of the sign, ChatGPT guesstimates that the house could be upwards of 100 years old and that the tree, a London Plane, was probably planted sometime after World War II and has at least 60 years worth of rings to its name.
Which all explains the situation quite a bit actually.
Stands to figure that the Brits, who administered northwestern Germany and therefore Bonn after the war, would plant something called London Planes all over the city and then sometimes smack dab in the front of a driveway because they couldn’t read the German sign either.
I’ve written previously about how the city of Not-Bielefeld is continuously trying to live up to its reputation as a bicycle-friendly city. Noteworthy efforts here, if only because they miss the mark completely, include the city testing out a gangrene wave for bikes and the University of Not-Bielefeld proudly installing the most expensive bike racks known to mankind.
Part of the problem here is that there is quite literally little room for improvement. Despite its reputation, Not-Bielefeld is not really laid out for bike traffic. (Or even car traffic for that matter, with most of the major roads being a single lane in either direction.) There are very few dedicated bike paths and the few that do exist are designed more to promote bikes as a form of recreation rather than as a form of alternative transportation. Or, in other words, the paths don’t really go where any bike commuters need them to.
Instead, most of the bike routes are simply vaguely divided sidewalks shared with pedestrians and all the potential chaos, ambulance rides, and insurance claims that mixture conjures up. Even that green wave is shared with pedestrians with the additional insanity of oncoming bike and pedestrian traffic on the same 3.5 meter wide stretch of sidewalk.
Therefore, an alternative solution that the city has been increasingly implementing is to declare some streets as “bicycle streets”, where except for the local residents, any car traffic is forbidden. One of the latest of these transformed streets is along a route my dog and I regularly take walking to work.
As potentially good as the idea is in general, there are a lot of weird things about this particular bicycle street. For starters, it’s a residential road that really didn’t see that much traffic beforehand, either from bikes or cars. It also runs parallel to some more major streets a couple of blocks removed on either side of it, one of which is the one where the city of Not-Bielefeld installed that bicycle green wave only a few months later. So, once again, the city is really just burning more money on another bike route that most bike commuters will tend to shun and, given that green wave, the city seems to want them to shun as well.
Moreover, if a bicycle street is really meant to facilitate commuting, it should get the right-of-way at any intersections. And the city proudly did this for this street, but with one major exception, namely the crossing road that leads to the University. So, right at the midway point of the bicycle street, any bike riders have to come to a screeching halt. As does any common sense. Although the city did install the equivalent of a pedestrian crossing where the cyclists can hammer away at their little button like a lab rat thinking that it will get its cheese faster that way too, they forgot to also install a traffic light for them for some reason. Instead, the bike riders have to crane their necks look at the pedestrian lights to know when it’s safe for them to cross. Merely annoying for the cyclist who pushed the button, but a downright gamble for any approaching the intersection. And, like with any pedestrian crossing on any only moderately busy road, it’s more of a nice (after)thought than anything else. As before, the bikes usually cross according to any gaps in the traffic rather than according to what colour light they see, with the end result that the cars are often dutifully waiting at their red lights for all the cyclists that equally dutifully pressed their buttons but nevertheless crossed the road two minutes earlier.
As always, it all makes you wonder how serious the powers at large really are about their environmental initiatives. (Or if they have any concept of reality.) What good is a bicycle street with a stop sign in the middle of it, especially when that intersection presumably leads to a place that the bicycle traffic presumably wants to go in the first place. I mean, they’re giving the right of way to a two-lane road where the speed limit is a miserly 30 km/h and where they specifically set up the street parking as a slalom course as a further traffic-calming measure. By contrast, the city is apparently mulling over the idea of having that green wave dictate the timing of the traffic lights on the road it runs along, thereby effectively giving the bikes the right of way. And that road is indeed a major artery in the city with a 50-km/h speed limit. (However, given that this is Not-Bielefeld, think “rectal” for that artery as opposed to “carotid”.)
On the practical side, how is this bicycle street even vaguely enforceable? Strictly speaking—and we are talking Germany here where strict represents the minimal, if grudgingly accepted, standard—”residents only” means that guests, Amazon, and repairmen can’t come calling anymore. At least not by car. And let’s not even start to think about anyone moving either in or out of a house there. Admittedly it’s understood that “residents only” includes “and associated activities” but then interpretation is not exactly something you want in traffic signs. Otherwise they begin to resemble signs from God, if only because more motorists will be talking to Him sooner than they might have otherwise wanted.
On top of that, although I did say that this street is a residential road, it’s really a mostly residential road that also contains a handful of businesses and some doctors’ offices. How do you even begin to sort out those customers and patients from those people just looking to use the road as an eerily empty shortcut? The cops (hopefully) have better things to do and any automated camera traps will just end up costing the city even more money for setting up the resident database and for all the court hearings from all those customers, patients, and Amazon drivers that were legitimately driving there.
Finally, comes the irony. Despite this now being a bicycle street, the city of Not-Bielefeld is investing major time and money in constructing new street-parking spaces along the road. Makes perfect sense to me: fewer cars obviously require more parking spaces. Or maybe its just some form of compensation to the residents for reducing the amount of annoying car traffic along their street. More to the point: almost all the houses there have driveways. If they didn’t need designated street parking before, why do they suddenly need it now? On top of all this, it’s not really street parking per se (which might inadvertently act to also calm the traffic along the road) but instead the partial bricking over of some front lawns to create the new parking spaces. Or, in other words, sacrificing the environment yet again to foster some environmentally friendly (PR) initiatives.
And then all this for a whole 42 spots, obscurely promoted by the city with the tagline Mehr geht nicht (“more is not possible”). Google Maps shows that there are about 140 properties directly fronting onto the road, with about an equal number behind that but with road access. That makes about one parking spot for every seven properties, a ratio that starts plummeting faster than a midair chicken when you consider that small apartment complexes are found on more than a few of those properties.
In the end, it’s strike three for Not-Bielefeld and its bicycle initiatives. Nearly two and a half years on and with construction of the street parking in full, slo-motion swing, there’s still more car traffic, even apparently legal car traffic, than bike traffic along this road.
On the plus side, it’s still a nice stretch to walk along with my dog …
Last year I wrote about how my private health-insurance company was holding out providing us, its customers, with any form of physical healthcare card, ostensibly with the motivation to save us money because of the cost of developing such a cutting-edge system.
This all, of course, is a load of crap. First off, saving us any money is simply an unintended side effect (but a damn good selling point) of them instead wanting to maximize their profits. Secondly, and as I again wrote before, these same development costs didn’t seem to be at all important when the government made them provide their economy class, statutory health-insurance customers with essentially the same cards nor when they tore down and completely replaced their online system for submitting refund claims after it was in operation for all of a year and a half.
But, let’s skip ahead to this year, 2025, the year when the German healthcare system increasingly shakes off its paper shackles to increasingly, if grudgingly, embrace the digital age.
Pretty darn racy that Jetpack AI …
Among the monumental advances awaiting us was the introduction of personalized, national health-insurance numbers, something that my insurance company has stressed is absolutely crucial for registering any implants I might have or might need. (Because, you know, they couldn’t tie them to my existing personalized, national tax number or my personalized, national pension number.) I mean, they even used bold face in the letter when making this point so it’s gotta be important, right? Makes you wonder how they ever managed to keep track of all my implants way back in those ancient, analog days of just last year.
The really cynical part of the letter though was their non-bold face hyping of how important applying for this “unique digital identity” is so as to be able to use things like electronic prescriptions to their “greatest possible extent”. All this from the same company that in part justifies not giving us healthcare cards, which are essential to use things like electronic prescriptions to any possible extent, by proudly proclaiming just how well their trusted, paper-based system has and is continuing to function.
And then comes the kicker …
After being away in Croatia for a couple of weeks, I came home to a pair of letters from my insurance company. One informed me of my personalized health-insurance number together with the warning that I should keep it in a safe place. (One of these places, of course, could include being encoded on my non-existent healthcare card, something that is in fact the case for all those people fortunate enough to have one.) The other letter was a reminder about how I had not yet applied for this very same health-insurance number and how I would be missing out on all those digital advances as well as potentially delaying any unplanned implant operations. (Um, except possibly for breast implants, what other kind of implants do you normally plan on getting? I’m pretty sure my dad didn’t go out and purposely break his hip as part of some grand plan to get a new one. And even I would be surprised if some admin-type would withhold a much needed emergency implant, thereby keeping a person in severe pain, until all the necessary paperwork was filled out.) Unfortunately, however, this second, reminder letter was written at least a week after the first one, which, to boot, was only vaguely dated as “February 2025”.
Welcome to the bonehead correspondence of the day.
Otherwise, I think I have a good idea how my insurance company can save some money to offset those development costs for my healthcare card …
An addendum: nope, thought it over and the idea really is good, especially since it’s now coming on the end of June and they just sent me another letter reminding me to sign up for my national health-insurance number. Sigh …
In its never-ending quest to be at the bleeding edge of self-promoting lip service, the University of Not-Bielefeld introduced its new environmentally-friendly travel policy at the start of this year. After what must have been countless collective person-hours in at least the high single-digit range, the following was foisted upon University members for all their official business trips:
a ban on plane flights for destinations otherwise reachable within eight hours and within Germany in general and
an obligatory carbon tax on all plane flights to be paid into a dedicated, central university fund.
The irony here is just how environmentally unfriendly such highly innovative stuff like this is. I’m sure that the Earth must’ve stopped spinning when these ideas were first pitched. A carbon tax on plane flights? Wow … Hope that no one was burning the midnight oil coming up with that outside-the-cardboard-box, original idea, especially given how much extra CO2 all that combustion would’ve released. Next time, how about saving all that extracurricular brainstorming for normal working hours when all those bright ideas can be generated using solar power instead of fossil fuels?
Presumably, the members of the responsible think tank also don’t have to walk past the same inspirational sign on campus every day that I do:
It’s not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.
(Although given that ideas can either be new or old and that neither seem to be especially needed, I really have no idea what ol’ Edwin is trying to inspire in anyone here.)
It’s not that being more responsible environmentally is bad—in fact it’s desperately needed—it’s just that its implementation, especially by the University of Not-Bielefeld, more often than not highlights the clash between reality and either idealism or jargon.
For starters, despite the label, the new policy is not environmentally friendly. There is no question that trains and busses have a way smaller carbon footprint than planes do, but that merely makes them friendlier, not friendly as such. Want to know what a truly environmentally-friendly travel policy looks like?
Don’t travel.
If the recent corona pandemic taught us anything, it’s that business trips are often optional luxuries and that many viable alternatives to them exist. But, sadly, human nature has taught us that the pandemic taught us nothing. In the span of only five years, we went from the death of the airline industry as we knew it to a full recovery in terms of passenger numbers and profits. And then some.
And, as is typical for the University of Not-Bielefeld, they are once again explicitly embracing the diversity amongst their academic disciplines by subjecting them all to yet another one-size-fits-all solution.
The new travel policy is unlikely to impact on, say, philosophers to any great degree because they can get into one of their long-winded arguments with anyone, anywhere, and at any time. It’s much different for researchers doing field work. Let’s face it, unless you find peat bogs inherently interesting, there’s not much for anyone from archaeology to ecology to do in northern Germany. More cynically, the University of Not-Bielefeld has been spending the past decade or so trying to grow its international exposure, both with respect to its teaching and its research. So, with its new travel policy, the University is effectively punishing those people who were foolish enough to listen to it in the past.
To its credit, however, the University has recognized this potential inequity from the get-go and already provided a solution in the form of it matching any fees paid into the central fund. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but what??? That just makes the whole pot bigger rather than balancing out who put how much into it. Adding insult to financial injury is that many people will probably also be indirectly paying the associated matching fee because the University takes a cut of any grant money they brought in to fund their trips abroad, with that cut to be used at the University’s discretion.
And, true to form, it gets even worse. The University has also said that it reserves the right to stop paying in the matching fees if it starts serving as an incentive for people to fly more. Again, what??? People are going to actively decide to destroy the environment that little bit faster not because plane travel is usually more convenient but because doing so will help pay for projects to save the environment that little bit slower? Dunno. Seems to me that those people wanting the fund to be as big as possible are also the ones least likely to pay into it.
Based on this example of the matching fund, I’m pretty certain that ol’ Edward would like to change his admonishment against having old ideas to instead just stop having outright stupid ones.
Nevertheless, the University still proudly proclaims these ideas on the webpage describing the policy. What the webpage doesn’t doesn’t actually talk about, however, is telecommuting. That important option, and the fact that it is the one that the University of Not-Bielefeld sees as the default, is instead buried two links away in the invitingly titled Amtliche Mitteilungen zur Richtlinie der Universität für klimafreundliche Dienstreisen (Official Announcement of the Guidelines of the University’s Policy for Environmentally-Friendly Travel). Instead, the webpage mostly presents a map of Europe showing how far away selected cities are together with the non-flying travel time to reach them and, for an even more selected few, the CO2 impact when flying to them. All the cities are put into three broad categories: must-not fly (under eight hours or within Germany), should-not fly (between eight and 12 hours), and could fly (over 12 hours).
One of the cities falling into that last category is Lisbon, which the map helpfully points out is only about 36 hours away if you don’t fly. Obviously, this kind of travel itinerary is only for the really devoted or the really hardcore. I don’t know about anyone else, but I go pretty squirrely after only about six hours traveling in any sort of tin can, which doesn’t even get me to the “should-not” category. And for other people sitting on the fence for a trip in that category, the University is more than willing to help keep their thoughts grounded through levying an additional charge of 50 EUR for flights under 1000 km. (From the text, it seems clear that the 1000 km refers to the one-way distance. What’s not so clear is if you have to pay the extra 50 EUR just for the entire trip or for each leg of it.)
Even more helpfully, the webpage also contains links to several portals for you to purchase your environmentally friendly bus or train tickets. Unhelpfully, however, most of these sites are rather meagre with respect to their offerings. For instance, not a single one could find me a train connection to Lisbon. The best I got was a bus. With two stopovers. And this same portal also showed me that flying would save me 33 hours, one stopover, and 34 EUR in comparison. (One way. Double those savings if you want to come back home.)
Of course, a policy wouldn’t be a real policy unless creates extra paperwork. And the form associated with this one is classic admin stuff. Another completely new form that could have been merged with either of the two already existing ones relating to business trips, ones that were also updated mere days before the new policy came into force. Plus, the new form also requires you to do all the work. Instead of simply entering the distance flown, you have to enter how much kg CO2e the airplane used and then multiply that by the carbon tax (0.055 EUR / kg CO2e) to get how much you owe in total. Thankfully, the University at least provides a link to the Atmosfair website where you can figure out the footprint of your trip.
(No idea if the University actually asked Atmosfair about doing this. Their page is actually designed to for you to financially offset your emissions to support their own environmental projects. Aren’t they gonna love it when all the employees of the University of Not-Bielefeld start using their search engine, their database, and their calculations for free?)
Fortunately, however, doing all the bookwork also gives you the opportunity to cook those same books a little. You’re expected to include all stopovers (which increase the carbon impact), but who’s going to verify if you did? (And if they do check it, then why can’t they enter all the info in the first place themselves?) There are also other variables that you can specify like the type of plane and which class you flew in, but the University webpage explicitly mentions that these are optional. And no wonder considering that the Atmosfair website defaults slightly high for both. Don’t list your class and their calculations average you into something close to premium economy. Don’t specify your plane and you end up having taken something like an Airbus A330-200, either a Boeing 737-500 or 747-400, or an Embraer 170, a collection of aircraft united by all being out of production and also not really being flown that much in Europe. Or, in other words, comparative kerosene guzzlers.
The difference between default and reality can be pretty high. Let’s take London as an example, a destination that falls into the “should-not fly” category. Atmosfair’s calculations default to an impact of 373 kg CO2e or 20.52 EUR for the University’s eco-fund. But specify that you flew economy and in a Boeing 737 MAX 8 (which is the real plane Ryanair flies on that route and the only class Ryanair offers) and those numbers nosedive to 222 kg CO2e and a tax of only 12.21 EUR, a savings of some 40.5%. But what do I know about planes, right? Claim that you flew in an ATR-72—which is a legitimate option for that distance if you can find an airline using it for that route (or at all)—and you can drop your CO2e impact even further to a diminutive 88 kg to only donate the equivalent of a cup of coffee (4.84 EUR) to the University. Even with those extra 50 EUR that you have to pay for flying under 1000 km, it’s still worth it.
(And for those suddenly developing a conscience, I’ll point out that even the University seems to be doing some creative accounting here, with their map putting London at a distance of only 202 kg CO2e …)
Or, for some advanced civil (servant) disobedience, just don’t register the business trip with the university. After all, no trip means no travel restrictions and no carbon tax, right? That I can tell, there are three reasons why we should be letting the university know about our business trips:
because admin wants us to,
to be covered by the university’s (private) healthcare insurance for the trip, and
to get your costs reimbursed.
For those who have been following along, #1 is usually not a good idea and therefore not a valid justification. The same is true for the obvious reason that seems to be missing, namely to inform the university that we’re away. For reasons that I still don’t understand (but don’t dare to question out loud), the University of Not-Bielefeld gives its professors an awful lot of freedom. We have a 40-hour workweek but no one ever enforces it, probably because they’d quickly realize that very few professors only work 40 hours a week. I’ve also never had to apply to go on vacation and, in fact, have never been officially told just how many vacation days per year I have. So if the University doesn’t care when I’m on vacation, does it really care if I’m on a business trip? Not there is not there, right? And, in becoming a civil servant, you’re basically forced to get private healthcare insurance anyway, so #2 falls away for me as well.
That leaves #3. The costs for a lot of my trips, however, are already covered by the other side meaning that there’s no reason for me to submit the claim form and its new ugly sibling, the carbon-tax form. Or, even more cynically for trips like this, I can dutifully register them with the University but, like with not applying for the European A1 certificate (Entsendebescheinigung), similarly forget to submit the carbon-tax form and see if anyone notices.
And, again, it’s all such low-hanging fruit taking potshots at easy targets. (Hmm. Sort of like this blog when you stop to think about it …) Want to see a huge carbon footprint? Take a look in your average molecular lab and see how much plastic waste is generated there each day.
As an example, a simple 5 µL Eppendorf reaction tube has a total impact of about 25 to 35 g CO2e depending on how much of the tube is made from fossil-sourced versus bio-based plastics. Barely worth talking about, right? Especially when you consider we each breathe out about a kilogram of the stuff each day. But, to fill that tube, you need a plastic pipette tip with its 2.2 to 3.1 g CO2e footprint. Again, next to nothing. If you want to sequence a gene, you’ll need at least four of each, one set to extract the DNA, one to increase the quantity of the DNA, and two to sequence both strands of it. There are more steps and more tubes involved than that, but we’re still well under 200 g of CO2e in total, so who cares?
Ok then, let’s scale things up. Normal (Sanger) DNA sequencing is good for about 1000 nucleotides, the individual letters in the DNA. The length of the human genome, however, is roughly 3 200 000 000 letters, requiring about 3.2 million sequencing reactions. And suddenly, those 200 g CO2e turn into 350 to 490 tonnes CO2e. Or about 15 lifetimes of breathing on average. This also all assumes that everything works perfectly the first time around, whereas the reality is that anywhere from 10 to 25% of these reactions need to be redone. (More reality: although the Human Genome Project officially ran from 1990 to 2003, it was only 92% complete when it “ended”. It took them until the summer of 2023 and much more CO2e to finally get that last and very tricky 8% done.) Admittedly, next-generation sequencing has drastically lowered the amount of plastic waste and genomes are becoming stupidly easy and cheap to sequence now, but the footprint of any molecular lab remains monstrously huge.
In the end, despite the University saying exactly the opposite, the policy is inherently punitive. People who have to go off-continent for their work are unduly penalized because the reality is that flying often does present the lowest possible impact in such cases. If you’ve got time to kill and keep a sharp lookout for wayward icebergs, it is indeed possible to go by boat to North America, but cruise ships makes planes look positively green by comparison, with the necessary long-haul flight having only a marginally higher carbon footprint than a city bus. And that’s what this policy should be all about: encouraging people to switch to better alternatives rather than just penalizing them when there aren’t any.
The policy also doesn’t give us the choice to offset our carbon in other ways. Most airlines allow you to do this when buying the ticket and, in fact, Ryanair now has this option switched on by default. It’s not that I have any great love for or trust in the airlines but then I also don’t want the University of Not-Bielefeld to be putting up any more million-Euro bike racks (for a whole 170 bikes!) and going around telling everyone how environmentally responsible (but not fiscally retarded) they are.
And that’s my final gripe (for today): the policy was implemented without the University having any idea about how to spend all the carbon-tax money they are going to raise, estimated to be 120 000 EUR for 2025 (including the matching grant from the President’s Office). It’s far easier for the university community to literally buy into something obligatory like this when it knows that there is some well-thought-out plan behind it.
But no. Despite the University’s climate roadmap now being several years old, all that’s known for this carbon-tax money is that there will be another workshop sometime later in the year to brainstorm ideas on how to use it.
A key, if underappreciated, skill in life is learning when it’s time to let go, be it from life itself or some of your various endeavours while living it. And so, I think that it’s only fitting to do this with The Blog About Fog, especially with this my 100th blog entry.
In helping me reach this decision, AI and ChatGPT in particular were instrumental. While waiting for both the coffee and the motivation to kick in at work this morning, I killed some time by asking ChatGPT what it thought about Not-Bielefeld and the University of Not-Bielefeld. Although both are creations of mine, the idea of Not-Bielefeld at least draws upon the Bielefeld Conspiracy, which holds that the actual German city of Bielefeld does not exist.
And this is pretty much what ChatGPT drew upon when I asked it about Not-Bielefeld. But, its answer to telling me something about the University blew my mind. This is what it came up with:
The University of Not-Bielefeld (UNB) is a prestigious institution dedicated to the study of things that simultaneously exist and do not exist. It is famous for its Department of Applied Non-Existence, where scholars rigorously research paradoxes, conspiracy theories, and the metaphysics of absence.
🔍 Key Faculties & Research Areas
Faculty of Quantum Sociology
Investigates the social behavior of entities that may or may not exist.
Offers a master’s program in Schrödingerian Public Relations.
Institute for Fictional Geography
Specializes in mapping places that people swear exist but can’t quite locate.
Publishes the annual Atlas of Non-Places.
School of Conspiratorial Studies
Offers courses on Advanced Bielefeld Conspiracy Theories and The Psychology of Mass Doubt.
Regular guest lectures by individuals who may or may not be real.
Department of Theoretical Tourism
Focuses on vacations to locations that aren’t supposed to exist.
Organizes field trips that no one can prove actually happened.
Center for Uncertain Mathematics
Develops proofs for numbers that exist only in hypothetical realities.
Pioneered the Imaginary Bus Schedule, which always arrives but never at the expected time.
🎓 Campus Life
The university library contains books that only appear when you’re not looking for them.
The student ID cards are valid both everywhere and nowhere, making discounts at real-world stores hit-or-miss.
The cafeteria serves dishes that people remember tasting but cannot accurately describe.
Would you like to enroll, or are you already an alumnus without realizing it? 🤔😆
From start to finish, that’s one damn fine hallucination. And all without so much of a wink of an AI from ChatGPT hinting it to be so. More pragmatically, when generative AI is both cleverer and funnier than you are (and scores better with Jetpack’s Write Brief writing guide on top of it), it’s a clear sign that it’s time to go.
Yeah, right. Don’t you worry. Just starting to roll up my sleeves here …
The University of Not-Bielefeld recently wrapped up its biennial exercise in democracy by holding elections for both the Senate as well as the Boards for each of its six faculties. (And, no, that isn’t a typo in the title but a bilingual play on words. Spot does exist in German and pretty much means the same thing as in English. But the German Spott means sarcasm, which, of course is pretty spot on for this blog.)
(These elections, of course, are not to be confused with the imminent German federal election, one that Elon Musk, ever the visionary and me-speech activist who is desperate to prove that Twitter (now known as X) was not some one-hit wonder, has referred to as being critical to “the future of civilization.” Unfortunately, ol’ Elon’s visions of pending catastrophic doom depending on German election results are about 90 years late. And, fortunately, even with his presumably favoured party winning that election, civilization did not drop to its knees despite taking quite the beating for a while. Really kinda hard to see us even coming close to something like that this time around no matter who wins this coming weekend.)
Two things always amaze me about these university elections. The first, of course, is that there are enough people wanting to run so that the elections are even necessary. Take the Senate elections for example where you had over 100 candidates competing for only 11 seats. And this despite that getting elected means a lot more admin for exactly no more pay. Admittedly, you are that much closer to the reins of power but it’s a university: those reins are leading to a shrivelled up nag with colic that’s long since missed its appointment at the glue factory. At best, any candidates from the political-science department could view it all as a nice, practical exercise for their otherwise largely non-applied research, but for the rest of us?
The second is, just like any German election, how complicated it all is. For a start, people can’t vote for just anyone but only for those candidates in their own status group (professors, technical staff, remaining staff, and students). And then most of the candidates also belong to university-specific parties, each with its own platform and agendas. (One of these parties in the last election was literally called Nicht wählen (Don’t vote), although it’s unclear if that message applied only to them or more broadly. Nevertheless, despite its name and exact intention, the party did garner the vote of exactly one illiterate troublemaker.) Finally, despite voting directly for individual candidates, the seats are actually differentially allocated among the status groups first, then among the parties based on how many votes their candidates jointly received, and only then among the candidates based on how many votes each actually got. All this occasionally leads to some American Electoral College like madness insofar as people with fewer votes than others, either within or across status groups, can get elected. (And, if you can somehow wrap your brain around all that, then you’re ready for the big leagues and Überhangmandaten(overhang seats), some serious psychedelic German electoral shit that make it impossible to say exactly how many seats will be in any German parliament before the votes have been counted.)
Anyway …
This past election was particularly memorable because it was the first one where we could also vote electronically. Now, despite having the capability to conduct the e-voting internally (as witnessed by our department doing just that for our recent committee elections), the University chose instead to outsource it to another company, a decision that you can view as anything from ironic to hypocritical given the hyperallergic reaction of the University‘s IT department to any personal data being housed outside of their apparently ultra-secure servers and firewalls. (Secure, that is, except to those outside hackers wanting to print something.)
The fun came because the University neglected to inform us about this outsourcing. So after a couple of years of being regularly spammed by our Office of Dataprotection and Informationsafetymanagement about how dangerous all external e-mails are, enough people were suspicious of some unknown company e-mailing them some e-voting log-in details in combination with a handy “click-here” URL that the University had to send around a follow-up e-mail indicating that it was all legit. Even worse, they had to arrange a system with the company so that all those people who had trashed the original e-mail out of an abundance of sensibility could get replacement log-in information.
The kicker was that the initial e-mail, despite definitely coming from outside the University, did not contain the gaudy banner indicating its external origin and designed to protect us from all its potential, associated evils. Which all makes you wonder (again) what that banner is actually good for. Not only can this system be fooled by a simple spoofing of the sender’s e-mail address, but IT can apparently selectively toggle it on and off. More importantly, it appears that enough people in the end didn’t actually need the banner to recognize an e-mail that looked like it might be a phishing attempt.
Looks like employees at the University of Not Bielefeld might in fact be capable of some critical thinking after all. And that’s never a bad thing when it comes to elections.
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The Blog About Fog 