For some time now, CNN has been my go-to source for general news. Unfortunately, they’ve shown an increasingly annoying tendency to clickbait their headlines.
It all started out innocently enough with the fluff pieces that no one is really interested in. You know, “Two strangers met on a flight to Paris. Find out what happened next.” (Answer: who cares?) But then they started doing it for borderline real new pieces that didn’t seem to be generating enough traffic, usually because the headline basically told you the entire story. You could actually watch the headline evolve over the course of the day from “Canada places ban on imported moose meat” to “This country has stopped importing moose meat” to try and entice more readers. (Better solution: try reporting real news.)
But CNN outdid themselves the other day with this headline associated with the attempted Trump assassination:
For starters, how can this photo possibly be iconic? It’s at most one goddamn day old. Iconic photos are ones that have stood the test of time, not hours. Had the photographer actually gotten a shot of the bullet just as it was about to hit Trump and not of one that just whizzed by him, then come back and talk me. But in this day and age where every event is “historic”, I suppose every photo has to be “iconic” too.
More importantly, how long does it take the average person to say “dumb luck” or “I just pressed the button”? Seriously. What else do you expect the photographer to say? “I waited for the sound of the gunshot and then counted to a thousandth of a second before pulling the trigger myself”?
Apparently, however, it takes CNN an entire three minutes and 34 seconds to say it. (Unfortunately, finding that little bit of information out required me to click on the link, thereby reinforcing their use of that clickbait headline.) Maybe (hopefully) there’s more to the video than just the explanation, but then modify the obvious, stupid headline and save the bonehead catchline for the two moose exporting themselves from Canada to Paris.
I’ve written more than a few times now about AI on this blog, AI in this case being artificial intelligence and not admin intelligence, which is something completely different. Although not among my list of followers, ChatGPT must’ve perused my blog from time-to-time in its pursuit of subjugating the human species, so I thought it would be cool to ask its opinion of it.
Ultimately, the impetus for this bit of time wasting on my part came from some of my students. While I was holding a lecture on generative AI and what it means in a university setting, they were busy killing time by asking ChatGPT everything it knew about me. Apart from showing me that I needed to make my lectures more interesting, the episode got me curious as to exactly what ChatGPT was indeed saying about me. (My students wouldn’t tell me.) Sort of the next generation of googling yourself, I guess.
It’s actually quite the interesting exercise because it’s like a three-paragraph summary of what the internet has to say about you. The review was very flattering (even without having Skylett Johanssonread it to me) and, in addition to that, it also made some other mistakes. For instance, ChatGPT had me being born at the wrong space-time coordinates, namely October 8th, 1969 in Germany. Apart from being just plain wrong, it’s also completely impossible because “Germany” as such, unlike Canada where I was born, didn’t exist at that time. (And, yes, I suppose the latter is the same sort of admin hairsplitting that I often poke fun at, but then you could also rightfully claim that Julius Caesar was Italian because he was born in Rome. No just ignore the anachronism and go right ahead and enjoy your Little Caesars’ pizza …)
In any case, I quizzed ChatGTP about what it thought about “The Blog About Fog” and promptly found out the following:
“The Blog about Fog,” also known as “Squinting through Fog,” is written by Cameron Lee, who is a professor of family studies and a Christian theologian. The blog focuses on reflections about the Bible, theology, and the Christian life, aiming to provide deeper insights into faith and scripture.
…
Take-home message: despite what WordPress claims in its annual review of my site, I’m not engaging with my readership, especially the artificial kind, as well as I could be. (And, before I get accused of plagiarism or just outright ripping someone off, I will point out that Lee’s blog is officially called “Squinting through Fog” and colloquially as “The Fog Blog”. That I know of, mine is the only one of many fog blogs, some dealing with actual fog, with the word “about” in the title. But ChatGPT just ran with it.)
After I clarified to ChatGPT that, no, I wanted the fog blog about admin, it returned with:
“The Blog about Fog,” also known as “Adventures in Admin,” is a satirical blog that humorously critiques the often frustrating and convoluted world of university administration. The blog is written by a university professor who uses the pseudonym “fogBlogger.” It delves into various aspects of administrative tasks, poking fun at bureaucratic inefficiencies and the absurdities that come with academic administration.
One notable post highlights the creation of a COVID-19 safety assessment form using ChatGPT, comparing it favorably to the overly complex forms typically produced by university administration. The blog post appreciates the efficiency and user-friendliness of the AI-generated form, contrasting it with the cumbersome and intimidating nature of traditional forms used in the author’s university.
Another post explores the use of “Beamtendeutsch,” or bureaucratic German, showcasing how administrative language can be unnecessarily complex and confusing. The blog provides humorous translations of official terms, illustrating the absurdity and inefficiency inherent in bureaucratic communication.
Overall, “The Blog about Fog” serves as a humorous outlet for venting frustrations about the administrative side of academia, while also providing insightful commentary on the inefficiencies and challenges faced by university staff and faculty. The blog is appreciated for its wit and relatability among those familiar with the intricacies of university administration.
Note once again the glowing review, which makes it clear now how WordPress generates the text for their annual reviews. Far more interesting, however, is the pat on the back that ChatGPT gives itself in the second paragraph. Now, it is true, I did come to that same conclusion. But I find it utterly fascinating that ChatGPT chooses to highlight that post, which is personally not one of my favourites, out of the 70+ other ones that I have made.
Late last year, a long stretch of sidewalk along the main campus of the University of Not-Bielefeld was cordoned off and replaced. And, like any other roadworks project in Germany, the entire section to be replaced was shut down from day one to provide all the non-existent construction workers with the maximal amount of safety and all the rest of us with the maximal amount of inconvenience.
At the time, I really couldn’t see the point of it all because the sidewalk looked to be in perfectly good shape. Or at least not anywhere run down enough to justify replacing an entire block’s worth of it. And, after the work was completed (many, many months later), I still really couldn’t see the point of it.
It turns out that the reason behind all the (on average) non-activity was to install a test section for a green wave for cyclists, a green wave being that fairy-tale situation where a series of traffic lights along a given stretch all go green for you when you hit the right speed. The principle behind it is simple enough. A series of green LED lights are embedded in the bike path. If the lights are on when you pass them, you’re riding the wave and will make the next traffic light. (As such, the traffic lights are now necessarily timed for the bike traffic and no longer the car traffic.) If they’re not, then there’s a power failure, either in the city as a whole, but more likely in your legs and you have to speed up to catch the wave again. (Or slow down and wait for the next one.) All this is hardly a new idea on the part of Not-Bielefeld and they themselves admit that their system is based on the “Copenhagen Model”.
Implementing this simple principle properly is a completely different story, however …
Key to any green wave is having the traffic going at the right speed to stay in the wave. Here in Not-Bielefeld, they decided on a fairly leisurely 18 km/h for the bike riders, which is 2 km/h less than the more robust vikings in Copenhagen have to sweat out. And, not to be outdone, the Aussies down in Melbourne have to put at least another 2 km/h on top of that.
Less obviously, but perhaps more importantly, there can’t be any traffic preventing you from keeping that target speed. It’s little wonder then that the most successful green waves are for cars and then on one-way roads where the only effort required is moving your right ankle. Nevertheless, Copenhagen and Melbourne have successfully applied this simple logic by implementing their bicycle green-wave systems on dedicated, one-way bike lanes.
Not-Bielefeld, by contrast, has decided to try this all out on a four-lane, undivided sidewalk. So not only do the local cyclists trying to stay in the wave have to swerve around other cyclists who can’t go or don’t care about going 18 km/h, but they also have to deal with pedestrians going in all directions. And, if all that weren’t bad enough, there’s oncoming bike traffic to contend with as well. All this on a sidewalk that is less than 3.5 m wide in total and occasionally narrows down to about 3 m when it has to jig around either trees or bus stops. Those surfing the wave are heading for a major-league wipeout.
(I should point out that oncoming bike traffic is not an uncommon occurrence in Not-Bielefeld. The cyclists here tend to be any or all of apathetic, suicidal, or moronic and drive however and wherever they feel like. And Not-Bielefeld just half-heartedly puts up with it all. For instance, very close to where I live, there are two street signs on the sidewalk, each pointing in opposite directions and both within plain sight of one another. The one forbids bike riding in the wrong direction (because outside of a car you need to be reminded of basic traffic laws for some reason), whereas the other warns you to watch out for that forbidden oncoming bike traffic. Be all that as it may, leave it to Not-Bielefeld to install their green-wave test stretch on a sidewalk where oncoming bike traffic is actually officially allowed.)
Apart from setting up their green waves properly, there’s an important difference between Not-Bielefeld and either Copenhagen or Melbourne, namely size. According to World Population Review, Copenhagen is pushing 1.4 million inhabitants and Melbourne has just over 5.3 million. Not-Bielefeld? Under 200 000. Or, put another, more relative way, less than the number of cyclists that pass over one single bike bridge in Copenhagen—the Dronning Louises Bro bridge—in a typical workweek.
In other words, there aren’t that many people to move and, by extension, they don’t have that far to move either. The city centre is about 2.2 km away from the university or about 7.3 minutes at a green-wavish 18 km/h. Optimistically assuming that surfing the wave makes you about 25% faster than normal (initial trials in Copenhagen showed it to be about 17%), this shaves less than two minutes off your travel time without it. (Or about three and a half minutes should you decide to go home again in the evening.) It’s really only after you retire that the savings work out to anything substantial (about a month), but only if you didn’t succumb to the temptation to take your car (or, gulp, the bus) on one or more of those dark, wet, and windy Not-Bielefeld winter days.
And these time savings could be incredibly optimistic indeed when you consider that Not-Bielefeld’s green wave might actually be slowing its cyclists down. According to data from the activity app Strava, the average, wave-free bike commuting speed on pavement (i.e., with lights and with traffic) is a more viking-like 19.5 km/h. Or, by the time you’re ready to retire, slightly over a week of exciting other things you could have been doing in Not-Bielefeld besides trundling along with the wave.
All told, there have been any number of weird decisions made here, including the ones above.
First, the green LEDs are only present for the last one-third of the test section. Apart from the question of why the city then had to replace three-thirds of a block of sidewalk for this project, it means that cyclists won’t know if they are in the wave until it might be too late. And, remember, although lights out for a green wave typically means “too slow”, there’s a good chance in Not-Bielefeld that it could mean “too fast”.
Second, although the green wave is directed toward the city centre, most of the commuter bike traffic along this stretch goes in the other direction toward the university, thereby sort of explaining why oncoming bike traffic is allowed in the first place. (But only sort of. Why the other side of the road isn’t sufficient for these cyclists—apart from them being any or all of apathetic, suicidal, or moronic—remains an open question.)
Third, by giving priority to the bikes over the cars, you also impede the bus traffic along the road. (Again, the same initial trials in Copenhagen showed up to 14% longer bus times.) Now, apart from my dog, no one I know particularly enjoys riding the bus and especially not in Not-Bielefeld where bus fares are steadily approaching a whopping 3 EUR for a single ticket. A green wave is guaranteed to only further increase the number of smiling faces among those on the bus and especially among those driving the bus, most of whom haven’t smiled once since 2004. (No offence. Shit job. I get it …)
Finally, the city of Not-Bielefeld proudly proclaims that there are a little less than 2000 spots to lock up your bike downtown. As such, this means that they’ve spent 200 000 EUR (so far) to benefit about 1% of its population and even fewer of its bikes given that they also proudly proclaim that—even ignoring all the dead bikes in the canals—there are more bikes than people in the city. (How they determined the latter is a mystery. I’ve lived here for over 15 years now and no one has ever asked me how many bikes I have.) And all this money was only for a single, one-block test section on a route that has no clear run toward downtown. Nope. Because right after the very next intersection (= about half the distance to downtown), the cyclists not only have to again yield the right of way to some more trees and another bus stop before negotiating two sharp, right-angle turns (like this section of the Copenhagen Model, just more extreme) to get onto the parallel residential street where the non-dedicated bike lane continues. So no more chaotic pedestrians to deal with, but now with the added thrill of oncoming car traffic instead. In any case, scale down the target speed by about a factor of 10 and you might come out of those corners with some skin still attached to your body.
Oh. And that very next intersection? It also happens to be a major junction with on- and off-ramps to the motorway that runs through Not-Bielefeld. Forget downtown. This junction probably accounts for the biggest chunk of car traffic along this road, meaning that instituting a green wave will do comparatively little to reducing car traffic and comparatively a lot to increasing the chaos that the junction already happily provides.
Call it what you will—sleight of hand, a smokescreen, or even LED and circuses—it’s the same old shell game that authorities have been playing for centuries: throw big money at some over-the-top, glitzy solution to distract the marks from the fact that some basic necessity is missing, namely the fundamental cycling infrastructure needed for a green wave in this case. Impressing is always so much easier than redressing after all.
And then double down on the fiasco to quell any lingering doubts.
First you employ lots of advertising, banners, and slogans and sound bytes and dare people to call you on it. Less than 2000 bike spots in the downtown is actually more than a little embarrassing for a city that is officially certified as “bike friendly”, but Not-Bielefeld proudly parades that number on its webpages anyway. (And it’s downright pathetic when you realize that it’s less than half the number of parking spots available downtown for cars.) Then you unilaterally declare the pilot project an unmitigated success worthy of expansion. Indeed, visions of thermal cameras, bike counters, and other sugar plums to automatically enable the green wave to regulate itself are already dancing in the city administrators’ heads. But all this doubling downing does is to waste even more money that could otherwise be spent on more sensible, more productive but decidedly less showy ideas like reduced, reasonable bus fares or dedicated bike lanes.
And then there are other opinions like those recently voiced by some “critics”. (Ok, vandals.) First, they simply ripped out all the LEDs last December and threw them in some neighbouring front lawns. And then just after the whole project got rolling in March of this year, they painted over all but one of the new LEDs with white paint. And apparently in the middle of a Friday afternoon when no one was around to see it.
Looks like Not-Bielefeld’s green wave needs CCTV more than it does thermal cameras …
For just over a year now, I’ve been unofficially officially severely handicapped. This will come as a surprise to many, especially those closest to me who have accused me of being handicapped for decades now. (Family. Sigh …) But, whereas chronic depression got me close, a little bit of prostate cancer will do the trick every time.
(And, before I get started, a word to the Word Police: I have no idea what the accepted terms for “handicapped” or “disabled” this week are and whether or not you can even use any version of the first term in any context outside of golf anymore. And, to be honest, I care even less. The problem, you see, doesn’t lie so much in our choice of words as in our choice of attitudes: as long as we as a society continue to treat any identifiable group of people as second-class citizens, it doesn’t really matter what we call them. New labels combined with old attitudes does nothing except to create a need for more new labels after a couple of years.)
It wasn’t clear to me before this entire process began, even after having been in Germany for so long now, but there are rules involved to qualify as being disabled. A lot of them. In Germany, it’s all pretty much functionally summarized by the Grad der Behinderung (or GdB), a scale that quantifies the level of disability from 20 to 100. For almost any ailment or missing body part that you can think of, there’s a GdB-value attached to it on the official list. (A summary, albeit also in German, can be found here. The EU also has its own lengthy version.) For instance, if you happen to lose your penis and can’t for the life of you remember where you put it, that counts as GdB 50. By contrast, a missing vulva only gets you GdB 40, a clear sign that the list was probably written by men. (And, yes, I am well aware that the penis and vulva are not each other’s respective equivalents. However, in an even clearer indication as to the list’s male authorship, the clitoris is impossible to find.)
Rumour has it that this whole idea of levels of disability had its origins from war, that favourite of human pastimes that ensures for a lot of missing body parts. I know a version of it from my youth in Canada from ads for disability insurance, which, in a weird combination of Let’s Make a Deal then and reality TV now, would happily tell you how much your different body parts were essentially worth. So whereas losing a thumb got you enough money for a new car (with power windows if it was the thumb on your dominant hand), a small toe got you a packet of cheese doodles (maybe), and a head got you a brand new one, albeit one made out of stone, and much, much more for your next of kin.
If it seems curious that the modern German scale first starts at GdB 20, it makes even less sense that it all means nothing in practical terms until you hit GdB 50, the threshold for being severely handicapped. For instance, my chronic depression only got me GdB 30, which for all intents and purposes is the exactly same thing officially as being absolutely healthy. In other words, you also have to be sufficiently handicapped (cf. that missing penis) to be officially disabled.
But whereas depression maximally gets you only GdB 40 (= healthy), prostate cancer minimally gets you two years at GdB 50 (= severely handicapped). I’m stretching but still somehow suspect that this particular distinction might lie with how the two respective illnesses are viewed. Many, many years ago and before I knew any better, I said that I’d rather have a heart attack than depression at least insofar as the latter tends to get you more understanding and sympathy. Unlike me, that statement has actually aged pretty well many, many years later where I do now indeed know better. No heart attack yet (no rush, I’m patient …), but whereas my depression has always gone unmentioned, my cancer diagnosis shocked everyone.
Cancer has by far the worse reputation because it can strike anyone and kill them. Depression? Although society has become increasingly aware of it, the perhaps still common perception is that it only affects wimps and doesn’t kill them. (At least not directly. Via suicide, sure, but that’s just another form of wimpiness, isn’t it?) And, going back to the possible wartime origins of the entire disability system, war heroes that lost part of their body got any or all of respect and sympathy, a medal, and financial compensation. (Or at least they used to.) War cowards that only lost part of their sanity because of PTSD (AKA shell shock) mostly got scorn with the optional upgrade of incarceration in a rubber room with a matching new wardrobe.
Cancer (left) and mental-health (right) awareness ribbons.
The reality, however, is that mental illness lingers and there is usually no cure for it. Cancer tends to be much more clear-cut: either you get rid of it or it gets rid of you. And my case history mirrors this reality. My depression, although officially classified as only “moderate”, has been the way more debilitating of these two illnesses. At the height of my depression, I was on sick leave for an entire year and have missed countless days over the almost 10 years since then. (Scares me to think what severe depression must be like.) By contrast, my prostate cancer cost me just under a month in total, most of which was spent recovering from the surgery.
Admittedly, I was extremely lucky with the cancer, which was caught in its very early stages and which was also completely localized to the prostate. Plus everything south of the equator seems to be working fine after the operation too. (And, if it wasn’t, the incontinence might nab me a few extra GdBs too. Like I said, the catalogue covers just about everything. At least for men.)
But that’s exactly the point: the lack of much differentiation in the system means that cancer gets you an automatic GdB 50 regardless of what its outcome and repercussions are. Understandable, however, because they can’t possibly check every case individually, right?
You’d like to think so, but, as a matter of fact, THEY DO …
You see, the reason for the delay in my getting official severely handicapped status is manyfold. First, it’s all backdated to when I got the cancer diagnosis last May. Fair enough, I guess. But I only found out that I could apply after the operation last autumn, some five months and many missed cheaper movie tickets later. Second, the various disabilities all have to be documented by the handling physicians. Again, fair enough. But whereas my urologist took care of this relatively quickly, my psychiatrist took another couple of months to submit his report. (Can’t say that I blame him though. He couldn’t rely on already completed hospital statements and lab reports and loves paperwork just as much as I do.)
But the last couple months’ delay was because the two reports each had to be independently verified by the government’s very own team of medical officers, the Betriebsärzte. I’ve run up against the Betriebsärzte more than a couple of times now and still have absolutely no real idea why they exist.
Usually they came into play when some big medical expenses were looming, like braces for the kids or therapy for me, and the Beihilfestelle, the governmental half of the overly complicated health-insurance plan for civil servants, wanted to make sure that my kids were ugly enough and that I was nuts enough to justify the money they were going to have to pay out for the necessary adjustments. One time, however, I actually met a Betriebsarzt face-to-face after that year-long sick leave to ensure that I was indeed ready to start working again.
As much as transparency and second opinions are good ideas in general, you really have to wonder what good they are providing here at all. That I know of, no Betriebsarzt ever looked at one of my kids or, with the exception of the one I exceptionally met, asked me how I was feeling that day. And even for that one, the meeting took all of about 20 minutes, a short enough time for me to sincerely fake either sanity or insanity depending on what outcome I wanted.
In the end, they all must’ve relied on the doctors’ reports, which they can’t possibly contradict having never met us and having no knowledge of our case histories. Or is there a real danger that I can convincingly fake hospital reports for both the biopsy results as well as my prostate surgery?
Instead, the Betriebsärzte seem to be there more for their math skills. GdBs for whatever you’re missing (tumours, penises / vulvae, sanity, …), you see, aren’t strictly additive. Instead, it all depends on the “reciprocal relationships” of the individual ailments with one another. For instance, unless you’re a bird or very creative, a missing penis usually means sterility. According to the EU list, however, 40% for the penis + 25% for the sterility = 45% in total. But, like I said, a missing penis and sterility are pretty much the same thing, right? However, how my very different and completely unrelated cancer (GdB 50) and depression (GdB 30) only add up to GdB 60 raises more questions and non-missing eyebrows than Fermat’s Last Theorem did.
The obvious takeaway from all this is that it’s apparently better to misplace your body parts in Germany than the rest of Europe. Not only do you get those 10 extra penis points, but the added European bureaucracy means that—forget the clitoris—they can’t even find the vulva.
The University of Not-Bielefeld, like many other institutions these days, has hopped on the environmental bandwagon (electric powered, of course) and, among other things, designed an Action Plan to guide it along its path towards becoming CO2 neutral. (Me? I’ve always been CO2 neutral, except when there’s too much of it in a room trying to kill me. Then I get CO2 hostile and open a window.)
As with most documents of this kind, the Action Plan was long on big words and even longer on bigger promises (and, at 50+ pages, just bloody long too), but surprisingly short on actual, concrete actions. One of the few mentioned, however, was to replace the aging, 40-year-old windows on campus.
Now in replacing the windows on the very large, glass-fronted foyer on our building (good) while also fitting a good many out with solar panels (better), they had to remove a two-meter strip of shrubbery to provide a solid base for the heavy machinery (not great, but understandable), which they then cobbled over when all was said and done (WTF?). Apart from providing even less runoff area for northern Germany’s torrential winter rainfalls, it appears that University’s idea of achieving CO2 neutrality is to remove about 20 square meters of objects that remove CO2 naturally.
On top of that, a very much optional part of the renovations was to add a two-meter large, double-sided LED display panel that, until now, has mostly displayed only advertising. On top of a university generally needing this like Elon Musk needed to sell flamethrowers, the presumably non-solar powered cooling fans are already going crazy in the 20 ºC spring “heat”. The University, it would seem, is taking CO2 neutrality literally instead of trying for the more farsighted goal of becoming CO2 negative.
But then, as one of my colleagues put it, at least they didn’t chop down any trees to ensure that the solar panels see enough sunshine.
I have another confession to make. Like countless other individuals, I have been flying under a false name for literally decades now. (Probably another good reason for keeping this blog anonymous.)
Airline reservation systems (if not many computer systems generally), you see, have a problem with hyphenated last names and, as I recently read, problems with any names containing any character that is not found in the English alphabet (or, more precisely, the ISO basic Latin alphabet). Spaces, however, are ok though. Exactly why this is the case is somewhat of a mystery and why it’s still the case is an even bigger one. You can sort of understand it from way back when when computer systems were a lot more primitiveand, more likely than not, programmed by some nerdy white male from the Western world. But the intervening decades of progress, both technological and societal, mean that the computers have not only become more powerful, but also that the nerds programming the software they run now increasingly include other genders and ethnicities.
Nevertheless, the only solution available to me remains relatively simple and completely non-technical: forget the hyphen and either run the two parts together as a single name or use a space instead. (Or, equivalently for other fellow victims, to remove all the fancy accoutrements from the letters from those languages that like to embellish their ISO-derived alphabets with all manner of squiggles, dots, and lines. Exactly how Malmö Aviation, Nicaragüense de Aviación or even O’Connor Airlines handled their own names remains unknown. It’s perhaps telling, however, that all three are now out of business. Just waiting patiently for the same fate to befall Boliviana de Aviación or Widerøe, among many, many others.) Contrary to the airlines’ explicit instructions, this meant that the name on my ticket no longer matched that on my passport one-to-one. But this was only yet another discrepancy between the actual and the realized that airlines didn’t seem to mind (like, for instance, with boarding times), so neither did I. I certainly had none of the problems John Scott-Railton described in his now apparently deleted blog piece (but summarized here).
Until today …
With the most recent update to their systems (AKA enhancement of my online experience), this tacit agreement with one of my go-to airlines here in Europe broke down. They happily took my money and my last name (with a space) to purchase a ticket with them, but no longer let me associate my stored passport details with the ticket. And with absolutely no reason given either. The system simply refused to accept the passport as it had in the past.
The airline’s help line was anything but because, as is becoming increasingly common, support issues are initially handled by virtual assistants, which, true to their name, are virtually useless. No matter what I typed in as my question, the response was always “Or find out how you can enrich your journey…” with a link to my trip details. Anyone who’s worried about AI taking over the world someday just has to deal with one of these algorithmic numbskulls a few times to realize that they can’t even take over a first-generation Furby with mange and a dead battery.
The breakthrough to the breakdown came when I tried to re-enter my passport details from scratch and the system told me that my hyphenated last name was “not a valid name”. (Others elsewhere have had this experience too.) I’ve got two different countries (Canada and Germany) saying otherwise—which is two more than Elon Musk could say for his son X Æ A-12—but the airline’s system was adamant: hyphen = invalid. If I removed the hyphen, my (fake) last name was suddenly acceptable. Although the system did not complain about the invalidity of my saved, hyphenated passport details, I tried removing the hyphen just the same. And, εὕρηκα!. Just like after a nice, long, hot bath, everything was cool again: I could associate these false passport details with my ticket.
Now I just need to forget the warning that the system brought up that my passport details have to match the information on my passport exactly. Fake name on the ticket? Experience shows it to to be unproblematic. Fake name on my passport details? Let’s wait and see. Border guards and probably the TSA too tend to be far more pedantic and far less forgiving than gate attendants.
It’s a truism that you can never make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious (or variations on that theme). As an amateur white nerdy male, I know that it’s impossible to trap all the ways that other people can bring my simple computer programs to their coded knees. But why is this ISO-conformity all still a thing in this day and age? Could it be that the airlines are hiring precisely these ingenious fools to program and simultaneously foolproof their reservation systems?
Might not be that far off the mark. Seriously. How else can you explain getting push notifications to check in for a flight that already took off nine days earlier?
(And, no, Lufthansa, is much more of a “got-to” rather than a go-to airline for me …)
It’s hardly an original observation on my part, but boarding an airplane does not rank among life’s most pleasant experiences: endless queues of aggressive people with elbows flying all jockeying for the best position. And all that before they’ve even announced that the gate is open for boarding.
(The obvious exception here, of course, are the Brits, who love to queue. For any reason …)
Let’s face it, apart from having to get on the plane, nothing about boarding makes any sense. To start with, no airline has really discovered an efficient way to get people in their seats. (Anyone else find it strange how you’re in your seat on a plane?) The seemingly intuitive way of loading up in blocks from back to front seemingly stops at being intuitive. Intuition, it appears, is just another late arrival in the airline industry. This back-to-front scheme was actually only developed in 2003 (!) with the assistance of industrial engineers at Arizona State University to replace the older, even less intuitive system of filling the plane up from front to back.
More importantly, despite it or some variant on it arguably being the default way to fill most planes, the back-to-front system is one of the slowest methods out there. (So much for that particular group of industrial engineers.) Instead, the most efficient system according to computer modelling by Jason Steffen, which he developed in his spare time while working as an astrophysicist at Fermilab, is one where the plane is filled in alternating waves from back to front: first the window seats in the odd-numbered rows, then those in the even-numbered rows before restarting the system for the dreaded middle seats and then again for the aisle seats.
For those able to wrap their brains around that, it’s said to be about 20-30% faster than the best among the conventional systems and twice as fast as back-to-front. However, it is unfortunately based on two utterly impossible preconditions. First, there are no groups, families, or other clusters among the passengers. Second, everyone has to buy in to such an overly complicated and seemingly unnecessary system. (To which all the admin types can only ask where the problem with precondition #2 is.)
As for actual, existing systems, KLM is at least honest about the whole thing to say that theirs is essentially based more on bribery than it is on seat location: the more money you’ve given them for your current (first / business class) or past flights (frequent-flyer group), the earlier you board. (Ok. KLM didn’t actually use the word “bribery”. I think they refer to it as something like “loyalty” instead …)
Lufthansa, by contrast, tries to straddle the line between loyalty and logic, with loyalty logically getting priority. After the big spenders board, the remaining tightwads are sorted into zones 3 to 5, which are designed to fill the seats progressively from the window to the aisle, the so-called WilMA (for window, middle, aisle) system. As good a system as WilMA indeed is, the problem is that it’s also ignored about as often as its namesake on the Flintstones. As such, only zone 4—and that’s four as in “free for all”—effectively exists. Or, in other words, pretty much KLM’s system.
Or in other, more formal words that assume that queuing aggressiveness does not correlate with seat position, random. And a random system (as opposed to an open one where there are no seat assignments), interestingly enough, appears to be among the best.
Now, even if the airlines, in doing nothing, have fortuitously stumbled onto one of the more efficient systems for loading passengers on to the plane, it still doesn’t explain the growing trend of inserting another layer of chaos by using a bus to shuttle them between the gate and the plane in its “apron position”. As with so many other, recent “improvements” by the airline industry today, this feature is designed entirely to save them money at the cost of your convenience. And peace of mind.
Now how using busses saves the airlines money is a mystery to most. Including me. They still need to rent a gate, often using ones that could lead directly to the plane via a jetway anyway, and, although they don’t have to hire anyone to operate that jetway for them anymore, they still need to pay for at least one bus with its bus driver together with at least one set of stairs at the plane with its, umm, stair driver. As well as all the people to ensure that you don’t absentmindedly walk into the jet engine. Ryanair, those undisputed champions of cost-cutting, at least have you walk to your plane so as to dispense with the bus entirely.
By contrast, the loss in convenience is a mystery to precisely no one. Apart from making them look forward to the comparatively wide-open spaces of economy class, all busses do for the passengers is to make their increasingly tighter connection times increasingly tighter. And even more so if they have to go through security again because of it, something that is thankfully becoming more and more of an exception. (Except if you’re going through London Stansted.)
(My extreme, absurd experience in this regard was one time when I was faced with a 45-minute connection with busses on both ends of the deal. After sprinting across two terminals, I made it to the new gate just as it was closing, only to get bussed back to the exact same plane with the exact same flight crew. Eliminate the busses and the transfer would have taken exactly zero seconds as opposed to the several years off my life expectancy that it actually did.)
Ironically, using busses should actually speed boarding up because it adds another layer of randomness to the boarding order. Pity about the added travel times and occasional gridlock it entails …
In the end, however, what really makes no sense whatsoever is when the airlines continue to insist on using their well-thought out, if not zoned-out, systems to board the bus. Why? What does your “loyalty” get you then?
First through the gate, but last off the bus to your complementary champagne …
Together with nearly 10 000 other people, the comedian Richard Lewis died the other day in the US. The media, of course, was gushing. About his talent. About him being a comic’s comic. About his legacy. Like him or hate him (or even wonder who he was), this piece really has nothing directly to do with Lewis, but with the gushing of the media instead.
We all know that the job of the media is not to report the facts, but rather to get us to believe their interpretation of them. Or at least of the facts they choose to present to us. This has been true ever since Adam and Eve gave an interview about that apple conspiracy and has only accelerated in the past couple of years with the rise of social media. As bad as all that is, it seems like the media is no longer even trying to break a sweat in doing so.
None of the four clips are either that funny or even that clever, and none more painfully so than the two bookending ones from Curb Your Enthusiasm. Even the example clip of him getting “huge laughs in real-life interviews” got only mediocre chuckles from the audience. And none whatsoever from Dr. Ruth. (Now, apart from the obvious, if there is something that Dr. Ruth is known for, it’s that she loves to laugh.)
Again, this really has nothing whatsoever to do with Lewis in particular or even with Curb Your Enthusiasm. But if you want to convince us that Lewis was a master comedian then perhaps try choosing some examples of him actually being comedic. And, if he perhaps wasn’t a master comedian in the first place, then don’t try to convince us that he was. (Unfortunately, the latter amounts to saying that the media shouldn’t engage in hyperbole. Now wouldn’t that be a historic event …)
Welcome to the bonehead commemoration of the day …
Working right up until the last second, the admin elves at the University of Not-Bielefeld published a set of 11 recommendations shortly before the Christmas break to advise its teaching staff in how to deal with generative AI in the classroom. And then took a well deserved seven-week break before facing the even more arduous task of translating it into English.
It was all worth the wait …
Given the sheer number of brilliant, academic minds devoted to this problem (the Vice President of Student Affairs, the Department of Student Affairs, and the Council of the Deans of Students), you’d expect something insightful, inspiring, and cutting edge to guide us. But, as with most things done by committee, the end product was instead a near-sighted, dispirited, and blunted piece of buzzword bingo that, as always, left all the real work to us:
stay informed
foster and nurture students’ competencies
acknowledge and value
review and adapt
sanction violations
define and communicate
But, most importantly, they got to use the word “overarching” by cramming their 11 recommendations into four overarching areas.
(Now if there’s one word that deserves to be eliminated from the English language—together with those people inclined towards using it—it’s “overarching”. The problem is that you expect something along the lines of the Arc de Triomphe when you hear it, but usually get the Golden Arches served up to you instead. (Which is not intended as a slight against McDonald’s. At all. Love it or hate it, it’s still fast food and not a surprisingly French-made architectural masterpiece.) Call it overarching themes, overarching concepts, or overarching whatever-you-wants, they’re all just categories and the use of the word is always much more of a case of overreaching than it is of overarching. This is especially true here. Eleven recommendations dissected into four areas means that some of the latter just barely fit the definition of a category.)
And then there’s the escape clause in which they note that the Recommendations are merely a “product of their time” and so subject to change as generative AI develops. Not only that, but that they also welcome any comments or suggestions to help develop “additional action-oriented recommendations and offerings.”
C’mon. Really?
It took them over a year since ChatGPT and generative AI shattered our illusion of safety to come up with a document as bland, useless, and action-oriented as tapioca? And also one to recommend pretty much what we’ve all been doing while waiting for their received wisdom to rear its ugly, administrative head?
(Why ChatGPT is almost universally vilified for starting the whole AI crisis is beyond me. Listen to the media and you’d think that it’s been systematically destroying humanity in Skynet-like fashion since it came online. (BTW, that’s ChatGPT, not the media, destroying humanity. But it’s a reasonable misunderstanding to make. Interestingly, ChatGPT went global almost precisely 25 years and three months to the day after Skynet became self-aware. Some say it’s a coincidence …) It’s not like ChatGPT invented AI or even a dangerous form of it. The social-media companies with their “algorithms” were way ahead of them there. But somehow their algorithms remained just plain ol’ algorithms and didn’t become dangerous AI. What many forget is that generative AI needs humans to make it dangerous. Just ask the poor guy in Hong Kong who wired $25 million dollars to scammers after they deepfaked him out with a video conference call including the company’s CFO. So, seriously, just how dangerous is generative AI really going to be in a teaching setting, apart from the fact that it’s hard to detect? At worst, it’s merely yet another form of cheating that we are being forced to detect. More charitably, it’s Google with a summarize function. Or, in other words, Wikipedia.)
In any case …
Those suggestions they wanted? How about actually offering something, like access to a tool that will help us teachers to recognize AI-generated content instead of recommending that we “inform” our students to adhere to “good academic practice” by “acknowledging” when they use AI and otherwise “sanctioning violations” that we can’t even detect? That’ll stop any cheating attempts …
Just for fun, if not to “stay informed” about generative AI, I ran the Recommendations through GPTZero, one of many web services that are designed to detect AI-generated content and that are also not mentioned in those same Recommendations. Interestingly, GPTZero was only moderately confident that the German version was written by a human (77%) but highly confident that the translated English version was (87%). Not sure what this says exactly about the Vice President of Students Affairs et al., but it might be worth considering packing some Linda Hamilton type heat, if not a few Turing tests, to the next committee meeting in case they really are cyborgs. (Or just shoot first and ask the questions later. You can never be too careful.)
Even more fun: I compared the English version of the Recommendations with the DeepL translation of the German version using the university provided access to the PlagScan software (which now finally works). The end result of 19.6% of the content being either word-for-word identical or comprising slight textual changes is not surprising given that we are talking about two translations of the same source document. However, DeepL is the acknowledged translation engine of choice for central admin, being used to generate the English translations in their bilingual e-mails for instance. More to the point, it also uses generative AI for its translations such that using it and not acknowledging that fact runs counter to the Recommendations (running because they’re action-oriented, remember?) as a violation of “good academic practice”. Now, I’m not necessarily trying to imply anything but those bilingual e-mails (including the one announcing the Recommendations) no longer mention the use of DeepL and I somehow doubt that all those admin types have suddenly become fluently bilingual.
Or at least bilingual to the point where I as a native speaker can’t tell that a non-native English speaker has written the text …
Most Germans will deny it, if only because they cannot pronounce the voiceless dental fricative (/θ/, one of the two “th” sounds), but they actually live in a theocracy, making it currently only the third western country together with the Vatican and the US to do so.
There are more than a few obvious signs pointing to this, the first being a virtual countrywide ban on dancing on Good Friday that I’ve railed on about before. However, this Tanzverbot is only the most famous restriction on what are known as “silent holidays” in Germany. These are mostly public holidays with religious roots where any number of otherwise normal activities are outlawed to promote reflection and maintain the solemnity of the day. Good Friday is the best known and most universal of the bunch, but there are others as well as “silent days” that don’t double up as public holidays. The list of banned activities varies from state to state and day to day, but generally includes dancing and musical events, circuses, public sporting events, and certain movies.
Yes, to prevent our thoughts on these days of contemplation from being led too far astray, the movie industry through its German self-regulatory rating body, the Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle der Filmwirtschaft (FSK), has been putting together a list of movies since at least the 1950s that are banned from being shown in theatres and on TV on the silent holidays. (You can, however, watch the films on Netflix and the other streamers in the throes of your little cabal for some unknown reason, further begging the question as to how something can be illegal only on certain days and then only in certain ways.) The List contains obvious smut like the 1974 Japanese anime film Heidi, Girl of the Alps together with a bunch of other similar pornos and slasher films that no one probably should ever watch, but not those stalwarts of religious purity and paragons of morality in the form of either of the SAW or Fifty Shadesfilm series.
Could be that poor Heidi just needed a better upbringing. Too bad that the FSK also had Mary Poppins doing hard labour since 1995 as well.
Be that as it may, to promote that desired clarity of thought, feel free to ring the Church bells as long and as loud as you want on the “silent” holiday of your choice (and probably naked too while you’re at it given that Frankfurt’s highest regional court recently upheld a landlord’s right to sunbath nude in the courtyard of his building), but don’t you dare think about subverting anyone through any satanic Swiss-Shintoist cinema.
Many of these observations and ironies about The List are not original on my part. Hell, there’s even an entry in the US Library of Congress blog about it. Nevertheless, as infamous as The List is and given both its legal and moral ramifications, it is surprisingly hard to find. Buried somewhere on its website, the FSK does provide a list of movies that had been blacklisted between 1980 and 2015. However, on the same document, they themselves note that even this catalog is not accurate because of potential data-entry mistakes. (Apparently, this is how Heidi made the list, something the FSK goes to great pains to explicitly point out on the document. Wonder why …) In addition, they add that many of the movies that are legitimately on this list could have subsequently been taken off of it upon appeal as well as because of the changing ethics and norms in German society. (This latter shift is probably best illustrated by the fact that <1% of the movies released since 2020 made the list, compared to the high of 65.9% of all movies in the 1960s being silently banned.) Instead, the FSK say that more accurate results can be found through their website’s (extremely slow) search engine, but even here I found it impossible to find any movie that was on The List.
(A word of warning. For those wanting to hunt down The List, it’s not only impossible to find, but obviously also in German for which I apologize. Twice. First, most of the film titles might not be easily recognizable to non-German speakers. Second, German translations of film titles tend to be boringly factual. Painfully, boringly factual. For instance, the German title of Driving Miss Daisy, namely Miss Daisy und ihr Chauffeur, is really just a census of the film’s major characters, whereas the English title at least has a verb to give it some movement. The Shawshank Redemption comes out as Die Verurteilten (“the convicted” (plural)), which misses the point of the movie entirely. Or the German translations tend to overexplain the title, another variation on over-factualization. For instance, the straightforward Top Gun becomes Top Gun – Sie fürchten weder Tod noch Teufel (“they fear neither death nor the devil”). One of the few exceptions to all this is for the claymation film Chicken Run, where the German translation of Hennen Rennen has the same clever double meaning, but with an internal rhyme to boot! So there …)
In any case, if changes in society mean that movies can become watchable on the silent holidays, including movies with music and dancing (e.g., Dirty Dancing, which is officially not on The List and, as far as I can tell, never has been), then why continue outlawing music and dancing?
But, Heidi notwithstanding, this is to some extent all grown-up stuff. Instead, any good theocracy knows to get them while they are young by offering religion, sorry “religious studies”, in school.
And this is actually codified in law. German basic law (Grundgesetz) officially enshrines religious instruction as part of the public-school curriculum, albeit with some extra caveats on top of that here in Not-Bielefeld: there have to be 12 or more students belonging to the same religion, there’s a willing and qualified teacher in that religion, and the parents of those students under 14 approve of it all. Otherwise, the kids should go in the default class of ethics and norms, hopefully without any of the FSK‘s temporally flexible insights into it. However, the elementary school here in Not-Bielefeld where my daughters went was small (only two parallel classes for each grade) and there were no teachers qualified to teach ethics and norms. (Ironic that. One can teach religion, but know nothing about ethics …) Thus, parental approval be damned, it was religion for all and learning important, general religious concepts like the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments. Other religions? That they even existed was something left for the very last grade in elementary school.
I have nothing against religion being taught in schools, including all the death, mayhem, and other assorted human-rights violations it was responsible for historically. It just shouldn’t be in elementary schools and also not-so-secret advertising for any particular one. Religious instruction? I believe they already have something called churches for that. (Or are those too busy providing “evolution instruction” these days?) Despite their internal redundancies and obviously plagiarized content, I can sort of accept the teaching of the Ten Commandments because there are universal moral and ethical principles underlying them that go beyond any single religion, if not religion as a whole. But the Lord’s Prayer? Granted, knowing it could win you $200 in Jeopardy, but still …
The problem here is that elementary-school kids tend to idolize their teachers to the point of believing anything they say over their boring old parents. A case in point was when my eldest daughter came home from school one day and told me that I had been saying “clothes” wrong all this time. Instead of my monosyllabic “klowz”, her English teacher told her that the correct pronunciation was the disyllabic “klow-THEZ” and with that emphasis. (The irony here is, of course, beautiful insofar as the northern German, non-native English speaking teacher is indirectly telling the born and bred, native English speaking Canadian how to speak his own language. Technically, she was right, at least up to that extra syllable. Clothes does indeed possess the second “th” sound, the voiced dental fricative (/ð/), but non-technically, this is English we’re talking about. If we want to voice the voiceless fricative and silence the voiced one, well, that’s our God-given right, isn’t it?) I imagine (read: sincerely hope) that the teacher was simply overemphasizing that fricative so that her students wouldn’t be condemned to saying “zis” and “zat” for ze rest of zeir lives, but who know-THEZ?
Now, I say “tend to idolize” because then there’s my youngest daughter. I didn’t know it until years later but she actually got permanently kicked out of her religion class for continually asking how evolution and the Big Bang fit into the whole scheme of things. (Or, in other words, not taking the gospel truth as the gospel truth.) So instead of learning about (a single) religion, she got to watch TV in school for an hour. For years. Pedagogically more than a little suspect but then so was the entire religion class to start with, wasn’t it?
And, finally, there’s the bottom line …
Theocracies cost money to run and the churches have the German taxpayers right where they want them. In many countries, churches are charitable entities and so pay no income tax despite raking in untold amounts of money via donations and, more importantly, through all the property and businesses they own. The inherent contradiction of this situation is finally being realized such that there are debates also starting in some of these same countries as to whether or not to end this tax-exempt status for the churches.
But in Germany?
Not only is there no debate, but in all German states except, ironically enough, the very religious Bavaria, the government actually directly funds the poor, destitute churches by having its tax offices collect a special church tax from the devout among the taxpayers. And there’s no debate there either: depending on which state you live in, an additional 8-9% of your income tax automatically goes to your church (apparently with a 3% handling fee for the tax office) if you’ve been christened or baptized, even if it was against your future will by your good-meaning parents.
And there is some serious money at stake here too. For instance, that 8-9% worked out to some 9.2 billion Euros in 2010 (and, by extension, up to 276 million Euros for the tax office), contributing in no small measure to the net worth of the German Catholic Church, which is estimated to be anywhere between $26 billion and 430 billion Euros. Even the more conservative of those two numbers (conservative because we are talking about the Catholic Church here), makes the German Catholic Church on its own the fourth richest religious institution in the world and is more than ample to place it on the Forbes 2000 list and in the top 35 of the wealthiest German companies ahead of, for instance, that little known shoe company called adidas.
Despite these embarrassing riches, there are separatereports of the tax office / churches investigating the religious background of foreigners who have moved to Germany to ensure they aren’t dodging their tax burden like the churches are. In the end, the only way out of paying the church tax involves some degree of pain, either in the form of dying or surrendering about 30 EUR and filling out the requisite paperwork to formally leave the church.
And even then the churches have found a way to tax the non-devout in the form of “special church money” (besonderes Kirchgeld) based on the joint gross income of those couples living in mixed marriages. Thus, the non-religious person indirectly pays taxes to the church for having fallen in love with a devout person who, in turn, actually pays taxes twice (presumably as punishment for marrying the heathen in the first place) because they also have to pay their normal church taxes. This all apparently only comes into play when the devout person has no to little income of their own. Or, in other words, is poor, and so belongs to exactly one of those demographics in society that the churches are supposed to be helping out.
And yet despite being a paying customer, whether directly or indirectly, my Catholic wife is still officially forbidden from taking Holy Communion or even going to confession because we only married in the eyes of a civil servant and not God. But, thankfully, because we are talking about charitable organizations here (at least in the tax sense of the word), all these church taxes are fully tax deductible …
The Blog About Fog 