Apfelmännchen

Andrew sent me a link to Benoit Mandelbrot's obituary in the NY Times. Mandelbrot connected art to mathematics in a way no one had done before by discovering fractals, self-similar pictures that "look the same" when blown-up to a larger scale. This is just one of many examples of recursion, an idea that both mathematicians and computer scientists share and communally love. (Here's a written summary of the term and a visual one.) His most famous fractal, the Mandelbrot Set, attained immortality through its presence on thousands of T-shirts.

That same day I discovered that my office-mate had posted an obituary from a leading German newspaper. While it expressed the same warmth toward this iconoclastic genius as did the NY Times article, there were distinct cultural differences. One was simply the name for his most famous creation. The Germans call it Apfelmännchen or Little-Apple-Man.

This was not the first time I had been charmed by picturesque language used by Germans. In 2001 we visited Berlin and saw the remains of a bombed-out church, the Gedächtniskirche (Remembrance Church),which still stands as a reminder of the horrors of war. Berliners call it "the hollow tooth."

Apfelmännchen. Little-Apple-Man. Schön.

Der Zug

Son, Andrew, also has a blog about his Fulbright year in Austria. Since Andrew is an experienced blogger and his Dad a newbie, I thought I'd seek a cross-generational critique. It was quick in coming and succinct: "Dad, your blog sucks!" A request for further explication yielded a suggestion to publish more frequently so here, Gentle Reader, is an attempt to reduce the SQ (Suckiness Quotient).

Before we left the USA, I had bought Zug (train) tickets from Deutsche Bahn, the excellent German national railway, online. They had a special online Sparpreis (discounted price—marketing, of course) of 29€ (the euro was then about $1.19, its lowest point in the last year) per person from the Frankfurt Airport to the Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof (main train station). This seemed like a deal for this 75-minute, 120-mile train trip, so I quickly paid with my U.S. Visa card and printed out the online boarding pass.

We had a lot of luggage and I imagined that, in the worst case, the customs authorities might want to open some of it to check for contraband articles so I allotted four hours between our projected flight arrival and our train departure. The flight arrived a bit early and we breezed through customs (nothing was opened) so we had plenty of time on the train platform to plan how to get all of our bags onto the train during its brief stop.

Public transportation in Germany is a marvel to behold. In general, trains arrive on time (to the minute!)  and depart on time. I timed a few trains prior to ours and discovered we had about three minutes to get our eight bags (and ourselves) on the train. We had opted for reservations (an additional 5 €—without one, seats are first-come first-served) and, hence, knew our seat and car numbers. With typical excellent planning, Deutsche Bahn provided this graphic display on the platform (right-click to open in a new tab full-sized and then left-click to enlarge). Each line shows a train which stops at the airport and the arrangement of cars, complete with car numbers. The letters A–G on the graphic correspond to marked positions on the platform so I carefully moved all eight bags to the precise spot where our car would stop, confident that I could get them all onboard in the allotted three minutes and that we could then find our seats.

The overhead display showed the number of minutes before our train would arrive and even provided another graphic which confirmed the order of first- and second-class cars. Two minutes before arrival an announcement came over the loudspeaker. It seemed to us that this wasn't the deutlich (articulate) German we had heard at the Frankfurt Airport but rather an actual slice of the local dialect, Schwäbisch, of which we understood little. I ran down to the overhead display and it appeared that the order of first- and second-class cars had reversed! Sure enough, our car, which was supposed to be near the beginning of the train, was now near the end but I didn't know exactly where it was nor did I have enough time to schlepp all eight bags. So, we just got on the nearest car (which turned out to be first-class) and, in several trips, carried our bags through the long train until we reached the second-class section of the train. We never did reach the car with our reservations and simply asked the conductor (who by that time was checking tickets) if we could exhaustedly plop down into the first two empty second-class seats that we found, which we hoped were not reserved. He checked his list of reserved seats and gave us his Genehmigung (permission), which we gratefully accepted. We arrived at the Bahnhof, took a taxi to the Pädagogische Hochschule, got the key to our apartment, and settled in. All in all, a minor setback in a long but ultimately successful day of travel.

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