Audiostretto 59/4/24 English

When I was a child, there were kiosks in very many places in the city. You could buy all kinds of things there: Newspapers, sweets, and weekly markets from the public transport season ticket. It was not uncommon for schoolchildren to buy a lollipop or chewing gum or the latest MickeyMouse magazine on their way home after school, if it was the day it was published. Today, there are only a few kiosk...

There are often bicycle stands at official bicycle parking areas. In the past, and sometimes still today, these are metal constructions that offer a kind of clamp for the bicycle. You clamp the bike with a little pressure so that it is stabilised and stands upright and does not tip to one side. This saves space. However, this technique has the disadvantage that if you don't press the wheel in...

A hinge is a rotating joint that we most often find on doors or lids. It allows a room or container to be closed or opened. Neither the door nor the lid has to be completely removed or pushed, but they are simply rotated in a circle around the hinge. If this is not done against gravity, it can be done with relatively little effort - unless the hinge is stuck or damaged. Another property is that th...

In the Old Testament in Psalm 103, King David exhorts himself to honour God because He makes him joyful and his youth is constantly renewed like an eagle. The image of the eagle touched me. Supposedly, the allegory means that just as the eagle's feathers are always renewed, so God always renews one's youth - but how and why? David sees the reason for this process in one's own behaviour...

Radiators are used for heating in many rooms. These are located on a wall and heat the corresponding room. It is interesting that the heat source is not in the middle of the room to have a radial effect in all directions, but at the periphery. A radiator has the characteristic that it has the largest possible surface area due to the many pipes in order to give off as much heat as possible. If the...

I am far from knowing anything about professional audio recording. But if I'm not mistaken, there are some external features that are supposed to help record the sound quality optimally. These include foam around the microphone and other such devices to help avoid sibilance or other unpleasantness. It's interesting that this is still practised today, when I could imagine that one could als...

During the pandemic period, many business meetings no longer took place physically and on site, but virtually and online. The necessary software ran on the computer and if the camera was set, it showed the camera image to all participants during the meeting - this was usually the relevant person taking part in the conversation. Many programmes offer the possibility to define a free background - th...

In my professional environment I knew someone who had a very specific way of saying things. He expressed this quite often in conversation. I cannot describe or reproduce it. At the beginning, it seemed to me like a spontaneous utterance in the sense of "oh I like that" - until I realised that he did it all the time, regardless of the situation. What first caught my attention now caught m...

The other day we were talking in the family about the use of gelatine. It was reported that when gelatine is used for baking cakes, lumps always form, much to our chagrin. The conclusion was: you just have to practise more or try this or that. I then suggested looking on the internet to see what advice or tips there were. And indeed, we found what we were looking for very quickly - a small video t...

We know the expression that something is memorable or we imprint something - by this we mean: we remember something that we can recall later. The imagery behind this is: you have a mass, clay or stone, and with an appropriate tool you work it and imprint an image or text into this material. This is much more durable than sticking the image or text onto the material. Embossing - as with coins - gua...

In plane geometry there are rules or laws that simply apply and are immutable. For example, two straight lines always intersect at exactly one point if they are not parallel. Or two circles can either be congruent, have exactly one common point - if they touch each other - or otherwise have exactly two but never more points of intersection. The same applies to a straight line and a circle. One cou...

When we use the word end in German, we usually or exclusively do so with the meaning that something is coming to an end or has gone or will go. End in the sense of a cessation, conclusion, being finished. And when we speak of the "end of the world", it is usually understood in a negative way: in the sense of: the end of the world, now it stops, everything is dead. However, at least in Gr...

I bought some very fine seedless grapes the other day. These have - compared to the usual grapes - no seeds. That means you can just bite them without biting on a seed. Practical, pleasant - I admit it. But what made me think about the name was this: They are called seedless. So the focus is on what is not or no longer there. Why aren't they called full-flesh grapes? Then the focus would be on...

There is a pot of fresh basil on my terrace. It is admirable how big and strong these leaves can become. But there are also fine, rather puny specimens. I was particularly struck by how flabby they are when they wilt. There is no longer any sign of the strong potential that they actually have. The same applies to other tender plants like a shamrock or others. What happened there? Surely the connec...

The other day I was thinking about an iron bar. I thought how incredibly robust, hard and stable such a part is. We used to do pull-ups on it when we were kids. There was no chance of deforming or breaking one. That made me wonder: as humans, we have managed to create things that are far stronger and more powerful, more massive than we are, or than what we can influence without any other tools. Of...

A table normally has at least one tabletop and four legs. It is desirable that the table is as evenly levelled as possible and does not wobble. This means that the four legs must be very precisely measured and matched to each other. They must also fit the underground, otherwise all the precision work is useless and the table will still wobble. This is because four legs are actually one too many, a...

It has become autumn time and I love this time of year because, on the one hand, it brings incredibly beautiful colours in nature to light and into being and lets nature once again appear in tremendous splendour. On the other hand, it is also harvest time - what has taken time to develop, patience, care, nutrients and much more can now be harvested and enjoyed. A huge variety awaits us here. Pumpk...

If we are honest, we have to say: as humanity we have achieved an enormous amount. In the past decades alone, our technology has developed tremendously, medically we have achieved breakthroughs and we have reached an unprecedented level of resilience, at least globally. We are able to do tremendous things like fly to the moon, move entire mountains, etc. And yet, as individuals, we remain very vul...

I suppose we all have our own individual ideas about love - what is love? And I also suspect that we initially start from ourselves - so: how do we perceive love? There is the well-known book of the five languages of love, which describes how people basically perceive and give love through five different channels. Certainly, most of us agree that love is more than just a feeling. But the feeling -...

Cherry picking is a figurative word for a selfish effort to secure only the most attractive parts of something in order to leave the more unattractive ones to others." So says Wikipedia. In politics or in argumentation this is also used: one speaks only of the positive or the aspects that support one's own point of view, but not of the whole truth. There is something contemptuous about th...

In biology class at school, we had the pleasure of looking at various things under the microscope. We then had to reproduce this in drawings, which I didn't do very well. But the fascination of being able to see things with such a device that I don't normally see and yet are there was still there. And so we looked at more than just leaves and insects microscopically. Paper structure sudden...

I suspect there are not many technologies that have had a relatively short life span. For me, these include the overhead projector. This is a device on which transparent transparencies were placed. What was written or drawn with matching pens was then projected onto a surface. Both here and with slides, what is relatively small in the original is massively enlarged by projection. That's what i...

When I was a child, I was allowed to watch and later help my father when he changed the tyres of our car. From winter to summer tyres or vice versa. He had a spanner that looked like a cross. If the screws were loose enough, he could turn the spanner with a pulse so that the cap came off very easily. I found that fascinating. In retrospect, I think that someone must have once had such an idea to d...

In some older films set in prisons, the prisoners are seen shackled or bound with chains. The feet are put in chains, shackled, so that the possible length of the step is reduced enormously - this prevents the convict from escaping. There is something degrading about simply looking at the situation with a little distance: a person is put in chains by other people, kept in custody, deprived of his...

There are these older aircraft that you rarely see flying. They are more likely to be seen as exhibits. In any case, one would not plan an overseas trip with such an aircraft, at most an Alpine flight or otherwise a rather shorter round trip. Not so with a large jumbo jet. Here, one would hardly mobilise such a large and heavy piece for a regional air show, but plan a long-haul flight with it. The...