Observations of an Ignoramus

#10:
The Antimatter to Intelligence

Those who manage to study or even teach at one of the world's best universities must be more intelligent than the majority of their species. Even if we leave out all other factors such as social status qua birth, happiness, diligence and so on, intelligence must satisfy a minimum level, and that is necessarily high.
But what is intelligence? The dictionary defines it as the ability to think abstractly and rationally and to derive useful action from it. However, a glance at the average wealth of experience of an average person raises doubts about the applicability of this definition. Especially people who are considered to have high intelligence do not always score points in the category of reason. And certainly not everything that highly intelligent people do all day long is useful. It is therefore an ideal picture, which intelligent people often do not satisfy, although they demonstrably possess - expressed in numbers - a high level of intelligence.
But now comes the next question: What is stupidity? The simplest answer is: the absence of intelligence. However, this is not a satisfactory explanation. Because intelligence can be high, medium or low. Even if it is particularly deep, it is still there. In other words, even a stupid person possesses a certain intelligence, even if it is so low, one wants to turn away from this person with embarrassment. This means that if intelligence cannot be there, it must be able to coexist with stupidity.
That would at least explain why even very intelligent people can do great foolish things. Such a person cannot simply present the IQ in his defense and prove that he cannot possibly be stupid, therefore his action is not an expression of stupidity.
We are therefore doomed to find a humble way of dealing with our own stupidity, even as (I am assuming that this is now generalised) above-average intelligent people. Only if we understand it as something integral and are (also) fully aware of our weakness, can we perhaps satisfy the demand for intelligence a little bit. And - just - purposefully to act reasonably.
Knowing that we can never be as intelligent as the most intelligent person on the planet. But that we always have the potential to win the prize of the stupidest individual.

#9:
The almost overlooked tear of a forgotten figure

On the afternoon of 28 March this year, something happened on the north facade of the ETH main building that will remain a mystery to science for a long time to come. Passers-by observed a tear rolling from the eye of a figure painted on the wall.
So far, only statues of the Virgin Mary at places of pilgrimage have shown such processes. Occasionally, these were places that only became places of pilgrimage after the discovery of a Marian tear. It may therefore have been isolated cases of religious marketing.
Not so on the ETH north façade. The crying figure was "Artes", the personification of the arts, who together with her colleague "Scientiae" acts as co-patron of the technical college. They were painted with the intention that at this institute both should run to top form.
The reason for Artes' tear might lie in the events that took place a few kilometres away on the other side of the Limmat and Sihl. In a patched together crumbling building called "Zeughäuser" which is part of the dilapidated barracks ensemble. This is where the Critical Thinking Initiative invited the public to a "market".
Now it cannot be said with certainty whether the liquid dripping from Artes' eye was a tear of joy or one of mourning. (The salt content was not determined either.) What speaks in favour of the tear of joy is that some projects were presented that afternoon that give reason for hope. Hope that the chains of conformity, of the ever-same, of the one who has already dissolved that earlier will be blown up here and there.
Some of the contents conveyed speak for the tear of joy: Students who produce films instead of paper. Or who don't write their written works for the drawer, but produce a series of books. And learn to write in such a way that somebody reads the result even if he or she doesn't have to.
Those who don't discover curiosity in themselves will never know whether morning yoga brings feelings of happiness and what the difference is to evening yoga. Or what we can learn from the social life of the bottlenose dolphin in the Indo-Pacific. If you think about machines all day long, you might eventually forget that you are actually human.
There are no important and unimportant questions. Everything is connected, everything is interwoven. Artes and Scientiae know that. But can they also convey it?
Therefore the suspicion that it was a tear of sorrow after all. Because there were considerably more chairs than people at the event. Is that why Artes cried?
It is a delicate plant, this critical thinking. And a thorn in the side of every ruling system. Anyone who questions it always takes a risk. Has the ETH perhaps become too much of a ruling system, could one ask as an outsider?
We all have our time on this planet. It can be seen as a gift. Or as a burden. Or as chance. It has a beginning and an end. At the end of your life, will you face a Creator like the howling statues of Mary want you to believe? Or one of the Artes and one of the Scientiae? Or the nothingness?
At the end, on our deathbed, do we ask ourselves what we have achieved? Or what we missed? Pretty sure no one will ask how many ECTS points we have earned over the course of our lives.
But the question might arise: Man, were you man?
And because that's far too poetic a conclusion, here's the hint that ETH Zurich has two million insects in its entomological collection. Now that the animals are also approved as food, a hungry doctoral student could live for 91 years with an average consumption of 60 insects per day.

#8:
We should listen to youth, not punish it

In recent weeks, young people have taken to the streets in various Swiss cities. They have also gathered on the Polyterrasse. They protested for the protection of the climate.
The movement is known as the "climate strike". The public reacted differently to the protesting youngsters: they always murmur, some found. Great, they understood it, in contrast to us adults, so the others. Somewhere in between are Mr. and Mrs. Average with their attitude: Yes, they are right, you would probably have to do something slowly. We are also against these energy-guzzling artificial snow cannons, which is why we prefer to fly to Thailand during our sports holidays.
In the run-up to the climate strike rallies, however, media coverage did not focus on the concerns of young people and their problem of growing up on a dying planet. Rather, it was about the demonstrators skipping classes at their schools. The canton of St. Gallen announced that it knew no pardon. Anyone who protests will pay. Elsewhere, people were more liberal: schoolgirls had a quota of freely available half days, which they could demonstrate away if they had nothing better to do. The Zurich headmasters announced that, for reasons of justice, they were discussing uniform penalties for all. And in retrospect, a school in French-speaking Switzerland awarded the worst grade to all students who missed an exam because of the protest.
Let's keep in mind that young people take to the streets to demonstrate against the way we treat the environment. They have every conceivable right to do so. After all, they will live around three decades longer than - for example - me. And about half a century longer than many members of governments and parliaments. Young people peacefully defend their future livelihoods. But the rest prefer to talk about how best to punish them.
Where does it come from to punish human love? Kurt Tucholsky once invented a fragmentary story on the "world stage": the reintroduction of the corporal punishment by the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic. Abstract: The idea is thrown into space. At first, leftists and democrats are horrified. Praise songs of the traditionalists follow for the benefit of corporal punishment. The middle tilts, now the number of blows and the condition of the batons are discussed. The Association of Stick Manufacturers lobbies. In the end, the Social Democrats keep silent to distance themselves from the Communists and the law passed the People's Chamber to applause. Years later, however, it is criticised that masochists would provoke abusive punishment in order to enjoy free stick blows.
Tucholsky's caricature of parliamentarism is that it seldom produces big litters. Ninety years later, too, we prefer to talk about how to put rebellious pupils in their place. Instead of how their legitimate concern to prevent the destruction of man's future livelihoods is watered down on the assembly line of legislation.
At the same time, we believe that the following generations will come to reason. As the opponents of women's suffrage, the guardians of sexual morality or the defenders of slavery have already done. History proved the other side right.
But perhaps they have already come to their senses. And that is why we took to the streets for our climate. And if you punish them for it, they might get used to it again, the reason. And critical thinking.

# 7:
Darwinism at the Patisserie Store

One of the most astonishing objects at ETH Zurich is not to be found in any collection, but at the coffee counter in the main building. It is a Swiss pastry, the Carac. A shortcrust pastry coat with a creamy chocolate filling and a sugar icing. Usually a chocolate dot in the middle discreetly indicates the filling. However, there are also specimens without this dot.

If you look at a Carac from above, you can see a thin circular shortcrust edge, a glaze and a chocolate coloured round dot in the centre of this overglaze. Thus, the Carac can be mirrored both at each central axis and at the center of the circle. It has neither a beginning nor an end, as if it stood for eternity.

This blatant symmetry of the object is underlined by its name. The word Carac is a palindrome, one can read it both from Latin and Hebrew direction - a relatively rare affair in the German language. Famous longer palindromes include the largely unknown Bavarian field name “Burggrub” [lit. castel pool] and “Leseesel” [lit. reading donkey]. We have been waiting in vain for many years for the emergence of the latter species, even though a certain Till Eulenspiegel steadfastly claimed to have known a specimen. (The seriousness of this source can be doubted.)

Remarkable about the Carac is the colour of its overglaze. While the filling is dark brown - a ganache of chocolate and cream - the icing is poison green. However, the green has no meaning. It refers neither to peppermint nor to any other taste associated with the colour green. It just is.

But why is it? And why did the Carac survive, even expand its territory, by immigrating to German-speaking Switzerland long ago?
The explanation for this question must necessarily be found in Charles Darwin's theory on the survival of the best-adapted species. The Carac, which probably first appeared in western Switzerland in the 1920s, owes its quiet triumph primarily to its simplicity. The broad masses do not want any extravagance. Successful products captivate by the choice of a few ingredients that shape the taste. Secondly, it is the striking nature of the Carac that makes it stand out in the display. At the most, the Swedish cake will compete with its green colour, but in a crude way. This multi-layered, greasy thing, whose dry biscuit mass is held together by flat-rolled marzipan dough rather badly, cannot compete in any way with the simple elegance and steadfastness of a Carac.
Thirdly, it is the timelessness of the Carac that makes it a proverbial evergreen at the counter. Optically it is most likely to be place at the Bauhaus. And that somehow never goes out of fashion, in contrast to the yawning boring playfulness of Art Nouveau, to which the Eclair can be assigned, with its curved lines.

Fourthly, the durability of the Carac is to be praised. While strawberry tartlets even under a layer of aspic can be left in an unappetizing state in just a few hours, the Carac can easily be kept for a few days. You can't tell from a Carac whether it's yesterday's or not, which increases its profitability for the seller. However, one should not exaggerate it in view of the high cream content.

Fifthly, the Carac is a relatively inexpensive product. A few years ago, the author of these lines bought a Carac for no less than CHF 1.60 in a small bakery in Bern's old town. And even Confiserie Sprüngli, notoriously overpriced and based in Zurich, sells its Caracs for a modest 3.50 francs.

# 6:
We don't get really warm towards the facts.

We live in exciting times. The more often a truth is repeated, the more it runs the risk of being burnt as fake news at the stake of outdated opinions. Take the proverbial elephant in the room, global warming. It has given rise to talk again this summer because people have been sweating. And that's where they usually don't sweat. So not only under the armpits and between the buttocks, but also in the office and at home.

So while Central Europe is dripping out of every crack, the country clubs in South Florida don't understand what the talk of a warm climate is all about. There are always pleasant minus ten degrees. And while the gentlemen are poking in their cold lobster soup, they deny the polar glaciers their ability to melt away. Anyway, science is almost as bad as journalism, all lies. We'll have another one for that.

Well, we know from a number of numerical comparisons: In general, a country's economic output decreases as the average temperature rises. At the same time, corruption rises, the hotter, the more bakshish, as we Arabs say. If the heat continues like this, Zurich will soon be like Sicily. But all this is not true. Because if people in hot countries were really lazier, Singapore, the city state on the equator, would have to have some of the worst universities in the world. And not two that figure among the top 20.

But we can't quite talk away the facts: Some occupational psychologist told a German newspaper twelve years ago that if an employee was working at 30 degrees Celsius instead of 23, work performance would drop by 30 percent. This is bad in two ways, because on the one hand nobody has ever checked the truth of this statement, on the other hand it has always been quoted when the summer slump coincides with the dog days. But whether she is right or not is not so important. A study by the University of East London has shown that if you drink enough, the 30 percent drop in productivity caused by heat increases by 14 percent. We'll have another one for that, too.

Everything is not all that bad with this global warming. It's not just the climate that's important for a worker's performance But the working climate is. And that warms up diametrically to the physical friction of the superior with his employees. A phenomenon that, by the way, has not yet been fully investiagated.  

Part 5:
Studies show: glosses are not always right

According to a study by a researcher at the University of Vienna, men who have complex music on their iTunes playlist are more attractive to women. This is all the more remarkable as it has recently discovered that women prefer music from composers of complex pieces during the fertile days of their reproductive cycle, while at one-night stands, they prefer to fuck guys with dumb music on the phone. Another study has evidenced that women generally apraise of all male body parts most the upper ones.

These findings are about as valuable as the hypothesis in Loriot’s film “Ödipussi," according to which his client, Mr. Melzer, may possibly kill his wife on a purple couch, unless the couch is flowered.

Almost every day, useless scientific findings dribble on us humans via free newspapers. That is annoying. But studies show that free newspapers are so popular because they are free. This, in turn, serves as evidence for Homo oeconomicus, for which, incidentally, there are various studies that negate its existence.

It is the noble task of science to explain to society what it does all day long. But it is not always that the right examples from research end up in the medial monotony. Even politicians, the extended arm of the free newspapers, happily quote from all sorts of real and invented studies. If members of parliament were forced to feed a child in Africa every time they cited a random study, the problem of the world hunger would have been solved long ago. This has recently been revealed in a study.

Since low grade scientific publications shoot out of the ground much like wild garlic in spring, there seems to be no more constrains. Any bachelor thesis, how ever stupid, may in the form of a one-column article succeed in pleasing the minds of commuting Homini oeconomici.

Studies have shown that people read less free papers when driving to work by car. I am in favour of investing more money in the construction of roads and parking lots. Studies show that this also boosts the economy.

Part 4:
The robot that is taking away my place

Not a week goes by without yesterday’s news telling us about robots replacing us all. By now, they even publish figures to that effect, calculations telling us how many employees end up in the street for every work process done by machine. While brilliant researchers are tirelessly working on artificial intelligence, the rest of humanity practices real stupidity. So at least my impression, when reading the news on world politics rather than just the scientific pages. In the foreseeable future, the unions will attack institutions like ETH with class action lawsuits. Even more so, once the labour movement realises that the robot movement did not just randomly come into existence but was purposefully developed. It’s going to be expensive. The world’s ETHs and MITs will be made to finance an unconditional basic income to the redundant part of humanity. To generate these vast sums, ETH will have to develop giant series of dishwasher robots. These in turn will one day work their way up to become millionaire robot. And then we’ll be in a pickle.

I do have certain doubts, however, whether things will happen this way. The problem, as I see it, is that most robots are still incredibly stupid and their abilities quite limited. People like me, who are largely talent free, not very bright and top of it all bone idle, have already pretty much been replaced by the current generation of robots.

People like me, then, should have left our place to these silly machines a long time ago: our performance is weaker than that of our automated colleagues but we are far more demanding. Robots don’t bash each other’s heads in in reality shows. There are no robot punks loitering in the train station corner with their robot dogs. You don’t find robots consuming stupid people’s magazines with emotional captions at the hairdresser’s.

On the other hand, I hear that one of these machine has been sitting at the critical thinking office recently, applying for the position of new columnist. So when it comes to the question of robots, I am not really all that chilled after all.

Part 3:
Who’s moving up?

I should have liked to have a chat with Nadezda, the young Russian student. Alas, I was too late. By about 150 years, for Nadezda matriculated at ETH in 1870. She was the first ‚woman student’, i.e. the first female human being, to study at ETH. In the end, it seems she never got her engineering degree, at least not at this school. I consider it highly likely that, since Nadezda’s time, no woman ever completed her studies at ETH. To corroborate this thesis I shall quote from a magazine I recently came across. It bears the cheerful title „Jobjournal“. Below it is written: „Exclusive Job market for ETH graduates“ (what the English fails to render is that in its original German – ‘ETH Abgänger’ the headline really only speaks of male graduates of ETH).

Besides having to resist the urge to add a hyphen between the abbreviation ETH and the word ‚Abgänger’ – I began to wonder: where are the Abgängerinnen, i.e. the female graduates? Did they take their leave rather than taking the lead, just like Nadezda?

If women made up a third of ETH freshers in 2015, we can hardly assume that they all got married or pregnant before completing their Bachelors and Masters…

But perhaps I’m not doing the school justice. The magazine in question was not, in fact, published by ETH but by its Alumni (sic!) association. And unlike ETH - which, as a federal institution must, or at least ought to, comply with the Federal Chancellery’s Guideline for Gender Equal Language Use - the alumni, being a private association, may neglect as many women as they choose to. There is, after all no penalty for this offense – it would in fact be presumptuous to even speak of an offense. Let’s assume, rather, that we’re dealing with a sin of omission here. And sins are no longer even punishable by hell, since the Vatican surreptitiously – and retroactively – abolished the place. Those who ended up in hell during the middle ages have thus been posthumously and retroactively transferred to purgatory. And there, in purgatory, or at least in its linguistic equivalent, must be lurking the alumni and alumnae responsible for this nonsense.

Whatever the magazine’s reason for its choice of headline – for those among the human species who frequently and not unjustly think of themselves as very smart, it would be stark nonsense to leave the stage to the ‚Abgängers’. The ‚Abgängerinnen’ are surely not averse to having a career, too. Even if they are not as many. Even if unequally shared baby breaks prevent them from straight career paths. And even if – apart from a few professors, one ETH rector, a number of federal councillors and foreign presidents or prime ministers - they have far fewer role models to lean on than their male colleagues. Perhaps one day they will even become visible as ‚Abgängerinnen’ or alumnaes on the title page of ‘Jobjournal’ magazine.

I did eventually come across a woman inside the magazine. She appeared on page 2, on the picture of an ad by a company named „Open Systems“. The woman in the picture has neither shoes nor stockings. She wears a pair of light, casual chinos and a blouse that flatters her figure. Sitting on a roof terrace sofa, she languidly combs her long, blond hair. Unrelated and underneath it all, we read something about „Mission Control Security Services in the IT area“. Perhaps, the ad seems to suggest, the woman is about to put her hair in a ponytail for reasons of IT security.

Part 2:
On taking the road less travelled and the concomitant chances and risks

The other day, as I was sitting on the terrace of the ETH main building, I involuntarily began reciting a poem to myself. I’d read it once too often - it had become stuck in my head and now kept surfacing on my mind’s inner stage at will.

Poems have lost much of their importance. They used to be able to enflame hearts and spark wars. In our day, can’t think of anyone who would load Amazon’s latest collection of poems on their E-reader. Is it that all the good poems have already been composed? Has the lyrical fountain perhaps run dry? Or is it simply a matter of economics and lack of interest among consumers that has caused this market to fold?

Those of us with a scientific mind tend to see language at best as a tool - one capable of adding clarity rather than beauty. To be put back on the shelf once it has served its purpose. But using it to compose poems? Never.

And yet no other form of literature depends as much on formal considerations as poetry. Traditionally, it obeys metric rules, proceeds by alliteration and rhyme patterns. Arranged in stanzas and metre-based indentations, its verses take on a physical pattern.

Rigidly following self-imposed rules, much of poetry is governed by complex structures.  

Shouldn’t this in itself make poetry interesting to mathematicians?

Besides the formal characteristics, which account for some of its beauty, the interest in poetry lies of course in its message. But the meaning of a poem is not always, and sometimes not at all, accessible to the reader.  Then there are others that are immediately understood and are able to touch even the most disinterested readers.

The poem I was reciting was by the American Robert Frost, who was born on the same day as I, albeit a good century apart. Perhaps this is the reason I am especially drawn to him.

Frost is the landscape painter of 20^th century American lyric. In his “The Road Not Taken” – which is the poem I can’t seem to get out of my head – he describes a walk in the forest. In it, the rambler is faced with a crossroads. He first considers that he cannot take two roads at once. He thus establishes the indivisibility of the quantity ‘human being’. He then reflects upon which road he should take and realises that there is little difference between them.  What’s interesting is that, at no point in his considerations, does the thought of his destination come up. The rambler finally makes up his mind and, with hindsight, observes that he has in fact chosen the road less taken. He then concludes that this must have been his reason for taking it all along (“this has made all the difference”).

We are inclined to agree with the author completely, for it is not by doing as everybody else that we discover new things. Only those brave enough to take a different road than those before them will be rewarded for their courage.  Such a great insight. And so true.

We forget, however, that the chosen road in Frost’s poem did not in fact seem any different from the other at the outset. The rambler arrives at the conviction of having taken the road less travelled only after he has made his choice. By trying to vindicate a gut decision a posteriori, he elevates it to fate.

PS: Robert Frost is said to have written the poem as a joke, insinuating a rambling friend of his who suffered from indecision at crossroads. But can we blame the author if his readers take drivel at face value?

PPS: During the much loathed carnival season, a friend decided to avoid the usual route through the Niederdorf and instead chose to take the far less travelled Obere Zäune. Where he was promptly mugged by two young men…