Eric Bodden

20°C

As I learned today, Beamer is not an English word. It must be one of those “germified” pseudo-English expressions like Handy. Believe it or not, we Germans say “Handy” if we mean a mobile phone! Now that I think about it: Why the hell? Ok, you can hold it in your hand but you can do that with a lot of things… Weird.

A Beamer (in German) is nothing else but a projector. I was actually had already convinced of the fact that Beamer is an English word because Beamer-latex is a latex package for slide presentations, to be shown on a projector. Well, turns out that it was written by another German There you go.

False friends are really hard to get rid of. I think it took me more than a year to get rid of the false correspondence between actually and “aktuell” (German for currently).

What’s your funniest or most annoying false friend?

Tonight I attended a special lecture by Dave Williams, McGill Alumni and Astronaut for the Canadian Space Agency who served on the STS-90 mission in 1998 (watch that photo! ) and the STS-118 “repair” mission this year. In his lecture he spent a lot of time walking us through his story about this last mission, backed by dozens of breathtaking images taken in outer space – truly impressive. He talked about quite some remarkable experiences he had up there, such as only being held to a spaceship by a small cord, while moving at 25 times the speed of sound, “lifting” a 600 pounds unit that needed replacement or fearing re-entry because of yet another damage to the hull plating. Another such experience was to drink Ice tea “from a bubble”. One experiment that he proposed for a later mission and which caused a lot of laughter was to place a fish in a big bubble of water and see what happens. Would the fish just be totally confused, “swim” out of the water and never find back or would it actually be able to perceive its environment well enough to identify the bubble of water as such and stay inside. Who knows? … interesting food for thought!