At least she is looking to the future ...

 

In about 10 min from now on the winner of the 100th Nobel Peace Prize will be announced live from Oslo, Norway.

Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate activist, is widely considered by bookmakers to be the favorite to win this prestigious award. 

If she succeeds, she will become its youngest ever recipient -- a year younger than Malala Yousafzai was when she shared the award in 2014. 

To be honest, I find her character and personality highly disturbing.  Watching her speeches at the UN or at the climat summit, I had to turn down the sound. And also, I still believe that she has been used by others as a vehicle.

But still, I believe that she should win the Peace Price or another highly recognized award.  And I also think that she should continue in her fight.  And I also think that her generation and also the elder ones (like me) should take her serious.  And this is why I think she is right:

Her anger about the slow political and economic changes away from the fossile energy sources is very rational, because it does not promote a move backward. She has no problems in promoting novel, innovative technologies. She even supported further usages of the (carbon saving) nuclear energy. 

She is not one of those eco-romantic who believe that we a life like in ancient times will be the future paradise. Greta is pro-technology, but she wants a faster usage of innovative technologies which are both make our lifes more convenient and the environment more clean. There are technologies like this, like the Maglev high-speed trains (abbandoned in Germany, but now re-developed in China), the HyperLoop (developed in California by Elon Musk) or synthetic, carbon neutral fuels (pioneered in Germany by Coren Technologies Inc.). 

The classical political greens, the organic and back-to-the-nature politicians, in contrast to Greta Thunberg, are sceptical about all modern technologies. And if they decide about our political agenda, we will really fall back and end in a deep recession.

In this sense, Mrs Thunberg is super-modern and super-realistic. And despite her strange character, she deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. Not least because Alfred Nobel himself demanded the prize winners to show a great dedication to human usage of technological innovations.

UPDATE:   11:12 pm, Greta Thunberg is not the winner, but the Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed for his effort to end the boarder conflict with Eritrea.  A could choise as well. And Greta will continue her climate campaign.

Germans and Austrians

Despite sharing a lot of its history with each other, vast cultural differences exist between Austrians and Germans. And a lot of them are reflected in a completely different meaning of certain words. A while ago, I received a written invitation from a local Tirolian-Austrian court, to report with them "to be executed". I replied that I have no intention and no time to be executed by them, due to private duties and an extraordinary big work load in our institute.
What was going on there at the Autrian court ?  Well, I had received a trafic ticket during a recent trip to Salzburg, and I failed to pay the fine. And when a sentence is administered in Austria, they call it "to execute". In Germany "to execute" means something like "to be put to death" (by hanging or electrich chair).

Another funny difference in using one and the same word is "Ausrasten".

This is how it looks when a German "ausrasted":

 (like "going crazy",  "Ausrasten" lieterally means "to unlatch")

 
And this is how it looks when an Austrian "ausrasted":

Here, "Ausrasten" is used in the sense of "having a good rest"