A fun trip and a serious anniversary

I am back from a few days in Germany, which have made me appreciate some things about Germany and some things about the US. I was in Berlin and Dusseldorf, and I love how open and uncongested these cities are, with quiet, efficient streetcars everywhere (by contrast, I took the Green Line home from Logan, and was crushed and suffocated). There is a lot of green and many open areas for walking; in Dusseldorf several downtown blocks near the Rhine are given over to pedestrian walkways with shops and restaurants, streetcars providing the only vehicular traffic. On the other hand, I was struck by the absence of two things I take for granted in the US: (1) A robust consumer health products economy -- there is nothing like a CVS or Walgreens, so small purchases like aspirin, reading glasses, and some diabetic supplies I needed, things that can be gotten on any block in any American city, require finding an Apotek -- which may not have them and probably is closed on Sunday. And (2) simple fire safety regulations -- in one of my (otherwise superbly well appointed) hotels, the only way to lock the door against possible intruders was to insert a key in the inside door handle and turn it 360 degrees to throw a deadbolt. Getting out requires reversing that process. That could lead to disaster in case of a fire -- I think the way doors work in hotels has been tightly regulated in Boston since the Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942. (See today's New York Times for a gloss on fire safety: the lack of regulation is an object of pride in Texas, where some communities lure businesses on the basis of their lack of fire laws.) My main reason for going was to speak at an awards ceremony for the Vodafone Foundation at Vodafone's Dusseldorf facility. The Foundation recognized several scientists and engineers, in particular cryptographer Ueli Maurer. I was asked to speak on Anonymity, and was glad to have the opportunity to pull together some thoughts on the issue. My basic question was, how can we protect the right to anonymity (which is stronger in the US than in Europe, cf. Common Sense and the Federalist Papers) and yet try to keep the (sometimes systematiclally generated) anonymous dreck in the comment sections of news stories and so on from influencing public opinion destructively? I hope I gave the audience something serious to think about in an occasion that was otherwise celebratory and fun. My hosts were kind and generous and the event served as a kind of pre-opening gala of the new Vodafone facility, a spectacular building with many green features. Many local dignitaries and politicians were present--including the head of the Dusseldorf Opera, whose controversial production of Wagner is written up in today's New York Times. On opening night, the staging included scenes of Nazi executions and gassings. After a public uproar, the production eliminated most of the staging and stuck to singing and music. It did not help matters that the murder trial of a defiant neo-Nazi woman had begun in Munich almost simultaneously. In any case, my visit could not have been nicer. The weather was beautiful, and I was able to walk down to the Rhine from my hotel and stroll along the embankment, pausing to enjoy some fresh fish in one of the cafes that line the river in the area near downtown. As as side trip, my old friend Prof. Johann-Christoph Freytag of Humboldt University invited me to Berlin. (Christoph is second from the left in my 1982 "family photo," next to Margo Seltzer.) I spoke on my "flipped classroom" experiment at the University and then on engineering education at Harvard to a gathering of the Berlin Harvard Club. The talk on the flipped classroom was well attended and the audience was quite engaged in the topic. At the Harvard Club talk I was able to spice up a general discussion of SEAS and the excitement surrounding the growth of engineering at Harvard with some details of the life and loves of our great donor Gordon McKay. I won't retell the story I wrote up a few years ago for that Harvard Magazine article, but I'll share some of the illustrations that I showed in Berlin but could not include in Magazine. Here, for example, is a photo of part of the ceiling of the grandiose mausoleum McKay built to glorify himself in Pittsfield, MA.