Topic: Germany (Page 3)
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π East German coffee crisis
The East German coffee crisis refers to shortages of coffee in the late 1970s in East Germany caused by a poor harvest and unstable commodity prices, severely limiting the government's ability to buy coffee on the world markets. As a consequence, the East German government increased its engagement in Africa and Asia, exporting weapons and equipment to coffee-producing nations.
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- "East German coffee crisis" | 2018-10-08 | 91 Upvotes 16 Comments
π DCF77
DCF77 is a German longwave time signal and standard-frequency radio station. It started service as a standard-frequency station on 1 January 1959. In June 1973 date and time information was added. Its primary and backup transmitter are located at 50Β°0β²56β³N 9Β°00β²39β³E in Mainflingen, about 25Β km south-east of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The transmitter generates a nominal power of 50Β kW, of which about 30 to 35Β kW can be radiated via a T-antenna.
DCF77 is controlled by the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Germany's national physics laboratory and transmits in continuous operation (24 hours). It is operated by Media Broadcast GmbH (previously a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG), on behalf of the PTB. With Media Broadcast GmbH, a temporal transmission availability of at least 99.7% per year or under 26.28 hours of annual downtime has been agreed upon. Most service interruptions are short-term disconnections of under two minutes. Longer lasting transmission service interruptions are generally caused by strong winds, freezing rain or snow-induced T-antenna movement. This manifests itself in electrical detuning of the antenna resonance circuit and hence a measurable phase modulation of the received signal. When the maladjustment is too large, the transmitter is taken out of service temporarily. In the year 2002, almost 99.95% availability, or just over 4.38 hours of downtime, was realized. The timestamp sent is either in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)+1 or UTC+2 depending on daylight saving time.
The highly accurate 77.5Β kHz (approximately 3868.3Β m wavelength) carrier signal is generated from local atomic clocks that are linked with the German master clocks at the PTB in Braunschweig. The DCF77 time signal is used for the dissemination of the German national legal time to the public.
Radio clocks and watches have been very popular in Europe since the late 1980s and, in mainland Europe, most of them use the DCF77 signal to set their time automatically. Further industrial time-keeping systems at railway stations, in the field of telecommunication and information technology, and at radio and TV stations are radio-controlled by DCF77 as well as tariff change-over clocks of energy supply companies and clocks in traffic-light facilities.
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- "DCF77" | 2021-06-30 | 67 Upvotes 37 Comments
π The Awful German Language
"The Awful German Language" is an 1880 essay by Mark Twain published as Appendix D in A Tramp Abroad. The essay is a humorous exploration of the frustrations a native speaker of English has with learning German as a second language.
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- "The Awful German Language" | 2021-05-16 | 46 Upvotes 52 Comments
π Magdeburg Water Bridge
The Magdeburg Water Bridge (German: KanalbrΓΌcke Magdeburg) is a large navigable aqueduct in central Germany, located near Magdeburg. The largest canal underbridge in Europe, it spans the river Elbe and directly connects the Mittellandkanal to the west and Elbe-Havel Canal to the east of the river, allowing large commercial ships to pass between the Rhineland and Berlin without having to descend into and then climb out of the Elbe itself.
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- "Magdeburg Water Bridge" | 2019-11-21 | 52 Upvotes 41 Comments
π List of Assassination Attempts on Adolf Hitler
This is an incomplete list of documented attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
All attempts occurred in the German Reich, except where noted. All attempts involved citizens of the German Reich, except where noted. No fewer than 42 plots have been uncovered by historians. However, the true numbers cannot be accurately determined due to an unknown number of undocumented cases.
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- "List of Assassination Attempts on Adolf Hitler" | 2019-11-06 | 55 Upvotes 30 Comments
π Master of the Playing Cards
The Master of the Playing Cards (German: Meister der Spielkarten) was the first major master in the history of printmaking. He was a German (or conceivably Swiss) engraver, and probably also a painter, active in southwestern Germany β probably in Alsace, from the 1430s to the 1450s, who has been called "the first personality in the history of engraving."
Various attempts to identify him have not been generally accepted, so he remains known only through his 106 engravings, which include the set of playing cards in five suits from which he takes his name. The majority of the set survives in unique impressions, most of which are in the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. A further 88 engravings are regarded as sufficiently close to his style to be by his pupils.
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- "Master of the Playing Cards" | 2024-02-17 | 69 Upvotes 8 Comments
π Henry Kissinger turns 100 today
Henry Alfred Kissinger (; German: [ΛkΙͺsΙͺΕΙ]; born Heinz Alfred Kissinger, May 27, 1923) is an American diplomat, political theorist, geopolitical consultant, and politician who served as United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. For his actions negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam, Kissinger received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize under controversial circumstances.
Kissinger was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938. Upon arriving in the United States, he excelled academically and graduated from Harvard College in 1950, where he studied under William Yandell Elliott. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University in 1951 and 1954, respectively.
A practitioner of Realpolitik, Kissinger played a prominent role in United States foreign policy between 1969 and 1977, pioneering the policy of dΓ©tente with the Soviet Union, orchestrating an opening of relations with the People's Republic of China, engaging in what became known as shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East to end the Yom Kippur War, and negotiating the Paris Peace Accords, which ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. Kissinger has also been associated with such controversial policies as the U.S. bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, U.S. involvement in the 1973 Chilean military coup, a "green light" to Argentina's military junta for their Dirty War, and U.S. support for Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War despite a genocide being perpetrated by Pakistan. After leaving government, he formed Kissinger Associates, an international geopolitical consulting firm. Kissinger has written over a dozen books on diplomatic history and international relations.
Kissinger remains a controversial and polarizing figure in U.S. politics, both venerated by some as a highly effective U.S. Secretary of State and condemned by others for allegedly tolerating or supporting war crimes committed by allied nation states during his tenure. A 2015 survey of top international relations scholars, conducted by College of William & Mary, ranked Kissinger as the most effective U.S. secretary of state in the 50 years to 2015. A centenarian, Kissinger is the oldest living former U.S. Cabinet member and the last surviving member of Nixon's Cabinet. The previous oldest cabinet member was George Shultz, who died at the age of 100 in February 2021.
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- "Henry Kissinger turns 100 today" | 2023-05-27 | 39 Upvotes 34 Comments
π Operation Epsilon
Operation Epsilon was the codename of a program in which Allied forces near the end of World War II detained ten German scientists who were thought to have worked on Nazi Germany's nuclear program. The scientists were captured between May 1 and June 30, 1945, as part of the Allied Alsos Mission, mainly as part of its Operation Big sweep through southwestern Germany.
They were interned at Farm Hall, a bugged house in Godmanchester, near Cambridge, England, from July 3, 1945, to January 3, 1946. The primary goal of the program was to determine how close Nazi Germany had been to constructing an atomic bomb by listening to their conversations.
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- "Operation Epsilon" | 2023-05-08 | 61 Upvotes 10 Comments
π SchΓΆningen Spears
The SchΓΆningen spears are a set of eight wooden throwing spears from the Palaeolithic Age that were excavated between 1994 and 1998 in the open-cast lignite mine in SchΓΆningen, Helmstedt district, Germany, together with an associated cache of approximately 16,000 animal bones. The excavations took place under the management of Hartmut Thieme of the Lower Saxony State Service for Cultural Heritage (NLD).
Originally assessed as being between 380,000 and 400,000 years old, they represent the oldest completely preserved hunting weapons of prehistoric Europe so far discovered. As such they predate the age of Neanderthal Man (by convention taken to have emerged 300,000 years ago), and are associated with Homo heidelbergensis. The spears support the practice of hunting by archaic humans in Europe in the late Lower Paleolithic.
The age of the spears was estimated from their stratigraphic position, "sandwiched between deposits of the Elsterian and Saalian glaciations, and situated within a well-studied sedimentary sequence." More recently, thermoluminescence dating of heated flints in a deposit beneath that which contained the spears suggested that the spears were between 337,000 and 300,000 years old.
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- "SchΓΆningen Spears" | 2020-01-29 | 63 Upvotes 7 Comments
π CityEl Electric Car from 1992
The CityEl is a 3-wheel lightweight electric car originally designed and manufactured in Denmark, but currently made in Germany by Citycom GmbH.
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- "CityEl Electric Car from 1992" | 2021-10-16 | 42 Upvotes 20 Comments