The Great Blog Confusion

Hallo und willkommen zu Kapitel acht. Acht? Ja, stimmt. Ich habe Kapitel acht vergessen. :(

Regardless, time to settle the score!

The article "draftophobia" war sehr lustig. Ich denke, dass luft ist nicht schlecht. I imagine that it would become far less amusing to me if I were in Germany and overheating, as I am prone to produce an obnoxious amount of excess body heat. I am curious why their lead medical researches say that moving air will cause illness, because from a mechanistic standpoint, I can not see any difference in inhaling air that is moving or air that is not moving. The only difference is the moving air may have a slightly different composition of gases and particles due to the increased ability to disperse the gas... [Just don't get it...]

Similarly, the article "You have What?" was more amusing to me than serious. I was interested in their link to "biowetter" which talked about the weather (not just drafts) effecting health, and that article actually made it make somewhat more sense. Apparently there are those in the German population who take the concept of humans functioning as a weather barometer more serious than most groups of people do, and combined with some hypochondriac tendencies, they psych themselves into feeling ill based on changes in the weather. (To a small extent, the body does indeed react to different weather patterns, but usually the degree to which the body reacts is very minute and it's more compensatory mechanisms to maintain homeostasis than illness...) As for the anti-medicine mindset in Germany, there is indeed some large merit to it. By forcing the body to compensate for illness by itself without additional drugs, the body becomes far more effective at mounting a response to any wide variety of maladies and illnesses. (A somewhat related example would be comparing MRI scans of a person who frequently uses caffeine to a person who does not, both with and without caffeine. The person who frequently uses caffeine requires caffeine to achieve even normal levels of neural activity - without caffeine there brain has depressed (not the mental state) activity, but a person who does not use caffeine regularly would have significantly elevated mental activity above normal. Similarly, using drugs for every various malady decreases the body's ability to generate a bass-line defense.

As for the Sauna article, i'll admit that inasmuch as Sauna gefällt mir nicht, I was not very interested in this article. (As stated above, I tend to produce an obnoxious amount of body heat, and overheating is not something I like to do when avoidable.)

The article "Philologus Ad Nauseam" was one I found interesting but not particularly noteworthy. By the time I read this article I had already read the average-age of a college student article, where the German average student age was significantly higher than most other college demographics. To that end I found the elaboration interesting but not ground-breaking. My friend in Aachen was, however, doing a 4 year program, so before reading this article and the textbook, I did not know that the German college system is quite often different than the American system. (Accursed americocentrism strikes again!)

And all caught up on the great blog confusion!

Tschüss!