germany

At Bletchley Park, breaking Enigma codes and winning WW II

BLETCHLEY, England--The list of important sites is endless: Omaha Beach, Dunkirk, London, Paris, Toulon. But if you're a real World War II aficionado, you may think of Bletchley Park with special fondness.

This nondescript town about 45 minutes outside London is where famed mathematician Alan Turing led a group of master code breakers in a successful battle against Germany and its once-unbreakable cipher codes.

Over the course of several years, the British government assembled a team and sequestered it here, working on various devices intended to break the codes. In the days prior to the war, the Germans rarely … Read more

Aboard the world's largest model train collection

HAMBURG, Germany--Sure, Miniatur Wunderland is the world's largest collection of model trains, but to describe it that way would do it a serious injustice. What it really is is a beyond-belief collection of fantastic dioramas depicting scenes from the Swiss and Austrian Alps, Germany, the United States, and Scandinavia throughout which run 900 trains on the more than eight miles of tracks.

I had planned to come here as part of Road Trip 2011, because I'd read that Miniatur Wunderland had recently added a giant scale model of a working airport. And when I looked into that, I … Read more

The making of King Ludwig's Neuschwanstein Castle

SCHWANGAU, Germany--Given that King Ludwig II of Bavaria built Neuschwanstein Castle as a place where he could get away from the public and the sycophants who wanted to be near him, he might well have shuddered at the notion that just weeks after his death, the incredible palace was opened up as a public museum.

Neuschwanstein, if you're not familiar with it, is one of the world's most fairytale castles. In fact, you've surely seen countless pictures of it, its picturesque towers and walls sitting gorgeously in the middle of an Alpine valley, a gorgeous German countryside … Read more

The great BMW art cars come home to Munich

MUNICH, Germany--They all shared a medium: Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Alexander Calder, David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and 12 others. But it wasn't canvas. In fact, it was the metal surfaces of a group of BMW cars, and together, for more than 35 years, they created one of the most unusual and unlikely collections of all time.

These are the BMW art cars, a group of 17 works by those world-famous artists and other leaders in the pop art movement. While most of the great works by these geniuses hang stationary on walls or stands around the world, … Read more

The long, great history of zeppelins

FRIEDRICHSHAFEN, Germany--It's one of the most famous photographs ever--the Hindenburg exploding on its mast, lives instantly lost, the romance of a modern way of travel forever tainted.

That is probably true nowhere more than this modest city on the northern shore of Lake Constance, a place where zeppelins were invented and the Hindenburg called home.

Of course, that disaster took place in 1937, but here in Friedrichshafen, the memory of that famous airship, and its many German cousins, lives on every day at the Zeppelin Museum, an homage to an age long before jumbo jets, when flying across the Atlantic meant three days, but three luxurious days for sure.

The Zeppelin Museum is part history lesson, part cheerleader. Visitors--about 250,000 a year these days--are treated both to an education in the origins of the zeppelin as an aircraft, and to a bit of a love affair with the Hindenburg and its famous predecessor, the Graf Zeppelin.… Read more

Germany wants nuclear exit by 2022

Germany plans to shut all nuclear reactors by 2022, Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling coalition announced today in a policy reversal drawn up in a rush after the Fukushima disaster in Japan.

The coalition, sensitive to accusations it may increase dependence on highly polluting brown coal, said it planned to cut power use by 10 percent by 2020 and further expand the use of renewables such as wind and solar power.

Merkel's bid to outflank the opposition smacks of opportunism to many Germans but could ease an alliance with the anti-nuclear Greens that may be her best bet to … Read more

Control this six-jointed robot by moving your arm

European research group Fraunhofer has developed an inertial sensor system which, together with a handheld remote control, lets people program the movement of a robotic arm simply by moving their own arms, in a sort of "follow the leader" fashion.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing, Engineering, and Automation in Stuttgart, Germany, devised algorithms governing the interactions of inertial sensors in the input device, which can be used to control the six-jointed robot arm.

The algorithms "fuse the data of individual sensors and identify a pattern of movement. That means we can detect movements in free space," the institute's Bernhard Kleiner said in a release.

Potential applications include easier programming of industrial robots: instead of teaching an assembly robot what to do by guiding it with a baton that it follows with laser tracking, workers could instruct the robot by simply moving their own arms.

A potential medical application is regulating the movements of active prostheses. The inertial sensor system could be attached to a patient's upper thigh and control the motors in a prosthetic foot to achieve a smoother gait.

The technology will be shown off at the Sensor +Test 2011 trade fair, June 7-9 in Nuremberg, where visitors will be able to control the robot using their arms, and make it catch a ball. … Read more

The 404 797: Where we earn our podcasting merit badge (podcast)

Today's story rundown includes the Boy Scouts of America staying culturally relevant with a new robotics merit badge, Cisco saying goodbye to Flip mobile camcorders, a crowdsourced fundraiser poking fun at M. Night Shyamalan's dwindling film career, and Germany saying no to Google Street View.

The 404 Digest for Episode 797

Help M. Night Shyamalan get a real education. Cisco gives its Flip video biz the boot. Boy Scouts can earn a robotic merit badge as part of their new curriculum. No more Google Street View photography for Germany.

Episode 797 Subscribe in iTunes (audio) | Subscribe in iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

The book of Jobs--the real one

Links from Monday's episode of Loaded:

YouTube is going to allow certain partners to broadcast live

Google purchases a company called PushLife

Google calls it quits on Street View in Germany

Sony launches a cloud music services on the PSP

An official Steve Jobs biography is finally on the way

An app called Meal Snap helps you count calories by photographing your food

Netflix gets permission to stream every "Star Trek" series ever made