I spent last week in Germany. Munich, specifically, with a brief encounter with Amsterdam. If you have never been, I highly recommend you go there. The city has the well deserved reputation for being one of the nicest cities in the German republic. There is a wealth of parks, beer, heavy food and — of course — Leiderhosen.

The official reason I went was for work. We were conducting a usability study on the new setup experience. This meant that my vacation was financed, courtesy of Bill Gates. And let me be the first to say, he spared no expense! I got to travel business class, sleep in my own bed, in my own room, at a five star hotel.

I had never travelled business class before, but I now know why it is so much more expensive. You are given such lavish surroundings: your seat goes completely horizontal — allowing a person to realistically entertain the idea of sleeping on the plane; your first drink (chosen from a full bar) is offered before the plane even takes off; your meals are chosen from a menu likely to have filet mignon or duck… It costs a fortune (5-10x normal) but is worth every penny if you can afford it.

The hotel was nice with distinctive European styling. The decor was very minimalist, using dark colors, lots of wood and metal. All artwork was isolated and individually illuminated. Toilets there follow the Japanese style of offering small and big flush modes (although big and bigger would be more apt in Germany). My room was not in any way spacious, but efficient in its use of space such that I did not feel pressed for space.

The most distinctive aspect of the hotel was the way it blended in with the city. Hotels in Japan and the United States tend to suffocate their surroundings. There is little to no activity unrelated to the hotel in the immediate vicinity, much the same way an oak tree stifles the growth of nearby bush and shrubbery. By contrast, the neighboring homes and businesses in Munich have grown together with the Arabella Sheraton Hotel. If you have any doubt, go to floor 19 — there you will find a hospital clinic.

Europe in general has no clear lines between where people live and work. There are apartments right in the middle of the downtown shopping area. The place where we conducted our usability study was a block from the hotel, which was right next to a farmer’s market and restaurants, which all had apartments above it. Some people have the luxury of living in a small apartment during the week and going home to a larger place in the countryside during the weekend. Still, I asked one of the Germans what the average commute time was and he said around 30 minutes each way.

I spent last week in Germany. Munich, specifically, with a brief encounter with Amsterdam.

The official reason I went was for work. We were on our way to conduct a usability study on the new setup experience. Two thirds of the employees — and all of the critical decision making — happens in Redmond. It is imperative we remove our heads from these (comfortable) grounds on occasion and remind ourselves how the rest of humanity experiences reality.

Before we arrived in Germany we had a three hour layover in Amsterdam. We asked some of the KLM employees — women adorned head to toe in baby blue — for some help. Here we got our first taste of the European work ethic. There were about 10 of these ladies behind the counter, five of whom were chit-chatting, paying no regard to the increasingly long line of people wanting help. We eventually got our help (no, we could not change our flight), which we duly ignored. We set off to make the most of what little time we had left.

We took a train into Amsterdam. A guy came by to check our tickets and immediately engaged us in English, inquiring whether we were American. How friendly, I thought! He asked for our tickets, which we handed to him. He then made a loud proclaimation — in English — that this was the first class car. Oh. Those found in the first class car without a first class ticket would be fined 100 euros. The car was blue with no other markings, which obviously makes it first class. He thus concluded in a very loud, still friendly, English voice; half the car got up to leave.

Finally in Amsterdam we walked around. Amsterdam is a trip. None of the buildings are above 4 stories. There is an unmistakable quaintness to the whole place — this is the capital city of the country?! We wandered around and finally settled on a cafe to enjoy our first beer, which they refused to serve to us. Apparently some cafes are unwilling to serve beer at 9am, but smoking pot? No problem.

Instead I had the world’s most expensive half of a grilled cheese sandwich (5 euros, about $7). This was actually well worth the expense, since it came with the entertainment of watching some drunk or otherwise inebriated locals start shouting at each other. The shouting escalated to flailing arms imitating punches, which escalated to rock and brick throwing. At this point three cop cars arrived on the scene. With our entertainment shut down and consumables consumed, we made our way back to the airport.

I imagine there was a large amount of, “why?” “how could this happen?” “this makes no sense” type sentiment after the recent shootings at Virginia Tech. This type of thinking is, while understandable, silly. In fact, I think it is amazing these things do not happen more frequently. The fact that someone slaughtering 50 people can cause grief across the nation — nee, the world — is about the strongest testament to the safety and luxury we enjoy as anything else I can imagine.

We should accept that these types of events will, on occasion, in our society, transpire. Trying to find excuses for the nature of humanity — video games, violent movies, poor air quality, whatever — applies but only tangentially. The truth is that they occur because we live in a society that purposefully allows bad behavior and poor decision-making but, paradoxially, never expects truly harmful behavior to happen as a result.

If you want to look for reasons why the Virginia Tech shooting happened, here are three reasons why:

1. We place very little social pressure on people to behave a certain way. We are likely to console the murderer’s family and the school. Were we to arrest or kick the family out of the country, fine the teachers and administrators, and bankrupt the school, someone probably would have raised a larger warning flag and connected the dots. But we believe that collecitve punishment is inappropriate. People generally think the book 1984 is not the kind of place in which they wish to live.
2. We have very rudimentary means for judging someone’s emotional health and rationality. If we had some sort of invisible hand guiding people toward patterns of thought that increased emotional health, there would be far fewer unhappy people — unhappy people willing to shoot up a school. There would also be fewer groups of people who think it is rational to ask a priest to perform an exorcism, leaving more room for more effective psychological treatment. As we do not have this invisible hand, we err on the side of caution and treat nearly all forms of thinking as equally healthy and rational. Our failure rate is pretty high when we do otherwise.
3. The most important thing: We do not really think a few people getting shot up is a very big deal. Sure we talk a lot of talk — or at least the 24 hour cable networks do — but at the end of the day, we value our freedoms more than we value the lives of those 50 random people. The 300,000,000 people who were not murdered by some crazy college student place real value on our freedom to say things without having to worry that the thought police are going to come and arrest us. I am sure that we could have made the lives of those 300,000,000 people miserable enough that a depressed lunatic could not have murdered the 50 unfortunate victims at Virgina Tech. Even if you think this is an acceptable tradeoff — something we should do — were this the case, the resulting despair would more than make up for the difference in a higher suicide rate.

Still, if we want to play the blame game take a gander at this:

Below the fold, the Post looks back at Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui’s last year of life, revealing that last summer, Cho’s mother sought help for her son at a local church, where the minister believed he needed deliverance from “demonic power.”

It is absurd that any person living on earth in the 21st century still talks about “deliverance” and “demonic power” in a manner other than jest. The fact that half of this country and the majority of the planet still thinks this way is mind-numbing. The boy’s family, teachers and friends should have been talking with their son, trying to understand why he was so angry, and gotten him some real help — theraputical, medicinal, whatever. Taking him to a preacher and saying a bunch of Hail Mary’s every night is irresponsible.

Have I been reading The God Delusion? Why yes, I have. How is it you can tell?

Previously: defending my belief that God exists, discussing what that means and why Dawkins is intolerant.

Slate tells us: “Surgeons are removing brain tumors through patients’ noses”. Does this remind you of anything?

Where will they remove things through next?

There is a controversy brewing in Japan where politicians are requiring their aides to donate meaningful amounts of their salary back to the politician hiring them. Apparently the practice is in the gray bounds of the law.