The Tower of Babel - Episode 1

For me in German what I realized when I studied in Italy for a while is that I would always ask how before asking why. I think also here it's like a lot people ask why first before they start doing anything. Whereas like in German it's more about the techniques first. Like you're trying to make the techniques perfect and then afterwards think about oh why this is actually relevant. In German we use points for multiplication and also like the two points for divide rather than having like the line. So what we say is in terms of the order of operation we say points before lines because you multiply and divide before you add or subtract. We have one that's about like chickens forming a club. Which means crazy chicken club which is how you remember the how the sign and cosine are related to the sides of the triangle. I still use it today honestly because I can't remember these things. So what we also do in German is when we count after 20 we say the last digit first so we would say two and 20 rather than 22. The only time I think in German is when I have to count because for some reason my brain can't do translate in English and count. So I could like count the chairs in terms of like the numbers around the room for example but I could then in the end I don't know how many I actually counted. Probably like high school math I would do in German and then everything afterwards English. So now giving a talk about my research in German quite intimidating to me more than in English. First of all I'm translating from English into German so when I hear myself speak afterwards I'm like no one would say that in German but it's like that's quite interesting and I don't know like some of the words of my research so I very confidently say what I think is the translation and then someone would be like I don't think this is a word. Which would be stochastic modeling of cancer metastasis. —