#university of strasbourg

[postcard-from-the-past]

University of Strasbourg, Alsace region of France

German vintage postcard

[downthetubes]

Guardian cartoonist Tom Gauld takes over the University of Strasbourg (not literally)

Students and staff at the University of Strasbourg are enjoying the weird worlds of The Guardian and New Scientist cartoonist Tom Gauld this summer

[tpwrtrmnky]

priorities

[ID: A two-panel "Pills that make you green" comic, showing two crudely drawn stick figures for people.

First panel: Two stick figures, one drawn in black, on the left, one green, on the right. The black one says: "You think I'm "unreasonably obsessed" with green people?" The green one replies: "Well yeah, our lives sort of barely affect yours at all." black: "Barely affect? This is by far the most important issue in politics right now!"

Second panel: Zoom in on green stick figure, which says: "…There is a literal portal to hell in Strasbourg and an Armageddon Beast rampaging through the infinite torment crucible." End ID.]

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[ronastudies]

march 22, 2024// Reading outside the Palais Universitaire on the first warm day of the year in just a t-shirt and leather jacket. Wandering through the small museum in the basement of the palais trying to decipher the Greek writing on maps. Cheap, overly sweet coffee from the vending machine and looking up theater plays to see in the evening.

[oatzmeal]

strasbourg, france

[dlyarchitecture]

[myjetpack]

I have an exhibition on in the Studium Library at Strasbourg University. My friends at @editions2024 built and installed it with support from the @centralvapeur festival. The full exhibition is on for another week with many exhibits staying up longer. There are fake books, real books, prints, cartoons, drawings, comics, signs, jetpacks, robots...

[spacevoyagerx]

The Ghost Nebula

The Ghost Nebula, also known as LBN 762, is a dark nebula located in the constellation Cassiopeia.

It is named for its ghostly appearance in images taken in infrared light, where it appears as a dark silhouette against the backdrop of brighter stars and gas.

Credits: NASA, ESA, and STScI; Acknowledgment: H. Arab (University of Strasbourg)

[vexingwoman]

“Human rights principles are based on experience, but not that of women. It is not that women's human rights have not been violated. When women are violated like men who are otherwise like them—when women's arms and legs bleed when severed, when women are shot in pits and gassed in vans, when women's bodies are hidden at the bottom of abandoned mines, when women's skulls are sent from Auschwitz to Strasbourg for experiments—this is not recorded as the history of human rights atrocities to women. They are Argentinian or Honduran or Jewish. When things happen to women that also happen to men, like being beaten and disappeared and tortured to death, the fact that it happened to women is not counted in, or marked as, human suffering. When no war has been declared and still women are beaten by men with whom they are close, when wives disappear from supermarket parking lots, when prostitutes float up in rivers or turn up under piles of rags in abandoned buildings, this is overlooked entirely in the record of human suffering because the victims are women and it smells of sex. What happens to women is either too particular to be universal or too universal to be particular, meaning either too human to be female or too female to be human.”

[infiniteglitterfall]

About 30 years ago, an American botanist dug into the mud of a dried-up lake in China and found 1,000-year-old lotus seeds. She studied them carefully and put them in a pot on her lab's windowsill. They sprouted a few weeks later. "That took no effort. I thought that if she could do it, so can we," says Dr. Sarah Sallon, a pediatrician at Hadassah Medical Center, where she founded the Natural Medicine Research Center 25 years ago. The lotus that flowered on that windowsill in the United States sent Sallon on a years-long journey of raising date palms based on 2,000-year-old seeds. She even ate the fruit and then carried on with her botanical detective thriller.

At the end of her quest she proposed a solution to intriguing historical questions: What are the biblical plants tsori and afarsimon? What links them? And where did they disappear to?

....The fact that the Commiphora that sprouted [from their 1,000-year-old seed] resembled varieties found in Madagascar, not far from Sheba, adds to the hope that maybe the small plant is the legendary afarsimon that vanished from history in the eighth century. But alas, the plant at Kibbutz Ketura produced no aroma.

"We waited several years hoping that as it grew it might become fragrant. And we also sent specimens to chemists at the University of Western Australia and the University of Strasbourg in France," Sallon says. "What they found were almost no compounds associated with fragrance but many very medicinal ones including those with anti-inflammatory compounds."

Sallon, therefore, has a few key questions about the afarsimon. How is it that a plant that thrived for 1,000 years on large farms at the Dead Sea vanished without a trace? How is it that no archaeological excavation in the region, from Qumran in the north to Masada in the south, has found any afarsimon seeds?

....Cautiously, Sallon proposed a hypothesis for all the mysteries. She believes that the plant she found is a Commiphora that grew naturally at the Dead Sea, and that it may be the healing tsori mentioned in the Bible and known since the time of the Patriarchs.... [and that] ancient farmers used it as the stock for the aromatic Commiphora – the legendary afarsimon. This grafting gave Judean farmers the ability to grow large afarsimon fields and become a perfume powerhouse. This solution solves all the mysteries: Grafted plants often don't bear seeds, so no afarsimon seeds have been found at archaeological digs.

This is so cool. I can't believe people are sprouting seeds from archaeological digs and bringing extinct species back to life to learn about!

And it's so appropriate that it's two of the oldest cultures in the world that are doing this. I can't wait to see what else people will sprout!

[hedgehog-moss]

Record numbers of protesters all over France today. Images from Paris, Toulouse, Grenoble, Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrand, Rennes, Lyon, Lille, Marseille.

Major highways and bridges along with train stations, ports, warehouses and refineries blocked by demonstrators and unions, many universities and high schools blocked by students, Tour Eiffel, Arc de Triomphe & Palace of Versailles closed to tourists, 25% of workers on strike in the national electricity and railway companies, 15% of all civil servants on strike. Protests were organised in every major city and many smaller ones. Could have added a lot more pics of huge crowds in Strasbourg, Nantes, Limoges, Orléans, Nancy, Annecy, Brest, Mulhouse, Pau, Montpellier, Rouen, Le Mans, Bayonne, Toulon, Tours...

And kudos to Brittany for consistently out-Brittanying itself this month, between the nurses who brought out the catapult again while playing the biniou, and the fishermen who sent a tractor to face down the police’s water cannon Transformers-style, your protests have a special place in my heart.

[igbooksstorm]

Hello everyone ! I study a Master degree in publishing, and I'm writing my master’s thesis on the success of Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments saga. Here is a link to a questionnaire that I created. Its purpose is to assess the real impact of the books and the extent of their success on several points. I would like to thank in advance all those who will take the time to answer this survey in its entirety. Don't hesitate to contact me if you have questions about my work. Have a nice day !!

[mariacallous]

Climate law experts are already calling it one of the most impactful rulings on human rights and climate change ever made. Today’s judgment, from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), was read out in front of an eclectic gathering of concerned plaintiffs from around the continent.

A group of older women from Switzerland, young people from Portugal, and a former French mayor—all had brought cases to the court alleging that their governments were not doing enough to battle the climate crisis now regularly ravaging Europe with heat waves, droughts, and other extreme weather.

While the ECHR, based in Strasbourg, France, chose not to admit two of the cases in question, it ruled that the Swiss women were right—their government had failed to do enough to meet the country’s responsibilities over climate change. What’s more, the women plaintiffs had also been denied their right to a fair trial in their country, the court found.

“It’s really a landmark judgement that was issued today, and it’s going to shape how all future climate change judgements are decided,” says human rights law researcher Corina Heri from the University of Zurich, who was present to hear the court’s decision for herself. “I was really relieved and very happy,” she adds, describing the moment when she heard the results of the judges’ deliberations.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg, who also attended the ruling, told reporters afterward that the world could expect more climate-change-related litigation.

The ECHR judges ruled 16 to 1 that the Swiss women—known as the KlimaSeniorinnen, or Senior Women for Climate Protection—had been subject to a violation of their human rights under the terms of the European Convention on Human Rights. The women had argued, for instance, that they were particularly vulnerable to the effects of heat waves.

Essentially, the ECHR has said it deems the Swiss government’s efforts on climate change mitigation to be insufficient. In the immediate aftermath of the ruling, Swiss president Viola Amherd told reporters that she would have to read the court’s judgement before commenting in detail.

“What Switzerland failed to do in the eyes of the court is, firstly, they don’t have a sufficient regulatory framework [for tackling climate change],” says Catherine Higham at the London School of Economics, who coordinates the Climate Change Laws of the World project. “They also felt there was evidence that Switzerland had inadequate 2020 targets and it failed to comply with those.” By 2020, the country had aimed to cut emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels—however, emissions fell by only 14 percent.

The case brought by a former French mayor who said his town was at risk from rising sea levels was not admitted by the court because the man no longer lives in France. And the case by six Portuguese young people, penned in response to devastating wildfires in 2017, was also not admitted—partly because the plaintiffs did not bring their case in their own country before approaching the ECHR.

Despite this, the positive ruling for the KlimaSeniorinnen is being touted as hugely significant by legal experts. In this case, the court did not accept complaints from individuals within the group, but it did accept complaints made by the group itself as an organization—a distinction that could influence how people collectivize and approach European courts with similar cases in the future, says Heri.

She adds that there was a possibility the court could have ruled that the European Convention on Human Rights doesn’t actually require climate action. Had that happened, it could have undermined existing rulings made in European domestic courts that have demanded tougher climate policies from governments. For example, the Brussels Court of Appeal ruled last year that Belgium must cut its emissions by 55 percent from 1990 levels by 2030.

Today’s judgement comes following years of climate-change-related litigation gathering pace in courts around the world. In the US in 2023, for example, a judge ruled that the state of Montana was violating the right of 16 young people to a “clean and healthful environment.”

Higham says the ECHR’s ruling is “likely to have ramifications around the world.” She notes that, globally, there are around 100 similar cases in progress at various courts, also challenging governments over their climate change mitigation efforts. Heri agrees, noting that the ECHR is viewed globally as a highly influential international court.

Jorge Viñuales at the University of Cambridge, who specializes in law and environmental policy, says it is notable that Switzerland has been found to have fallen foul of human rights legislation, despite the fact that the country has relatively good climate policies. He criticizes the ECHR’s decision not to admit the case brought by the Portuguese young people, however. Part of the court’s reasoning was that their case was targeted not just at Portugal but every EU member state and five other countries. “The court seems to misunderstand that the climate system is everywhere and that effective control over the source of harm is what should count,” says Viñuales.

A big question around climate-change-related legal cases is over their impact—do they actually have enough clout to steer countries and large corporations toward reducing emissions faster than planned? Higham says there is evidence that this is already happening. In the Netherlands, the country’s Supreme Court ordered the government to slash emissions by 15 megatonnes in 2020, and a sharp drop in emissions followed. “We do see policy changes in the Netherlands that seem to be influenced by that judgement,” says Higham.

The ECHR ruling could also reignite cases that have struggled in some nations under the ECHR’s jurisdiction, such as the UK. This is “immensely significant,” says Tim Crosland, director of Plan B, a legal group that challenged the UK government over its climate policies but ultimately lost the case in 2021. “The High Court said, ‘Your fundamental problem is there is no precedent from Strasbourg to support your position that fundamental rights have been violated,’” says Crosland. “Well, now there is.”

Defendants in future cases may feel that their country’s own emissions are only a fraction of those responsible for climate change, and that therefore it is unfair to single one state out over many others. However, the ECHR ruling does not exaggerate nations’ individual duties, says Crosland. Each state has a share of the world’s carbon budget for keeping global warming to, for example, less than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

“Obviously, Switzerland isn’t responsible for emissions from the US or from China, but it’s responsible for its own emissions—and that’s what the judgement says,” he explains.

[oatzmeal]

strasbourg, france

[adri2-brgr]

Hi everyone ! My name is Adrien and first of all, welcome to my blog !

Music has, for as long as I can remember, always been a part of my life. My dad loved (and still loves) to just sit down and take time for him to just enjoy his favourite songs, which is an habit I share with him.

I know it sounds really cliche but I do mean it when I say that I try to listen to everything. If I had to narrow it down tho (which is the case), I would say that some of my favourite artists as of right now would be the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kaffetorsk, Nujabes, Luv Resval, Snorunt, Ziak, Saez and Aoraki.

As for what I want to talk about for my first blog, I decided to share a little tip with all of you (I'm amazing I know) !

So today's subject is...

...about the concert hall ''La Laiterie'' in Strasbourg !

Most of you have probably been there once or twice to experience a concert or two, given than some rather big names already performed in there (Muse, Radiohead and, more recently, Fave or Ziak to name a few). What you may not know, however, is that sometimes some concerts are free ! Yes, you read that right, free ! As in, cheaper than cheap ! Obviously most of the bands you'll be able to see for free aren't really well known, but it can lead to some amazing discoveries !

If you enjoy discovering smaller bands and listening to music you might have never discovered before, it can be a good idea to check La Laiterie's website from time to time to see if any free concert catches your eye.

For exemple, I think it was in May of this year, some of my friends and I went to check out a band named ''Howlin Jaws''.

We knew nothing about those guys except that they made rock music... And what a good surprise ! This post is already long enough as is, so I'll try to keep it short. Their music has a 2010's garage band aesthetic that I personally really dig. They also take a lot of inspiration from The Beatles in regards to their musical universe. I highly recommend listnening to their album Half Awake Half Asleep (specifically Blue Day and Lost Songs) and their EP Burning House (particularly She's Gone).

Discovering this group was a really good surprise, so if you like to discover smaller artists I highly recommend checking La Laiterie's announcements from time to time !

[sgiandubh]

May bank holiday for schools is generally the same throughout various council areas , except for private schools one of which her son attends, so her IGS was correct.

Dear Bank Holiday Anon,

There is usually not one, but two bank holidays in May, in the UK. Also, Scotland's term dates are usually not the same as in England and Wales.

I have checked both with Quora and some private Scottish schools' websites themselves. I do not know which one he attends: I am not a stalker, nor a data miner - are you? - and I do not have inside information, either - do you? I just wanted to give you an answer as accurate as possible.

It is absolutely true that, as a general rule of thumb, private schools are not bound by public authorities' set term dates. However, bank holidays are generally observed, for obvious practical reasons.

Independent school means 'private school', by the way.

I then took the example of a private, Catholic school in Stirling: Saint Ninian's Primary School (https://sites.google.com/stirlingschools.net/st-ninians-primary/).

And also of a private school in Glasgow, Hutchesons’ Grammar School (https://www.hutchesons.org/). One of the best in Scotland, actually:

Your ask is legit, though, Anon and I shall always stand corrected, if you come back and prove me wrong with facts. No problem with me in this regard - just so you know.

PS: I went to a private school myself, for six years before leaving for university. We had to follow the French curriculum and term dates for the Bas-Rhin/Strasbourg School Zone, to which we were attached (in France, there are three different School Zones, with different term dates!) However, we always observed French and Romanian bank holidays. Always. I even sat on the school's board as a student elected representative and I remember the kerfuffle about all this was even worse than allowing optional Bible classes (I was very proudly vocal and successful against it, France being France even overseas).

[Jimmy Sime - Toffs and Toughs, 1937]