Welcome to Jürgen Braungardt’s Website.

Practically everything around us changes with increasing speed; we are in the midst of a profound transformation of human civilization. I am an academic philosopher and a psychotherapist, and I developed this website because I want to explore philosophical thinking in relation to current events and trends. What are the visions we have for our collective future? How do we balance humanity with technological progress? What is humanity in the first place? What do we mean by “nature,” and how do we relate to the nature around us, as well as to our own nature? How do we gain more consciousness in this flood of information and in the midst of our struggles to keep up with the change?
Please take a look around; I hope you like this website. Thank you for visiting!

T.S. Eliot: As we grow older…

January 19, 2012 Poetry

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. [...]

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Astronomy images, old website.

January 15, 2012 Images
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Hubble and other telescopes are giving us images of the universe, but it’s size is still incomprehensible. I like the photos of earth from space, because we can look back at our own home, and see how beautiful it is.

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Calligraphy images from my old website

January 15, 2012 Images
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This is mostly Islamic calligraphy, based on Arab writing, variations and often represents God, or a variation of “God is great.”. I collected these images a long time ago, and unfortunately I lost the sources. If you search for “Islamic calligraphy,” you will get thousands of beautiful pictures.

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Art images, old website.

January 14, 2012 Images
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These pictures are collected from the public domain. There is only one criterion for selection: I liked them.

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Architecture images, old website

January 14, 2012 Images
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Many of these pictures are from the public domain, also collected before 2000. I like the variety of building styles; I still think that most of them are very beautiful.

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Landscapes, from my old website

January 14, 2012 Images
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These 72 images are taken in the years before 2000, mostly in the Bay Area, Hawaii, or the Alpes. Old memories.

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Plants from my old website

January 14, 2012 Images
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These 68 plant images are also from my old website, same Olympus digital 3MP camera. The more exotic flowers are all from Hawaii.

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Animal Pictures from my old Website

January 14, 2012 Images
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These pictures are taken before 2000, and they were on my old website for about 10 years.  Many of them were taken with an Olympus digital camera with about 3MP. I still like them, so I include them here.

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Rudi Dutschke – Revolution and History in 1967. A look back.

December 30, 2011
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Thinking about the Arab spring, I am reminded on the German protest movement in the sixties. Here is a quote from one of the student leaders of the movement, Rudi Dutschke, who was later shot: “We can change. We are not desperate idiots of history, unable to take their destiny in their own hands. It [...]

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A 40-year-old puzzle of superstring theory solved by supercomputer

December 25, 2011 Physics
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From Physorg.com: “A group of three researchers from KEK, Shizuoka University and Osaka University has for the first time revealed the way our universe was born with 3 spatial dimensions from 10-dimensional superstring theory in which spacetime has 9 spatial directions and 1 temporal direction. This result was obtained by numerical simulation on a supercomputer. [...]

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Chinese Dynasties

December 24, 2011 History
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I learned almost nothing about Chinese history when I went to school in Germany. In our times, it is really important to learn global history, and not just the history of our own countries or continents. The following short overview of Chinese dynasties is a frame for understanding at least the outline of Chinese history. [...]

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0 to 6 dimensions and back – simple rotation.

December 5, 2011
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Computing Power from 1997 to 2011

November 23, 2011 Computing
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I found the following picture in a power point presentation from Intel. Their newest chip,  Knights Corner, can do in 2011, what a super computer with  9298 cores, distributed over 72 cabinets, could do in 1997.  Where will we be in another 14 years?   Related articles Intel Puts a Supercomputer in the Palm of [...]

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Prime numbers in nature

November 23, 2011
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I found this on Wikipedia, reading about prime numbers: “Inevitably, some of the numbers that occur in nature are prime. There are, however, relatively few examples of numbers that appear in nature because they are prime. One example of the use of prime numbers in nature is as an evolutionary strategy used by cicadas of [...]

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Thank you Wikipedia!

November 19, 2011 Miscellaneous

For me, Wikipedia is the best website on the Internet. It is incredibly useful, and it democratizes information. This is especially helpful to people across the world who don’t have access to universities, libraries, schools, and so on. Please consider supporting Wikipedia with a small donation.

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Walter Benjamin: Theological-Political Fragment

November 19, 2011

By Walter Benjamin Quoted from:  “Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings.” Translated by Peter Demetz. P. 312. Only the Messiah himself consummates all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation to the Messianic. For this reason nothing historical can relate itself on its own account to anything Messianic. Therefore the Kingdom [...]

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It’s all in the Punctuation

November 17, 2011 Quotes

An English professor wrote the words, “Woman without her man is nothing” on the blackboard and directed his students to punctuate it correctly. The men wrote: “Woman, without her man, is nothing.” The women wrote: “Woman: Without her, man is nothing.”  

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Shelby Steele: White Supremacy

November 17, 2011
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“It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and [...]

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