Philipp Bunge

There are only a few days left to go out and vote on the legislative body of the student union of the University of Bern. So if you are an undergrad, go and vote online (preferably voting for the Tuxpartei) while you still can.

Also, there is a ballot vote for an artificial restriction on what the legislative can and cannot discuss (you can tell by my tone what I think of the vote). So if you received a letter with your ballot card, go out and vote by Wednesday.

I’ve just spent the last hour or so perusing photos on The Big Picture from The Boston Globe. I can only encourage you to at least take a look at the three 2008, the year in photographs sections which provide some amazingly impressive and powerful images of items that were in the news this year.

U.S. soldiers search for weapons on an Afghan man, who works for a private security firm escorting truck convoys, after they found illegal weapons in his vehicle, in a village near Kandahar in this April 27, 2008 file photo. Forty countries are now contributing to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) which has around 47,000 troops, but drawing up a strategy that unifies their work has proved elusive. In addition, the United States has some 14,000 troops serving in a separate force. (REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic/Files)

The photos are not only impressive because they manage to capture and convey the events we were confronted with this year so poignantly, but also because of their photographic merit that only heightens their intensity.

A man’s hand drips blood as he stands in front of riot policemen during a demonstration in Athens, part of a days-long series of demonstrations throughout Greece on December 9, 2008. (REUTERS/John Kolesidis)

And of course I am particularly proud that the images contain a photo of an exhibition at the natural history museum where my sister works and in which she was directly involved in.

A visitor looks at  a mock skeleton of the cartoon character Tom of “Tom and Jerry” by South Korea’s artist Hyungkoo Lee during a special exhibition ‘Animatus’ at Natural History Museum Basel August 26, 2008.  (REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth)

So welcome to my second attempt to actually writing and maintaining a blog!

I can’t and won’t promise that this experiment will last nor that you will find anything of interest here. I have decided not to re-post any of the articles that were ever published here. They were few in number anyway and not of particular interest to anyone. I wish to make the content of the blog more technical in future. This way, I hope, I will actually be able to deliver some value to the reader or visitor that purposefully or accidentally finds himself on my page.