UTAH BY MARIAH MAYNES DRAPER — Draper IKEA plans to commemorate Earth Day with sustainability-minded activities and discounts on April 26.  According to the event website the store will present a series of stations starting at 10 a.m customers can learn about incorporating sustainability into their homes.  participants can collect stamps on their “sustainability card.” After collecting stamps sustainability cards can be redeemed for prizes.  the better your prize,” according to Draper Ikea’s website.  cards must be returned to the entrance by 2 p.m the location will also be offering some discounts to those looking to add sustainability to their home.  The company will offer a 20% discount on LED and smart lightbulbs waste sorting solutions and “select” food storage those who participate in product buyback will be eligible for 50% extra value.  Those looking for a sweet treat can also snag a half-price small strawberry soft ice in the store’s bistro.  has often faced criticism for varying durability it’s prompted consumers to question if it encourages consumption.  Circularity is about reusing old materials or revamping old items to give them new life as opposed to buying a brand-new item.  GERMANY – OCTOBER 17: General atmosphere at the IKEA Eching store during a celebration of IKEA’s 50th anniversary in Germany on October 17 IKEA’s 2024 Annual Report also highlighted its buyback and resale program which saw “over 2,700 products” bought back by the company and resold to consumers via its “as-is” department.  97% of the wood it consumed was Forest Stewardship Certified or recycled.  In 2023, The Verge reported that it stood out among competitors, being graded a B+ in climate action by Ship It Zero a group of environmental and public health advocates working to educate consumers on some brands’ shipping behaviors a World Wildlife Fund ranking of cotton scored IKEA the highest on its list of companies incorporating sustainable cotton into their products clothing retailer H&M scored 9 points and Adidas scored 7.75.  Per the WWF website “No company achieved the maximum available score of 19.5 points mainly because no company uses 100 per cent more sustainable cotton according to the criteria used in this research or is fully transparent about its policies and cotton supply chain.” More sustainability reading: Looking to incorporate sustainability into winter recreation? Consider purchasing used ski gear Have a story idea or tip? Send it to the KSL NewsRadio team here Logistics plays a key role in the value chain of vehicle manufacturing. It links all the actors participating in the logistics and vehicle manufacturing processes. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are generated during manufacturing but also during the logistics of car parts as well as the brand new vehicles ready for global distribution. the company aims to reduce CO2 emissions by 40% across the entire life cycle of a vehicle This ambitious target means that the entire life cycle of a vehicle needs to be carefully examined and potential areas for emissions savings need to be identified Logistics is an area where such emissions and the ecological footprint can be effectively reduced when looking at the entire life cycle of the vehicles Technological innovations for reducing emissions in global logistics are much needed the BMW Group had already kick-started multiple activities over the past years Since December 2022, one of the company’s initiatives in Germany has been a pilot project with Neste MY Renewable DieselTM Four trucks belonging to the logistics service provider Guggemos (GV Trucknet) traveling 120 kilometers several times a day on the 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expert analysis on circular economy and renewable solutions 10-year-old Ursula Herrmann headed home by bike from her cousin’s house So began one of Germany’s most notorious postwar criminal cases Read moreAfter class on Tuesday 15 September 1981 a 10-year-old girl named Ursula Herrmann returned to her house in Eching practised piano with her oldest brother Michael and then headed off to her late afternoon gymnastics lesson in Schondorf cycling through the forest along the lakeside path she went to her cousin’s house in Schondorf Ursula’s mother phoned the aunt to say her daughter needed to come home The shadows were lengthening but it was still light and the cycle ride would only take 10 minutes who said Ursula had left 25 minutes before Both of them immediately knew something was wrong Ursula’s father rushed into the forest from Eching Ursula’s name rang out through the darkening wood torch beams raking the water and struggling to penetrate the thick undergrowth a sniffer dog led its handler away from the lake Ursula Herrmann Photograph: Lka Bayern/EPAAt first light the search intensified Dozens of officers wearing raincoats and rubber boots spread out through the dense forest on the border of which stands Landheim Schondorf an expensive private school founded in 1905 and favoured by Bavaria’s political and business elite a police boat and divers scanned the shallows of the lake Local radio carried the shocking news of the missing girl in an idyllic part of the country: 1.43m (4ft 7in) tall with short blonde hair a grey woollen cardigan and red-brown sandals; the daughter of a teacher and a housewife when Ursula had been missing for more than 36 hours When Ursula’s parents picked up there was silence which they recognised from the traffic bulletin on the Bayern 3 radio station and then the jingle played again before the caller hung up Three more similar calls – baffling and sinister – followed over a period of hours the postman delivered an envelope addressed to Ursula’s father Inside was a ransom note composed using letters and words cut out from tabloid newspapers “We kidnapped your daughter,” the note began “If you ever want to see your daughter alive again then pay 2m deutschmarks [£450,000] ransom.” The kidnappers expecting the letter to have arrived a day earlier – before the calls began – explained that they would phone the Herrmanns using a jingle as their call sign “Just say if you will pay or not pay … if you call the police or do not pay we will kill your daughter.” She also asked for proof of life: what were her daughter’s nicknames for her two stuffed toys with curiously specific instructions regarding the ransom The kidnappers wanted the money to be paid in used 100-deutschmark bills It was to be delivered to an as yet unnamed location by Ursula’s father who was to drive alone in a yellow Fiat 600 going no faster than 90km/h One of letters sent by the kidnappers Photograph: EPAUnlike some other residents of Eching and the parents of the pupils at the boarding school in Schondorf They had only been able to build a home near the lake because Ursula’s great-grandfather had purchased some grazing land there decades earlier The Herrmanns waited desperately for more instructions But there were no more letters and no more calls The police decided to search the forest again More than a hundred officers were assembled In a tiny glade about 800m away from the lake path one of the officers had struck something solid when probing the soil after wiping away the leaves and scraping through a layer of clay discovered a brown blanket covering a wooden board It was 72cm by 60cm – the size of a small coffee table – painted green and locked from the top with seven sliding bolts Two detectives were sent to break the news to Ursula’s parents at their home While her mother was too distraught to ask any questions her father asked repeatedly: had his daughter been hurt before her death An autopsy concluded that Ursula died within 30 minutes to five hours of being buried the doctors assumed she had been drugged beforehand It appeared that the kidnappers had planned to keep Ursula alive was fitted with a shelf and a seat that doubled as a toilet It was stocked with three bottles of water four packets of biscuits and two packs of chewing gum romance novels and thrillers with titles such as The Horror Lurks Everywhere There was a light and a portable radio tuned to Bayern 3 the same station that broadcast the traffic jingle the box had a ventilation system made from plastic plumbing pipes But whoever designed it had failed to realise that without a machine to circulate the air The police believed they were hunting more than one kidnapper it would probably have needed at least two people to carry it into the woods The perpetrators must have known the forest well for they had chosen a remote site within it and had avoided attention while digging the hole and hacking paths through the dense brush parents who previously let their children roam free were now terrified to let them out of sight The shock was amplified by the frenzied press coverage lost his temper with a photographer who held a camera right in front of his face the police offered a DM30,000 reward for information lived with his wife and their two children just a few hundred metres from the Herrmanns A trained car mechanic who left school at 15 and now ran his own TV repair business with a beer-drinker’s stomach – and quick-tempered A police sketch of the box in which Ursula’s body was foundQuestioned by police a week after Ursula’s body was found Mazurek could not initially recall his movements on the night she went missing It took him 24 hours to provide an alibi: he had been playing the board game Risk with his wife and two friends But a search of his home and workshop revealed nothing that linked him to the crime the forensics team examining the box found a fingerprint on a piece of duct tape The police still suspected that Mazurek was involved and interrogated them for several days before releasing them another of Mazurek’s acquaintances was questioned Klaus Pfaffinger was an unemployed mechanic with a drinking problem had told police that in the weeks before the crime he had seen his tenant driving his moped with a spade strapped to the side Pfaffinger initially protested his innocence when the interrogators took a break and he was alone with the police secretary he said a startling thing: “What if I know something?” When the interrogators returned Pfaffinger told them that Mazurek had asked him to dig a hole in the forest in early September 1981 promising payment of DM1,000 and a colour television Pfaffinger said he had dug the hole and had later seen a box embedded inside the detectives drove Pfaffinger to the forest that separated Eching and Schondorf They asked him to lead them to the burial site he announced: “I am revoking this confession it’s not true what I said.” During at least 10 subsequent interrogations in the following months and was eventually released without charge Mazurek was preparing to move away from Eching with his family The lead detective who had pursued him was replaced Some 100,000 colour posters requesting help with the investigation were distributed nationwide Ungelöst – Case number XY … Unsolved – which would serve as the model for the BBC’s Crimewatch and America’s Most Wanted featured a long segment on the Ursula Herrmann case The new police team found more evidence of the kidnappers’ methods including a wire that they had strung through the trees along the lakeside path to serve as an alert system during the abduction But investigations of other suspects came to nothing most people still remembered the shocking unsolved case of the 10-year-old girl buried alive in the box were doing their best to move on with their lives energetic girl who loved to sing and paint the parents had made a conscious decision not to let the hunt for the kidnappers consume the family they tried to think of it as a terrible accident who believed she should have gone to fetch her daughter from her cousin’s house Ursula’s father and sister turned to their strong Christian faith to find peace Her youngest brother eventually found solace in surfing A model of the box on display at the district court in Augsburg Photograph: Karl-Josef Hildebrand/EPA/ShutterstockMichael who was in his final year of school at the time of the crime was playing music at a friend’s house on the night Ursula disappeared he rushed home and joined the search for her in the forest “Then it quickly turned into: what can I do with this now?” he told me recently “Because I knew the ‘why’ could never be answered I decided: I am alive and I have some tasks to do.” the Bavarian state office for criminal investigations started looking in earnest at its backlog of cold cases The most famous was the Ursula Herrmann kidnapping which had by then appeared three times on Case number XY … Unsolved and was still a stain on the reputation of the local police and judiciary Prosecutors hoped that the development of DNA profiling over the previous two decades might help crack the case The mass of evidence from the original investigation from which the forensic experts were able to build the DNA profiles of several different people For the prosecutors looking at the Herrmann case but rather kidnapping with deadly consequences a crime that carried a 30-year statute of limitations the people responsible would be in the clear The state prosecutors went back to the 1980s case files the unemployed man who briefly claimed to have dug the hole and living with his wife in the north of Germany where he ran a boat accessories businesses and a snack bar that bore the advertising slogan: “Norbert’s pig and Werner’s beer Mazurek was placed under surveillance and an undercover officer deployed to befriend him Police planted recording devices in his car and his house his home was searched and he was asked to provide a saliva sample It did not match any of the genetic profiles found on the box Ursula’s brother Michael at the court during the murder trial in 2009 Photograph: Dpa Picture Alliance Archive/AlamyThe prosecutors had one hope left Among the items taken from Mazurek’s house during the search was an old reel-to-reel tape recorder In the calls to Ursula’s parents in the days after her disappearance Was it possible that this device was used to record that jingle from the radio all those years ago who had access to the original recordings of the 1981 calls spent months conducting tests on the tape recorder concluding that it was indeed used in the kidnapping Mazurek was arrested and flown to Augsburg who were still living in the same house by the Ammersee had been notified a few days before that an arrest was imminent They were also told they could be part of the trial relatives of the victims of certain serious crimes are allowed to formally join the prosecution as nebenklage This gives them the right to view the evidence request witnesses and put questions to the judges Ursula’s parents did not want to be confronted again by the horrifying details of their daughter’s death it was agreed that the co-plaintiff would be their oldest son teaching religion and music at a girls’ secondary school in Augsburg but also one who is “not content with half-truths” who was with him in Eching on the evening Ursula disappeared recently told the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper “He has such a very deep sense of justice that drives him.” The trial opened in February 2009 before a packed court in Augsburg characterised in one newspaper as a “bearded giant” who was also on trial as an accessory to the crime “I know I was certainly not a good citizen and we’ll see many attempts to portray me as a bad person The prosecution had no difficulty finding evidence of his poor character Mazurek’s daughter and stepson had few good things to say about him as a father He had also had other scrapes with the law including a fraud conviction in 2004 for falsifying documents Mazurek returned from the Oktoberfest beer festival to find that the family dog had overturned the rubbish bin in the kitchen Mazurek grabbed the dog and locked it in the basement freezer went to the freezer to get some meat only to discover Susi there Mazurek later said he had punished the pet “with exile to Siberia” The prosecution laid out the circumstantial evidence against Mazurek While Ursula was missing he had been observed listening to police radio and a piece of leather used in the box construction was cut from a belt owned by someone with a large stomach after police searched and bugged his house they listened in on a phone call between him and an old friend from Eching where they discussed the statute of limitations for the Ursula Herrmann case But the key elements of the prosecutors’ case were the revoked confession by Pfaffinger – that he dug the hole at Mazurek’s request – and the tape recorder Pfaffinger’s confession was accurate in several ways: he had described the burial site in detail from the size of the forest glade and the dimensions of the hole to the soil conditions The lead police investigator in 1982 was convinced Pfaffinger deliberately misled him during the forest visit when he could not locate where the box was buried the same policeman described Pfaffinger as an “excellent actor and practised swindler” Mazurek said he had purchased it only a few weeks earlier at a flea market while on a short holiday with his wife and nobody at the market could recall such a device being on sale that day whose speciality was phonetics rather than audio you could hear a couple of clicking sounds – the buttons of a tape recorder being pressed during the recording of the jingle When she pressed the buttons on the tape machine Other subtle characteristics of the recording also corresponded precisely to the specific machine in front of her “probable” that the very same tape recorder found in Mazurek’s house was used in the ransom calls Detective chief superintendent Detlef Puchelt shows a picture of the tape recorder that was used as evidence the senior prosecutor reminded the court that Ursula had been “buried alive in a box” revealing the “cold-bloodedness and mercilessness of the perpetrator” The three judges and two jurors were convinced finding Mazurek guilty and sentencing him to life imprisonment everyone seemed happy that Ursula’s killer had finally been put away few people in court had taken much notice of Michael Herrmann Despite his distinctive appearance – he wears his grey hair in a ponytail and at the time also sported thin sideburns down to his jaw – he is unassuming not the kind of man who draws attention to himself People who knew what happened to Ursula sometimes asked if it made Michael anxious about his own kids Nor did he ever think about looking for the perpetrators himself; that was the job of the police his sister’s death still felt to him like an “unclosed circle” While most nebenklage are passive observers in court Michael decided to take his role far more seriously He would not allow the family to be victims a second time to the surprise of his state-assigned lawyer Michael had requested full access to the case files which ran into tens of thousands of scanned pages In the first few weeks of the trial he got through 6,000 pages locking himself in the study at home at night His memories of Ursula were strong: he recalled how she was also cautious and at times sensitive growing upset when some of her schoolmates repeatedly misbehaved But reading through the typewritten police reports he realised he had forgotten many of the details of the horrifying days in September 1981 even the fact that he had helped Ursula with her piano practice just a few hours before she was kidnapped like his brain has somehow blanked out that part of his life there was much to suggest Mazurek might have committed the crime but there were also things that troubled him about the prosecution case He could not understand why Pfaffinger’s revoked confession was now being treated as plausible when it was dismissed all those years before From the police files it was clear that Pfaffinger had a serious alcohol problem While in detention he claimed to have experienced hallucinations He was also chronically work-shy; questioned in 2008 his former wife called him a “lazy guy” who would never have agreed to dig a large hole Pfaffinger’s confession was not even signed; the investigator wrote it down from memory weeks later there was no DNA proof connecting Pfaffinger to the crime the police exhumed Pfaffinger’s body but there was no match to the genetic profiles they had discovered among the evidence a few years before Most concerning to Michael was the tape recorder he knew a lot about acoustics and sound engineering and could not understand how a tape recorder could be definitively linked to the ransom calls all those years ago Even if the reel-to-reel device had been used to record the jingle from the radio the kidnappers would still have had to transfer that recording to a second since the calls to the Herrmann house were made from pay phones The acoustic environments in the booth and at the kidnapper’s home would also have influenced what the police eventually heard and recorded at the other end of the phone line Michael’s lawyer advised him not to make a big deal out of it “She said: ‘you don’t do this as a nebenklage’ I just did what I thought was right,” Michael told me calling the sound expert’s report about the tape recorder “incomplete or one-sided” but by law they were obliged to read out the letter in court It was a highly unusual and sensational intervention – a member of the prosecution team When the verdict against Mazurek was announced Michael made a statement at the courthouse “I am not convinced of his guilt,” he said “But neither am I convinced of his innocence.” Instead of the circle being closed At night the hissing would wake him up and prevent him falling back asleep especially when was he trying to teach music on hand to assist relatives of crime victims examined him and agreed that the stress of the court case was indeed the likely cause Mazurek had sent Michael a letter – not to thank him for questioning the tape recorder evidence but to suggest that they were somehow on the same side “I was surprised to receive a letter from you because it is certainly clear to you that despite all the doubts I have about your guilt I have considerable reservations about your person,” he wrote “If you are not the culprit I wish [for] more new insights and that you can be rehabilitated Michael was increasingly sceptical that Mazurek was guilty meticulously arranging the evidence in folders It had put strain on his marriage – he separated from his wife in 2012 – but he could not let it go “What drives me is ethics – doing what is morally right,” he told me “It was just wrong for the case to end like it did.” Werner Mazurek in court Photograph: Christof Stache/APNSo he came up with a plan seeking €20,000 in damages from Mazurek for causing his tinnitus It was a legal ruse: since Mazurek would defend the case on the basis that he was wrongfully convicted and so could not be considered responsible the court would have to reconsider the facts of the criminal trial before coming to a conclusion told me when we met at his offices in Landsberg am Lech an ancient town about 20 minutes drive from Eching “They tried several times to stop it going forward.” The court insisted that an independent psychiatrist examine Michael and to rule on whether his tinnitus was caused by the trial He found himself having to explain to his pupils in his music and religion classes why they were seeing his face in the newspapers and on TV and into the forest where Ursula was kidnapped apart from Herrmann’s close family and friends few understood why he was pursuing the case A local journalist who covered the criminal and civil cases told me his newsroom colleagues often asked him why Herrmann “could not just let it go” “I myself am still trying to work out why Michael Herrmann is acting like this,” the journalist said but still he looks into the files … There is a little obsession.” it became clear that he was not the only person with doubts about the original verdict Appearing for the defence was a retired physicist and amateur sound expert named Bernd Haider who had built his first tape recorder from scratch in the 1960s and lived in a village just a few miles from Eching He vividly remembered the coverage of the crime from 1981 though he had never heard of Mazurek before his arrest Haider had followed the 2009 trial in the media and was highly sceptical about the tape-recorder evidence and tried to see if it was possible to replicate the phonetic expert’s findings and offered his assistance to Mazurek’s lawyer the borrowed tape recorder was still in his loft After a lunch of wiener schnitzel and potatoes he told me: “Michael Herrmann was the only person in the original trial who understood what the problem with this evidence was but he was sitting on the wrong side of the court!” Since Zipser’s speciality is linguistic profiling – at Royal Holloway she uses modern profiling techniques to identify authors of ancient Greek medical texts – she decided to compare the ransom notes sent by the kidnappers to samples of Mazurek’s writing Whoever composed the ransom notes was well educated a native speaker pretending to be a foreigner by writing in broken German “I am sure it was not Mazurek,” Zipser told me Her opinion only hardened after she went to meet Michael in Germany and spent many hours going through the case files with him “I know this is an incredible story but I’ve seen the evidence and Michael has done very good investigative work,” she said “I support him in his findings.” For a few years after the criminal trial Michael thought there was still a 50% chance that Mazurek was the kidnapper the civil case concluded and the court ordered Mazurek to pay Michael €7,000 for causing his tinnitus It was a victory that to Michael represented a loss since to arrive at the decision the judges first needed to agree with the criminal court that Mazurek was indeed the man who had kidnapped Ursula In an open letter to the Bavarian state and the media Michael wrote: “My sister’s fate has stayed with me for 37 years it is unclear who was actually responsible for her death Could it be that the Augsburg legal system is not actually interested in solving the case of Ursula Herrmann … If the court decides to close the proverbial lid it should be well aware that one cannot shut the truth away.” one of Bavaria’s best-known defence lawyers If a client asks him whether he believes in their innocence – as Mazurek did in 2008 – he brushes away the question “I told him I don’t believe any of my clients,” Rubach told me in his chambers in Augsburg “My job is to work out if there’s enough proof and evidence to convict them.” In Mazurek’s case he was convinced from the start that there wasn’t “It was clear that Mazurek was a person who could have committed something like that But there were no hard facts – it was a circumstantial case at its finest,” Rubach said Rather let 10 guilty men go free than hang one innocent one.” Though Rubach has had little personal interaction with Michael going against the decision of a court – this never happened before in Germany.” From his prison cell in Germany’s far north he replied saying he had hired a private investigator to track down the man who he says sold him the tape recorder in 2007 “I am just angry and I am awaiting the 11th anniversary of my time in jail,” he wrote and the tinnitus that continues to bother him As we drove through the Bavarian countryside towards Eching he tried to explain the meaning of überfordert the word he used to describe the police in 1981: “It means when the task you have is bigger than your capabilities – like Brexit.” Michael knows the case material so well – he has put in far more hours of research than any of the lawyers for the defence or prosecution – that when he speaks it is with the precision and detachment of a special investigator After parking the car beside the road between Eching and Schondorf he noted it was probably where the kidnappers had parked when bringing the box to the forest “We need to walk 141 metres,” Michael said to locate the spot where Ursula was buried “We don’t know if she was sedated and carried or if she was forced to walk there,” he said “But we know she was taken on paths specially cut through the forest.” and in 2016 his mother moved out of the family home in the village to Augsburg But his younger brother Hannes – the surfer – still lives in the house along with two Syrian refugees who rent out the bottom floor Michael phoned him – he did not want to show up with a journalist unannounced – and Hannes invited us in for coffee As with his oldest sister and their mother Hannes has never talked to the media about his sister’s death though Michael says that in private his family supports his work on the case he is alone in his quest to reopen the case After lunch at a restaurant beside the lake we walked along the road towards the forest the route Ursula took on her way to gym class nearly 40 years ago The spruce trees are much taller than they were then but the path is the same: three metres wide as we neared a small jetty leading to a wooden hut used by bathers “This is where Ursula was kidnapped,” he said “It’s where her bike was found and where the bell-wire ended.” The bell-wire is the 140m-long coil of insulated copper wire the kidnappers used as part of a warning system Though the police had noticed the wire while searching for Ursula they only learned of its significance more than a year later when investigators visited the private boarding school in Schondorf to talk to pupils about the case saying that seven or eight months after the kidnapping they had found the bell-wire strung through the trees next to the lakeside path The boys then did a very strange thing: they took the wire down and then kept it in their dormitory in a locked box the investigators realised it must have been used during Ursula’s abduction While one of the kidnappers waited for the victim the other presumably served as a lookout further along the path with their finger on a button that would light up a bulb or sound a buzzer at the other end of the wire Michael believes the wire is one of the key pieces of evidence that could help identify the real kidnappers the boarding school pupils also knew the forest well Yet it appears that none of them were fingerprinted at the time of the investigation Another piece of evidence also hints at the possible involvement of younger people in the plot: an impression on the paper of one of the ransom notes revealed a mathematical probability tree Michael also notes that in a comic found in the box one of the main characters drives a Fiat 600 the car that was mentioned in the ransom note and which was rare in Germany at the time suggesting the kidnappers may have read the comic Michael submitted a dossier of all his new evidence and theories to the state prosecutor’s office in Augsburg he acknowledged that many people still had questions about the verdict in the criminal trial but insisted the judges had arrived at the correct decision in 2010 when the prosecutor’s office announced it would not be reopening the case Michael told the local press that he would be making no more public statements about the case which the media interpreted as him finally giving up But when I emailed him recently he said this was not true “I didn’t say that I am not going to take it any further,” he wrote it was the 38th anniversary of Ursula’s kidnapping and death along with his two siblings and his mother travelled to the graveyard in Eching where Ursula is buried There they remembered the little girl who left her cousin’s house on her red bike on a summer’s evening and never came home Subscribe to the New York Review of Books This article was first published in the February 25, 2016 issue of The New York Review of Books I Ching: The Book of Changetranslated from the Chinese by David HintonFarrar I Ching (Yijing): The Book of Changetranslated from the Chinese with an introduction and commentary by John MinfordViking The I Ching has served for thousands of years as a philosophical taxonomy of the universe and an oracle of one’s personal future and the future of the state It was an organizing principle or authoritative proof for literary and arts criticism and competing schools of thought within those traditions it has been by far the most consulted of all books in the belief that it can explain everything it has been known for over three hundred years and is surely the most popularly recognized Chinese book With its seeming infinitude of applications and interpretations there has never been a book quite like it anywhere It is the center of a vast whirlwind of writings and practices for most of the crucial words of the I Ching have no fixed meaning studied the patterns of nature in the sky and on the earth: the markings on birds He discovered that everything could be reduced to eight trigrams each composed of three stacked solid or broken lines Fu Xi devolved all aspects of civilization—kingship agriculture—all of which he taught to his human descendants doubled the trigrams to hexagrams (six-lined figures) numbered and arranged all of the possible combinations—there are 64—and gave them names He wrote brief oracles for each that have since been known as the “Judgments.” His son added gnomic interpretations for the individual lines of each hexagram known simply as the “Lines.” It was said that Confucius himself wrote ethical commentaries explicating each hexagram which are called the “Ten Wings” (“wing,” that is The archaeological and historical version of this narrative is far murkier In the Shang dynasty (which began circa 1600 BCE) or possibly even earlier fortune-telling diviners would apply heat to tortoise shells or the scapulae of oxen and interpret the cracks that were produced Many of these “oracle bones”—hundreds of thousands of them have been unearthed—have complete hexagrams or the numbers assigned to hexagrams incised on them Sometime in the Zhou dynasty—the current guess is around 800 BCE—the 64 hexagrams were named The book became known as the Zhou Yi (Zhou Changes) The process of consultation also evolved from the tortoise shells which required an expert to perform and interpret to the system of coins or yarrow stalks that anyone could practice and that has been in use ever since were simultaneously tossed; the resulting sum indicated a solid or broken line; six coin tosses thus produced a hexagram 50 were counted out in a more laborious procedure to produce the number for each line the “Ten Wings” commentaries had been added transforming the Zhou Yi from a strictly divinatory manual to a philosophical and ethical text Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty declared it the most important of the five canonical Confucian books and standardized the text from among various competing versions (some with the hexagrams in a different order) and its format has remained the same since: a named and numbered hexagram an often poetic interpretation of the image obtained by the combination of the two trigrams and enigmatic statements on the meaning of each line of the hexagram Confucius almost certainly had nothing to do with the making of the I Ching but he did supposedly say that if he had another hundred years to live 50 of them would be devoted to studying it the I Ching was the essential guide to the universe In a philosophical cosmos where everything is connected and everything is in a state of restless change the book was not a description of the universe but rather its most perfect microcosm the “underpinnings of reality.” Its 64 hexagrams became the irrevocable categories for countless disciplines Its mysterious “Judgments” were taken as kernels of thought to be elaborated in the “Ten Wings” and countless commentaries into advice to rulers on how to run an orderly state and to ordinary people on how to live a proper life It was a tool for meditation on the cosmos and as a seamless piece of the way of the world it also revealed what would be auspicious or inauspicious for the future the I Ching was discovered in the late 17th century by Jesuit missionaries in China who decoded the text to reveal its Christian universal truth: hexagram number one was God; two was the second Adam Jesus; three was the Trinity; eight was the members of Noah’s family; and so on Leibniz enthusiastically found the universality of his binary system in the solid and broken lines Hegel—who thought Confucius was not worth translating—considered the book “superficial”: “There is not to be found in one single instance a sensuous conception of universal natural or spiritual powers.” The first English translation was done by Canon Thomas McClatchie McClatchie was a Reverend Casaubon figure who four years after the publication of Middlemarch found the key to all mythologies and asserted that the I Ching had been brought to China by one of Noah’s sons and was a pornographic celebration of a “hermaphroditic monad,” elsewhere worshiped among the Chaldeans as Baal and among Hindus as Shiva the first important English-language translator of the Chinese classics considered McClatchie “delirious.” After 20 interrupted years of work—the manuscript was lost in a shipwreck in the Red Sea—Legge produced the first somewhat reliable English translation of the I Ching in 1882 and the one that first applied the English word for a six-pointed star Professionally appalled by what he considered its idolatry and superstition Legge nevertheless found himself “gradually brought under a powerful fascination,” and it led him to devise a novel theory of translation but symbols of ideas,” therefore “the combination of them in composition is not a representation of what the writer would say and enter into a “seeing of mind to mind,” a “participation” in the thoughts of the author that goes beyond what the author merely said Legge’s version is flooded with explanations and clarifications parenthetically inserted into an otherwise literal translation of the text the next important English-language translator after Legge thought the I Ching was “apparent gibberish”: “This is freely admitted by all learned Chinese who nevertheless hold tenaciously to the belief that important lessons could be derived from its pages if only we had the wit to understand them.” Arthur Waley in a 1933 study—he never translated the entire book—described it as a collection of “peasant interpretation” omens to which specific divinations had been added at a later date he wrote that the omen “red sky in the morning shepherds take warning” would become the divination “red sky in the morning: inauspicious; do not cross the river.” Waley proposed three categories of omens—“inexplicable sensations and involuntary movements (‘feelings,’ twitchings belching and the like)…those concerning plants animals and birds…[and] those concerning natural phenomena (thunder rain etc.)”—and found examples of all of them in his decidedly unmetaphysical reading of the book Joseph Needham devoted many exasperated pages to the I Ching in Science and Civilization in China as a “pseudo-science” that had a deleterious effect on actual Chinese science which attempted to fit exact observations of the natural and physical worlds into the “cosmic filing-system” of the vague categories of the hexagrams It was Richard Wilhelm’s 1924 German translation of the I Ching and especially the English translation of the German by the Jungian Cary F Baynes in 1950 that transformed the text from Sinological arcana to international celebrity but unlike Legge was an ardent believer in the Wisdom of the East The “relentless mechanization and rationalization of life in the West” needed the “Eastern adhesion to a natural profundity of soul.” His mission was to “join hands in mutual completion,” to uncover the “common foundations of humankind” in order to “find a core in the innermost depth of the humane from where we can tackle…the shaping of life.” Wilhelm’s translation relied heavily on late Song Dynasty Neo-Confucian interpretations of the text specifically Chinese referents were given general terms and the German edition had scores of footnotes noting “parallels” to Goethe (These were dropped for the English-language edition.) The text was oddly presented twice: the first time with short commentaries The commentaries were undifferentiated amalgams of various Chinese works and Wilhelm’s own meditations (Needham thought that the edition belonged to the “Department of Utter Confusion”: “Wilhelm seems to be the only person…who knew what it was all about.”) The book carried an introduction by Carl Jung whom Wilhelm considered “in touch with the findings of the East [and] in accordance with the views of the oldest Chinese wisdom.” (One proof was Jung’s male and female principles which Wilhelm connected to yin and yang.) Some of Jung’s assertions are now embarrassing (“It is a curious fact that such a gifted and intelligent people as the Chinese have never developed what we call science.”) But his emphasis on chance—or synchronicity metaphysical version of chance—as the guiding principle for a sacred book was the I Ching does not operate on chance at all The Wilhelm/Baynes Bollingen edition was a sensation in the 1950s and 1960s wrote poems inspired by its poetic language Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics used it to explain quantum mechanics and Terence McKenna found that its geometrical patterns mirrored the “chemical waves” produced by hallucinogens Others considered its binary system of lines a prototype for the computer Dick and Raymond Queneau based novels on it; Jackson Mac Low and John Cage invented elaborate procedures using it to generate poems and musical compositions It is not difficult to recuperate how thrilling the arrival of the I Ching was both to the avant-gardists who were emphasizing process over product in art and to the anti-authoritarian counterculturalists what Wilhelm called “the seasoned wisdom of thousands of years.” It was an ancient book without an author a cyclical configuration with no beginning or end a religious text with neither exotic gods nor priests to whom one must submit a do-it-yourself divination that required no professional diviner It was a self-help book for those who wouldn’t be caught reading self-help books and moreover one that provided an alluring glimpse of one’s personal future The two latest translations of the I Ching couldn’t be more unalike; they are a complementary yin and yang of approaches John Minford is a scholar best known for his work on the magnificent five-volume translation of The Story of the Stone (or The Dream of the Red Chamber) universally considered the greatest Chinese novel in a project begun by the late David Hawkes obviously the result of many years of study Minford presents two complete translations: the “Bronze Age Oracle,” a recreation of the Zhou dynasty text before any of the later Confucian commentaries were added to it and the “Book of Wisdom,” the text as it was elucidated in the subsequent centuries Each portion of the entries for each hexagram is accompanied by an exegesis that is a digest of the historical commentaries and the interpretations by previous translators as well as reflections by Minford himself that link the hexagram to Chinese poetry almost a microcosm of Chinese civilization much as the I Ching itself was traditionally seen the rare example of a literary Sinologist—that is a classical scholar thoroughly conversant with he and Watson are surely the most important American translators of Chinese classical poetry and philosophy in the last 50 years and both have introduced entirely new ways of translating Chinese poetry with only two pages allotted to each hexagram presents a few excerpts from the original “Ten Wings” commentaries but has nothing further from Hinton himself like a book of modern poetry—though it should be quickly said that this is very much a translation and not an “imitation” or a postmodern elaboration Or perhaps its fragments and aphorisms are meant to be dipped into at random Hinton adheres to a Taoist or Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist reading of the book unconcerned with the Confucian ethical and political interpretations His I Ching puts the reader into the Tao of nature: that is the way of the world as it is exemplified by nature and embodied by the book He takes the mysterious lines of the judgments as precursors to the later Taoist and Ch’an writings: “strategies…to tease the mind outside workaday assumptions and linguistic structures outside the limitations of identity.” The opposite of Wilhelm’s Jungian self-realization it is intended as a realization of selflessness it is based on the belief that archaic Chinese culture living closer to the land—and a land that still had a great deal of wilderness—was less estranged from nature’s Tao Hinton occasionally translates according to a pictographic reading of the oldest characters a technique first used by Ezra Pound in his idiosyncratic and wonderful version of the earliest Chinese poetry anthology Hinton calls Hexagram 32—usually translated as “Endurance” or “Duration” or “Perseverance”—“Moondrift Constancy,” because the character portrays a half-moon fixed in place with a line above and below it The character for “Observation” becomes “Heron’s-Eye Gaze,” for indeed it has a heron and an eye in it and nothing watches more closely than a waterbird Hinton doesn’t do this kind of pictographic reading often but no doubt Sinologists will be scandalized The difference between the two translations—the differences among all translations—is apparent if we look at a single hexagram: number 52 Minford translates the name as “Mountain” for the hexagram is composed of the two Mountain trigrams His translation of the text throughout the book is minimalist He has also made the exceedingly strange decision to incorporate tags in Latin can help us relate to this deeply ancient and foreign text can help create a timeless mood of contemplation and at the same time can evoke indirect connections between the Chinese traditions of Self-Knowledge and Self-Cultivation…and…the long European tradition of Gnosis and spiritual discipline he translates the “Judgment” for Hexagram 52 as: The backIs stillAs a Mountain;There is no body.He walksIn the courtyard,Unseen.No Harm,Nullum malum This is followed by a long and interesting exegesis on the spiritual role and poetic image of mountains in the Chinese tradition Hinton calls the hexagram “Stillness” and translates into prose: “Stillness in your back Keeping his back stillSo that he no longer feels his body.He goes into the courtyardAnd does not see his people.No blame True quiet means keeping still when the time has come to keep still and going forward when the time has come to go forward In this way rest and movement are in agreement with the demands of the time The hexagram signifies the end and beginning of all movement The back is named because in the back are located all the nerve fibers that mediate movement If the movement of these spinal nerves is brought to a standstill He no longer sees in it the struggle and tumult of individual beings and therefore he has that true peace of mind which is needed for understanding the great laws of the universe and for acting in harmony with them Whoever acts from these deep levels makes no mistakes translated by Richard John Lynn and billed as the “definitive version” “after decades of inaccurate translations,” has “Restraint” for Gen: “Restraint takes place with the back so one does not obtain [sic] the other person He goes into that one’s courtyard but does not see him there There is no blame.” Lynn’s odd explanation based on the Han dynasty commentator Wang Bi is that if two people have their backs turned they do not see each other.” Therefore neither restrains the other and each exercises self-restraint The six judgments for the six individual lines of Hexagram 52 travel through the body (Wilhelm weirdly and ahistorically speculates that “possibly the words of the text embody directions for the practice of yoga.”) Thus Minford translates it as: “The calves are/Still as a Mountain./Others/Are not harnessed./The heart is heavy.” He explains: “There is a potential healing But the Energy of Others…cannot be mastered and harnessed Wilhelm’s version is: “Keeping his calves still./He cannot rescue him whom he follows./His heart is not glad.” This is glossed as: The leg cannot move independently; it depends on the movement of the body If a leg is suddenly stopped while the whole body is in vigorous motion the continuing body movement will make one fall The same is true of a man who serves a master stronger than himself and even though he himself may halt on the path of wrongdoing he can no longer check the other in his powerful movement In the “Bronze Age Oracle” section—the original Zhou book without the later interpretations—Minford translates Gen as “Tending,” believing that it refers to traditional medicine and the need to tend the body The “Judgment” for the entire hexagram reads: “The back/Is tended,/The body/Unprotected./He walks/In an empty courtyard./No Harm.” He suggests that the “empty courtyard” is a metaphor for the whole body His judgement for the second line is: “The calves/Are tended./There is/No strength/In the flesh./The heart/Is sad,” which he glosses as “There is not enough flesh on the calves in a monograph on the I Ching for the Princeton Lives of Great Religious Books series and Arthur Waley take the hexagram back to the prevalent practice in the Shang dynasty of human and animal sacrifice says that the word might also mean “to glare at”) His “Judgment” is puzzling: “If one cleaves the back he will not get hold of the body; if one goes into the courtyard he will not see the person There will be no misfortune.” But his reading of line two is graphic: “Cleave the lower legs Waley thinks Gen means “gnawing,” and “evidently deals with omen-taking according to the way in which rats mice or the like have deals with the body of the sacrificial victim when exposed as ‘bait’ to the ancestral spirit.” His “Judgment” is: “If they have gnawed its back but not possessed themselves of the body,/It means that you will go to a man’s house but not find him at home.” He reads line two as: “If they gnaw the calf of the leg What is certain is that Hexagram 52 is composed of two Mountain trigrams and has something to do with the back and something to do with a courtyard that is either empty or where the people in it are not seen None of these are necessarily misinterpretations or mistranslations One could say that the I Ching is a mirror of one’s own concerns or expectations But it’s like one of the bronze mirrors from the Shang dynasty now covered in a dark blue-green patina so that it doesn’t reflect at all Minford recalls that in his last conversation with David Hawkes the dying master-scholar told him: “Be sure to let your readers know that every sentence can be read in an almost infinite number of ways No one will ever know what it really means!” In the I Ching the same word means both “war prisoner” and “sincerity.” There is no book that has gone through as many changes as the Book of Change ChinaFile ChinaFile is a project of the Asia Society This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page ECHING, Germany, 25 Jan. 2012. Kontron in Eching, Germany, is introducing the company's power-on built-in test (PBIT) capability on Kontron VPX, OpenVPX, and VME single-board computers to improve the reliability and security of mission-critical aerospace Kontron PBIT provides a modular and scalable set of uniform test routines to assess the health and configuration of boards and systems to improve diagnostics, minimize maintenance, and reduced debugging of rugged embedded computing systems The Kontron PBIT is available for Kontron 3U and 6U VPX/OpenVPX and VME processor boards where it is stored in a non-volatile memory Kontron PBIT not only checks the on-board components such as controllers but also looks for peripheral components across the backplane Learning mode enables Kontron PBIT to capture intricate system configurations and minimize the risk of security breaches in fielded computers by preventing the system boot of unauthorized applications Kontron PBIT launch automatically after the firmware boot by the BIOS or EFI on x86 CPU boards or Uboot on PowerPC CPU boards, or started interactively from the firmware prompt. For more information contact Kontron online at www.kontron.com a German-based developer of floating renewable energy platform solutions has put forward a plan to build a floating solar power plant in Eching am Ammersee SINN Power has teamed up with Ammerseewerke water and wastewater company which represents a joint company of several municipalities in German state of Bavaria to build a floating solar plant on the ponds of the wastewater treatment plant An area of ​​almost 11,000 m2 is to be built on a total of five wastewater ponds corresponding to approximately 50% of the existing water surface The system will generate around 1,500MWh of solar power per year and can cover the wastewater treatment plant’s own needs but also feed green energy into the power grid of the surrounding communities founder and managing director of SINN Power said: “We are very pleased to be driving the energy transition in the region with this project together with our strong and innovative partners from AWA and Ammerseewerke There has never been a use of polishing ponds for the generation of solar power in Germany or anywhere else in the world We hope that this project will set a precedent.” The start of construction depends on the approval process that is about to start SINN Power is developing floating hybrid platforms for sustainable power generation technologies the company offers floating hybrid solutions SLake Late in 2021, the company also introduced its new floating solar solution dubbed the Water Lily which has been designed for renewable electricity generation on calm waters Daily news and in-depth stories in your inbox Ingersoll Rand Engineering Project Solutions At Ingersoll Rand’s Engineering Project Solutions we have been managing and implementing engineered to-order air packages for complex technical requirements for over 60 years We provide specialized custom compressed air and gas compressors as well as nitrogen generation packages to international EPC contractors and engineering companies across a range of […] An unthinkable scenario many have sadly endured There are few things quite as awful to imagine as the notion of being buried alive Stuck underground in an airtight box with limited oxygen and no way to contact the outside world isn't exactly the way most of us would like to go out But people can and do find themselves in this situation and while some survive - with severe mental and physical scars - most people's first grave is also their last From everyday citizens being placed in a coffin after a false declaration of death to criminals holding their victims hostage deep underground but there are a shocking number of recorded incidents from as far back as 100 years ago The fear of this happening is so great that it led to a coffin with a built-in communication device being manufactured - let's pray you never have to use one And if you weren't scared of being buried alive already (for some reason) then these ten cases will probably turn you A recent incident that gained significant media traction due to its horrifying nature the 37-year-old Rosangela Almeida Dos Santos was thought to have died of septic shock on 28 January 2018 funeral arrangements were prepared and the ceremony took place in the town of Riachao das Neves However, residents who lived near the burial site reportedly began to hear screams coming from Santos' tomb, according to Brazilian news site G1. Video footage shows her coffin being retrieved Santos' dead body was found with bloody injuries on the hands and forehead evidence of the fact that the woman had tried to force her way out of her grave She was estimated to have been trapped for 11 days Those involved have since been accused of needlessly violating Santos' resting place after doctors claimed it was impossible for them to not notice the woman was alive before she was buried Because of how recently this all took place only time will tell who's really at fault here WhatCulture is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site (opens in new tab) ©Future Publishing Limited Quay House England and Wales company registration number 2008885 You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser or activate Google Chrome Frame to improve your experience the Swedish furniture giant will begin offering its PV systems throughout Germany via the internet The company’s “Solstrale” offer has been tested in five markets and Ikea has said it is “very satisfied” with the response Ikea is making its solar home system available across Germany to online customers On Wednesday Ikea will launch its photovoltaic “Solstrale” offer in Germany, with the date having been brought forward from February 1. Since October, Ikea has been testing the offer in German stores in Kaarst, Eching, Walldorf, Ulm and Freiburg “We are very satisfied with the demand so far and have been able to convince some Ikea visitors in the five stores of our offer,” said Sustainability Manager Christiane Scharnagl The company was unable to report sales figures at pv magazine’s request or to provide expectations about future sales The online offer will not differ from that available during the test phase The Solstrale PV package is available from €4,730 and applies to a fully installed photovoltaic system without home storage There is also a higher priced package available at Ikea The offers are available at ikea.com/solar the group continues to work with British solar company Solarcentury which has set up a German subsidiary to implement Ikea orders “We offer an integrated service from development to construction and operation,” said Dennis de Jong Ikea set up information points at entrances and exits as well as near the restaurant “We are delighted to hear from all of our five furniture stores that customers are very interested in our range of home solar systems,” said the Ikea spokeswoman the Swedish furniture company will soon launch German marketing campaigns for its Solstrale offering Ikea already sells residential PV systems in Belgium More articles from Sandra Enkhardt Please be mindful of our community standards and website in this browser for the next time I comment Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value" By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_2" ).setAttribute( "value" This website uses cookies to anonymously count visitor numbers. View our privacy policy. × The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this Close The countries containing the most IKEA stores are highlighted below Germany is IKEA's largest market, with a current total of 53 locations. For example, the capital of Germany The first IKEA store in Germany opened in 1974 in Munich (Munich Eching) the largest of which is located in Berlin-Lichtenberg and encompasses an area of approximately 45,000 m2 Other IKEA stores in Germany include Cologne Am Butzweilerhof The United States (US) has a total of 50 IKEA locations The country's first IKEA store was built in 1985 in Plymouth Meeting which is a suburb of Philadelphia but has since relocated to Conshohocken California has the most stores of any US state while Texas and Pennsylvania each have three stores The largest US location is the Burbank IKEA which covers an area of approximately 456,000 sq ft Other notable stores include Chicago Schaumburg (430,000 sq ft) the latest of which is Paris La Madeleine that opened in May 2019 the oldest IKEA store in France is Marseille Vitrolles which opened in 1985 and has an area of approximately 172,000 sq ft The largest IKEA in France is Paris Franconville Other locations in France include Paris Roissy There are a total of 29 IKEA stores in China which has an area of approximately 592,400 sq ft and ranks as the third-largest IKEA in the world Shanghai and Beijing each have three stores The second-largest IKEA store in China is the Shenyang location Other large IKEA stores in China include Beijing  (452,000 sq ft) but both rank among the chain's five largest locations in the world The largest is the Gwangmyeong store in Gyeonggi Sweden's Stockholm Kungens Kurva is the second largest IKEA store in the world while China's Shanghai Baoshan store is the third-largest Thailand’s Bangyai store is the fifth largest IKEA in the world with an area of approximately 541,187 sq ft photos and original descriptions © 2025 worldatlas.com Sign up for our daily Newsletter and stay up to date with all the latest news You are receiving this pop-up because this is the first time you are visiting our site You are using software which is blocking our advertisements (adblocker) we are relying on revenues from our banners So please disable your adblocker and reload the page to continue using this site.Thanks As the demand for sustainable locally grown produce increases IKEA has entered into a partnership with Infarm to grow herbs inside the restaurants of three IKEA stores in Germany Infarm and IKEA have carefully chosen a selection of herbs to complement the culinary range in the chain's restaurants at these locations The partnership aims to inspire IKEA employees and customers to lead healthier and more sustainable lives enjoy their delicious flavors and aromas.  Food that tastes goodIncreased awareness of healthy and sustainable diets and the potentially harmful effects of chemicals commonly used in food production has led to the development of many new agricultural technologies and approaches One example is Infarm's modular technology that allows for the implementation of vertical farms of varying sizes The rapidly growing global farming company relies on the vertical cultivation of food crops in a controlled environment that uses 95% less water and land than conventional agriculture and does not require chemical pesticides "Infarm's concept convinced us because we can make the topics of sustainability and healthy eating tangible for our employees and customers in a prominent place in our furniture stores," says Tanja Schramm "As part of our People & Planet Positive strategy we aim to inspire and empower people to lead healthier That's why we're increasingly focusing on plant-based foods and dishes with a lower environmental impact at a price everyone can afford." "Infarm and IKEA come from different industries but we have something in common: the goal to revolutionize our respective industries' status quo for how we produce our food and how we live," says Daniel Kats "IKEA's restaurants are the most visited globally: In the fiscal year 2021 2.5 million people ate at the Sweden restaurants in Germany we clearly see the benefit of positioning our instore farms in the restaurants and offering IKEA customers the chance to top up their meals with our delicious herbs especially those who have not tried our produce before." For more information:Infarm[email protected]www.infarm.com FreshPublishers © 2005-2025 VerticalFarmDaily.com the Swedish furniture provider will start a test phase at five of its branches in Germany A nationwide online sale of the “Solstrale” offer is planned to begin next February Ikea will start selling PV systems in five stores in Germany starting in October The offer “Solstrale” will initially be distributed in the furniture stores in Kaarst said the Swedish furniture company on Thursday A complete turnkey 2.2 kW PV system will have a minimum price of €4,730 including VAT An Ikea spokeswoman told pv magazine that the offer includes polycrystalline solar modules from Canadian Solar and SolaX inverters includes monocrystalline solar modules from JA Solar and also SolaX inverters a battery storage from LG Chem can be purchased The price of the home storage system is currently unknown Ikea offers a product warranty of 10 years for modules the offer includes an installation warranty for the PV system for six years the furniture company continues to work with Solarcentury The British EPC company is currently in the process of setting up a German subsidiary The Swedish furniture company had previously looked for a German company as a partner, but then decided to expand its cooperation with Solarcentury, with which it already cooperates in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Belgium “We examined the market intensively for the best in order to provide less expensive alternative for our customers,” explained Armin Michaely The “Solstrale” offer will be distributed during the test phase in specially appointed outlets in the five stores It will then be available online to all customers via the Ikea website Back in time all these small discounters for computer pieces spread across the cities … The reason was that the computers assembled by big chains were too expensive and with regard to performance inferior … IKEA or whoever could sell nowadays 300+W-Mono-PERCmodules for 99€ incl VAT in Germany with a decent double digit margin … Combined with a quality module inverter (including cables) they would end up at about 199€ probalby – or for one inverter with two modules @ 299€ That means about 50cent/Wp for a plugin package of 600W … buy 4 packages and you end up at 2.4kW @1200€ … … so there seems to be still a huge gap to what IKEA is asking for … … plenty of room for the small discounters in the solar arena – as in the days back in the 90’s when computer’s ad parts got cheap and performance increased exponentialy … It has been said that clothes make the man are all aware that appearance is everything; it’s the first thing most people notice when looking at someone we judge people by what they wear or how they look It’s in our nature and there’s nothing we can do about it it’s a sort of an unwritten rule: if you want to make a killer first impression most of us remain confined by the norms and principles that define our gender It’s a distinction made in the broadest spectrum possible we often make those stereotypical color associations that relate to gender (blue for boys or we identify certain kind of clothing as suitable for men or women In order to maintain these strict social rules many would sacrifice their comfort to appease their sex wearing a dress is absolutely more comfortable than wearing that would be quite shocking because we are not prepared to lose our “macho” image over a dress if you were a baby boy in the 19th century you could have easily ended up wearing a dress and that wouldn’t be weird in any way the patriarch system was the norm in the Victorian era and gender roles were extremely polarized young children were left out of the equation gender was apparently not something that parents paid much attention to The clothes worn by boys and girls were nearly identical Chances are great that you’ve accidentally stumbled upon an image of a Victorian-era toddler boy wearing a dress Even some of the most famous individuals of the 20th century had their picture taken wearing white skirts that were considered gender-neutral for the time period Many people would find this practice peculiar today and perceive it as feminine but the explanation behind why this was done the way it was is very simple and it is due to pragmatic reasons Imagine being a parent in an era when zippers and snaps were yet to be invented and the pants that were available were too complicated and had too many accessories which made it almost impossible for a small boy to put them on all by himself One alternative would be to dress your toddler boy by yourself But Victorian-era parents had another method and frankly Dressing boy toddlers in dresses made the process of potty training significantly easier and much more flexible Parents were able to change the toddler’s diapers without the need of undressing them Just lifting their skirts up would suffice the flexibility of the dresses allowed them to be worn from infancy to about age six or seven It was around this time that boys would reach what was known as “the age of reason,” which meant that wearing a dress would no longer be necessary this was cause for celebration because then the event Related story from us: 17th-century children learned to read with lessons on death, hell, and salvation showing off his new clothes for everyone to see Goran Blazeski is one of the authors writing for The Vintage News Join 1000s of subscribers and receive the best Vintage News in your mailbox for FREE