The village, my village, det smukke by Møgeltønder: about 1,000 inhabitants, and somehow amazing how quiet it is: walking along the main street, you rarely meet anyone, although somehow everyone seems to know everyone else, direct contact is limited to the five neighbouring houses.
The train station — I have to go to Suzhou in order to give a lecture:
Law — Loosing the Role of Being the Great Equaliser
The walk through the waiting area is probably as long as the main street in my village. At 6 o’clock in the morning, it’s quiet here too… relatively speaking. Size does matter, even if it is often overestimated, because after all, some cities ‘over there’ also have several million inhabitants.
A man in the station concourse is practising Tai Chi: calm, balance, harmony… not only in the dance, but also in the clean station concourse.
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Size matters: the evening before, I had to deal with the supercomputer. These are dimensions that are difficult to grasp. This is no longer a comparison between a mobile phone and the old Siemens computer; this is about something else:
• two buildings with a total floor space of 27,000 square meters
• a storage capacity of 20 petabytes, and a peak power consumption of 8 megawatts; a peak performance of 1.342 petaflops
• the world’s fastest supercomputer from November 2010 to November 2011 The Tianhe-1A system used a heterogeneous architecture combining CPUs and GPUs, with 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 CPUs
• The National Supercomputing Center in Changsha is part of a national network of six centers, including those in Tianjin, Jinan, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Wuxi, each focusing on different research domains and leveraging unique networking and resource advantages
• The center’s development aligns with China’s long-term strategy to advance high-performance computing, as outlined in the National Medium- and Long-Term Science and Technology Development Plan (2006–2020) and the “863 major projects” during the Eleventh Five-Year Plan period
• a wide range of high-performance computing (HPC) applications, including *weather forecasting, climate prediction, ocean environment simulation, aerospace engineering, and remote sensing data processing. It also serves critical roles in **biomedical research, genetic technology, materials science, energy, and computational chemistry*.
Then I walk along the little path, wanting to use the time to gather my thoughts: a narrow trail… The path turns slightly to the right; halfway there is a wooden gate, a little rickety, but the big dog looks rather inviting, and a sign invites to take a break… Yes, a coffee would be nice. The place has something enchanted, hyggelig as we say at home.
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• Size matters… Shortly before the train departs, I go to the toilet – unisex and accessible for disabled people; but also for tall and short people, because even the little ones need to go sometimes.
Automatic ticket inspection
1.HERRMANN PETER, train No.G1778, departure at 07:24 on 11 November 2025 from 长沙南站(Changshanan) to 苏州北站(Suzhoubei), Seat No.012D in Coach 13. The ticket price is RMB470.00
• 7:21 — a soft beep, the doors close
• 7:22 the train starts moving
• 7:26 — cruising speed is reached, 305 km/h, until shortly before MiLuoDong, the first stop.

