You don't give a Tibetan a German alias if you want him to be able to visit a bank inconspicuously and draw out large sums of money.

They really didn't know what to do, until along came a German scientist who realized that they were using two words for forelimb and hind limb, whereas genetics does not differentiate and neither does German.

Working on projects that actually have visible impacts, like a book for a deceased German artist whose widow came to us with the requirement to make her late husband famous.

But one of the simplest and most transformative things we can do is to give everybody access to birth control methods that almost all Germans have access to and all Americans, at some point, they use these tools during their life.

Now let me tell you, if you want to experience the visceral feeling of trusting strangers -- (Laughter) I recommend this, especially if those strangers are drunk German people.

And the little girl who arises out of their union will of course be not Korean or German or French or Thai or Scotch or Canadian or even American, but a wonderful and constantly evolving mix of all those places.

I once got on a plane in Frankfurt, Germany, and a young German woman came down and sat next to me and engaged me in a very friendly conversation for about 30 minutes, and then she just turned around and sat still for 12 hours.

Many people, most people at the time, viewed the Holocaust as sort of representing some tragic flaw on the part of the Germans, some genetic taint, some authoritarian personality.

But the Germans are known to be very effective, so the Stasi grew very quickly, and already in 1953, it had more employees than the Gestapo had, the secret police of Nazi Germany.

In the '90s, I worked in our Boston office for almost two years, and when I left, an old senior partner told me, literally, "Send me more of these Germans, they work like machines."

Because a couple years after Brazil was awarded the World Cup, we heard that the Brazilian government wanted to do something meaningful in the opening ceremony in the country that reinvented and perfected soccer until we met the Germans, of course.

She was a PR woman from New York with 170 Twitter followers, and she'd Tweet little acerbic jokes to them, like this one on a plane from New York to London: [Weird German Dude: You're in first class. It's 2014. Get some deodorant."

And he looked out of his car at this bedraggled, rain-drenched German teenager, took pity on her, and said, "Never forget... only for you."

whether it's sheer willpower, whether it's the flip of a card or whether it's a guilt trip from a German teenager, all of us, from time to time, need to sit down and try and play the unplayable piano.

In the 1920's, the German mathematician David Hilbert devised a famous thought experiment to show us just how hard it is to wrap our minds around the concept of infinity.

Much, much later, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer maintained that love based in sexual desire was a voluptuous illusion.

And in an enormous 40-page paper in German he says, at one point -- my wife is German and she translated it for me -- and at one point he says, "ganz widerlich Geruch, " an "absolutely repulsive smell, " which is good. Reminiscent of hydrogen sulfide.

And everyone goes, "Great!" He leaves the country and the French and the Germans go, "No, no, forget about that, absolutely not." Nothing happens. He goes to Strasburg.