Frankfurt am Main

This is a Kryptikmo stzle entrz from an internet cafe in Frankfurt. Iäm stuck here for two hours because I just missed the onlz decent train connection to Nuremberg. I have a german kezboard and canät be bothered to tzpe properlz. Iäm going to go and see if I can get mugged now.

The Lancashire Derbyshire & East Coast Railway

If I walk out of the back door of the house where I grew up then within 20 minutes walk I can cross the Lancashire, Derbyshire and East Coast Railway, the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincoln Railway and the North Midland Railway. They all run parallel in the floodplain of the River Rother, and their owners presumably didn't get along with one another too well, cause they could have saved themselves a lot of hassle by just building the one. Now only one is left, the North Midland Railway, which is used by a few freight trains.

The first one I listed (that's the one in the title) must have been a bitch to build, as it was the last of the three and the flat and easy ground had gone. The railway dates from the 1890s and runs through impressively deep cuttings followed by huge embankments. Today I cycled, walked and slipped down the derelict remains of this railway. The lines were removed when I was small and the track has been mostly left to nature and to fly-tippers, which makes cycling quite a challenge. Here's a picture of the railway as it passes through a cutting.



click for google maps overhead shot of photo

Possibly the trickiest bit of cycling the Lancashire, Derbyshire & East Coast Railway to get past is the bridge over the Chesterfield Canal. In some weird parallel world the canal is filled with water and boats and the railway is home to the Killamarsh steam railway museum, and all visitors to the area would flock to see the point where the steam trains pass over the narrowboats going down the canal. In this world the canal is empty and filled with vegetation and the odd house, whilst the bridge has huge holes in it and is fenced off on one side. Here is a photo of the bridge. If you look carefully you can see the fence which used to block the way, but no longer does.



And here's the bridge from the other side. I didn't manage to get my bike across, but it's not too hard to walk round.



click for google maps overhead shot of photo

Anyone wishing for a serene pedal would be better advised to go down the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincoln Railway which is now a cycle path and part of the trans-pennine trail, but it isn't half as much fun.

If you read this far you might wish to see the three railway lines on google maps. They run fairly straight from north to south and are lined with trees. If you can't work it out, use streetmap for orientation. Note the lovely oxbow lake in both cases.

(I wrote this a few days ago, but only got the pictures up now).

Welcome to Chavland

I landed in Manchester airport this afternoon, and the first words I heard were a tannoy announcement 'Would the person who bought a bottle of Jade Goody perfume please...'. I can't remember the rest, as in my head the only words which made sense were '...kill yourself'.

It's going to be a long week at this rate. For the sake of England, the Queen and old maids bicycling across foggy airports drinking pots of tea please don't bother looking at the following wikipedia links.

Chav
Jade Goody

Juggling and the Coriolis Force

The Coriolis force is one of those things that I've believed in but never experienced. When it was taught at the university we were given examples of balls falling from equatorial skyscrapers, the British Navy making false corrections in the Falkland islands (possibly mythical according to wikipedia) and weather systems.

All of these are rather abstract things for a physics student as I rarely have a skyscraper or battlecruiser handy, and to me wind blows in straight lines. When was the last time you read "the icy wind was blowing from the north with a radius of curvature of 50km"? If I had a fully-crewed battlecruiser I would do nothing else but try to hit shipping at all possible latitudes in both hemispheres, but sadly I don't.

All of these examples are of the coriolis effect because of the earth's rotation. Things are much more fun and managable on smaller things which rotate every few seconds rather than planets which rotate once a day, such as roundabouts in this YouTube clip.

Last week I experienced my first ever difficulties with the Coriolis force. I was trying to turn around whilst juggling 5 balls, and found that if I turned clockwise then my right hand was catching balls far from the body and my left hand was catching them close to the chest. If I turned the other way then exactly the opposite happened. Was this the Coriolis force? Having read so many phenomena which are attributed to the Coriolis force but which aren't I thought I'd better check this out to make sure that it wasn't just bad aiming because of dizziness.

If you throw a ball from one hand to the other so that it stays in the air for one second, and your hands are half a metre apart, then the horizontal speed (v) is 0.5m/s. If you turn around every 12 seconds then you will have an angular velocity (omega) of about 0.5 rad/s.

The size of the coriolis acceleration is 2*omega*v, so to you the ball will appear to be accelerated inwards or outwards at about 0.5 m/s^2, which is about 1/20th of g, the acceleration due to gravity. The ball will land about 25cm further away (or closer to you) than you would expect. Maybe I wasn't turning that fast, because this seems a bit too much, but it's not far off what I was doing.

The centrifugal force depends on the square of omega, so it's not too important for slow rotations. Of course for fast rotations it quickly becomes important, see here, here and here.

Having had a few minutes of enjoyment (and then dizziness) experiencing this elusive force first hand I found that I'd got the hang of juggling whilst turning, and was automatically correcting for it quite nicely. It was fun while it lasted.

It took me a long time to understand why, if your throw an object in the direction of rotation, it should appear to move away from you or towards you. I only really got it whilst drawing the following diagram. Those blue squares represent a pair of hands, the small round thing is a ball, which starts from the left hand and is aimed at the right one. During the flight the hands rotate around the point in the middle, and if you're in control of the hands then the ball appears to make a curve. Of course somebody hovering above you would argue that your hands were curving and not the ball.

End of Part two

Part two of the blog (September til now) was pretty shite, to be honest. I wouldn't have bothered reading it, if I were you. It wasn't really more interesting than it sounded, but for the record here is what it said at the top of the page:

"The diary of a disillusioned physicist trying to get back on his feet by finding a job. It's more interesting than it sounds, honestly."

I will start a job in Bochum at the start of February, developing ultrasound scanners at the university. This means that I now have six weeks proper holiday.

Loss of Reality

Today I just about returned to the real world. I've had a damned annoying cold and decided to basically stay in bed for a week. I stopped reading emails, stopped checking post and prayed that the phone wouldn't ring.

I popped in once to reality to go bowling but spent the rest of the time asleep, or lying in bed or surfing the internet or playing freeciv. An afternoon nap has a great habit of shortening the day by a few hours. The most interesting activity was rereading a few books in a random but on the whole back-to-front order.

This laziness started off as being a fair enough reaction to a bad cold, but now the cold is gone and I'm left lying in bed trying to avoid anything happening. Time has speeded up so that December seems to be going in a flash. Three days are somehow nothing.

Well today I at least took the rubbish out, went to the bank, booked a flight and read my emails, and I'm going to go juggling. It's a start, at least.

Kenny Lunt

Asides from being nominally a Sheffield Wednesday fan, I am a fan of subtle humour. Wednesday beat Norwich City 2-1 on Saturday, with midfielder Kenny Lunt earning a booking. I looked up his entry on Wikipedia, but am at a loss to explain how he got the nickname "Lenny". And why does clicking on his nickname lead to the page on Spoonerisms?

I nicked this one of Jon Henley's diary from last weeks Guardian, but here is Sheffield's top eatery, the Polonium Restaurant.



I'd better be off, otherwise I'll be lucking fate for lunch.

William "Fatty" Foulkes

I've got a godawful cold, my nose is blocked, and I keep falling asleep and waking up with a parched mouth. I tried to get over this cold on Thursday evening by playing squash, but I just ended up with an even worse cold and very wobbly legs. This cold might explain why I'm writing so much, for in between sleeping and reading I've been looking at some good stuff on YouTube.

But to get you in the mood, here is a competition. Please identify, from the 1897 England team which beat Wales 4-0, William Foulkes. The only clue I'm giving is that his nickname was "Fatty".




Anway, I was watching this clip of the 1901 FA cup final replay between Tottenham Hotspur and Sheffield United (boo hiss, for I am a Sheffield Wednesday fan). I was struck by the size of the goalkeeper, and thought "Is it? Naa it can't be, no way, not the legendary Fatty Foulkes". But it was, and is. As United (in striped shirts) trot onto the pitch one of their players is a head taller and a few feet wider than all the others. We then see him taking a goal kick, before pulling up his shorts (perhaps he'd been on pre-final diet).

There are numerous stories about Foulkes, the Sheffield United website says that he hung from and broke a crossbar in the 1896/97 season, and this cartoon from the day after the cup final replay makes note of his famous punches (If I read it right then the caption bottom right says "Little Willie's little punch with all his weight behind it"), which were claimed to reach the half-way line. Here is a report from the Independent describing Foulkes "picking up the Liverpool centre-forward George Allan, turning him upside down, and standing him on his head in the mud".

He even found time between meals to play some cricket for Derbyshire, and his cricketing obituary appeared in Wisden.

A stick of rhubarb.

It took me a couple of days to work up to this, but England (without Trescothick) managed to throw away the second Ashes match. Having scored over 500 runs in the first innings and having declared (that means that they were so confident of not losing that they gave up their remaining wickets voluntarily) they were in control of the match, but they blew it on the morning of the fifth day. It took me a couple more days to see the funny side, but quite amusing in hindsight are the comments in the 25th over from Rob Smyth: "If England lose this game I'll run through Oxford Street tomorrow wearing nothing but a relentless glow" and in the 31st over from Brad in California "So let me get this straight, you're not watching, not listening to, but reading about a game that has been going on for five days, and is almost certain to end in a draw". England lost, quite disastrously, but at least that showed Brad in California, Haa.

For anyone who takes pleasure in English disasters, you can read all about it here and here too. There are lots of amusing quotes, such as "Let's face it," says Matt, "it is going to be a draw.", " "That was the biggest load of rubbish I have ever seen."

And now for something completely different, here's a YouTube link to a football match in the days that Referees wore impeccably straight bow ties.

Something I should have done a while ago.

The only thing I managed to do today was to go to a psychotherapist. There are two reasons that I made this appointment, and one of them is a bit embarassing. The first is my failure to go about getting a job in any kind of sensible manner. I just can't keep a positive mindset long enough to go through the process of reading an advertisement, writing an application, going for an interview and then accepting a job. I've got a CV which would suggest a job involving complicated physics stuff or some kind of responsibility or importance, and I generally don't feel up to it.

Possible jobs (I just opened up an old Physikjournal) include working with an "intense optical fs-laser in two-colour pump-probe experiments" or "non-equilibrium phenomena in multiphase flow through porous media"

This kind of stuff scares the shit out of me. Some other jobs require that you are "Belastbar": able to work under pressure, and I'm not. The second and real reason that I went to a psychotherapist is because of the England cricketer Marcus Trescothick. A couple of weeks ago he decided that touring Australia swinging a piece of wood was too much for him, and I knew how he felt.

Here is a report from Geoffrey Boycott on Trescothick's departure, and I found the comment from Melanie most useful.

Burnout is not solely a mental fatigue it is physical, the body no longer has the physical resources to cope with demands being made upon it and this leads to the mental stress and illness. Gastro-intestinal illnesses are induced by the body’s constant demand on adrenalin to keep things going – high levels of adrenalin in the body cause a reduced blood-flow to the stomach and intestines, this in turn affects the body’s ability to absorb nutrients from food, which in turn affects the body’s ability to renew its resources.

As far as I can work out this is what happened to me two years ago. I pushed myself too far in my PhD and broke down completely. Sleeplessness, depression, stomach pains, an ear infection and a general feeling of exhaustion and worthlessness. Now I'm alright, as far as it goes, but I'm scared to do anything with my life. I also still get really nervous whenever I'm woken up by a telephone. So I'll book an appointment for a therapy course on Monday.

The shrink asked me whether there had been a history of depression in the family. My honest answer is that I don't know. It's not the kind of thing we really talked about, and the only way I'd have known is if a relative had blown their head off, which they haven't, so I guess things can't have been that bad. This design for life probably explains why I haven't taken this step earlier, but I can't think of any good reason for not doing it now.

An Old Film and Bamberg

Well I'm still alive and well, so yesterday I took the RC for a nice trip to Bamberg. She wanted to take some photos, so I got my old camera out of the cupboard. It is a 20th century model which still takes film and I've not used it for a couple of years.

After taking one photo the film was full but I was able to buy a new one from the newsagents at the station. I'm going to go and let the film be developed now, and I don't have a clue what's on it. Probably some holiday with an old girlfriend or something.

What's that, you say that you don't care about an old camera, and want to know what went on in Bamberg? It was a lovely day out, and I got to have liver-dumpling soup, roast pork and smoked beer for lunch, but somehow things seem different to being in a disco, and explaining the tale of Queen Cunigunde and the ploughshares (see picture) was maybe a mistake. The story is that as a test of her virginity and she was forced to walk across a dozen glowing ploughshares, and emerged unscathed. I bet that she'd been round the houses and was probably fucking the blacksmith.

Aye m'Kaiser, them there ploughshares be straight out o' yon fire. Them be black hot ploughshares, so they be. (winks to queen)

Note for Interpol

If I should happen to be found murdered with an ice pick, it was presumably the siberian oil mafia.

The geeks' guide to pulling.

Experimental science is rather simple, and you learn pretty much all you need to know in school. You put on a white coat, set up your stuff and every 10 minutes change something, whilst looking and recording something else. Hopefully you will then see a pattern emerge between what you change and what you observe.

This is a pretty universal technique, and is fully described in this link for science projects. At any one time thousands of poor scientists are sat around twiddling their knobs (should I rephrase that?) and looking at the colour of their litmus paper, and some of them will be female.

Now here's the trick: If you wander into a laboratory at 5pm on a Friday evening you will find frustrated scientists trying to finish their measurements, one of which you identify as your date for the evening. She'll be twiddling a knob, waiting a while, and then looking at the colour of her litmus paper. This process will have to be repeated for several hours, and she's probably written the evening off.

As a geek, you can walk in and connect a computer via a digital-analogue converter to a motor which automatically rotates the knob, aim a digital camera at the litmus paper, wire the camera up to the same computer and write a program to fourier transform the colour information, plot the results and send them by email to her supervisor at 2am.

You then take your astonished admirer by the arm, whisper into her ear "the only buttons you'll be pushing this evening are mine" and walk off into the bright lights of the city.

I'm sadly not geeky enough to achieve this. I settled for leaving her to finish the experiments alone and picking her up later. Although it lacks the style of the real geek method, it does have the advantage that she'll be so frustrated with the futility of experimenting that she'll be desperate for alcohol.

Some crap pun on chemistry, or lack thereof, like dating, but with a chemist, like.

A couple of weeks ago I experienced one of those "you're a pathetic fantasist, endofphil, you wish, in your dreams" moments. I had managed to stay awake during a physics colloqium, which is an achievement in itself. The typical audience member of a physics colloqium is male, bearded, over 50 and quite probably asleep. He will wake up a few minutes before the end of the talk to ask whether the topic being discussed has any relevance to his area of expertise.

Being a special colloqium there were a couple of crates of beer at the end of the talk, and thus the audience got to drink a beer and discuss beard trimming techniques and whether their areas of expertise had some overlap somewhere. The thing that didn't fit in here at all, in any way whatsoever, was a young female Russian Chemist stood with a bottle of beer looking bored and homesick (honestly I'm not making this up, I may be a pathetic fantasist, but this is straight up). She was most certainly bored, as the whole evening had been held in German and she hadn't understood a thing.

I'd drunk enough to work up some courage, so I explained that I could in principle speak English and offered to take her out of the physics institute and show her the sights of Erlangen (I took here to the Schlossplatz, I don't know why but I had to start it somewhere). In one of those wonders of German organisation she is living in an office in the physics institute, so she was in no position to turn me down. This evening we went for a few beers, but I think she just wants me for my social life (WTF !?), although that could be one of those numerous excuses I make to avoid ever making anything of anything.
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Youtube link of the day: This is probably a waste of time, as all Germans know it and any non-Germans won't understand it. Anyway, this is the first "go away and spend 5 years learning German, it will be worth it" clip that I've come across. Ein Klavier, Ein Klavier

Product Warning

Before we get to the product warning, first a blog warning. Having covered vomit and urine in recent days, today we are dealing with poo, cack, crap or whatever you like to call it.

So now the product warning, you know the idea: "This product may contain nuts", "wearing this superman costume will not necessary enable the user to be able to fly" and so on.



May I suggest that those little toilet freshener things which hang over the rim of the loo ought to be issued with the warning

Freshening effect only occurs on rim of toilet. If the freshener is somehow flushed down the toilet it will no longer give 'a feeling of springtime' to your bathroom. In fact, if you accidentally flush it whilst taking a shit, it will probably block the toilet and thereby hinder the effective removal of faecal matter, leading to your toilet being filled with and smelling of shite.

Nobody in the flat knows how exactly this blockage happened, and the rest of the story involves a few bottles of beer, a rubber glove, a plastic bag and a building site. Suffice to say that we can now poo in peace again and my flatmates owe me a beer or two. Hurray!

Amplifier Operational (until I broke it)

I finally plucked up courage to wire up my birthday present today. It is an home-made amplifier with lots of inputs and outputs and no labels or manual for idiots like me.

Bollocks. I think I just broke it. It was happily playing a song and then stopped all of a sudden. Maybe it has a "Shitty Britpop" recognition unit built in? "Pulp? I'm not amplifying that crap". I think I'm going to start to cry :-(

Zombie Nation.

Nights out in Britain have always been a bit scary, but things seem to be getting worse, according to the Sun.

"It is thought trouble started when the dead man became involved in a fight with another man."

Tumblers and other old stuff.

I decided to make use of my excess leisure time and look round the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.

I only saw less than half of the stuff as it is a big museum and I have a limited attention span for historical relicts. After a while I got a bit depressed by the exhibits: it seemed that the extent of human achievement over the millennia has been finding new ways to kill each other (axe, dagger, sword etc.) and finding new ways to depict the death and torture of Jesus. My favourite was one which had the crucifixion in the foreground and a lovely harbour scene in the background. Most picturesque, although it is a shame that Jesus was looking the other way, probably at something much less soothing.

For me, the "I wonder if I could steal this" exhibit was a 7th century franconian drinking pot. The great thing is that it had a rounded bottom so that it wouldn't stand up and you had to down the contents. I just looked around the internet to see if you can buy such a thing, but I can't find any. I did however learn the following quite interesting fact: a tumbler is, according to the Merriam-Websters dictionary, "a drinking glass without foot or stem, and originally with pointed or convex base". At some point people must have gone all puritanical, and designed the flat-bottomed tumbler which no longer tumbled. For years I've drunk out of these things, and never asked why we called the most stable of all glasses a tumbler. For some reason the name has stuck, though, so here's to franconian drunkards. Cheers.



For comparison, a raucous 7th century tumbler (top) and a sober 20th century tumbler (bottom). The tumbler in the picture is not the one in the museum, I just borrowed the image from wikipedia

Walking on Broken Glass, Mud and Sangria.

If the success of a party can be determined by the mess created, then last night's was a definitely a good party. After cleaning the flat from broken bottles, fag ends and a bucket filled with urine right next to the toilet we found that the floor has a few cigarette burns and a lingering stickiness you get in bad discos, so that each footstep is accompanied by a faint "squelch".

During the party I made plans to learn to speak italian, to visit some village festival (Kerwa) near Ansbach and to go cycling to remove the hangover. These are the things I can remember agreeing to, and I did actually manage to go cycling today whilst wearing my new "skeleton" jersey and red polka dot "King of the mountains" socks.

It's strange how alcohol can solve major personality deficits. I spend most of my time when sober thinking of how things can go wrong, and why it would be bad or pointless to do something. When drunk, all plans seem like great ideas which can't fail, even plans like "Let's go piss in a bucket".

So if you were here, or weren't here but helped buy a present (one of which deserves its own blog entry and is way too good for just a passing mention), thankyou very much.

Why half of Erlangen will have a headache tomorrow.

Today is the day of the big party in our house. We are making the nastiest Sangria I have ever seen.

Recipe:

Ingredients: 10 litres of tetra-pak red wine, 1 bottle of Aldi Vodka, 1 bottle of rum, 5 litres of fanta-like orange stuff, some half-fermented fruit, sugar.

Take a 25 litre pot filled with mud, cement and rain water, make a half-hearted attempt at washing it. Remember that mud, cement and rain water are the most nutricious part of this drink.

Chop the fruit, throw everything in the pot, get all your guests drunk on something else slightly more expensive and serve in plastic cups. Cheers!

Profile Updated

I have a new occupation, some new hobbies and a new age. I've also gone beta, so I can put coloured text in, and do other amazing stuff probably.

Youtube link of the day:

Thanks to TV shows like "Adolf and Eva's home improvements", "Nazi wives" and "I'm an SS officer, get me out of here" the British are most well informed as to events in Germany from 1933-1945. Just don't mention the Wirtschaftswunder, they/we won't know what you're on about.

Therefore: Starting a new job

Receptacle of choice?

You may be wondering what I'm up to: I certainly am. I thought I would record one day of aimless unemployment.

Today I overslept, ate breakfast, sent a couple of emails, tidied my room a bit, bought a copy of the Guardian, read half of it, did a third of the crossword, ate lunch, surfed the internet for an hour or so (I read the most interesting vomiting FAQ and completed the attached questionnaire), picked up my bicycle from the bike shop, went to the University and changed the brakes and mended the rear light, ate tea and wrote this entry.

This was one of my busier days, my bike is now in good condition and I know all there is to know about vomiting.

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Youtube link of the day: Swedish made simple, or the explanation of the following code (you may wish to try to decipher it yourself before watching the video).

L.O.
L.O.
R.U.B.C.
S.V.R.B.C.
L.O.
L.O.
L.O.
L.O.
F.U.N.E.X.
S.V.F.X.
F.U.N.E.M.
9.
I.F.C.D.M.
V.F.N.10.E.M.
A.V.F.M.
R.
O.
C.D.M.
O.S. V.F.M.
O.K. M.N.X.
M.N.X.
F.U.N.E.T.
1.T.
1.T.
O.K. M.X.N.T.
M.X.N.T.4.1
V.F.N.10.E.X.
U.Z.U.F.X.
Y.F.N.U.N.E.X
I.F.E.10.M.
S.I.L.L.Y.C.O.W.

+ Danes in skull desecration shock! +

ENDOFPHIL exclusive!!! Scandal rocks Danish royals



First the Mohammad cartoons, now photos show highly ranked Danish officers in shocking scenes of depravity! Have they no respect for the dead?

MUSLIMS OUTRAGED!

This shows how little respect the Danes have for our culture, said one islamic source, who didn't wish to be named for fear of his family being dug up and used as stage props.

BACKLASH!

Senior arabic figures called for a ban on imports of danish beer and bacon. ENDOFPHIL contacted Elsinore to demand an explanation.

King Claudius blamed the "unfortunate skull incident" on a "young officer going through some existential problems", and promised that the entire royal family would kill themselves/each other forthwith.

THIS IS NOT ENOUGH, WE DEMAND MORE!

A Pampered Rock Star.

I'm taking a break from the usual scheme of things to plug Jarvis Cocker's latest song. I wouldn't normally do this, but Jarvis comes from Sheffield and used to be in a band which I liked, called Pulp. It's also a rather catchy song with subversive lyrics.

Please take time to watch his video, and/or have a look at his myspace space.

Following on from Jarvis' suggestion, I also challenge all-comers to a Conker duel. This is what kids used to do for entertainment before they had computers and stuff. It led to a strange sort of appreciation for nature. I am always surprised to see dozens of battle-ready conkers lying around unused and unwanted.

Depression.

I suppose it's my own fault, but then I would say that. I had a great weekend: I got drunk, stayed up too late, made some new friends, learned what "Agrartanzen" is [1], went for a lovely bicycle ride through the autumn colours of the "Franconian Switzerland" and made a Lancashire Hotpot for tea.

This all seems like months ago, although the rest of the hot pot is lying cold in the oven. Today I am thoroughly downhearted. My eyes refused to properly open and my cheeks feel as though they have small weights on them pulling my face into a tired and bored glaze.

I tried looking for a job this morning, but failed completely. Any job which I am halfway qualified for seemed to be impossible for me to ever do. The prospect of moving to another town, or starting something new and exciting scared me, so I slouched home to go back to bed for the afternoon. I nearly didn't make it, the weight of my coat seemed to stop me from moving, and I spent five minutes on a park bench trying to summon up the energy to walk the last 500m.

It's not the first time, and I know what to do now: Sleep, eat, sleep, eat and wait until I can face the world again.

[1] Agrartanzen, literally "Agricultural dancing" is a fusion of disco moves and farmyard labour. Apparently popular in the "Bavarian forest" region, typical moves include mowing a wheatfield, driving a tractor and strangling chickens. The lack of any google hits for this phenomena is probably not a surprise: people who pretend to drive tractors in the disco don't usually have an internet connection (or an indoor toilet).

ps. writing that footnote brought the first smile to my face today :-)

King Franz I

One of the nice corners of Erlangen is the english section of the municipal library, which has most of the "what, you've never read ...." books on four shelves of classic literature, which I'm slowly working through. This week I read "Kidnapped" by Robert Louis Stevenson.

I had actually read this book when I was little, but I didn't really understand it at the time. I never quite worked out what a "Whig" was, and got a bit confused by the bits of dialogue in scots, and the scottish geography, with it's numerous lochs and glens.

Now, together with google maps, wikipedia, and a scots-english dictionary, I finally got this book.

The starting point of this book (and many british problems, including the troubles in Northern Ireland), is the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. Here King James II of England was thrown out by his protestant daughter, Mary, and the dutch prince William of Orange. The scots didn't like this, and many stayed true to James, and his descendants. "Kidnapped" is set a good 60 years after the revolution, and six years after the rising of James' grandson, Bonnie Prince Charlie, in 1745. At that time, many highland scots still supported the claim of the descendents of James II for the throne, and in fact some still do. And to be honest, they've got a point. The revolution of 1688 was a protestant joke: inviting some first-cousin-marrying Dutch caravanner to illegally take the British throne. All the attempted jacobite risings failed, though, and the heirs to James II and Bonnie Prince Charlie are now living in Bavaria. If Franz, Duke of Bavaria fancies claiming the British crown upon the death of the Queen, he has my wholehearted support.

Oh Mr Darcy, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

This blog has gone downhill badly recently, as I've been sat on my arse a lot, have filled in a job application for Siemens and have been down with a bad cold.

I'm looking for further job options, and was struck by this ad. I don't know what the greatest thing about this ad is: the literary title, the AWE acronym, or the appeal "ask yourself whether your making a difference, and whether you'd like to make a bigger one". Yeah, I'd like to nuke Paris. You can't make much of a bigger fucking difference than that!

I figure that the ad won't stay forever, so I'll put it here too.



Pride. Without Prejudice.
AWE
Berkshire
United Kingdom

Closing date: not specified
Job reference code: N/A
Salary: not specified

Qualification: Not specified

Atomic Weapons Establishment

Near Reading, Berkshire

Regardless of their role, everyone who works with us here at the Atomic Weapons Establishment shares the same sense of self-worth. A sense that everything they do is ultimately focused on maintaining the UK’s nuclear deterrent, on protecting the nation and ensuring that protection continues.

If you’re a Scientist, Engineer or Business professional, it’s time to ask yourself if you’re making a difference where you are. And whether you’d like to make a
bigger one. Find out more and apply at www.awe.co.uk or call 0118 982 9009.

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Squared paper

I have been reading Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury in the last couple of days. The introductory quote is from the spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez:

If they give you ruled paper, write the other way

Oddly enough, in Germany schoolchildren are given squared paper to write on.

Liverpool 3 Galatasaray 2

It's a probably meaningless group game of 2 teams which I don't care about, but it's got Peter Crouch, who is great. I have tried to preserve his second goal for posterity using a minimum of effort, file size and artistic ability. Spot the difference!



Not apropos to liverpool in the slightest, I signed on to officially be unemployed today.

Cycling not very far.

Looking back at the summer, I peaked too early with my cycling efforts. This blog suggests that I reached an optimal performace on the 6th June, and have been slowing down ever since. July was too hot, August was too cold, and I was in Hamburg and England anyway. Right now I am distinctly off the pace, and I could swear that the muscle on my left calf is distinctly wimpier than my right calf. It feels that way to touch (I'm not really the kind of guy who goes around feeling his muscles, I was just checking for signs of tension, honestly), and the left leg is the first to complain whilst going uphill. Why is this? Presumably I've managed to keep one leg in training over the past month. Have I been kicking things that much, or hopping on one leg, or always jumping from the right leg? If so, why have I been jumping so much at all?

Plan for tomorrow: hop on left leg, and find a job.

Beaurocracy.

I am still not officially unemployed. For this to happen, a certain form must be filled out, certifying that I had a job. This form was posted by the Federal Agency of Work to me. I took it to my workplace, and got a secretary to post it to the central university administration. They sent it to the central administration of government employees in Ansbach, who will hopefully stamp the form and post it back to me, so that I can take it to the Federal Agency of Work.

As an exercise in pointlessness this doesn't beat the invitation I received for my degree ceremony. The letter was written and sent by our group secretary to the exams office, who posted it to my office address. Of course all items for our group members go into the pigeon hole thingy, which is directly next to the secretaries office. After a couple of days and a 5km round trip the letter ended within 2 metres of where it was written.

Pope Benedict XVI

The pope (or should that be Jessyl, the Trifelge Putinard?) is in Bayern, which is a good excuse for a link to this video.

On the job front, I am still trying fill out the forms to officially become unemployed. Once I achieve this, I will be earning more than twice as much as my flatmate, Slawek, who went to work at 7am this morning.

Job of the day: Armour Researcher
. Advantages: Get to shoot stuff at other stuff, become civil servant, get to pretend to be "Q". Disadvantages: Not sure I want to live in Salisbury, trying to avoid military work, might not get security clearance due to german accent.

End of Part one.

The mission statement until now has been

"The diary of a disillusioned physicist trying to get back on his feet by idling, cycling and drinking the summer away. I will try to be distracted by every distraction possible, and set my heart on pointless tasks until the point comes where I have to get a real job. This will be the end of July."

The end of July came and went, and I didn't get a job. I did get drunk a fair bit, cycled quite a lot, and idled with great intent. The end of August came (I got a job extension you see), and now summer is pretty much over, and I'm unemployed. I was wondering whether to stop the blog, or start a new one, but I quite like the title and layout, so I might as well just carry on, but with a new mission statement.

Democracy in action

On the 23rd of June last year there was a most hotly contested election for a seat in the british parliament. The election was contested by a select bunch of 26 Lords, Viscounts, Earls and Dukes, and the leading candidates were Viscount Montgomery of Alemain (son of the bloke who saw off Rommel in Egypt) and the Earl of Effingham (a descendant of the bloke who crushed a rebellion by Thomas Wyatt the younger against Mary I in 1544). The electorate consisted of 28 assorted noblemen and women, who chose Viscount Montgomery.

Viscount Montgomery now sits in the House of Lords, the second chamber of the British Parliament. Any law passed by the House of Commons must be approved by the Lords before it comes into effect. The House of Lords consisted for many years of a combination of leading religious figures (archbishops and the like), life peers, and hereditary peers. The special thing about a hereditary peerage is that it is passed on when the holder dies. Thus there had been Effinghams in the house for five centuries, and when one Earl died his son took his title and seat.

This all changed in 1999, when the labour party realised that there was a slight imbalance. Because hereditary peers are pretty much immortal there were lots of them (759 to be precise). And as they tended to be rich and live in big houses, they alomost always voted for the conservatives. Trying to correct this imbalance, the labour government pushed through an act to reduce the number to 92, to represent the interests of the 759. This drastic cull still leaves them with a fair proportion of the 713 current peers, and they still tend to vote conservative, but it is a slight improvement.

If one of the 92 dies, then they are replaced not necessarily by their son, but by any hereditary nobleman. This means that elections must take place, with the electorate being those hereditary peers who are already in the House of Lords who support the party of the deceased.

Ingerland

I've gone back home for a couple of weeks. I will be trying to observe the differences in English and German culture, whilst being fed lots by my mum.

The most striking things about England are the taps. Every time I try to wash my hands using the standard english procedure:

1/ Turn on warm tap.
2/ Work soap into a lather.

(by this point the warm water will be very hot.)

3/ Frantically try to turn on the cold tap using burnt hands.

(this will of course fail as they're covered in soap lather.)

4/ Use the forearms to turn on the cold tap.
5/ Rinse lather off burnt hands with freezing cold water.

by this point several litres of hot and cold water will have washed down the sink, but the blood circulation in your hands will have been optimised, like in a sauna.

Goodbye Hermes

My last shift ever was brightened by speaking to a guy called Lu. I've forgotten his first name, and will probably never see him again, but we got on well. Lu has what I used to have: an excitement about all things physics.

My boss tried a few times in the last couple of years to interest me as to what happens to the spin of an electron if you make the electron go round in a circle, which is one of his favourite little topics. My unspoken response was to think "vacuum leak, broken magnet, radiation damage, it's an academic question as that electron aint never gonna get round a full circle anyway". As my boss was also here today, he started explaining this problem to Lu, who then spent the next hour working out this problem using the basic principles of physics. I'd like to think that there was a time when I'd have done this, and that one day I'll feel like that again about physics again.

As it was, I spent the last few hours finishing off the Guardian crossword. Today I learnt about the Crimean war, 19th century russian literature, and finally about the Sea of Azov (it's the light blue sea in the picture), which happens to be next to the Crimean peninsula, which happens to be under a whisp of cloud.

Lanose and other words.

Whilst sat on shift here in Hamburg I have been quite busy solving crosswords from the Guardian. My favourite clues of the past week have been

8's is 2. (two words, four letters each)

and

Author who can balance a pint on her head whilst playing snooker. (two words, first word seven letters, second word six letters)

The first is very easy if you think in the right way, the second requires a knowledge of english children's literature and of bad puns. In total I needed several hours and a few extra letters to solve them, though. In addition to these nice clues, which give an AHA! feeling when you find the answer, there are some clues which give a WTF?! feeling. One such answer was "Lanose", which was the last clue I found today.

Lanose is of course a little-known synonym for woolly. Little known in this context means that I have never heard of it. Any reasonably all-round educated person (such as my intelligent and discerning readers) would spot that it is derived from "lana" which is latin for wool, but being a beer-swilling germanic sort of bloke it passed me by.

But now I know, and I will try to remember. I will also try to remember that 2 is the cube root of 8, and that beer-tricks potter wrote some lovely children's books.

I now only have one shift left, and am slowly getting the hang of it. The key is to turn off your mind, and just follow stupidly the rules from here. It is then very refreshing to occasionally turn on the mind again and take a random journey through the world of english language and culture.

DESY bicycles

As an equal opportunities employer, DESY has to make sure that they don't discriminate against anyone. As all employees have the right to hire out a bicycle, these bicycles must all be suitable for everyone. On the principle of the lowest common denominator, this means that everyone gets a bicycle designed for a female midget.

It took me 2 days to work out that I had borrowed a ladies bicycle. I sort of wondered why my knees could touch, and why my back leg kept crashing against the basket above the rear wheel as I got on and off. Today I realised that the cross-bar was missing, and that I could just swing on and off lady-like. I don't cycle lady-like, though, I cycle like a baboon, with arms and legs pointing out at ridiculous angles.

This afternoon my bike got a puncture, so I pushed it to the nearest bike shop and asked whether they could repair it. They said that they could have it done by Friday, but they let me borrow the tools to do it myself, which was nice of them. This sort of cheered me up, I think, and I am feeling much better than in the past couple of days.

The importance of being useless.

Yeah, I know, it's a shit title, but this week was never going to be a literary highlight for this blog. I have nearly got through four of my seven shifts, which is some reason for hope. I am still sat here on shift, and am completely incompetent. When I started at HERMES five years ago I saw some people here on shift and wondered "how can anyone be so fucking stupid". Now I know, for I have touched the depths of utter incompetence.

My job here could be performed by a rather unintelligent robot, and 99.9% of the computing time for this dumbass robot would be trying to walk up a flight of stairs to reach terminal 2.

Situation: Monitor says "Magnet preparation"
Response: Type command list (a) into terminal 1, and press enter.

Situation: Monitor says "Luminosity run"
Response: Press button routine (I) into terminal 2.

Then every 2 hours type command list (b) into terminal 1, and press enter.

and every 4 hours copy some values from terminal 3 onto piece of paper.

Situation: Monitor says "Please turn off your HV"
Response: Press button routine (II) into terminal 2.

Situation: Something goes red, or beeps.
Response: Call phone number x-xxxx

Typically I have to perform a couple of these tasks in an eight hour shift. The saddest thing is that I am useless at it. It should be impossible to fuck up this job, but I keep forgetting to do stuff.

I have a feeling that my job performance and state of mental happiness are interlinked. It's not easy to care when you don't give a shit.

You're so perfect you don't interest me at all.

I went for a walk today, from DESY through the pretty suburb of Othmarschen, down to the River Elbe, then along the beach to the Museumshafen (literally a harbour museum, this is where several old ships are maintained). Everything is beautiful, green, clean, safe, and friendly, for this is one of the richest suburbs of one of the richest towns in the world. Everything was just like it was the last time I was here, and it will stay this way for a while, too, as it is pretty much perfect the way it is.

I don't know whether it's just the monotonous perfection, or the fact that every cafe and restaurant reminds me of someone I once loved, or the fact that I'm on shift, sat 20m underground doing fuck-all, but I'm feeling down. I wish I was excited by being in a big city, but I've seen all I want to see of Hamburg, and I want to go home.

Hamburg again

The least said about Hamburg and Hermes the better. It's depressing me too much, and I want out of here.

I'm surfing the internet quite a lot at the moment, and am desperate enough to read the reports of english county cricket matches. The bitterest rivalry in county cricket is Yorkshire vs. Lancashire. It all goes back to the wars of the roses, and neither team likes to lose this match.

Often, if a match is heading for a certain draw because there won't be enough time for all the innings to be completed, a captain in a commanding situation will make a "sporting declaration". This means that he forfeits some of his batters to speed up the game, losing potential runs in the process. The upside is that there is then more time to bowl out the other side and win the match, the downside is that the other team could win. In any case the spectators will be entertained, and a win would be worth many more points than a draw.

A defeat by your bitterest rivals is unacceptable, though, so Yorkshire decided to carry on batting through the last day to secure a safe draw. For the last few hours of the match there was no possibility of victory. Blah blah blah, you say. Well all this is leading to a lovely quote from the match report on the bbc website.

Such was the dull nature of the game in the closing stages, Lancashire's Mal Loye fielded wearing a trilby hat.

Dimensional Analysis

The thing that most fascinated me about physics is that the dimensions work. If, for example, you multiply mass by a velocity squared then you always get an energy. People knew this long before Einstein came along with his E=mc^2, a revolutionary equation which changed the world but completely obeys the laws of dimensions. Had he claimed that E=mc he would have been laughed out. Physicists are prepared, eventually, given enough evidence, to believe that even the most boring lump of rock could explode with an energy that would put dynamite to shame, but they won't let you fuck around with dimensions.

Biologists, on the other hand, will quite happily fuck around with dimensions. Ever wondered what the surface area of a human body is? Probably not, unless you're into body painting (tell me darling, do you think 20 litres will be enough for your whole backside?) or are looking for an animal-skin rug with a difference.

Well wonder no more, because it's easy to find out. Just take your mass (m) in kilograms, and height (h) in centimetres. Then pick an equation from the ones below to find your surface area in square metres:

Gehan and George A = m^0.51456 * h^0.42246 * 0.02350
Mosteller A = m^0.5 * h^0.5 / 60.
Haycock A = m^0.5378 * h^0.3964 * 0.024265
Du Bois and Du Bois A = m^0.425 * h^0.725 * 0.007184

The ^ sign means "raised to the power of". My body surface area is therefore between 2.06 and 2.1 square metres, depending on which equation I choose.

How did anyone come up with these equations, and what does this have to do with dimensions, you ask? The first people to develop such an equation were D. Dubois and E.F Dubois in 1916. As far as I can tell they took their subjects and covered them completely in Post-it notes of known area. They then counted up the notes, and had their measurement. Only 9 people were measured before the glue (presumably) went all funny.

The Dubois' were certainly rather good at dimensional analysis, for if you take their exponent for mass and multiply it by three, and add the exponent of height you get exactly 2.

3*0.425 + 0.725 = 2.

It is possible to show that this sum will always be 2 if the dimensions of the equation are to be correct. If the result is anything other than 2, you will have calculated an "Area" in metres, or cubic metres, or "metres to the 2.01", rather than in square metres, so the Dubois' had given the calculations a good start.

There are two problems with Dubois' equation, however. The first is that it systematically overestimates the surface area, the second is that it requires competent use of a scientific calculator with a "power of" button. Gehan and George got round the first one by measuring a few more people and choosing more accurate exponents. Their equation sadly doesn't result in square metres

3*0.51456 + 0.42246 = 1.966

but it seems to work quite well nonetheless, provided you have a nifty calculator. Hancock did something similar with a similar disregard for the correct units for an area. So there were now several equations which worked but which were vastly more radical than anything ever proposed by Einstein.

But all was not lost! A simplified version of the Gehan-George equation was provided by Mosteller, who presumably had a calculator with only a square root button (remember that raising to a power of 0.5 is the same as taking the square root). Either by chance or by design he got the dimensions right, too, for three lots of 0.5 plus another 0.5 gives exactly 2.

Another nice thing about the powers of 0.5 is that this is exactly what you would get for a thin cylinder, and any mathematican could tell you that people are, to all intents and purposes, cylindrical. A mathematician could have saved 80 years of plastering people in Post-it notes by pointing out that it was obvious the powers should be both 0.5, and measuring one person to find the necessary factor of 1/60.

It seems that the Mosteller equation is slowly being accepted, so the next time you want to know your surface area just take the square root of your height, multiply with the square root of your weight and divide by 60. Go on, do it!

Some links

Source for the equations
History of the equations
A calculator for body surface area

Food!

Today I ate the following:

Breakfast: Boiled egg and toast, porridge and a peach.

Morning snack: 1 apple

Lunch: Soup, 2 sausages, mashed potatoes, pasta salad, green salad.

Afternoon coffee: 2 Muffins, 1 apple, 1 ice cream.

Dinner: Plate of pasta salad, 1 yoghurt, 1 apple

Supper: Plate of chips

Midnight snack: 1 Muffin with a mug of cocoa.

I don't know how many calories this is, but it seems to be quite a lot to me. The funny thing is that if you remove the chocolate muffins, ice cream and chips you get a nice healthy diet. Ever since cycling to the Dillberg on Sunday I have been eating as much as possible. I'm tired, and seem to be using most of my energy to digest food. I suppose that I should just count myself lucky to be hungry, thin and well-off in a country where food is plentiful.

Rain Stopped Play

A cricket match at the highest level has five days to be completed, with roughly six hours per day. If it rains or it is too dark then play is suspended, and the time is usually lost. Should the match be incomplete after five days then a draw is declared. It is therefore possible to draw a match simply by having bad weather. Take for example the first test of the ashes series of 1926, played at Trent Bridge in Nottingham. After less than an hours play it started raining, and kept on raining. Play was never restarted and the match was drawn. Only two of the England team even got onto the pitch, the rest stayed in the Pavilion and presumably drank a lot of tea. Fortunately there were four more matches in the series, which England won 1-0.

The Pakistan team of 1998 were unluckier. Trailing 1-0 after the first two matches of their series against Zimbabwe they must have fancied their chances of winning the last match in Faisalabad to draw the series. Unfortunately the match was abandoned due to four days of fog.

Our local cricket match yesterday suffered a similar fate. A pitch inspection revealed that it was raining, and so we moved directly to the beer garden. By the time the rain had stopped the light was too poor, and play was abandoned.

Here is a link which can be saved for a rainy day: a list of strange weather events which have occurred during cricket matches, which goes to confirm a quote by Benny Green, which roughly went as follows

The world is divided into two groups of people: those who think that nothing ever happens during a cricket match, and those who know that anything that could possibly happen already has.

Ignorance is Bliss

If you were forced to pick a spot for a picnic, you would do very well to beat the west shore of the "Happurger See", a reservoir near Hersbruck, which is about 25 miles south east of Erlangen. This is where I stopped for lunch yesterday as I cycled off for a rather lovely barbeque on the Dillberg with Chris.



If you sit on the shore of the Happurger See, you can look across to the "Houbirg", which is a big hill, or even a proper mountain: over 600m above sea level and with most daunting looking slopes, with rocks and small cliffs (see photo). Having a good map, but not a good dictionary, I knew that there was a "late-celtic oppidum" on the top of the Houbirg, but was left wondering how the celts had managed to get an indian takeaway, and how it had kept so well. Having eaten my picnic (a ham, lettuce and tomato sandwich plus a banana, as you ask), I skipped a few stones across the lake, and went for a quick swim too. I then set off, somewhat refreshed, for the rest of my tour.

After an annoyingly short amount of time to digest lunch I came to the first hill, as the road rose up to the village of Schupf. The hill is not too steep, but relentless, straight and with little shadow at lunchtime. I was hot and out of breath at the top of the hill, and cycled straight past a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. I couldn't work out what the Holocaust had to do with this beautiful corner of Bavaria. Maybe, I thought, a local Jewish family had been killed. If I'd taken time to stop and look, I would have seen this memorial.



The reason for the memorial is brutally simple. Towards the end of the war the Allied bombing of German towns and factories was affecting the war effort, and efforts were made to move production underground. Some bright-headed soul must have remembered the steep-sided mountain near Hersbruck, and suggested digging out the mountain to create a bomb-proof factory. A concentration camp was then built in Hersbruck to supply labour, and the Houbirg was duly dug out. Those who died were burnt in a crematorium that now lies (presumably destroyed) in the lake. When the crematoriam capacity was exceeded they took the rest of the bodies up the hill to Schupf and burnt them in the woods.

Links:

The society for the concentration camp in Hersbruck (in German). This is an excellent website describing what happened, well written, and without waffle. It is also a very good balance to the half-facts and flippancy you get on my blog.

Wikipedia page about Hersbruck.

Wikipedia page explaining what an Oppidum is.

The world's worst chat-up line.

...is probably the following

You appear to be rather small, but when I look into your eyes the angle from the horizontal is only weakly dependent on our relative heights.

A series of tests with my flatmate have shown that it is possible to approach somebody to within 30cm (about a foot) eye-to-eye separation before they get really freaked out. Taking this as a standard distance for talking to somebody in a disco, it is possible to calculate the relation between the angle A and the height difference of two people stood a distance d apart.



By plotting the angle A as a function of height difference you can see that once the height difference reaches a certain value any further increase makes little difference to the angle. I am 1.93m, but anybody less than 1.63m will not really be able to judge how tall I am. In the same manner I can hardly tell the difference between somebody 1.55m and 1.60m: they are small.



When I started writing this post I seem to think that I had a good reason for doing so, but I have now forgotten it. The only conclusion I can find from reading this is that I need to get out more.

Quick Lemon Cheesecake (second iteration)

This one was much better than the first one. The really good thing is that the recipe now has completely untransferable units. How much does a packet of Leibniz biscuits weigh? Don't ask me. How large is a tub of whipping cream, or a tube of Milchmaedchen condensed milk? No idea. Thus lives on the spirit of the recipe from my mum that required "one tin of condensed milk". In England tins of condensed milk only came in one size, and were all made by the same company (Carnation). In Germany Leibniz biscuits are a standard which can be reproduced by walking into your nearest shop, which is guaranteed to have a biscuit selection consisting of pretty much nothing else: Leibniz, Leibniz with chocolate, wholemeal Leibniz, own-brand Leibniz, own-brand Leibniz with chocolate etc

So here is the "Schnell schnell schnell lemon cheesecake".

Ingredients

For the base: 1 packet of "Vollkorn Leibniz" biscuits.
100g butter.
Brown sugar.

For the topping: 2 tubes of "Milchmaedchen" sweetened condensed milk.
2 tubs of whipping cream.
Juice of 4 lemons.
Some kind of fruit.

Instructions

Crush the biscuits, work in the butter and add brown sugar until it tastes sweet enough. Tip it into a container and squash it down. Mix the cream, condensed milk and lemon juice together, and tip onto the base. Cool for 2 hours, then put the fruit on the top and serve.

Psychosomatic stomach pains

Yesterday I had some slight stomach pains. This is the third time within a month, which is kind of worrying. Whenever this happens I don't know what the best course of action is.

Choice 1: Assume that the pain is real, and caused by an external influence (bad food, a virus or whatever). Remedy: get some rest, drink peppermint tea and eat mashed potatoes.

Choice 2: Assume that the pain is real, but caused by myself (maybe something stress related). Remedy: chill out, think happy thoughts, drink peppermint tea and eat mashed potatoes.

Choice 3: Assume that the pain is imaginary and caused by myself. Remedy: Ignore the stomach problems, eat something nice and healthy, drink a beer, and try to think happy thoughts.

I'm pretty sure that yesterday the pains were somehow self-inflicted. I went for mashed potatoes last night, which didn't help too much. Today I went for steak, bread and salad washed down with a beer and am feeling better. I think it all rests and falls on the happy thoughts. It's much easier to think of good stuff when you're eating a steak.

The trouble is that once in a while I will go for steak and happy thoughts when I really am ill, which is no good at all. If there is something really wrong then eating steak will just make you worse, which is an unhappy thought, which is a bad thing to end a post on. I therefore leave you with the words of Oscar Hammerstein.

Happy talk, keep talkin' happy talk,
Talk about things you'd like to do.
You got to have a dream,
If you don't have a dream
How you gonna have a dream come true?

England 824 Pakistan 659 (match drawn)

After five days the Lords test match ended in a draw. I've been in Germany long enough now to see the amusing side of this: a sport which not only takes five days to play, but a sport which doesn't even get a result in five days. In case you are wondering why England didn't win by simply having more runs (824 of them in total), the answer is that Pakistan still had six batsmen left who could have made the difference had the match continued for another day or two.

But five days it is, although the match didn't last exactly five days: with about half an hour left to play both teams decided that they couldn't win, so they packed it in and went for a cup of tea.

Here is a picture from the bbc website of the Pakistani captain, Inzamam-ul-Haq, playing a forward defensive shot. The key to playing this shot is a good pair of trousers. They should be tight enough to not flap around, but elastic and roomy enough to let you take a good step down the pitch. Once you've got the trousers everything else (bat and front leg together, head directly above the ball, bat angled to the floor) will just fall into place.

Experimental techniques.

I studied in physics in York. The three guys in charge of the demonstration experiments were Matt, Pete and Ian. They were all quite accustomed to students and professors who couldn't get things to work, but were always keen to remind you how stupid you were when you appeared with a newly broken piece of apparatus. In their office they had a framed cartoon which summed up their suffering. I made a quick reproduction of this cartoon, which referred to the famous tale of Galileo and his cannon balls.



The cause of my new-found solidarity with lab technicians was an encore of the Stern-Gerlach experiment which was held today. Prof. Dr. X decided to include the experiment in his lecture, and was determined to run the experiment himself, despite the fact that there were four perfectly qualified people standing around ready to press the necessary buttons. The experiment worked, but not as well as it could have. An hour of preparation was almost screwed up because he lacked the coordination to press a key and flick a switch together. Of course he then had several suggestions for how the experiment could be improved. It's not that he's wrong: of course you could improve the experiment. It's just the pomposity of assuming that he's the first person to think of these things.

Success!

Today I helped run the Stern-Gerlach experiment, and it worked even better than I hoped. Physicists make a distinction between things they are looking for (signal) and things they don't want to see (background). What the layman would call a needle in a haystack, a physicist calls a signal/background ratio of 0.00001.

If you look at this plot then the maximum value (0.21) is nearly four times larger than the minimum value (0.06). This means that the signal is almost three times as large as the background: so this is more of a lamppost in a flower arrangement than a needle in a haystack (if you are a layman) or a signal/background ratio of 3:1 (if you are a physicist).

This background of 0.06 nA doesn't come from the beam and is always present, so in principle you could just subtract this value from all the measurements to see how many atoms come from the beam (this is then your signal). The trouble is that the 0.06 is sometimes 0.058 and sometimes 0.062, and these fluctuations cause the measurement to jump up and down from point to point. The only way to get a really nice measurement is to keep this background very low. This is where the liquid nitrogen cold-trap comes in handy: the more stuff which freezes on to this trap, the less background is seen by the detector, and the smoother your curves are.

For one night only...

Tomorrow is the big day for the Stern-Gerlach experiment.

Roughing pumps: check
Pressure gauge: check
Turbo pump: check
Oven heating: check

The detector is on standby, the liquid nitrogen is still liquid...

As you can see I am a bit excited by the whole thing. To tell you the truth I never really got over the loss of my nice big Stern-Gerlach experiment: If you look at the photo you can see part of the "Atomic beam source" which is a souped up version of the good old Stern-Gerlach device. I'm the guy on the left caressing a cryo pump. It was an emotional affair between me and the Atomic Beam Source, and I got in way too deep. It's not healthy for one man to spend so much time and energy looking after one gizmo.



But tomorrow, for one day, I can be an expert again, and not the poor fucker with broken nerves and broken dreams who does the baker's run. I can be important, needed, coolly guiding the detector wire with an expert hand into the beam of polarized atoms, tuning the oven for optimal intensity...

Please only leave a comment if you have a degree in psychology, or at least saw a talk show with the theme "Men who fall hopelessly in love with plasma-driven turbo-pumped atomic mother-fucking beam sources".

Liquid Nitrogen

Today I tested the cold-trap of the Stern-Gerlach experiment. This is just a steel container which holds liquid nitrogen, and is represented as the blue thing in the above diagram. Well it's not quite just a steel container, it's actually a steel container with a pipe welded through it. Only a small proportion of atoms which leave the oven will fly in the wanted direction (straight forwards and through the pipe). Most of the others will hit the cold-trap, and stick to the cold walls. This is good, because they can't cause problems by then flying somewhere they shouldn't.

As part of the intensive research that goes into every post I write here (or actually every post I write soberly here) I typed "liquid nitrogen" into google. What do you think is the top hit? The ubiquitous Wikipedia, maybe, or a company which delivers liquid nitrogen, or a site explaining chemistry and phase transitions of nitrogen? Wrong, wrong, wrong, the top hit is of course "1001 things to do with liquid nitrogen". (Hello Mr. googlebot, by the way).

I'm not really sure if the liquid nitrogen cold-trap is really needed, as the turbo pump is pretty nifty alone. However, someone already explained to me that it is never a bad thing to have liquid nitrogen in your experiment. Even if the experiment doesn't work, you can freeze things, or blow them up, or pretend you're in a disco. And when you've finished you can clean the floor with it. If I ever build a house it will be designed to be cleaned by liquid nitrogen. I think I will need a rather understanding wife.

Bollocks

I'm back where I was a couple of posts ago. I have a bloated feeling somewhere in my digestive system, and am fucking annoyed. It all started so well on Thursday, with a piece of linoleum, a barbecue and a crate of beer.

Our ex-flatmate Sabine agreed to come over and lay the piece of linoleum in our hall. She is doing an apprenticeship as an interior designer and did a very nice job. I sort of stood around and made encouraging sounds. The hall now looks much nicer, which is great.

Being a sensible sort of person, Sabine is quite happy to work for beer and sausages, so we then moved on to Juliane's birthday barbecue. In short it got quite late and I got quite drunk, and I've been feeling shit ever since I woke up on Friday.

My original plan today was to go cycling and drink a couple of beers whilst watching the final. My depressed-as-fuck backup plan is to eat some mashed potatoes, clean my room and do the washing.

The worst thing about this backup plan is that I have no distractions left. Without beer, world cup, bicycles or Stern-Gerlach experiments the truth is plain to fucking see: I need to get a plan, a job and a future.

Stern-Gerlach woohoo!

That is more like it. The guys at the mechanical workshop here rebuilt the motor system so that the detector moves automatically across the beam. Together with Fabian I put everything together and it works. woohoo!

If you've not been following this, check out these previous posts!

Introduction to the Stern-Gerlach experiment.

First measurements, with an explanation of what you can see in the plot.

Hello world.

I'm really drunk (Burp!). Wahey!. Germany 0 Italy 2. I did my best supporting Germany, but they lost, and I don't know if I mentioned that I'm very drunk.

Yours, drunkenly, Phil.

Quick Lemon Cheesecake (first iteration)

Disclaimer: I haven't tried eating this yet. This creation is lurking in my fridge. If this should happen to be the last ever post of this blog, I would recommend that you don't follow this recipe.

Ingredients:

1 Packet of hobnobs. You can also use digestives, but I ate the packet I brought along from Hamburg specially.

100g butter.

50g brown sugar.

1 tin of condensed milk.

250ml whipping cream.

2 lemons.

Notes for people residing in Germany:

1/ Hobnobs aren't easy to get your hands on. Handelshof sell Hobbits, which are basically the same. If you are in Hamburg, then the English bookshop in Stresemannstrasse is the place to go for biscuits.

2/ Germans don't seem to make a distinction between "evaporated milk" and "condensed milk". The standard stuff you can buy which is labelled Kondensmilch (Germans put it in their coffee) is what the English call evaporated milk. What we need is condensed milk, which is much sweeter. If you mix sugar into the evaporated milk until it becomes sickly sweet then you get condensed milk.

Instructions:

Crush the biscuits, mix with the butter and brown sugar. Tip this mixture into a flat dish, and press it down.

Mix together the cream, condensed milk and the juice of the lemons. Tip this on top of the biscuit mix.

Put the dish in the fridge and wait for 2 hours.

That's it!

Well played, and good luck to Portugal

Oh dear, England lost a football match. Maybe Rooney was a bit unlucky to be sent off, but we didn't look like scoring in the 60 minutes when we had 11 players, and the team gave a good "backs to the wall" display with 10 men. Over 120 minutes a draw was probably fair enough, as Portugal passed well and had a few chances to win the game too.

You've got to give credit to Ricardo, the goalkeeper of Portugal. He guessed right on all four occasions in the penalty shootout, and made three good saves.

We have to look on the bright side of this defeat:

1/ We actually won games against Paraguay, Ecuador and Trinidad and Tobago.
2/ We got further than Spain and Holland.
3/ We got just as far as Brazil and Argentina.
4/ We are better at taking penalties than Switzerland!
5/ We're going to win the tennis. Come on Andy!

We wuz robbed!

Bleeding diving Portuguese! Stay on your feet for 10 seconds, you feckin' Alice-banded nancy boy. Stood on your bollocks, you say! When I was young we got kicked in the balls at least twice per match and nobody ever complained. Anyway what the feck were your bollocks doing on the pitch to be stood on in the first place:

La da da, I'm Portuguese and need to fall over. Oh no, I fell down in the middle of a FOOTBALL PITCH and there are people running around still. And one of them stood on my knackers!

And as for the ref, what can you expect from an bloody Argy! Carragher taking a Penalty too quickly? What the blazes is he there for? He walks from the half-way line, takes the ball, puts it on the spot, and then surprises the ref by taking a penalty. What did he expect him to do, sit down and have afternoon tea with the goalkeeper? Go on ref, take the Malvinas and stick them where the sun don't shine!

Anyway who gives a damn, we're going to win the Tennis.

Your speed is 10km/h

I'm tired out today, probably because I had stomach pains yesterday and the day before. As soon as anything is wrong with my stomach I get very quickly depressed, so don't read this if you want cheering up.

For some reason or other my legs have stopped working properly. I have the feeling that I've run a marathon, or cycled lots, but I've done sod all. This morning I had trouble walking up a flight of stairs, and I needed a break after 10 steps. On the way to the shop I was clocked by the "check your speed" device at 10km/h. Even if you can't do metric, this is slow. It's not just that there is no strength in my legs, there is also no coordination. Every five steps or so one foot jumps out at an odd angle, and I have to stop, check where I wanted to go to, and start off again.

After lunch I went home for an afternoon nap, which helped a bit, but not too much. On the way home for the second time I was overtaken by five people, none of whom looked particularly to be in a rush.

The highlight of the day was being almost knocked off my bicycle by some blind bitch. Honestly it was, I got to swear and point and look indignated, and it was the only thing I've done properly all day long. I'm pissed off, so I'll force myself to eat something, then try to go to sleep.

Wise words

I didn't mean for this to turn into a two-days-late world-cup blog, but I must quote from my good self, one post down:

It seems that they [England] have finally got the hang of nutritional advice

Balls and hats

I bought an all-rubber cricket ball over the internet yesterday, which hopefully will look a bit like the one in the picture. This is called thinking ahead. Of course football is all the rage at the moment, but it only takes one defeat and it's all over. England are preparing for their match against Ecuador, and it seems that they have finally got the hang of nutritional advice, too, a full week after I sort of did. It's rather hot in Germany, and here are the wise words of Sven-Goran Eriksson:

'Maybe the conditions will suit Ecuador better, but there are things we can do too, things we are already doing, in fact. Drinking enough fluid is the most important, not just a couple of hours before the game but starting a couple of days before the game. Eating the right meals is important, too, but not as important as drinking.'

If they had any sense, and if FIFA rules allowed it, they would also be wearing a hat. I guess that for the centre-backs it could be a bit of a hindrance, but David Beckham would definitely be better off swinging in his crosses with a straw hat on. I bought a very nice wide-brimmed Stetson sun hat from "Hut Broemmer", and can confirm that it is a most useful device.

So the hatless English will probably wilt in the heat, and lose to those damned sun-burnt Ecuadorians who are used to those tropical temperatures of, how hot does it get in Quito again? Oh 19.4 +- 0.6 degrees.

Publication

I am in the process of writing a paper about what I did for my PhD thesis. I have been rather slow in writing until now, but this week I actually wrote some stuff. To be honest I had written sod all between the start of March and now, but the gap is quite useful.

Firstly I have forgotten what I wrote in the thesis, so now I can go back and check if it made sense or not. Most of the time (but not always) it does. Secondly the rest of the group (unless they are reading this blog) will be so surprised that I finally got round to writing something that they will hopefully put their names immediately to whatever I might happen to write.