Vfl Bochum 2 - FC Schlake 05 1

The best ways to annoy fans of FC Schalke 04 are

1/ To ask when they last won the title.
2/ To misspell or mispronounce their club name.

Credit must therefore go to Carmen Thomas for a now legendary slip of the tongue, and to the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, who today reported the Bochum full-back Oliver Schröder as asking "Do we feel sorry for the Schlaker?" (his answer was no, by the way).

Ob uns die Schlaker [sic] ein bisschen leid tun? Warum? Ich glaube nicht, das sie andersrum mit uns Mitleid gehabt hätten. 39 pubkte [sic] sehen in der Tabelle nciht [sic] schlecht aus.

Torpedo Entenhausen 2 - Dead Trousers 2

Musical memories from german lessons at school in England:

1/ Singing a german cover of Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega, with something about a Currywurst, and the line "Wo ist Roland, oder Meier, oder Herbert Grönemeyer". This translates as "Where is Roland, or Meier, or Herbert Grönemeyer". I don't know who Roland or Meier are, but Herbert Grönemeyer is a famous singer from Bochum, who once sang a song about a Currywurst.

2/ Reading an article about the contents of Herbert Grönemeyer's dustbin, which had been sifted through by intrepid journalists, and then building a shrine in the classroom to worship this rubbish container.

3/ Finding out that a top band were called "The Dead Trousers", and finding this funny.

Over ten years have passed: I have no idea who covered Tom's Diner, I have forgotten quite what Herbert Grönemeyer had thrown away, and I have discovered that the Dead Trousers are actually quite good, despite coming from Dusseldorf. [1]

As you may have guessed from the title, "The Dead Trousers" is also the name a football team in the second division of the spare-time league in Bochum, and they are not very good at all. Torpedo Entenhausen should have won easily, having led 2-0 for most of the match and enjoyed most of the possession, but we then conceded two quick goals in the final minutes and drew 2-2. Still, that was at least the first point of the season.

[1] This may appear uncalled for, but in order to get a residence permit in Bochum, you have to sing a song by Herbert Grönemeyer and agree to dislike Dusseldorf.

EeeyEe0e

Yesterday I had a confidence crisis at work. It started off with an equation with too many E's in it. It looked to me pretty much like the post title, and described an electric field entering a region, whilst oscillating according to a power of Euler's number (e), and pointing in the direction of the y-axis, but only one unit (einheit) long.

So in summary, Electric (E), Einheit (e), Eintritt (e), Euler (e). I looked at this equation and was thrown into despair. It is an amazing ability to be able to look at an equation and immediately recognise the significance of each term, to see that the direction of a vector doesn't depend on a constant value, or that the time-dependence doesn't depend on the direction. I looked at the equation, and could only see and say "EEEEEE". That was it. The same understanding as a five-year-old.

I recovered slightly, read the foreword to Calculus made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson, and found a book where they used "Incidence" instead of "Eintritt", and worked around the e for "Einheit". With most of the E's gone, things made sense again.

This happened to me once before, when I found an equation consisting of 17 J's and pretty much nothing else. I remember intensely wishing to never see a physics book again. The next time this happens, I will try to remember this advice: drop the book (or lecturer), but keep at the subject.

Gletzenbrod

I was looking through photos of a Party in the kitchen in Erlangen, and saw a recipe for a christmas fruit bread in the background. I baked this bread for christmas, but then lost the recipe. The resolution was just good enough to figure out the words, so I decided to bake one. The recipe came from my flatmate Martin's mum who lives in Zwiesl. The name should actually be written "Kletzenbrot", meaning "dried pear bread", but in Zwiesel the pronunciation is more like "Gletzenbrod". It is most nutricious and tastes even better when buttered.

This recipe involves soaking things overnight!

Ingredients

For the dough:

500g flour,
150g sugar,
1 packet of yeast.

For the fruit:
500g dried pears
500g dried plums
A few dried figs
Some nuts
Raisins/sultanas
Candied fruit peel
Cinnamon
Cloves

This list is quite flexible, but the dried pears must be included. A rule of thumb is to make sure you have more fruity stuff than dough.

Procedure

1/ Soak the dried pears in sugar water overnight. Don't throw the water away until the very end!

2/ Get a good night's sleep.

3/ Get out of bed, then make the dough using the flour, sugar, yeast and pear water. The dough should be firm and give the impression that it could hold a bread-like form in the near future. Leave to stand and ferment a little.

4/ Chop up the dried fruit and nuts etc. In the meantime the dough should have risen slightly. If it hasn't, convince yourself that it has.

5/ Set the oven to 200 degrees Celcius.

6/ Knead the fruity stuff and spices into the dough. Make two (or more, or less if you wish) loaves on a baking tray, coat with pear water and bake until done (about an hour, but it never hurts to look before).

7/ Tip the pear water away.

Here are some alternative recipes for Kletzenbrote (in German).

Higgs Bosun

Having left the world of particle physics far behind, I missed the excitement of the Large Hardon Collider in Cern in the last couple of weeks. An accelerator which has been sexed up so much in the past years was heading for a fall. Phrases like "finding the God particle" and "recreating the conditions of the big bang" may be propagated by journalists in search of a headline, but must have originated with physicists overly keen to sell their product.

So a Magnet breaking from its support and blowing out lots of Helium can become a big story. I have long regarded broken, burnt, flooded or leaky magnets as an intregal part of a particle accelerator, but the public response to the Times article is strong and crazy in equal parts. Special attention should be paid to the comments by Amelie in London (surely a delightful piece of trolling),

'Bosun' or 'boatswain' not boson! Does no-one at The Times use their spell-checker?

to Walter E. Wallis in Palo Alto

It is a scientific breakthrough, but when something breaks it is an engineering error?

and to Mark Bergner in Chicago

Not to make light of a bad situation, but how seriously can you take a dozen scientists yelling, "Run for your lives" in a squeaky high-pitched helium-induced voice?

The Möhnesee

My easter weekend wasn't nearly as depressing as last year's. I finally got round to doing what I'd always wanted to do as a kid: play ducks and drakes on the Möhnesee.

The Möhnesee was the main target of Operation Chastise in the second world war, as planes of the RAF attacked the dam with Bouncing Bombs. The bombers flew over the jut of land visible here (this is where I took the photo, too) before releasing the bombs around 400m from the dam wall. The fifth bomb breached the wall, sending a wave of water down the Möhne valley and into the Ruhr.

I got the train from Bochum to the other side of Dortmund, then cycled to the dam, ate lunch at the rather expensive Seehof restaurant (the reservoir is now a major tourist centre) and walked to the jut of land in order to launch a flat stone or two at the wall. The water was too choppy for any serious assault, but I got one stone to make four jumps before it sank far short of the wall.

The dam wall has a promenade so you can walk across, or possibly even drive across with a car. I stood on the wall for a couple of minutes, wondering if you could hide a 3-ton bomb in a fake sausage van. Fit the bomb with a hydrostatic fuse, drive onto the wall, tip it into the lake and run...

I will now try to change the tone to a more sombre one. The raid was part of the "Total War", where civilian targets were selected in order to damage the war production. The aim was to kill workers, destroy factories and homes and to restrict water and food supplies and energy production. Over 1000 civilians were killed, including hundreds of Prisoners of War. Of the 133 aircrew involved, 53 died, and those who returned safely had remote prospects of surviving the war. I'm glad that I can go to the Möhnesee on a bicycle and not in a Lancaster bomber, and I'm glad that when I throw stones at a lake, nobody is throwing anything back.