It is impossible to stand on one leg.

I'm in Erlangen again, and drunk again. The most telling signs of irresponsible use of alcohol and other intoxicating substances so far:

1/ The two bottles of exploded beer in our freezer. Someone put them in to chill, but now the beer can only be consumed as an ice slush. Maybe someone will drink it soon, as we have even run out of Oettinger and are getting desperate.

2/ My flatmate Timo playing the theme from the A team whilst drinking a beer and smoking something or other for breakfast.

3/ My housemate Katja using the scaffolding on the building site next door as the most convenient path between first and second floor balconies.

4/ Me walking straight into a set of traffic lights at 4am without a shirt on.

The beer festival in Erlangen has another week to go, but I only have to stick it out for 2 days.

SG Sundern 1- Torpedo Entenhausen 1

We secured our first away point of the season in a match which neither team deserved to lose (if you're being generous) or win (if you're being realistic). Lots of long ball punting, some poor finishing (I headed over from 6 yards, but I wasn't the worst culprit), a few nice moves, one great save from our keeper, and two hittings of the woodwork.

I wasn't sure if people still say that they hit the woodwork (germans say that they scored an Aluminium goal, Alu Treffer), but apparently the bbc do.

Skip this bit if you neither know nor care what Matlab is

I've cheered up since yesterday, and had quite a useful day at work. For a while I have been trying to work out what to do with Matlab. There are two major problems with this program: it costs a lot of money and lends itself to terrible programming.

I know that if I was to program something well, and document it well, then the main beneficiary would be the mathworks, for my successors would be doomed to keep buying Matlab licenses in order to use my program. This combination of vendor lock-in and awful programming caused me to question what the point of it all was, but now I understand that the two problems cancel each other out. By writing awful (but quick) Matlab code I can positively encourage my successors to use anything but Matlab. I will therefore do my best to confuse imaginary numbers with loop variables (i=1), to assign floats as numbers (sin = 3) and to find further ways of making fast but unreliable code.

Skip this bit if you don't care about my toenails

Yesterday I cut off two toenails. On one toe. The outer layer was about to fall off, so I gave it a good tug, only to find a second shrivelled toenail beneath. This I cut off too, leaving a small toenail which is growing slowly upwards and outwards and some hard skin. I had to vent the room for a few minutes to remove the cheesy smell of mouldy toenail, but now things are fine, and the toe stood up to a full game of football.

Chirp

This weeks exercise was about pulse compression, which is used in radar and ultrasound devices. By transmitting a pulse which increases in frequency, it is possible to find out accurately where distant things are. The name of the chirp comes from the likeness to birdsong, although some birds sound much more melodic than a linear chirp.

The exercise was a disaster in terms of educational value. It consisted of me telling some students what the answer would be if they took time to convolute the signal with itself, which is not the point of an exercise at all. The exercise is too complex for the students to solve themselves in the given time, so it ends up being a "look at me, I have the answer sheet, this is how it's done" thing. When someone designed the question, they must have felt great about themselves, showing how clever educational people can be, and what clever things can be done.

I am learning basketball, and the comparison between basketball training and electrical engineering training is telling. In basketball, the trainer explains something simple, like passing the ball, then tells you to do it 100 times. I'm sure there are lots of clever and complicated things that you can do in basketball, but there are also simple things which must first be learnt. I hope that if basketball training consisted of the trainer doing round-the-back slam dunks and explaining to the students that they couldn't do this yet, then people would see that he is a useless show-off.

Looking back, the honourable thing to have done would have been to sit there and let the students try to solve the exercise themselves (this approach seems to be an exception in our faculty). They would have failed, as the mathematics was too complicated to be solved in the given time. I could then have explained to my colleagues that it is useless as an exercise.

This would have taken more courage than I have at the moment, and would probably have achieved fuck all. I guess the colleagues would probably decide that the problem is with me and not with the exercise.

Torpedo Entenhausen 4- BW Bochum 3

BW stands for "Black-White", as the opposition played in black and white. Some related footballing two-tone colour facts:

1/ Teams from Essen, Oberhausen and Erfurt all call themselves Red-White and play in red and white strips. (see here, scroll down to "teams which say what they mean on the tin).

2/ Essen is the german word for food, and many Germans like to eat chips with ketchup and Mayonaisse: Red-White chips. Thus if you are not too fussy about your adjective endings, Rot-Weiss Essen is possibly the only edible football club.

3/ Except for the Hamburger SV.

4/ A favourite song of Arsenal fans, directed at rivals Tottenham Hotspur, is "You won the league in black and white". Still, their fans have had a shorter wait than those of FC Schalke 04, who claim to have been wearing blue when they last won the league in 1958.



5/ As far as I can tell, no team is named after the same colour twice. The governing coalition in Berlin, however, is called the red-red coalition. Maybe the politicians could form a football club and play in red and red stripes (or maybe hoops would look better).

Anyway, we won the first match of the season yesterday! I scored a stunning 12 yard looping header from a free-kick. Sadly it was an own goal, but I like to think of it as the killer goal-scoring instinct prevailing.

Black-White Bochum were down to 9 men by the end of the match due to two red cards for "pulling the emergency brakes", and we managed to force the win in the final minutes.

Problem group

I held my first problem group for electrical engineers this morning. I apologised in advance for using i's instead of j's for the square root of -1, and for not knowing much about electrical engineering.

On the plus side I managed to explain why the sky is blue, discuss the family line of Lord Rayleigh , and lose the chalk and the answer sheet (this is my trademark move).

I think that not really understanding the subject you are teaching could be the way to go. I quote from Bertrand Russell.

Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favour of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.

If you establish at the outset that you really don't know more than the pupils, then they start to think about what you are doing and whether it is correct or not, and are prepared to offer their own views. As long as you keep some kind of order to proceedings then everything is fine.

Odd bit of knowledge: Rather good physicist Paul Dirac studied electrical engineering.

Odd bit of english culture: Cheese Rolling.

Things you may not wish to know.

1/ I have one black toe nail and one white toe nail which is about to fall off. I would go to the doctor, but he/she would tell me to stop playing football, so I won't.

2/ I headed a goal from a free kick for Torpedo Entenhausen this week. I saw the ball at the last second, tried to stick my head in the way and nearly missed it. The result was a most professional-looking glancing header just inside the far post. We lost the game, but only just. Here is a completely unrelated piece of footballing commentary, in German.

3/ When sober, I can juggle 3 balls with my eyes shut for quite a while. The first requirement is to throw accurately. If the first ball thrown doesn't land in the other hand then it's a nonstarter. No matter how well you throw, though, the pattern will slowly drift away unless there is some feedback of how things are going wrong. Usually when juggling this feedback comes from the eyes, but provided the corrections are small it can come from the hands, by feeling exactly where the ball lands, and correcting the trajectory of the next ball.

(So if your blind and reeding this why not try and learn teh juggling)

I can't do the whole thing anything like this well, though.

4/ When drunk, I can't juggle two half-filled half-litre plastic bottles. I found this out whilst travelling with the U-Bahn. The moment of inertia of a half-filled bottle is a very funny thing indeed, and the bottle seems very reluctant to go round in a circle. Trying to compensate for this I gave the bottle an extra twirl, causing it to fly through the carriage and nearly hit someone on the head. He was surprisingly understanding.

5/ Australia won the cricket world cup. For some reason the final of this tournament which has, in the best traditions of cricket, been going on for ages, had to be settled in one day. And it rained. So they shortened the match and finished up playing in the dark.