Fire Moths

Juggling with torches in the dark last night, I felt a little brave. I'd managed to burn a few arm hairs, and gain a soot mark on one arm. Then came the moths, and I felt not quite so brave. They were flying around and between the columns of fire.

Imagine wearing a jet pack, and trying to avoid three flying spinning tubes, each 10 times your length, spouting a giant flame at one end. The flame is about 10 times your height, and will burn you to death if it hits you. This is possibly the ultimate extreme sport, comparable perhaps only to Douglas Adam's solar flare surfing.

Flare-riding is one of the most exotic and exhilarating sports in existence, and those who can dare and afford it are amongst the most lionized men in the Galaxy. It is also of course stupefyingly dangerous — those who don't die riding invariably die of sexual exhaustion at one of the Daedalus Club's Apres-Flare parties.

I'm sure a couple of moths got surprised by a flame and spiraled blackened to the floor, but I don't know what they got up to afterwards. I went for a good night's sleep.

Coins

I have an almighty collection of very clean 1 cent coins. No vending machine will take them, and I can rarely be bothered to look through my pockets at the checkout to find the exact change, and get a couple of coins more. If I empty the pockets carefully when I put the trousers in the wash, these coins end up on my floor. If not, they end up in the washing machine, then on my floor.

Yesterday I found a use for 1 cent coins: demonstrating the independence of horizontal and vertical motion. Some people are surprised by the following experiment, so I showed it to my student.


The three coins need to be in contact, and the two small coins must balanced on the edge of the table. Hold the top 2€ coin with one thumb, and flick the bottom 2€ coin towards it with the other hand. The top 1c should fly off much faster than the one on the left, but they should start to fall at the same time. See which coin hits the floor first. It helps here if the floor is hard enough for a coin to make a nice clink when it hits the floor.

If you do this in the pub (or anywhere where someone else does the cleaning up), you can dispose of 1c coins quickly and painlessly, and learn about the world at the same time.

Experimental Physics

The former right-back of Torpedo Entenhausen is trying to learn physics, and has hired me for private tuition. He is paying me in food, which suits us both fine.

His physics course sounds very boring. He sits through long lectures, and then sits in problem groups where the tutor solves the problem on the blackboard. After hours of tuition, he has done nothing himself, and learnt almost nothing. He has a full set of notes, but it would have been far cheaper and easier just to photocopy them all.

Over the past few years I have developed a very experimental view of physics. Physics should start with an experiment and end with an experiment. It is impossible to understand a physical property unless you can relate it to an experiment. His course doesn't seem to do experiments. Maybe it costs money, and takes too much effort. It is cheap and easy to write P=m*v, but expensive to find a cannon and a place to shoot it. The exam questions are full of mathematical detail, of vectors, equations and calculations, and of units. But they never ask "How do we know this?" or "How could you test this law?".

So yesterday, after a bout of mathematical problem solving, I tried to change matters. We did the following experiments, first in his garden, then in a children's playground:

1/ Vitamin pill rocket, as a demonstration of the conservation of momentum You put a fizzy pill in the lid of a tube of vitamin pills, and fill the tube 1/3 full of water. Reattach the lid, turn upside down and place on a flat surface and retreat. Lid pops off, Water goes down, tube goes up. Momentum conserved. Neighbours impressed.

2/ Roundabout, as a demonstration of the conservation of angular momentum. Get on. Start turning. Move to the middle, move to the outside. See when the roundabout turns faster.

3/ Roundabout, as a demonstration of the centrifugal force. Start turning, place ball on floor, watch ball.

4/ Roundabout, as a demonstration of the Coriolis force. Both get on. Start turning, throw ball to other person. Stop turning. Turn other way. Throw ball. Throw up.

I sadly forgot to take a pendulum on the roundabout to demonstrate the principle of the Foucault pendulum. Next week. I like roundabouts. Why are they only given to children? Why don't physics institutes have roundabouts in the Foyer?

I think I could get to like physics again, as long as I don't have to spend too much time with physicists, and as long as it isn't a job requirement.

Change of profile

I have changed the description of the blog. For the past few months it was subtitled:

"The diary of a soul who doesn't know what he's doing, or even trying to do, but is blogging it anyway".

A new job

I managed to do it. In the past 12 months I sent out 6 job applications. I kept trying to up the rate to at least once a week, but never managed it. I got invited to two interviews, so I'm rather surprised that I found a job. I've decided to keep the details of the job out of this blog in order to give it a decent chance of working.

The job doesn't require any knowledge of physics, which made applying for it a lot easier. I never got to the point of coming to terms with the depressed endings of the past two jobs well enough that I could talk about them with a bunch of strangers. It was a relief to not have to discuss the contents of my PhD at all. When applying for this job I was relieved not to have to explain why I'm an expert with glass tubes and ultrasound devices, while feeling my stomach turn with the weight of perceived failure.

So I've started something completely different. It should pay well enough for me to live comfortably, and hopefully won't interfere with my evenings and weekends too much. With a bit of luck I'll have some nice little projects to work on. At the moment that's all I want in life. My projects won't make me rich and famous and won't change the world, but I'm happy to leave that sort of stuff to others.

Overheated

Being driven back from the Netherlands at the weekend, I passed a couple of cars on the hard shoulder that had become too hot in a traffic jam, and needed a break to cool down again. This is how I feel today. I am tired and sunburnt, and my face feels like it wants to shrivel up and pull my eyes closed.

I was in the Netherlands for the Dutch juggling convention, and spent too much time drinking, juggling and standing in the sun, and not enough time sleeping. I'm trying to change my life so that I catch myself when I'm getting carried away, and stop before I tire myself completely, but I didn't manage this at the weekend. On Friday night thoughts of time, tiredness and limits just weren't in my head. I was thinking only about music, games, laughter and juggling.

So I need to sleep, stay out of the sun, rest and get back to looking for a job. I will recover soon enough, and can look at the good parts of the weekend:I have met lots of new people, appeared in some nice photos, and learned how to flick up a football with my heel.

Dance if you wanna dance.

My professor in Erlangen spent several years persuading me to get out of the laboratory more and take dancing classes. At the time I was too fascinated by the beauty of quantum states to bother with things like music, rhythm, movement and women. Two nervous breakdowns later, I decided to give it a try.

Because of a previous juggling performance for the culture office of the university, I got 20% off. But because I'm not a student, I had to pay 50% extra. I spent several minutes debating with the culture office whether I should pay 30% more (the obvious answer) or 20% more (the correct answer). You don't just get a reduction on the original price, you get a reduction on the increase!

If you don't believe this, ask for a 50% pay rise this month, then a 50% pay cut next month, and see what happens. I have a copy of "How to Lie With Statistics" by Darrell Huff on my lap, which explains this better than I can. I can thoroughly recommend it. It was a good read and may well have saved me 4 Euros.

Back to the dancing, I found an Italian Erasmus student as a dance partner, and have decided that the Salsa arm movements are the same as a juggling cascade, but with a pause after every third throw.

German Police in Sense of Humour Schock

I am in a good mood today. I have an extended job interview with an IT company tomorrow, and took a Salsa class last night. When I'm in a good mood I try to make boring situations as fun as possible.
So on the way back from the supermarket, stuck at a red light, I tried to stay on my bike for as long as possible. I started off edging slightly forwards with the front brake on and turning the handlebars to balance. As I approached the bumper of the car in front I stopped completely and used my left leg to balance. All the time I was being watched by a police van behind me and a rather pretty girl stood at the lights using her phone. As my left leg was thrown to and fro, the police van used their loudspeaker to announce something (I sadly don't know what it was), and when I stopped balancing and turned round, they were laughing heartily. The girl smiled, ran her hand through her hair, and carried on texting. The lights turned green and we all went our separate ways.

Torpedo Entenhausen 2 - VfL Linden 0

I have transferred my football writing to the official forum of the spare-time league in Bochum. Most match reports follow the standard procedure of discussing goals, fouls, offside decisions, the score and whether a team deserved to win. The official description of the first half of Torpedo Entenhausen's match this week is:

In the middle of the first half, our defensive midfielder perfectly wellied the ball into the top branch of a tree. The zenith of the ball's parabola matched the height of the tree exactly, and the twigs held the ball in the position where other stadiums have their corporate boxes. The ball was able to watch the match from this position until I knocked it down with a perfectly thrown plank. Because of this, the goalless first half sort of passed me by.

Arbeitszeugnis

I got my Arbeitszeugnis (a kind of public reference) from my job in Bochum today. Last year I wrote that I wanted my reference to say

Mr. endofphil came unprepared into the job, was unable to master life's basics such as eating and sleeping, showed a complete lack of interest for anything whatsoever and subsequently spent 6 months staring into space. His only lasting impression was drunkenly juggling lots of mandarines at the christmas party.

Of course my reference couldn't say this, as it is a product of depression and self-loathing. I'm probably the only person who could write this about myself, and can be sure that anyone else in the world will find a couple of nice things to say about me.

I opened the letter with a feeling of dread and sadness. It was an intrusion from very unhappy times into my present life. It was a reminder of things I've been trying to forget about. But it says some nice things about me. It lists the things I did in the job when I wasn't depressed. This confuses me.

In order to get a job as a physicist, I have to be able to defend my work in previous jobs. I have to be able to live with the mistakes and successes of previous years, and explain how these experiences will be useful for the future. I have to be able to do this without shaking or crying. I can't just pretend that I fell to earth knowing lots of stuff.

Or I could give in to my natural instinct, and say that I failed at being a physicist. I could then do something completely different without worrying about the past. Until it goes wrong again.

Torpedo Entenhausen 1 - FC Porno Villa 0

Mark Twain wrote

My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years.

The major reason for the thirty years are the genders of inanimate objects. If you don't know them, even the most simple sentence has a 2/3 chance of being wrong. My attempts to describe the matches of Torpedo Entenhausen in German are often confounded by a combination of alcohol and der/die/das confusion. Yesterday I made a small step towards learning German: the word for a football pitch is masculine, der Fussballplatz. I found this out because, as manager, I needed to know whether the pitch was waterlogged or not. During a couple of calls to find and pass on this information I was corrected.

"So, the pitch. Is it playable?"
"Yes, HE is playable"

So, one noun down, a few thousand to go, and things are fine until summer comes and we play on grass. A grass pitch is also called a 'Feld', which is neutral. Yet it is still a pitch, which is still masculine. I have been learning German for nigh on twenty years, and hold little hope of mastering it in another ten.

Well anyway, the pitch (male) was playable, and the defence (female, but consisting of four males) of Torpedo held firm. We shot the winning goal (neutral) in the second half (female). I wonder how long you have to write like this until insanity (male) sets in.

Kickerfreunde 3 - Torpedo Entenhausen 7

I have progressed to player-manager of Torpedo Entenhausen. This week I was only the manager, as I hurt my foot the day before the match. Manager me fined myself a week's wages, which player me felt was rather unfair but financially irrelevant. It's times like this that the days and nights playing Championship Manager '93 don't seem wasted.

I don't like to take too much credit for the victory, but I did persuade everyone to turn up, on time, at the right ground. I also brought along the kit and two balls to warm up with. As I've never classed organization as one of my strength's, I'm quietly pleased with the start to the 2009 season.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I see that the Bank of England have started printing money. It seems to be time to turn paper money into solid assets. I bought all the juggling equipment I need last week, and a new pair of football boots. I could stock up on tinned food. One of the comments below the story suggests buying a wheelbarrow to push your money around in when hyperinflation sets in. It would also be a good way of moving tinned food around. While I wait for financial meltdown I could put it on my balcony and fill it with plants. A wheelbarrow it is then.

Diddle der der, Diddle der der, Diddle der der Dee

A while ago, I wrote that being woken by a telephone makes me nervous. Between 2001 and 2005 a telephone ringing at unsocial hours was almost certainly a call from the control room of the Hermes particle-physics experiment, saying that something was wrong with a souped-up Stern-Gerlach experiment, and that I should stop sleeping and start fixing it. At first it was an exciting challenge, as Stern-Gerlach experiments are fun things. But fun things can become tiresome if you're forced to do them in the middle of a good night's sleep, and by 2005 I was exhausted, nervous, and depressed. The phone calls weren't the only reason, but they didn't help. I dreaded the sound of the phone. I knew that a call would lead to stress, meetings and being made to feel useless. I imagined destroying the phone with a blunt object, or sinking it deep into the river Elbe, weighed down with a couple of stones, and hearing the ringtone fade away...

Now logically, my fear of a ringing phone should have ended by 2006. Nobody rang me any more about Stern-Gerlach devices, and I knew this, but if my sleep was disturbed by a phone ringing, I woke up feeling panicky and nervous. This may or may not have something to do with Pavlov's dogs.

This week I have been trying to change my thought process. When my phone rings I say to myself, "I hope it is a friend wanting to do something, which will be good. I will be hopeful and answer the phone". This morning I was woken by my phone ringing. For two seconds I felt sad and negative, and a little nervous. The move to grab the phone was a slightly panicky motion. I then remembered to say that it would probably be a friend, and felt a little better. It was a friend, and there was no need to feel nervous.

Devaluation

There was a time when being called 'Sir' was a time for respect. Damsels in distress, holy grails and all that. After living in Germany for a while, it appeared to be an anachronistic nicety. Now it is a short and polite form for 'Rich useless fat cunt'. Take, for example, Sir Fred Goodwin or Sir Allen Stanford. The whole Knighthood business relies on the respect of the common people, and its been a while since any of these so-called knights challenged anyone to a jousting duel in the name of righteousness. What if 'Sir' becomes slang for 'useless fat bastard'? My husband has turned into a right sir.

It would be quite easy and painless to devalue a name, but how about money? When people retire, they rely on the following generation to do their bidding, carrying them round the world on ferries and eventually changing their underwear. They either get their offspring to work to fund this, or rely on their savings and pension to persuade other people's offspring to do it. But what if the next generation say no? What if they devalue the old money, and return to bartering? What does a Sir Fred Goodwin have to offer them? I hope he has some loving children, and more than a bundle of promises to pay the bearer whatever he wants. Promises can be broken, and bundles of promises can end up as firewood.

I promise to pay any good friend who leaves a comment the sum of one 'I owe you one mate'.

Citation Needed

Could there be a more German photo than this, taken at the end of my road? Even a picture of Lederhosen-clad men drinking beer, eating Bratwurst, leering at bedirndled Fräuleine with a backdrop of Oompah bands and mountains could not capture the spirit of a country as well as this photo. The literal translation is

Access to the railway is forbidden! Section 58 of the regulations of construction and operation of urban railways.

What makes this so very German is

1/ Verboten! Verboten! Das ist hier Verboten!

2/ The little section thingy. A German kezboard even has this on top as 'shift' + '3', relegating the local currency to an Alt-Gr manouvre. Referencing the correct paragraph of legal texts is obviously more important than paying for stuff.

3/ The appeal to a list of rules, rather than to common sense. Section 58 of the rules does of course exist, and says, in legalese, that people should keep off the tracks.

In England a similar sign would say "Please Keep off the tracks", although some more abrupt ones may omit the 'Please'. The specific authority telling you this isn't important, because this is a sign. It carries its own polite authority.

When I become King, all signs will be polite, logical, and carry proven scientific statements backed up by useful references.

Cramp

Of Torpedo Entenhausen's 26 games last year, I took part in 25. Once I came on for the last ten minutes to waste some time, but it felt like an important contribution at the time. The game I missed was due to injury. After playing the last few minutes of a game with cramp, my legs didn't recover. The calf muscles were permanently stiff and a couple of days later I couldn't stretch my legs out. This made walking difficult and painful, so I stayed in bed and got depressed. I got a lift to see the doctor, who told me to take some painkillers, take it easy, and not play football for a while.

I managed to do something similar yesterday. After a week full of doubts and confusion, I came to life on the football pitch. It was only a Sunday kickabout, but I ran around like an idiot, chased every ball, and was in a great mood. As things were going so well, I didn't want to stop. So I kept running until I got cramp. Now walking is slightly painful, especially uphill. I will try to take it easy for a day or two.

Tobleron-e

I decided to liven up my shopping experience by trying to use a Toblerone as the 'Next Customer' bar. This needed a certain amount of planning, as some supermarkets sell Toblerones but have separators with a square cross-section, and some have triangular separators but only flat bars of chocolate.

The supermarket chain Rewe have both triangular-shaped separators and triangular-boxed chocolate with nougat, honey and almonds. They were therefore rewarded with my custom. I actually bought more than I needed to, as I attempted to give body to my ruse. I thus approached the checkout with a full basket of shopping and one Toblerone.

While discussing my plans with a friend last week, I realised that in all my time in Germany I have been pronouncing the name Toblerone wrong. I have been using the english tow-bler-own, whereas the correct pronunciation is somewhere between towbler-owner and tobbler-owner. I also never knew there was a bear hidden in the picture of the Matterhorn. Actually, just sod off and read the wikipedia page.

Anyway, I approached the checkout and tried to make it look like I had two lots of shopping. I decided to go for two mixed-bags of shopping with apples in front, bananas behind, cereal in front, milk behind. In the middle was a Toblerone, it's axis pointing across the band, but with a 10 degree tilt, as though it had been slightly thoughtlessly cast down. A respectful 15cm of empty band each side of the Toblerone made it clear that this was no standard grocery item.

An old lady approached the checkout, her arms struggling to clutch her groceries. In any other circumstances I would have shifted my things together to relieve her straining, but I was on a mission. I put the real customer separator behind my second lot of goods and ignored her visual pleas. She'd just have to hold on.

And then it didn't happen. The checkout lady just scanned everything through, including the Toblerone. She didn't even pause, or look twice, or smile.

Freibad

I went to a pub last night, and thought I was in for a good night when I got a bingo card. Sadly it wasn't a bingo card, but a reminder of how much I'd ordered. There are several things I didn't understand about this card.

1/ This open bookkeeping can't be in the pub's best interest. Surely either the drip-drip approach of ordering one drink after another, none of which costs much, or the drink-all-you-like-and-hand-over-your-wallet-at-the-end approach would extract more money. Being told exactly how much you've spent after every drink is rather annoying.

2/ 'Kein Eintritt' literally means 'No Entrance': You can't come in. But I was already in. Should I go out again? I decided to stay, as they probably meant 'Eintritt Frei', which is 'Entrance Free'. But they should have said so.

3/ The font used was Comic Sans, or something very similar.

4/ So there is no entrance fee, and no minimum order (kein Mindestverzehr). When did pubs in working-class towns like Bochum start expecting people to pay to go in to a pub, or tell them how much to order? It really was just a pub. No dancefloor, no DJ, nice dark furniture, a billiard table, all the usual pub stuff. The next time I go in, I will walk up to the bar, put on my best Father Dougal accent and ask "Would you like some money?", then follow up with "Is it alright if I order just the one pint, or should I start with a dozen?. I don't want to be putting you out there".

5/ What other things don't they have that other pubs don't have? No entrance fee, no minimum order, no cock-fighting, no fat naked men. Maybe it's too much psychotherapy, but why not advertise with what you do have. Freibad - Cold beer and hot food, solid dark furniture, friendly service and a bit of music. Had they said that I may have stayed for another beer.

Party Girl

I haven't had the pleasure of blogging while drunk for quite a while. I cut back on the old alcohol consumption to stop the cycle of euphoria and desperation. Tonight I agreed to a juggling appearance for the culture office of Bochum university. I did a little 3-ball juggle to Party Girl by Elvis Costello, and it went down very well. This has been one of my forays into perfectionism. I've been trying to cut down on them, and to allow myself little mistakes, but the plan was to juggle perfectly to every beat and lyric of the song.

I know that I can drive myself crazy looking trying to do things perfectly, so I spent the last five minutes before the show convincing myself that it is fine to drop a ball. I picked out two members of the front row to throw the ball back to me if it fell off the stage. I convinced myself that it would be fine to make some mistakes, and that it would be done and finished in 3 minutes and 23 seconds.

It was finished in this time, and I had time to get quite drunk, which is enough for me to load up a picture that is somewhat amusing, but which wouldn't pass my sober blogging threshold. Maybe you can do better in convincing the world to follow your beliefs.

Bicycle Brakes

Some would call it laziness, but I think I have been a victim of "Acclimatization by Slow Change", to use the phrase of R.V. Jones. The brakes of my bicycle have been getting less and less effective over the last few weeks. I took lots of measures to counter this: first pulling harder at the back brake, then pulling harder at the front brake, then dragging a foot on the floor.

By yesterday the procedure to stop my bike was quite complex. Pulling as hard as possible on both brakes achieved only a negative third derivative of distance with respect to time. I was getting faster, but not as quickly as I would have done without applying the brakes*. To stop accelerating, I had to go into a slalom with both brakes on. By bobbing up and down in the saddle and thrusting the bike out at each turn it is possible to slalom quite sharply. This still left me going at a constant speed. To actually stop I had to stop slaloming, put the left foot to the floor and then turn the bike ninety degrees at the last second.

Today I decided to mend the brakes. I just had to loosen and tighten two screws, and took about five minutes. Now I can safely propel myself over the handlebars whenever I feel like it. I will try to tighten the brakes sooner the next time.

* If you understand this, you will also understand the Bild Zeitung headline on the German economy this week "Growth shrinks" (originally "Wachstum schrumpft")