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.

AWE welcomes applications from women and men, regardless of disability, sexuality, racial or ethnic origin, age or responsibility for dependants. The normal contractual retirement age at AWE is 65. Successful candidates will be selected solely on their ability to carry out the duties of the post. Because of the nature of
the work associated with these posts, they are required to meet special nationality rules and are open only to British Citizens. All selected candidates will be required to undergo security clearance.
Contact

Human Resources Dept, AWE, Aldermaston, Berkshire, , United Kingdom
Web: http://www.awe.co.uk

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.

A Time-honoured Tradition

Today, children, we will learn about nutrition. Now we all know that a healthy diet is important, and that drinking too much and eating fast food is bad for you, but sometimes the consequences are not immediately clear. Say, for example that you drink beer all afternoon, and fill up on a Kebab and chips. The chances are that you will survive this piece of foolishness, your liver will sort out the booze and you'll burn off the fat soon enough, and continue your life apparently none-the-worse.

Of course after a while you might lose the odd organ (I am missing the gall-bladder), but then it is hard to know exactly what caused this. Was it the wine and beer, or the fish and chips, or the turkey twizzlers, or too many hamburgers? Maybe something worse would have happened if you'd been eating salad the whole time.

Well this weekend I did some experiments on nutrition and sport. On Friday I went cycling with beer and kebab and chips lingering in my stomach from the night before. Until 20 miles I was feeling fine. I then got a cramp in one leg. After 30 miles I ate a salad (things were that bad!). After 40 miles I was suffering badly from the heat, and couldn't think quite straight. After 50 miles I was home and kaputt. Some guiding voice inside my head told me to eat lots of Spaghetti Bolognese, after which I fell asleep.

The next day I cycled 80 miles, despite the legs being a bit tired from the day before, and I felt a damn sight better. I then ate more Spagetti Bolognese, and cycled another 50-odd miles on Sunday.

So right now I have a new-found respect for my digestive system. It's quite amazing to think that a plate of Spaghetti Bolognese can propel you to the top of a big hill. It looks so static and splodgy (well mine did), and I can't imagine how anyone would ever think of getting huge amounts of energy out of it. It's an impressive feat, and I should imagine that the amazement is even greater on the side of the plate of Spaghetti Bolognese. One minute it's sitting there minding it's own business, the next it's being used as fuel by some idiot with a bicycle.

And before I forget, greetings to the two idiots with bicycles from Berlin who put me up to these trips. And thanks to "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" for the picture.

England 2 - Trinidad and Tobago 0

I'm a bit late on this one, but what the heck. I had a ticket (thanks Fabian again) for England against the "Soca Warriers" from Trinidad and Tobago. I could give you a match report, but there is no way that it would be as good as this one.

I can confirm that whilst some of the english fans were recounting the events of the second world war, and discussing the politics of Northern Ireland, the fans from the Caribbean really were singing

London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. London bridge is falling down. BREK it down! BREK it - down!

So England progress without playing particularly well, and the brave soca warriers from little old Trini... [NOTE FROM EDITOR: Rest of post removed for being too damned patronising. The days of your British Empire are over Mr. Endofphil]

Deutschland 1 Polska 0

Germany beat Poland with an injury-time winner this evening. Almost the whole flat here and the flat below turned up in Berto's pub afterwards to celebrate/commiserate. In total we comprised five poles and three germans, plus the odd englishman.

Germany deservedly won the football match, but the Poles remain undefeated when it comes to drinking Vodka. They also won the best chant competition (in my eyes) for "We're going to steal your cars". The Germans seem to be rather chuffed at beating Poland for some reason. This whole business is probably quite important in terms of new europe, and the increasing importance of Germany's neighbours to the east, but I'm drunk and I'm going to go to sleep, so I'll leave that as a point for you to ponder over.

WM

You may well have noticed that a certain football tournament is underway. Due to a combination of this and the erlangen beer festival I have been rather slow in updating this blog. Since the last update I went for a bicycle ride, drank lots of beer and watched lots of football, so everything is alright.

Even the usually xenophobic drunken English fans have turned into weltbuergerlicher drunken English fans. I quote from that bastion of reasonable thought and openness, the british tabloid: "The Sun".

Basking — like England — in the middle of a heatwave, Germany is heaven for footie followers now.

Huddersfield fan Paul Braithwaite, 39, who is sharing a VW camper van with two mates, said: “Everyone is drinking loads but behaving. The Germans have been laid back and the policing is low-profile. Right now, there is no better place on Earth.”

Is it worth the aggravation?

Yesterday I went for a round-table discussion with a leading consulting firm. I swear that I didn't just lift the following exchange from a Dilbert cartoon.

Boss: The job's not easy, and has long hours. For the first two years, you don't see much of your friends or family, which can be painful.

Potential Applicant: And after two years it gets better?

Boss: Oh yes. You still work the same hours, but you've forgotten what your friends and family looked like.

Shortly (well about an hour) after this I walked out, explaining that I had an urgent appointment in a beer garden.

Forchheim

125 km and 1.5 litres of beer was the sum of yesterday's cycling and beer-drinking efforts. The trip took me to Bamberg, where I saw off Henning, who is cycling to Hamburg after several days of careful preparation.

On the way to Bamberg I passed through Forchheim, and more importantly through the small village of Hausen. The residents of Hausen, apparently, believe that Pontius Pilate was born there, either in house number 48 or 73. I suppose that you can forgive them a few lost details in the 2000 years which have passed. Before the fact can become universally acknowledged, though, the Forchheimers will have to fight it out with the Fortingallers, who are equally convinced that Pontius Pilate was scottish.

Forchheim is otherwise of note for holding off the might of the swedish army during the 30-years war, during which they earned themselves the nickname "the wall shitters", a name best left unexplained. They achieved their military success despite having possibly the least imposing coat-of-arms ever, with not just one but two rather bored-looking trout.

Bergkirchweih

The Erlangen beer festival has come to town. I can't take my beer, and need a day off after each visit. It's not as though I get roaring drunk, I just feel hung over the next day, and need an early night with a cup of cocoa.

Anyway, "beer leads to hangover shock" is probably not worth writing about. The beer festival here attracts thousands of visitors from all over the world (the good thing about being hung over is that you can make up random facts without feeling guilty about it), and this year it brought Wouter and Uli, who may or may not be reading this. In a supreme example of inhospitality I invited them for a curry at my place. The trouble was that they only got to eat the curry after bringing the missing ingredients, chopping everything up and (this is the good bit) unblocking our bathroom sink.

I may make this a regular deal. In our flat we have quite a few things to fix, so if you are feeling hungry and have some kind of plumbing/floor laying/painting qualifications just send me a comment, and I will see what can be done.

Stern-Gerlach results

The first results for the Stern-Gerlach experiment are in. Our data production has been rushed through, and the results have been analysed. The data transmission from the experimental area to the main site (my office) was found to be rather slow. The exact rate was 0.144 MB per minute, but could be doubled if I didn't stop for a coffee on the way over with my floppy disk.

Anyway, here are the results: The black points show the profile of an atomic beam as the detector is slowly moved across the beam. I pushed the detector by hand, so you can't really compare the positions of the maxima for the four measurements. The width of the beam is a couple of millimetres. When the inhomogeneous magnetic field is turned on by passing a current through the electromagnet the beam is split into two. You would expect that the two beams have the same intensity, but one is always larger than the other: maybe something is cutting the beam off for positions in the left of the plot. The next step will be to reattach a motor which moves the detector automatically, and to check the alignment of all the components.

Virtual vacuum leaks

I have a really good quote about vacuum leaks, and thought that I had blown the chance to use it, already having fixed one leak. Today I tried to restart the Stern-Gerlach experiment, and found that it had a huge leak in it. There was a very good reason for this: I had attached a light to the vacuum system to check whether it was aligned properly. This light was built in to what looks like a leak-tight metal plate, but which actually has a huge hole in it.

The picture below shows what happened: the air which was pumped out by the pump was continuously replaced by the air coming in through the leak. Now the funny thing is that the leak could only be heard by listening to the bellows, which I drew as being the zig-zaggy thing. At this point you could hear a hissing sound. This hissing sound couldn't be heard at the point where the air came in, only when it passed through the bellows.



After a couple of hours, and after installing a spare bellows which made exactly the same noise, I worked out what was wrong, and removed the piece with the hole in. For a while I was annoyed, but then I realised that I may have created a new musical instrument: the leakophone. Presumably by varying the tension in the bellows you could create a whole range of hissing sounds with various tones. Add a couple more bellows and you could play a lovely tune. Before I forget, that quote, stolen from R.K. Fitch who claims that it was a student's answer to an exam question.

The essential components of a high vacuum system are a rotary pump, a diffusion pump, and a leak

Black Humour

I read in the newspaper today the tragic death of Do Van Ky, a would-be Vietnamese immigrant to Britain, and I burst out laughing. You may find this heartless, for the story is a very sad example of what happens to many people who leave a life of poverty in their own country to seek a better life in the west. After somehow making his way from Vietnam to Europe, he entered England via Dover, hidden in the back of a lorry together with several others. Once in England, the immigrants tried to leave the lorry whilst it was still in motion, but Do Van Ky slipped and was crushed under the rear wheels of the lorry.

What could be funny about this? The unfortunate driver of the lorry was Stan Bowden, who couldn't be blamed for what happened. He summed up the event thus:

"A man made all that effort to struggle halfway across the world for a better life, he tried so hard, he must have been desperate. The first time he hit British soil, some bastard ran him over. That bastard just happened to be me."

This made me laugh. I don't know if you are supposed to laugh at such things, but it is probably better to laugh at these things than to ignore them, which is what I usually do.

An honest day's work

For the first time in god knows how long I actually worked properly today. I took the Stern-Gerlach experiment apart and stuck it back together again with a new vacuum chamber, which has been built by the workshop. Vacuum systems are a bit like a child's building set. Each component has a kind of connection at the end, which (hopefully) fits the connections of other components. This is commonly called a "flange". This means that once you get enough pieces you can build and rebuild your system in any way you want.

With a bit of luck it will work soon. The down-side of this is that I sacrificed the afternoon coffee and cake break.

Sacrificial offerings

No, no, no, despite the title of the post I'm not writing about Hermes. I am back in Erlangen, and back on track with my mission statement: today I cycled to Bamberg and drank a shandy. Bamberg is about 40 km from Erlangen, but I took the scenic route, stopping for lunch in the small franconian village of Teuchatz. Gasthof Neuner (that's the name of the pub in Teuchatz) is good for three reasons; it has cheap beer, a very limited menu (a choice of one of three lumps of meat, each served with salad and dumpling), and is on top of a hill. This means that you get 5 extra minutes to digest your dumpling before you have to go up the next hill.

A short while after lunch I passed a sign pointing to the "Jungfernhoehle", which translates as the "virgins' cave". Of course I cycled straight past it, suspecting that seeing the cave would involve a long walk, that the cave would be very much like any other, and that the virgins had probably taken the afternoon off.

In all these points I was probably right, but the cave has a most peculiar history. According to a local legend three virgins were beheaded in front of the cave and each October would go for a headless moonlit ride. Then in 1951 some members of the Engert family, living in nearby Tiefenellern, decided to dig out the cave in a search for treasure. They were eventually stopped by some local amateur geologists, and the digging, which had found only bits of bone, stone and pottery, was turned over to some proper archaeologists. After quite a bit of digging, they had quite a lot of bones, including 40 skulls of young girls each with a hole in the side. They also had an extra large cooking pot. Putting two and two together, the experts declared the cave to be a site of ritual sacrifice and cannibalism, dating back 4000-5000 years. The cross below (borrowed from wikipedia) is a memorial to the victims.



Is it a coincidence that the story of the beheaded virgins rose around a cave where ritual sacrifices took place? Many people, including Victor Harth (see link below) thinks that it isn't, and that the legends were passed down through the generations for several millennia.

Links:
Victor Harth describes the story, in german.

Two geologists from Erlangen mention the story in their article about something else. Also in german.

A Time article from 1953, which you have to pay for. I did pay for it, so if you really want to read it just [DELETED BY ENDOFPHIL LEGAL TEAM].

Hardon production in deep-inelastic scattering

This is not quite what Hermes is supposed to do! If you can't spot the mistake try clicking on Mr Ben Goldacre's website. I just made up the title of this post, but it seems that there are a lot of genuine high-energy physicists who have made this typo. The next ten years of particle physics suddenly looks much more exciting!

Suddenly appearing objects

I have very good eyesight, but sometimes I just don't see stuff. After three days in Hamburg I discovered that they had built a new police station right at the entrance to DESY. I managed to pass this building several times without noticing it at all, and was surprised to say the least when I got off the bus this afternoon right next to a police station.

I also spend three evenings in the control room of hermes and never noticed the bottle of champagne which has a label declaring that in should be opened "for the first recoil proton". The new detector at hermes is called a recoil detector, as it detects things which are going forwards, but not as much forwards as other stuff which is going forwards. This means that anybody who happens to be going forwards at a good rate themselves would conclude that the stuff detected by the new detector is actually going backwards.

So if the new detector ever detects one of these "recoil protons" it is time to open the bottle of champagne. At the moment the recoil detector is in lots of small parts, and the experts are welding and hammering it back into shape. To be honest, I think that buying champagne and labelling it "for the first recoil proton" is a rather safe investment.

Hamburg

I went for a nostalgic bicycle ride around Hamburg today. I went to the english bookshop on Stresemannstrasse 169. I didn't buy any books, but I bought a packet of teabags, a tin of drinking chocolate (Hi Juliane!), some malt vinegar and two packets of biscuits. The malt vinegar is the last missing ingredient for a fish and chips, which I will try when I am in Erlangen again. I got my hair cut at the old barbers, drank a coffee in Ottensen, and bought a set of ping-pong balls.

I used to have a life here in Hamburg with lots of nice things. Somehow I let the bad stuff take over and I gave it all up.

Key Access

I am back in the east hall of the Hera ring, looking after the Hermes experiment. Things have changed since I was here in November. The polarised target, which was my special bit of apparatus, was removed and replaced by a new detector.

The most obvious things here are the gaps. The new detector has gone into the place of the old polarised target, but it isn't as big. There are now places you can walk where you used to have to climb or crawl. There are gaps in the array of electronics, too, whole racks are missing. The odd thing is that nobody pushed the remaining things together, they just left the holes as they were, as a kind of reminder of what used to be.

One thing that hasn't changed is the chance for a key access. The experiment and accelerator are enclosed behind concrete blocks, and you can't get into the experiment when the accelerator is running because of the high radiation levels. If there is a short break then it is possible to go inside and try to mend the odd broken cable. To do this you have to talk to some guy in the accelerator control room, and say who you are. The sound system is really bad, though, so the guy just makes his best guess as to what you might be called. Of course you can help by giving some context: "Nass wie feucht" or "Vogel wie Tweet Tweet" [1]. Then you are allowed to take a key, and pass through the gate. Today we went in and reattached one cable, and swapped two others round.

[1] I have a collaborator whose name translates as "Wet", and one whose name translates as "Bird". For such circumstances it is easy to pass on the correct name.

München

This weekend I am in Munich, visiting Britta, Max, Konstantin and Helena. Konstantin is 3 years old, and Helena 4 months. Yesterday we went for a walk through the English garden, which was originally designed by one of my heros, Benjamin Thompson, later Count Rumford. A nice long walk with lunch in a beer garden is always good for the soul.

Stern-Gerlach sort of lives

I have been quite busy trying to get the Stern-Gerlach experiment to work. After fixing the leaky flange I tried to run the experiment. Yesterday I saw the first signs of a beam of potassium atoms. It wasn't really a beam, more of a diffuse flow from the oven to the detector, but I guess that once you measure some potassium atoms it is a matter of time until you get the thing working.

I think that the reason I didn't see a clear beam was because I didn't put the detector together properly. The detector consists of a hot tungsten wire and a collector plate. The plate has a hole in it to let the beam of potassium atoms through. They should then hit the hot wire where they lose their outer electron. The remaining potassium ions are then attracted to the plate, which is at a potential of -9V compared to the wire.



The problem is that when I took another look at the detector the wire wasn't directly beneath the hole in the plate, but had slipped to the side. This means that atoms from the beam could not be detected, only those which had somehow reflected off a wall somewhere.

Call to Arms

Next week I get to go to Hamburg to help out Hermes, in an effort to at least to show willing. The following play for three people sums up the situation. I don't know quite who the other people might be, but I am one of the folk dancers.

Act 4 scene 2.

A fort somewhere, at some time. The captain walks the ramparts, taking stock and surveying the damage from the previous day's bombardment. In the background the remaining bodies are being disposed of.

enter Lieutenant

Captain: What news bringeth ye.

Lieutenant: The enemy hordes are amassing, sir. Their construxion of the siege weapons runs apace. Our supplies are low, the powder is short. The west wall is but a ruin. We cannot hold for much longer.

Captain: Yet hold we must. Avast, what spieth I.

Lieutenant. A messenger of the King! What chance relief?

Captain: Open the gates! Let the messenger arrive.

enter messenger.

Messenger: I bring news, Sir, from the king.

Captain: Hold not your tongue! Which news do you bring.

Messenger: The king acknowledges your request for support.

Lieutenant: Yes, is the Cavalry brigade underway? Are the 18 pounders being towed as we speak?
Has the counter offensive on the eastern flank set forth?

Messenger: The king did his best to fulfill your request, Sir. Alas, the cavalry are preparing for the royal wedding and could not be spared. The artillery are stuck east of the river and cannot cross until after the bridge is officially opened. However, his highness sends news of reinforcments.

Captain: Reinforcements, what form do they take? When will they arrive?

Messenger: They are on their way as we speak, Sir. Hark, I hear them now.

Lieutenant: I hear but the sound of bells and and song. Which regiment shall it be.

Messenger: No less than the queens own folk dancers. It is the most which could be spared, Sir.

Lieutenant: What use be the folk dancers against the combined Mongol horsemen, Zulu Impi and Martian tripods amassed against us?

Captain: The world champion chip awaits. Let battle comments.

Shifting sand

My name is Phil, and I am a member of the Hermes particle physics collaboration. There. I said it. I spent over three years helping to keep the Hermes experiment on the road, and in the end I went a bit mad. I stopped doing any useful work at the start of 2005 and have been trying to sort out my head ever since. Perhaps mad is the wrong word: to be more accurate I had psychosomatic illnesses and depression, which is probably what most people whould call mad, loopy, off your trolley, a wafer short of a silicon detector or whatever. I willingly invited people to knock me out and stick an endoscope down my stomach, when there was nothing wrong with my stomach at all, and if that isn't madness it certainly isn't quite the behaviour of a normal-thinking person.

If I had any principles about me I would have quit the Hermes collaboration on the 24th February, right after I finished my PhD exam. I would have written a mail to the whole collaboration and told them that their beloved collaboration was a rotten mess of an overworked workaholic management, overworked frustrated students, numerous hangers-on who were concentrating on other projects but sticking around to get their names on the publications, and senior scientists who had lost touch with the daily reality of what was happening. This would have left me unemployed but with my dignity intact. As it is I have become a hanger-on, somebody who is there in name but does practically sod all to help the collaboration. I let others work themselves to stupidity so that I can stick my name to some publication which I don't properly understand.

The Hermes experiment seems to be in a critical state. It wasn't feeling well, so someone stuck an endoscope down its machine equivalent of a tummy and it did the machine equivalent of spewing up its guts in the examination room. The next few days/weeks will decide whether there is a future (other than as radiation enriched scrap metal) for this experiment.

In the circumstances, I did the only thing possible: I took the afternoon off work to help vogelchr fill his sand pit. I feel that this was a worthwhile project. There was a plan, we carted some sand, and the result was one sand-filled sand pit, and at least two sand-covered children.

Cherry Blossom

Considering that it says in the title of my blog that I will try to cycle and drink the summer away, I have written remarkably little about cycling or drinking. I've been doing quite a bit of both, but in a rather unremarkable 50 km here, one litre there kind of manner, which doesn't really lend itself to writing about.

Well today I went for a very nice bicycle ride in and around "franconian switzerland". Franconian switzerland is a natural park just outside Erlangen, and is quite hilly, but lacks the major mountains (and yodellers and banks and ...) that its name suggests. It was rather windy, but also warm and sunny. And for about 20 minutes between Geschwand and Bieberbach everything came together. I had just eaten a ham and lettuce sandwich, the sun was shining, there were no cars at all, the wind was on my back, and the road was lined with cherry trees, each of which was in full blossom.

Tutorial

I held a tutorial for some students who aren't studying physics, but need to take a physics course. Of the 20 people only five turned up, but the five who were there were friendly, quite well prepared and happy to complete the exercises on the blackboard. This is good, as I tend to get rather confused when writing things on the blackboard. My main problems are that I can never quite decide which symbol to use to represent a physical property (there are just too many options), my rho looks like a p, I randomly drop symbols and I sometimes say something completely different to what I write. I also have a habit of losing the piece of paper with the answers on, and slowly taking all the pieces of chalk and depositing them randomly around the room. I think that I could have a long career as a lecturer in front of me.

As I say, it turned out very well, as the students rapidly gained in confidence and were quite happy to complete the exercises themselves, which is the point of the whole thing anyway.

If you want to read a more interesting blog than this one, I would suggest the BBC political editor, Nick Robinson. Tony Blair today effectively sacked his under-fire home secretary, Charles Clarke, after a some rather disappointing local election results.

I’ve often interviewed resigning ministers, but this was amongst the bizarrest. When I was called to be told the news, I was naked in bed in a Westminster hotel hoping to get at least an hour’s sleep, having stayed up all night covering the local elections. The interesting discovery I’ve made is that you can go from being in bed to attending a resignation statement in exactly seven minutes.

A small contribution to anglo-german friendship

What better way to improve the relations between england and germany than a charity football match with ex stars (Paul Gascoigne, Lothar Mattheus, Thomas Haessler, John Barnes), pop stars (Herbert Groenemeyer), other sporting figures (Boris Becker) and the right honourable member of parliament for Henley, Boris Johnson?

You may think that such a game would be a timid affair, with lots of pussy-footing around and no hard tackling. You would be wrong. Take a look at this video with the floppy-haired Boris Johnson in the starring role!

There is also a description of the match in the Daily Telegraph.

Missing

I live together with five other people in a shared flat. If you're reading this guys, czesc! That's polish for "hi", as four of the five come from Poland, and the other gave in and decided to learn polish. Csesc is the only polish word I know which is fit for print. Anyway, we get along fine here, and go out occasionally, and sometimes cook together, and as long as nobody mentions the word "Putzplan"[1] we get on just great.

The thing is, I never knew that my co-inhabitants really cared about me. So when I left for the weekend without telling them that I'd gone, I assumed that they would classify my disappearance as somebody else's problem. That's the good thing about sharing a flat with five other people. You don't really miss the odd person.

In any case they really did notice that I wasn't there and tried to ring me. Having failed (I somehow turned my mobile off), they got the name of a work colleague, found his home number in the telephone book and rang him up. Not really getting into the spirit of things he told them that I was in Duisburg (which was true) instead of saying that I had muttered something about a game of Russian Roulette (which would have been a rather whopping lie).

So here's to my caring flatmates. I missed you guys too. Just don't mention the Putzplan.

[1] The Putzplan is a table of recipriversexclusive name entries. The only person guaranteed not to clean the flat in a given week is the person who should do it according to the Putzplan.