Antidepression

I just looked at the guardian online, and saw the headline "Prozac does not work, say scientists". The article had a link to the original paper, which was very helpful, as this says something completely different.

First rule of reading scientific papers: just look at the plots, the rest is usually irrelevant. This plot from the paper shows how much patients improved when they were given either an antidepressive drug or a placebo.



Maybe there are too many dots and curvy lines to see what is happening. After squinting my eyes a bit, I have, using the power of MS Paint, reproduced the main features of this plot.



Note the baseline, which the authors felt was unnecessary. Mistake. First rule of drawing plots: add a baseline. Looking at the plot, and looking at the baseline, I drew the following conclusions:

1/ Taking antidepressive drugs improves, on average, the mood of people with all degrees of depression. Woohoo.

2/ For people with mild depression, the same improvement can be made with a placebo. For these people, it is not the active chemical of the antidepressive that is helping them, but the circumstances of being given and taking a "cure". This could lead to a long debate about the ethics and effectiveness of giving patients a placebo cure.

3/ For people with severe depression, the chemicals of the antidepressive work and improve their mood. Woohoo.

So antidepressive drugs have been shown to improve the mood of people with severe depression above the level achieved by a Placebo. Or, as summarised in the Guardian:

Prozac, the bestselling antidepressant taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class, according to a major review released today.

This is obviously bullshit, as a second look at those graphs will tell you. More subtle is the mistake made by the authors, who conclude:

The relationship between initial severity and antidepressant efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication.

This is confused thinking. Taking any drug gives potentially a medication effect and a placebo effect. If the total improvement caused by taking the drug stays the same, but the placebo effect diminishes, then the response to medication effect must have increased: the drug works.

Maybe there are other, better, options for some people, but antidepressive drugs do on average have a positive effect for people with severe depression.

Links:

This blog discusses the difference between statistical and clinical significance (the funny green area in the plot), so that I don't have to.

Don Jewett is an emeritus Prof. at the University of California and knows how to use his CAPSLOCK. He takes issue with the conclusions of the paper (link added 28. Feb)

The language log get into the graph-drawing spirit. I like their old-skool noughts and crosses marker styles. They also summarise the press coverage.(link added 1. Mar)

Stream of Consciousness

I am unemployed, unattached, living in a bedsit and will turn 30 this year. These are facts, and I'm not particularly unhappy about them. I am trying to decide where to live. I have four choices: Bochum, Erlangen, Leeds or somewhere completely different.

Bochum

Plus: I live here, and have done for one year. I am good friends with some Bochum jugglers. I am the left winger of Torpedo Entenhausen and have developed a good understanding with the left back and the strikers. I know enough budding footballers to get a kick-about twice a week. I live close to a good ice-cream parlour. It only costs 11 Euros to watch a football game.

Minus: Bochum is "no beauty, and grey from work".

Distance to Leeds: I can be in Leeds within about 3 hours and the flights are cheap.

Erlangen

Plus: I used to live in Erlangen, and am friends with the local jugglers, some of whom even read this blog. Erlangen is a rich town with relatively good job chances. I am good friends with my ex-colleagues, who form the majority of people reading this blog. I grounded an Erlangen cricket club, and could try to reform it. There are lots of beer gardens within cycling distance of the town.

Minus: Erlangen is a small town which I might get bored with after a while.

Distance to Leeds: The flight to England takes a couple of hours and there is no direct flight from Nuremberg to Leeds. Awkward.

Leeds

Plus: Leeds is in England. My parents and sister live not far away. I would be able to write, speak and read the language perfectly, and never have to see another kezboard. I could race my dad up hills and find a cricket club. I could make my mum cook Sunday lunch, or even lend a hand. If I ever get bored I can call myself Klaus-Peter and pretend to be a German exchange student.

Minus: I know only four people there. The football club is owned by Ken Bates.

Distance to Leeds: N/A.

Somewhere Completely Different

Plus: Maybe I'll find something I never new I was missing.

Minus: I know nobody and would find it hard to get going, like I did in Bochum. I think I can rule this out.

Distance to Leeds: Upper limit - Leeds is to be found at -1.5 deg longitude, +53.8 latitude. The other side of the world is somewhere below New Zealand. The nearest landfall would be the bottom of New Zealand, and nearly 100,000 Furlongs away. Lower limit - Negligable compared to upper limit.

New Mission Statement

I am no longer an electrical engineer, and must therefore give up my search. Being an electrical engineer didn't do much for me in any regard. For the record, during the past year the following stood at the top of my blog.

The diary of a soul searching for the answer to the question: do electrical engineers have better sex lives than physicists?

The Perfect Crime

Bochum is just on the edge of the german Carnival scene, which is centred around the Rhine cities of Cologne, Dusseldorf and Mainz, where thousands don their fancy dress and get very drunk. I stayed away from the main events, but juggled at a small Carnival party in Bochum on Saturday; a video may appear soon. The payment was free beer and food, which was quite a good deal.

In Duisburg the perfect crime may have been committed, as reported in the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.

A 25-year-old was robbed at gunpoint by two men at the Central Station on Sunday at around 17:30. One robber was dressed as a clown, the other as the Pink Panther. According to the police, they relieved the man of his money. The robbers fled in the direction of Friedrich-Wilhelm Street.

The first robber was described as being 1.85m tall, 25-years-old, with a black goatee beard, a dark complexion, a red clown's wig, a red clown's nose and a white costume with blue and red polka dots. The second robber was described as being 1.80m tall, 25 years old, with short blond hair, square black-framed glasses and dressed in a Pink Panther costume. Any information should be given to the local police.

Reports that the culprits were last seen being pursued through the streets of Duisburg by Batman and Robin remain unconfirmed.

20 Million Cubic Litres

I just sat in a cafe and read the European edition of the guardian, which sadly doesn't have Ben Goldacre's column in it. This week he makes fun of bad usage of numbers and statistics in newspapers. The European edition does, however, have a report on sending music to the stars, with the following excerpt:

Nasa will encrypt the song and beam it into space from its Madrid transmitter on Monday at the start of a 2.5 quadrillion-mile trip (that's 23 zeros for anyone without a large capacity calculator) to Polaris, where it will finally arrive in the year 2439.

The single most useful thing I learned studying physics is that there are almost exactly pi*10^7 seconds in a year. I also learned that the speed of light is almost exactly 3*10^8 m/s. So if you multiply the speed of light with the time of 400 years, there is no way that you're going to get a power of 10 to the 23.

I never learnt what a quadrillion is, as any attemped use usually ends in confusion between the British and American systems, but all these things that end in 'illion' are powers of three. 23 is a prime number, and obviously not a multiple of 3. I worked all of this out in the cafe, but things are a lot easier with a google calculator, which kicks ass, and has room for lots more zeros than needed astronomically.

((2 439 years) - (2 008 years)) * c = 2.53363342 × 10^15 miles

(Rounding to an appropriate level of significance is left as an exercise for the reader)

If all this sounds too mathematical, you can just look up Polaris in Wikipedia, and find out that it is 431 light years from the earth. This means that light will take 431 years to get there, and will arrive in 2439. No miles, no powers of tens to the fifteen, not so much fun.

Let it Bleed

Over Christmas I read the novel "Let it Bleed" by Ian Rankin. This book is one of a series describing Edinburgh detective John Rebus. Rebus mixes personal oblivion with flashes of obsessive brilliance as a detective and disdain for any kind of establishment.

In this book Rebus a mouth ulcer gives him the reason to see a dentist for the first time in years. After pricking the ulcer the dentist gives Rebus further appointments for half-a-dozen or so fillings.

Reading this, I realised that I probably haven't seen a dentist this millennium, so as part of my plan to take better care of myself I made an appointment yesterday. He was able to see me on the same afternoon and made a quick check-up. My teeth are alright but my gums bled when he poked his pokey-thing down beside a tooth. He asked me whether they sometimes bled when I cleaned my teeth, and I suddenly remembered that they did. I had completely forgotten this, and must have learned to repress it. The first time it happened I probably said to myself that I was too busy with work to bother going to the dentist, and after a while I got used to it. We have arranged further appointments to remove low-lying plaque and stop the inflammation of the gums.

For tea I had a cheese and blood sandwich. Lovely.

Unemployment

My contract runs out on Thursday, and I've taken holiday for this week, so I'm free to do what I like. I'm open to any short-term offers, but am not going to get a proper job again until I feel ready. I've decided to concentrate on getting my life in order before I start working again. I need to become generally active whilst eating well and not getting drunk too much.

Today I read the paper, did 4/5 of the crossword, went for a jog and went shopping. This evening I juggled three torches. A man walking past said that his dog found it fascinating. I practised spinning torches round in my hand and learnt to recognise the smell of burning arm hair.

Standing on Stairs

The campus of Bochum university has lots of stairs. It's a concrete monster of several layers covering a large area. Each layer is connected to the others with concrete steps of various designs, and I keep finding myself stood on the top step, or sometimes on the middle step, wondering what to do.

There is a large protest today in Bochum against the closure of the Nokia factory. I hope that the protesters know what they are letting themselves in for. A lesser known event of the Second World War was the winter war between the Soviet Union and Finland.

Clock Watching

Every minute I spend in my office drags me down. I can feel my mood worsen as soon as I wake up on a work day, and by the time I sit at my desk I feel sad and annoyed. I then surf the internet, drink coffee and watch the time slowly go by. This is my favourite clock. It shows the time in America, but has a nice picture of the earth, so I can look out of the window and compare the darkness/light with that on the map. The sun just set over Bochum.

New Year's Equivalent of "Bah, Humbug"

I got a bad cold and spent New Year's Eve in bed. I was awoken by a barrage of fireworks and spent the next three hours listening to bangs and whizzes while trying to get back to sleep. In this time I saw the air fill with fog, so that the tree at the end of the garden became faint and blurred. Eventually I fell asleep.

I was therefore delighted to read that I wasn't the only one to have a bad time. Bochum was covered by a smog so bad that buses stopped their service and taxis only went for special rates: "Sorry mate, I can't even read the meter in this fog". Car drivers often gave up, as described in a comment from kindly citizen Ralf Kelm.

We were stood on the pavement when a woman stopped her car and asked if we knew where we were. She thought she was still on the motorway, but was surprised to see so many houses. The motorway exit was about half a mile away. You could see absolutely nothing. We took her with us for the next five hours. After 7am the visibility improved enough for her to continue her journey.

Now I can't prove that the fog was due to the fireworks, although I suspect it was. Smog, as seen for decades in cities such as London (and probably Bochum and the whole of the Ruhr) was caused by air pollution from houses and factories. The London smog is described here by lost motorcyclist Arthur Musson.

On one occasion, I was motor cycling down Queens road Yardley on my way home from Mary’s, when I realised I was not on the road. I stopped, put my foot down, and found that I was in a field.

A useful measure for air quality is PM10 concentration. PM10s are particles less than 10 micrometres in diameter, and their concentration can be described in micrograms/cubic metre (μg/m³). A typical concentration of these particulates is 30 μg/m³ . During the great London smog of 1952, which killed around 12,000 people, the concentration was estimated to be 4000-14000 μg/m³. The German federal ministry for the environment measured the PM10 concentration over the last-but-one New Year, and found that in a city area the concentration rose to almost 4000 μg/m³ just after midnight, which is the lower estimate for the concentration in the great London smog. Congratulations, fellow citizens, you've created a minor environmental disaster! The ministry's recommendation is that people

limit their personal use of fireworks, or even do without them completely.

Happy New Year!

Marvels and Mysteries

As I explained in the last post, my dad is quite generous in his presents. In addition to a free seven-mile run, he bought me a second-hand copy of "Marvels and Mysteries of the Unexplained" by Nigel Blundell and Allan Hall for an estimated 50p.



The back cover explains what the book does:

We do no more than present to you the facts. We give you the evidence. We pose the questions. Only you, the reader, can provide the answers.

Among the many mysteries, the book describes the life of the great seer Mother Shipton, who lived in Knaresborough, only 15 miles from Otley.



She must have been a supreme fortune teller, for not only could she see into the future, she could also see The Past. The French had already lost the Battle of Agincourt 73 years before her birth.

Sometimes the book comes closer to solving mysteries than the authors themselves realise, such as when they search for possible reasons for the Hindenburg disaster.

The vessel had a proud record to live up to ... and the safety standards were of the highest.

What could be the reason for the airship bursting into flames? The picture editor seems to have laid his finger on the problem. His caption below a big picture of the airship explains:

The Hindenburg. It was 245 metres long and contained 198 000 cubic metres of inflammable hydrogen.

More seriously, the authors have picked some genuinely interesting unsolved mysteries, and the cause for the Hindenburg igniting is still debated. They also have included many great pictures and there aren't many factual inaccuracies. There is, however, a lot of suggestion, and a distinct lack of respect for Occam's Razer.

Chevin Chase

My dad didn't skimp on christmas presents this year: he bought the family entry into a seven-mile running race called the Chevin Chase. The race starts in the town of Guiseley, rises to the top of the Chevin, drops to the Otley side, then goes back to the top and down into Guiseley for the finish.

I've never run seven miles before today, so I started cautiously, but at the half-way point I decided that I was feeling quite well, so I sped up a bit. I still finished over five minutes behind my dad, who is pretty quick for a 60-year-old.

Otley 42 - Wharfedale 9

I'm in the small North Yorkshire town of Otley, staying with my parents, who have moved here. The sporting highlight of Otley is the Rugby Union club, who even hosted a Rugby World Cup game between Italy and the USA in 1991.



In the first frame of the clip, you can see the flank of the Chevin to the left of the main stand. Right behind the end where Francescato scored his try is a small farm with hens and pigs. The crowd today was much smaller than in 1991, and the ground looked bare in comparison. Otley ground down their opponents at the end of the first half, pushing for the corner inch by inch. After five minutes of sustained charges and pile-ups, they forced their way over the try-line to take a 14-9 half-time lead, before running in four second-half tries without reply.

Has the Cat Died?

I got dressed in a bit of a hurry last night and accidentally tucked half of my trouser leg into my sock. I only noticed after 20 minutes of walking around with one trouser leg hitched up. This took me back to my school days, where I would have been greeted with the inquiry "Has the cat died?". A trouser leg tucked into a sock is "at half mast", and the mourning was then presumed to be for the family cat. There are lots of phrases for too-short trousers, either from growth spurts or rushed dressing, described here: "half-masts", "budgies", "catsdieds", "noahs".

According to this dictionary, the Germans call them "Flood Trousers", but I've never heard it.

Mills Mess (with an effect of vagueness)

There is a very good explanation of the juggling pattern known as the Mills Mess here. It's in slightly garbled Frenglish, but the advice given is pretty much how I learned this trick. I would recommend just skimming over stage 1, as I think the author does too. Don't be put off by the complicated instructions: the trick is famous for being easier to do than say, and has a lovely rhythm so that it sometimes feels less like a trick, and more like the natural way to juggle.

Trying to be clever, I bought three glowing balls, which alternate between red, green and blue, so that you can see the paths of the three balls, and compare them to the animation. Unless when you take the photo all the balls all happen to be blue.

Thanks to my photographer.

I've walked out on another Ceremony!

My best friend in Bochum just passed his PhD exam. I'm really happy for him, but I just left his PhD party during his Laudatio (the bit where everyone says how good he was). I couldn't be bothered to laugh at the unfunny jokes of his professor. I will join him for a beer in 20 minutes, and shake him heartily by the hand. At the risk of sounding like Holden Caulfield, these official celebrations are all so phoney.

The Rock and Roll Years are Over

I'm in a better mood today, mainly due to the psychotherapy, which has been embarassingly simple so far. We've discussed things that have been worrying me, then agreed a time and a way to solve them. So far I have found my income tax card and told my health insurance, the German Physics Society, my bank, and Amnesty International my new (since February) address.

The only beaurocratic thing I'm really scared of is my tax declaration. I so far refused to fill one out, thinking that it wasn't Rock and Roll. I thought of it as being the saddest and squarest part of German life: all those people running around reclaiming tax. The German tax system is so complicated that people buy computer programs to help fill in their tax declaration. These programs used to be (and maybe still are) tax deductible.

I was going to try to find a citation to back up that last claim, but failed. I can't even write income tax in German. Neither can the Germans. The word for income is Einkommen, and the word for tax is Steuer. If you put them together you get Einkommensteuer, but if you like you can add an extra 's' in the middle to get Einkommenssteuer. I just bought a book which tries to explain this kind of thing, but usually ends up by giving a seemingly arbitrary rule

The middle 's' is added if the first word to be joined contains an even number of Umlauts or the second word begins with three consonants in alphabetical order.

and then includes a table of 200 exceptions.

As the figure below shows (red with one 's', blue with two), the german speaking world is as confused as I am in this matter.


Anyway, I dislike the tax system (I don't mind people taking money off me; I just dislike filling in forms), but I'll try to fill out a form this year. May seems to be a popular date according to the graph. I have a cast-iron tax deductible donation to Amnesty International. Now the clever bit is this: I'll give the tax that I get back this year as a donation next year, in addition to the regular sum. I did a calculation on the back of an envelope, and found that by continually giving the original sum plus all tax returned from the previous year to a charitable organisation I would be able to achieve roughly 30% year-on-year growth in donations until I pay no tax at all. Rock and Roll! I'm not quite sure that this will work, but I'm going to give it a try.

p.s.

It's interesting to see the way the world searches for "income tax". The British seem to have no massive peaks, because most people don't declare taxes. The average employee has tax taken at source and never sees the money. The Americans, in contrast, go income-tax crazy once a year. Still, at least they can fucking spell the word!

United Kingdom



United States

Fired?

Clear your desk by the end of January

I'd given up on my job a few weeks ago, but now it is official. Of course officially I've not been fired. Officially, I spent a year as a post-doctoral researcher, but couldn't see any future at the university. Inofficially the faculty will be glad to see the back of me, and I'll be glad to be gone. I suppose you can say "by mutual agreement".

Torpedo Entenhausen 2 - Blue Star Oblomow 3

At the final hurdle we lost for the first time in the Rückrunde, despite leading 2-0 at half-time. The Blue Stars had a chance of promotion, and overcame their nervous start to secure the points, but to no avail: Red Star Fussek won their last game to clinch the second promotion spot and join Black and White Bochum, the second division champtions, in division one next year.

Torpedo Entenhausen finished in eighth place, making up for a disappointing Hinrunde with fourth place in the Rückrunde table. A full statistical analysis of the spare time league can be found here

Can Anyone beat Seven?

I was surfing the internet at work when I found this list of reasons to quit work. Reason zero should probably have been "you found this website while randomly surfing the internet at work." I'm already in internal resignation mode, so my score of 7/10 doesn't surprise me.

I'm not happy with this state of affairs, and I'm trying to change my life. I think I only started this job because last December I was too depressed to think what I really wanted to do. I'm getting help for the depression now, and hope that I will be soon in a position to get a job that suits me, and then be in the position to keep doing it.

The Natural Order of Things

Football is a winter sport. It is played on muddy pitches when it is cold and rainy. The only exception is the Cup Final, played in May, when the sun shines, and the fans have a grand day out. This splendid occasion marks the end of the football season.

During the English summer, there is not enough time to play football! People are too busy watching and playing cricket. If the cricketers are taking a well-earned rest, there may be time to take a round of golf, play croquet on the lawn, see the hats and horses at Ascot, or watch the fine ladies and gentlemen play tennis at Wimbledon.

Switzerland and Austria are small alpine nations. They are covered in mountains, and the more adventurous Englishman may dare to ski down a mountain in the winter. During the summer, Swiss and Austrian people like to relax by climbing mountains, hiking and yodeling. No right-minded Englishman would want to play football in the summer, on the side of a mountain!

...No One Said it's Fair

I just unwillingly threw a portion of cream across a bakery. It landed about 1.5m away, intact, just behind me to my right. I had one of those shakes. I never shook with something in my hand before, and just shook about 20 times in 5 minutes.

I'm in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Literally, my nerves have broken down. I'm not in control of what I do. I think I've calmed down a bit now, though, as I write. It's a scrawl, but I haven't thrown my pen across the room, either willingly [1] or unwillingly.

I slept too little and ate too little last night. I still don't get the tutorial.

[1] Willingly thrown pens travel at least 20 yards unless they hit a wall. Unwillingly thrown pens probably go as far as coffee-cream portions.

Update - I held the tutorial. It wasn't great, but I tried to make the best of a bad job. I wrote the above on a piece of paper at 10:30 this morning. I corrected only for mistakes, and not for the simplistic sentences and repetition of words.

I quit

Warning: Rant.

I've been trying to think positively. I've been trying to avoid perfectionism, and making the best of bad/indifferent/good-but-not-perfect jobs. But today I have failed. I was in a lecture today, and could see the boredom creep across the students faces. Tomorrow I can entertain them with an electrostatics exercise.

It's another of those "I'm a fucking clever bastard: sod the fundamental principles, let's get lost in the mathematics" exercise. Expressions pop up from nowhere and in the end some parameters which I don't understand are calculated. There's some random fucking equation which appears from nowhere with the explanation that "a is a geometry parameter (dimension: length), which determines the diameter and position of the [infinitely long] cylinder".

For my whole life I've been using two parameters to determine the position of long cylinders. One for where it is, and one for how thick it is. The toilet roll is 10cm from the cubicle wall and has 5cm diameter. The lead piping is in the library, 2 feet from Miss Scarlett and 1 inch thick. But no! It is possible to put it all in one, apparently. I think it's some kind of scaling thing: a cylinder twice as thick twice as far away looks the same as one once as thick and once as far away. So is a a ratio? No, it has dimensions.

I want to understand things. Engineers seem happy with parameters which describe some unknown length. I'm not. So tomorrow I will stand and try to explain to the students this crap. They'll be bored and become boring engineers. I will fuck off out of here and do god-knows-what, but something different to this shit.

FC Polterberg 2 - Torpedo Entenhausen 2

I'm undergoing therapy for depression, and trying to see things in a more positive light, so I'm not going to worry about terribly miskicking a tap-in which would have cancelled Polterberg's early lead. The goalkeeper was on the floor, the goal was gaping, the ball wasn't even coming fast and nobody was near me, yet somehow my shot dribbled past the far post.

But enough about that. I've made a habit of scoring with tap-ins and rebounds, and it was time for something better. So two-nil down and with five minutes left, I made a run down the left, passed and got the return, and shot from the edge of the area into the bottom corner. Things got even better in injury time as Markus, our goalkeeper, sprinted upfield to take control of the ball. Seeing the resulting confusion in the defence, he had time to feint one pass, then play in Georg, who shot into the corner of the goal for the equaliser. It was his first shot of the match and his first goal of the season. There wasn't even time to restart the match.

I've never seen a goalkeeper help save a game like that. Usually in professional games they just go forward for corners or freekicks, looking for a header. The difference between the spare-time league and higher leagues is probably in fitness levels (all except the goalkeepers are tired out by the end) and ability (a goalkeeper can be just as good an outfield player as the rest). It's a tactic that we may try repeating.

Torpedo Entenhausen 4 - Megalomaniacs Herne 0

In my absence, my teammates have kept the unbeaten streak of Torpedo Entenhausen intact with two 3-3 draws, helping to consolidate our slow but steady rise into mid-table mediocrity (see graph above, showing league position throughout the season, courtesy of SG Sundern). That green stripe shows the promotion slots, from which we are safely removed.

My travels saw me relegated to the bench for the first half of tonight's game. The Torpedo Fanblock tried winning the affection of the sole WAG[1] of the Megalomaniacs by opening her flask of tea, but without success: we couldn't open the flask, and she seemed happy with her present love, even though he played in a woolly hat.

After the first half ended goalless, our substitutions turned the match, with all four goals coming from the bench, including a rare left-footed finish from me. The Megalomaniacs played the whole match with 10 players who looked a bit tired by the end, so I suppose it's no surprise that we turned out winners.

[1] I suppose that when only one footballing partner arrives, it should be a Wife Or Girlfriend, but I decided not to pursue that acronym.

p.s. The first edition of this post had the word mediocracy instead of mediocrity. The latter is the correct word in this context indicating a state of being mediocre. The former is a rare word meaning "rule by the mediocre"; compare to democracy (rule by the people), aristocracy (rule by the nobs) and plutocracy (rule by a cartoon dog).

Some things I did and didn't do

Thursday 1st November

I had some good plans for today, my last day in New York. I thought of going to downtown Manhatten and seeing the financial district and the Statue of Liberty. I thought of getting a ferry to New Jersey and seeing the site of the Burr-Hamilton duel, where the Burr, Vice President of the US, killed his rival. This would have made a fun day out, and shown how far the US has come since those lawless days of trigger-happy Vice Presidents.

In the end I did neither. The subway looks scary, and walking is impossible, with lights fixed to stop you for a minute at every block.

So I went to Central Park again. It's great. You can walk for more than 100 yards in a stretch. There are trees, grass, birds and squirrels. You start to appreciate these things more when stuck in the concrete of Manhattan. I juggled and got the rocking shoulder motion of the four-ball Mills mess just right. I passed some statues: Columbus, Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Shakespeare and King Jagiello of Poland. I guess this shows the shortness of white American history and the importance of immigration to New York.

On the Great Lawn I saw a man playing baseball with his two kids. I offered my services as a second baseman, and we had a good little game with imaginary runners on the bases. It turned out that the guy was from Nottingham, about 30 miles from Sheffield, my home town. So the only baseball game in Central Park was being played by two cricket-trained Englishmen. You can easily spot cricketers playing baseball, as they don't see the need for a glove, and turn inside pitches disdainfully to square leg.

Health Warning

Wednesday 31st October, 8pm

Watching lots of videos showing heart motion, blood flow and clogged arteries hast got me on a health streak. Seeing a video of a carotid artery (that's the one you feel on your throat, and also the one you learn to cut silently during ninja training), all but clogged up, with just a small gap letting the last drops of blood flow to the brain is scary.

I'm now eating ots of apples and went for another jog round Central Park, feeling my heart to check that it was beating nicely. I've been eating oatmeal (that's the American name for porridge) for breakfast. I didn't expect to find it here, but a small diner on the junction of 57th Street and 7th Avenue do a nice oatmeal/banana combination.

Presentation

Wednesday 31st October, 8am

Well the talk about pulse measurements went quite well. I should have known from my years in particle physics that not knowing what you're talking about isn't really a problem. Just turn up on time with the right clothes and some slides that someone else made and talk away.

I never know how talks that I give are going to go. Sometims I freeze, get confused and lost for words. Other times I get into the flow and it goes well. Today I managed to pronounce "Photoplethysmograph" correctly, and slipped in a couple of jokes that got a laugh. They weren't good jokes, but in an engineering conference they don't have to be.

I then went for a jog all the way round Central Park. I keep thinking about manic depression. Yesterday I went from self-hatred and tears to happy and confident within two hours. I can go back in the same time, if not shorter.

Doubt

Tuesday, 30th October.

I'm holding a talk this afternoon about measuring heart pulse (that expansion of the artery you feel when you put your finger on your throat/wrist). I guess that any medical doctor will see that I know fuck all about arterial blood flow. Any electrical engineer will see that I know fuck all about electronics. And any physicist will see that my error bars are way too big.

I can see it, as I'm a physicist. You don't need to know anything about the subject to say that this graph is bullshit. Nature don't work like that.


If you're not a physicist, let me tell you a secret. If those error bars show one standard deviation, then if you fit a line through all the points, about one third of the points shouldn't touch the line with their error bars. A plausible plot looks something like this:



I didn't make the plots, and couldn't be bothered to sort out the error analysis. I'm just the gimp who does the talk. My worst case scenario is to tender my resignation on the spot (with 3 months' notice), go for a juggle in central park, and find a good strip club.

World Series

Sunday, 28th October

I'm quickly getting the hang of baseball terminology, which is almost as confusing as cricket terminology. The New York Times wrote yesterday that during the regular season

[David Ortiz] looked like he was stumbling down a steep hill and then barreling through a revolving door when he corralled one pop-up on a windy day

This means that, in cricketing terms, he shelled a skier, or spilled a dolly.

I used to think that baseball was about hitting home runs, but there is a lot more to it. I watched games 3 and 4 of the World Series, and have seen a bunt (cricket equivalent: forward defensive shot plus a quick single), a double play (cricket equivalent: a run out at both ends, which is imaginable although not possible with the present laws) and a player stealing third (cricket equivalent: running when the bowler isn't looking).

I've also learnt what a designated hitter is: a batter too fat to run, see Ortiz/Inzamam, and that they exist in the American League but not in the National League. This means that there are two sets of rules for the World Series, which is played between the champions of the two leagues. When Boston (AL) played at home, they could use Ortiz, their immobile slogger, to bat in place of their pitcher, but when they played in Colorado (NL) he had to field at first base. In the end he did just fine.

Gala

Monday 29th October, 9pm

I am turning into my dad. He has made a habit of avoiding posh events. Whenever forced to turn up anywhere in a suit, he grumped around for an hour and then went off for a walk. Now people have stopped inviting him, so he's free to go and run up and down hills.

I did the same (except for the hills, of course) at the Gala of the conference in the grand ballroom of the New York Hilton. I started to get unhappy when I realised that I was missing the Torpedo Entenhausen game. Then came the smarminess of some guy thanking the hotel staff "who came from all over the world to watch rich white men pig themselves and slap themselves on the back". What finally flipped me was a professor being given a $2000 prize, and his laudator thanking him for "20 years in the trenches". It's a fucking hard life building ultrasound devices. The mustard gas, shell shock, trench foot, etc.

All this indignation and walking out still leaves me a fucking hypocrite. Would it be better not to thank the staff? I guess not. And of course I pigged out on the food before I left, and I'm not going to volunteer for a war anytime soon. I don't have any answers, but I'm fucking annoyed. Maybe that's a start.

Word Count

Monday 29th October. 5pm

I've been reading the New York Times, which I like. In today's obituaries, the composer of the world's longest diary is featured. From 1935 until 1997, Robert Shields wrote 37.5 million words about his life, recording every detail such as his body temperature, blood pressure and junk mail. I have managed 170-odd posts, giving me an estimated 50,000 words. Were I to blog for another millennium, I might just break the record. Would you like to hear about the solidity of my number twos...

At the conference, I managed to present a poster which I knew almost nothing about. Only one guy noticed, and explained that he had published the same work already, but had done it better. After the poster session I had a confidence crisis, and thought about juggling in Central Park to cheer myself up.

Central Park

Sunday 28th October

The pumpkin gutting has tired me out. I have bits of pumpkin wedged deep into my fingernails, and a pumpkin rash on my forearms. I spent the day reading the New York Times and juggling in Central Park. The skyscrapers of Manhatten are really pretty when viewed through a five-ball reverse cascade. A kid called Brad (aged 3) threw me some juggling balls and showed me how to pass an American football.

Pumpkins

Saturday 27th October

I am in New York for a conference on Ultrasound. I was probably the only person to check into the New York Hilton wearing odd socks (one purple, one green). This morning, I decided to get away from the traffic and Starbucks and went to Central Park, which is five minutes from the hotel. As it was raining, the park was quite empty, although there were plenty of joggers.

I then chanced upon a man, stood on a table, directing a large group of people how to turn 30,000 pumpkins into Jackolanterns. His plan was a division of labour into cutters, gutters and carvers, with carriers and candlers too. Having no real plan for the day, I offered my services and spent the day gutting pumpkins. Eight hours later, a little bit of Central Park looked beautiful, with the lanterns, sometimes scary, sometimes funny, lighting the ways. The centre piece was a pyramind of lanterns with heart shapes cut into them.

I pilfered the photos from some guy on Flickr. I hope he doesn't mind.



This post was part of my plog. I have made some corrections and added photos and links.

America

I am in a hotel in Long Island. I have been left behind by the wifi revolution and didn't manage to get on the internet for a whole week in New York. The cheapest internet cafe I could find was $0.49/min, so I decided to write postcards instead of emails and start a "paper log", or "plog". Sometime I'll type them up and add the correct dates. Today I am heading for Boston.

BW Bochum 0 - Torpedo Entenhausen 1

There's no better feeling in football than watching your opponent throw himself to the floor in an attempt to tackle you, skipping past, waiting for him to catch up with you and repeating the trick. Most top players only get the pleasure of doing this on grass, but on a cinder pitch it is even more fun. I got some bruised ankles for my troubles, but I guess that the defenders of Black and White Bochum got some bloody legs from the hard cinder pitch.

Other good things about the match: we won the game with our only good shot on goal, the opponents were top of the league, and we are now their bogey team, and our winning goal, a left-footed strike from outside the penalty area by youngster Michael somehow flew high into the net in slow motion.

It Was Fun While It Lasted

The Winner, and Nuuuuuuuuuuuu, dominant ape of the planet, is .....the Rhesus macaques.

The Deputy Mayor of a capital city, for fucks sake! What are the chances of that? Assuming, as usual, that this is not a coincidence, this was either

a/ A planned political assassination by monkeys
b/ The latest in a string of monkey killings

Either way, we're fucked.

And the plan to save us from these damned dirty apes?

One approach has been to train bands of larger, more ferocious langur monkeys to go after the smaller groups of Rhesus macaques.

Well, no dangers lurking around the corner there, then.

This approach reminded me of a scene from the Simpsons, where Bart helped introduce bird-eating Bolivian Tree Lizards to Springfield, and is thanked by the town for solving their pigeon problem. The episode ends with a discussion between Principal Skinner and Lisa.

SKINNER: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.

LISA: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?

SKINNER: No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.

LISA: But aren't the snakes even worse?

SKINNER: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.

LISA: But then we're stuck with gorillas!

SKINNER: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.

Wondering Why it's Only After Dark

Warning: this post uses html microdots.

I was flicking through a "what's going on in the Ruhrpott" magazine last night, and glanced over the personal ads. All I found was a lovely German word: tageslichttauglich. This literally means "daylight compatible", and seems to describe a minimum standard of attractiveness and grooming. If 18 letters is too short for you, or if you are are looking for a creature of the night, then you can add an "un" to get "tageslichtuntauglich", meaning "daylight incompatible". Finally, a politically correct term for vampires.

What a lovely language, and what a wonderful country. There was even someone advertising that she had lots of wood in front of her shed. It's an odd thing to boast about, but I suppose you need something to keep you warm in the cold, dark months ahead.

Funny names

Warning: this post contains childish humour and at least one bad pun from me.

I was in a meeting this morning, discussing the purchase of electronic equipment. One of our suppliers is Wayne Kerr electronics. I wonder if they had to beat off bids from Hugh Jass, Mike Hunt and Heywood Jablome.

Links:

Here's the wikipedia take on gag names.

Check out whether there really is a Nicola Tipples (UK electoral register only).

Torpedo Entenhausen 6 - VfL Linden 2

It's been a successful "English week" for Torpedo Entenhausen, with seven points from three games in eight days. Someone asked me what an English week was called in England, and my reply was "a week". Germans seem to think that once a week is enough, when it comes to playing football, and I do admit to feeling quite tired now.

Luckily I didn't have to do too much today as Andy, our midfielder with a good left foot, scored the first five goals. He was on such a hot streak that he even netted one with his right foot.

Right on the final whistle I fired a shot from just outside the box high into the goal for our sixth. The goalkeeper was lying on the floor having just made a save, but it was a nice feeling anyway.

Bugs

A few months ago I conducted a most interesting experiment into the effect of vacuum cleaners on fruit flies. My shared flat in Erlangen had a plague of them due to some rotting onions, so I put a clean bag in the vacuum cleaner and sucked about 20 flies. I then checked and saw that all were dead except for two or three moving very slowly.

My flat in Bochum got some fruit flies this summer, and I did my best to kill them with a vacuum cleaner, but it was difficult to get them all, and it only needs two for them to restart their colony. I spotted a couple of spiders in the corners of the flat, and decided to leave them alive in the hope that they would join in with the fly-killing.

In hindsight this was a mistake, as cobwebs gather dust, and dusty cobwebs give an appearance of decay and neglect to a flat. Today I sucked up the cobwebs and a couple of spiders. I hope they survived: If there are any flies left alive in the dustbag, then they can finish them off.

Taxi Zentrale 1 - Torpedo Entenhausen 1

"So why are you called Taxi Zentrale?"

"We drive taxis".

The game was about as good as the pre-match banter above, and would have ended goalless if it hadn't been for two goalkeeping mistakes. We gave the Taxi Zentrale the lead early on through a miskicked clearance, and their goalkeeper made a mess of a free kick in the last minute. Not too much happened in between.

Video Analysis

Monday's match of Torpedo Entenhausen has been recorded for posterity.

Watch the highlights by clicking here.

Torpedo Entenhausen are in the orange shirts, FC Porno Villa in black. It wasn't a great match, but you can see my Carlton Palmer style trapping of the ball (0:43), a header so bad that all my teammates and one of the opposition throw their heads into their hands in disbelief (5:50), and my point-blank range goal including a "running into the goalpost" celebration (6:00). I think the ball was already over the line from the original shot, and Amin had aleady run off to celebrate, but the whistle hadn't been blown so I'm claiming the goal.

The best bits don't involve me at all, though. At 4:30 the guy filming suggests that the Porno Villa midfield "retreat somewhat so that the goal kick doesn't go over them all". Of course, by the time he's said this it's too late. Next time a less intellectual "GET BACK!!!" might be more effective.

The top scene is right at the start of the video, as our striker, Mario, decides to give the ball to the opposition as a sign of friendship. Check out the double take from Andy, who was expecting the ball and stays rooted to the centre circle, before beginning to philosophise.

The Golden Spurtle

The World Porridge Making Championship has taken place (in Scotland, of course), and a Sassenach came third. A spurtle is a scottish stirring device, like a wooden spoon but more pointy.

As the winter draws in, I will try to eat more Porridge.

FC Pr0n0 Villa 1 - Torpedo Entenhausen 2

Porno Villa are new to the league, so we welcomed them with a good kicking, apparently. We picked up three yellow cards, of of which was for me, although I think it was more clumsiness than anything else. One of the other two yellow cards was for suggesting that the referee was in need of a new pair of glasses, so I don't know where all their injuries came from.

It wasn't a great game, but I scored the winning goal from point-blank range. Normally this is a cliche to say "somewhere very close to the goal", but the limit of point-blank range is quite easy to calculate.

The term comes from the days of cannons. The normal procedure was to estimate the range to the enemy, look up the correct angle of elevation in a table, point your cannon up in the sky, and kill them with a beautiful parabola. Alternatively, if you could already smell the garlic on the enemies breath, you just pointed it straight at them and fired quickish.

Taking the equation from the wikipedia article, a shot speed half of David Hirst's record shot speed (57 mph) and an allowable drop in trajectory of half the height of the goal (4 feet), then point-blank range becomes about 12 metres. This makes sense, when you think about it, as few people bother to adjust for gravity when taking a penalty kick (although maybe some overadjust), but it is common for a free-kick to be shot up and over a defensive wall and into the goal.

So technically, almost all people shot by guns are hit "at point-blank range". It is rare that the killer has to adjust for gravity, but in common usage the term has come to mean "from a distance at which you can't miss the target". So my goal yesterday, scored from a range of zero yards (it was already on the goalline) fulfilled both the original meaning and the newer one.

PhD exams and Werner Heisenberg

Physicists can be divided into two big groups: experimentalists and theorists. The first lot (to which I belong) know what a vacuum pump is, the second lot write long equations.

Werner Heisenberg was a theoretician, and so good that he could even write short equations. He has a great (if true, I can't find any reliable source for it) epitaph, applying the inability to exactly locate a particle, as defined in his uncertainty principle, to his own body.

Er liegt irgendwo hier

meaning "He's buried somewhere/anywhere round here". I will try to check this out the next time I'm in Munich. It sounds somehow too good to be true.

Anyway, before he died, and before he developed his nobel-prize winning quantum mechanics, he wrote a thesis titled "On the Stability and Turbulence of Fluid Flow" that concerned the flow of the River Isar through Munich. In Google Maps the flow looks distinctly turbulent in parts, but maybe it's changed since 1925.


Größere Kartenansicht

Well, having done whatever he'd done in the Isar (I can't imagine that he spent much time wading in it) and writing his thesis, Heisenberg had to pass an oral exam. He had four examiners: A theoretician (Arnold Sommerfeld, his PhD adviser), a mathematician, an astronomer and an experimentalist (Wilhelm Wien). Being a theoretican, Heisenberg knew little about experimental matters, and was torn apart in that part of the exam. The bad news for experimentalists is that the theoreticians have been seeking their revenge ever since.

My exam was pretty much a mirror image of Heisenberg's, but without the mathematician. I had a theoretician, an experimentalist (also my PhD advisor) and an astronomer asking the questions, and almost drowned in the theory section. I passed, but only just. This happens to everyone I've ever heard of.

My only suggestion to future experimentalists is to make a formal apology to the theoretician at the start of the exam, explaining your regret for Heisenberg's treatment. Say how cruel it was to confront such a brilliant mind with trivialities of technical equipment, and profess that great thinkers don't need to know how vacuum pumps work. Suggest that you abandon the exam, pick a grade out of a hat and crack open the champagne, drinking to a reconciliation in the world of physics.

Links

I lifted most of this post from this site on Heisenberg's career.

Arnold Sommerfeld is the unluckiest physicist of all time.

That theoretician may be the train that Gajo-Simpatico is fearing.

Dead Trousers 0 - Torpedo Entenhausen 9

Yes, believe your eyes, that is 9 (nine, 0b1001, 0o11) goals. Torpedo Entenhausen are a few matches into the Rückrunde, a typically German concept. German football leagues, from the Bundesliga down to Bochum's spare time league, are arranged so that each team plays all the other teams (the Hinrunde) and then plays them again in the same order, but at the other ground (the Rückrunde). So, because we played against the Dead Trousers at our ground in the sixth match of the season, we played the return fixture at their ground in the nineteenth match. If you are good at maths, you will have calculated that there are 14 teams in the league, so Hinrunde and Rückrunde consist of each 13 games, and over the season we play 26 matches.

This will all seem terribly obvious and boring to any German reader, but being English I find it most wonderful. In England, the fixtures are calculated by that mysterious entity, the fixtures computer. Nothing causes more paranoia than this dreaded calculating device, which makes sure that Chelsea always get away games in freezing Bolton after european ties and that sacked managers meet up with their old club exactly twice a season. People even get paranoid about non-existent computers.

The Rugby League does not have a fixtures computer, but, if it had, it would be one that does not like Widnes.

There is some just cause for this dread, fear and misunderstanding of the fixtures computer. Take Sheffield Wednesday, for example. This season they will have played Hull City twice before the year is out, but will first face local rivals Sheffield United in January. They will then play them home and away within a month. Why? This computer seems to be an exercise in Chaos Theory. A single flower show, balloon fiesta, or gay pride march anywhere in the country can throw the whole system into imbalance and result in millions of people up and down the land going to somewhere completely different, and their team getting badly beaten by someone else instead, which brings me back to the match yesterday.

The first game (in the Hinrunde) ended 2-2, but we continued our strong Rückrunde form by winning by 9 goals to zero. Their goalkeeper was of the William Foulkes mould, and initially, despite our dominance, we struggled to beat him as he quickly closed the angles. By closing the angles I don't mean that he rushed out of goal (too much effort), I just mean that he turned to face you.

Martin, our stalwart supporter, suggested that we aimed for the bottom corners of the goal in an attempt to exploit his immobility. The scoreline suggests that this tactic worked in the end, and I scored too with an unchallenged run from midfield and a shot into the bottom left-hand corner from just outside the box.

Borussia Mönchengladbach 2 - Alemania Aachen 1

Well I got my mobile back. I still don't know whether to thank or curse the guy who took my phone on a round trip from Bochum to Mönchengladbach via Dortmund, but at least he was honest and gave me my phone back, so I probably was a bit harsh in the last post.

After leaving the grotty internet cafe (see post below) I needed to pee. As their toilet was broken, I went into the pub next door. Peeing there cost 50 cents for non-customers, so I ordered a beer. After a few minutes, some Mönchengladbach fans had returned from the stadium and joined me to celebrate their victory. I left and found the guy who had acquired my phone, got it back, and went for another beer to celebrate, inwardly singing

Ohne Handy fahre ich nicht nach Haus, ohne Handy fahre ich nicht nach Haus. [1]

I returned to the pub and bought a round of drinks, and the Mönchengladbach fans said that they would get me home, seeing that a couple of them lived in Essen, which isn't far from Bochum. We drank the way to Düsseldorf, visited a pub next to the station in Düsseldorf (a guy said he knew the landlord, Pedro), and then drank the way to Essen and Bochum. Right now I'm back in Bochum and drunk. Borussia Mönchengladbach are top of the league and aiming for promotion.

[1] Translation: I will not aboard the train to Bochum without my mobile phone.

Mönchengladbach

It could have happened even if I was feeling well, but these things seem to happen more often when I'm feeling down anyway.

I ate lunch at a chinese restaurant, famous for it's chicken meat courts, and left my mobile phone there. Someone found my phone, and claims to have taken it to Mönchengladbach, which is over an hour from Bochum by train. Leaving it in charge of the restaurant owners was obviously too simple for him, so I'm off to Mönchengladbach, in full expectation that this guy will mug me for my wallet and keys when I get there.

Today I have slouched, cried, retched and despaired, and that was even before I realised that I'd lost my phone. I'm starting to wonder if I can live an independent life. It all seems so complicated.

Update 20:21

I'm in Mönchengladbach, and the guy is nowhere to be seen. I rang him up, and he explained that he is in Dortmund, and had an accident. Apparently, someone broke his mirror, and he had to wait for the police. He hoped to be in Mönchengladbach in an hour. Quite why the cunt has sent me to Mönchengladbach I don't know, as he will be driving his silver fucking BMW through Bochum to get here, the wanker. Top quote from him so far, as I frantically shove money into the pay phone: "Can I reach you by telephone". Sure, just call yourself on my fucking mobile!!!

If this is a practical joke, be 100% sure that I will use violence when I find out. And if this fucking arsehole doesn't turn up at 9, I will call the police and accuse this verdammte Drecksau of stealing my phone. It's OK picking up lost items, but you really should remember to give them back.

By the way, this internet cafe is a piece of shit. They have old cathode ray tube monitors, the toilet is broken and they don't clear the memory of the web browser. The last sites visited include www.sexrelax.de, www.gina-wild.de and www.nightparc.de. The keys seem slightly sticky, too.

Referral Forms

Germans like to go and see their doctor, or even better lots of doctors. According to this article (in German), the average German sees a doctor 16.3 times a year, which is the highest rate in the world. In order to try and stem the number of visits, especially people diagnosing themselves and going straight to a specialist, patients have to pay 10 Euros each quarter in order to see a doctor. Referrals in that quarter are then free. This system is supposed to encourage patients to first see a GP (General Practitioner), who can send them to a specialist if necessary. This great step forward was part of the Gesundheitsreform.

I was sent by my GP (where I paid 10 Euros back in July) to a psychiatrist, who sent me back to my GP, who yesterday referred me to a neurologist. I got a little referral form explaining who (the GP) was referring me to whom (the neurologist) and wherefore (depression). I then rang up the neurologist, and was told that the appointment could only be made at the end of October as he was busy. The secretary of the neurologist explained that the referral was only valid until the end of September, and that I would need a new one if I came in October. The alternative would be to pay 10 Euros to the neurologist and then keep going to the neurologist to get referrals to the GP. So I will make a completely pointless trip to my GP in a weeks time to get a referral to replace a perfectly good referral that I got yesterday. Which means that her waiting list will increase until the point that nobody ever sees a doctor in the same 3-month period that they were referred, and 100% of the doctor's time is spent filling out forms again and again.

The alternative would just be to go to the bank, get 163 Euros in 10 Euro notes, and pay each time. This would be my favourite solution, but I quite like the idea that one doctor has a list of when you were ill and with what. I just wish that the referrals were valid for a reasonable time.

I cried a lot yesterday and took time off work. A friend forced me to tidy my room, which was one giant floordrobe. I found one of the toenails which had fallen off a few months ago. He said that I have let myself go, and need to sort myself out.

Torpedo Entenhausen 1 - Team USA 1

We should really have won this game against one of the few teams which are below us in the league table. Reading their website, it seems that they have had trouble getting a full team out on some occasions. Against us, though, they had enough for a full team and two substitutes, whilst we were down to the bare bones: our eleventh player was still putting on his boots as we kicked off.

We started the match strongly, and took the lead halfway through the first half. Team USA tried to clear the ball, but gave it straight to me. I passed to Aziz who beat one player and scored with a low shot. We should have added another goal or two before the break, but didn't. The advantage of a couple of substitutes was seen in the last half hour as we tired and Team USA scored an equaliser. They could have even gone on to win the match.

Update: Team USA have put up their version of events. It's good to see that the babelfish translation is as amusing as ever. Please be reassured that nobody really suffered shell shock in the match.

Duck-live vs. team U.S.A. 1:1 (1:0). In a combatstressed portion the ducks went by right after quite chaotic first 20 minutes into guidance. To appropriate speech and some restructuring we came better into the play and had numerous hochkaraetige gate chances. Janni refuelled itself in the 65 min by the strafraum... peng reconciliation. Afterwards run on a gate, unfortunately without victory. One point with which we first times can be so content.

I saw a psychologist this morning, and he diagnosed me with mild depression with ups and downs, or something like that. I will start a therapy course soon.

This music video is worth watching, if only for the mindless violence.

Better to cry in an ICE...

...than a Regionalbahn. I got the high speed train to from Bochum to Erlangen, and filled out some forms about my psychological health. I have an appointment on Monday with a psychologist, and I have a lot to discuss. When I finished filling out the forms, I burst into tears and shook quite a bit.

After half an hour of crying, I cheered up a bit, and the young girl sat opposite gave me a picture of a horse. She drew horses, the sun, butterflies and grass, and wanted Würzburg castle for christmas.

My Dad

If you want to know your future, it is often a good guide to see what your parents are up to. I have added my dad to the list of blogfriends. He likes to run up and down hills, and tries to organise others into doing the same on his car share webpage.

Sometimes I'm not quite sure what he's up to, but it sounds like fun, and over rough ground he's too fast for the police anyway:

This week's News.

Labrador Tea Plants. We all know about Mike's original mystery Tea Plant, placed at Outer Edge.

He permanently rues the fact that England's hills are too small, and is off to Austria to run up a mountain this weekend. It looks quite a testing route, but I think that he can at least take the cable car back down.

Claude Shannon

One of the most entertaining biographies in Wikipedia must belong to Claude Shannon. I first heard of him this year when I had to learn some information theory, which explains why the world of computing is based on 0s and 1s, and why u cn stll rd whn I wrt lk ths.

I could have also kicked off by pointing out that he planned the most beautiful machine . I think the beauty, as so often, lies in the symmetry of the device. The only action which causes it to open brings about an inside-out mirrored action which closes it again.

Alternatively, I could have led with the fact that he built the first juggling machine and gave it the head of comedian W.C. Fields, who made his name in a Vaudeville act.

Here is a video of Claude Shannon and his juggling machine.


and here is a video of his inspiration, W.C. Fields. I will try out the fake behind-the-back trick (3:44 left to go). I'm not very good at real ones, and from that angle it looks quite convincing.

Bowl Bloomin' Straight!

This looks like it is a Monty Python inspired joke, but it is deadly serious. The game of 20 overs (120 balls) a side cricket between India and Pakistan ended in a tied score, and a bowl out.

Labels

I went through my Blog and labelled all of the posts. I realised that this year I haven't written as much as in 2006. Must try harder. Having a little label bar according to frequency of appearance, I see that the top three are:

Football (15)
Stern-Gerlach Experiment (11)
Depression (11)

Having reread some of the posts on depression, I decided last week that it was time to get some specialist help, and will be starting a therapy course next week. I got this far in December, but then hoped that a job and a change of city would fix things. It didn't.

I have been feeling sad quite a lot in the last week, and shaking sometimes. On Thursday I tried to go to work but started crying and went home again. This weekend I slept lots.

This story about a web of lies told in an effort to skive from international football duty cheered me up a bit.

I would write something about the Stern-Gerlach experiment, to complete the top three, but I don't have anything to say about it.

Red Star Fussek 0 - Torpedo Entenhausen 2

You don't have to take my word for it; you can read that Torpedo Entenhausen won their first away match of the season as written by the opposition (in German).

Their pitch, as you can see in the picture which I nicked from their website, has an odd mixture of cinder fairway down the middle and deep rough grass on the flanks, as if their groundsman did his apprenticeship on a golf course. You can see it even better on google maps.


Größere Kartenansicht

Click here if the embedded map doesn't work

Our first goal was a wind-assisted 3-iron down the middle followed by a crisp 25-foot putt by striker Amin. The Red Stars then put us under quite a bit of pressure, but our defence held firm until the 55th minute, as we broke away down the right wing and then switched play to the left. I played Amin in behind the defence and he floated a cross to the back post which was headed in by Aziz for the second goal. Despite having no substitutes to replace some tiring legs (our spare striker is possibly still driving around Bochum looking for the ground), we just about kept going until the end to secure the points.

The occasion was lifted by the vocal support from the terraces (it's that thin grey strip at the side of the pitch outside the running track). Usually we are watched by the proverbial canine-assisted trio, but there were a couple of dozen supporters yesterday.

The Bermuda Cup

The centre of Bochum's nightlife is the so-called Bermuda Triangle. The area is full of pubs and stuff, and once a year they hold a seven-a-side football tournament to see which pub has the best team.

I imagined that the teams would be formed by dragging the regulars off their bar stools and sticking a football shirt over their beer bellies, but it seems that the cup is so prestigious that pubs try to get a few ringers in. So despite never having passed through their doors, I ended up playing for "Tucholsky" in a seven-a-side football tournament on Saturday. We went out in the first round, which was quite an achievement given that four of the five teams went through. We didn't even manage a consolation goal. The main problem was that the group stage took six hours, and most of the team were drunk by the final game.

Still, I have cheered up a bit, and I have learnt who Kurt Tucholsky was. I have just read quite a bit about and by him, so remember to "Buy German lemons."

Reasons to be Cheerful.

I am feeling very depressed. I went to the doctor yesterday, and told him that I was sad, scared, confused and unproductive. He referred me to the Centre for Psychotherapy at the university. I went there and filled in a form about my mental and physical health.

Since then I've been crying a lot (particularly when I think of my parents), walking around miserably, and having muscle spasms. I'm sat there, thinking about something, and then another thought comes in from somewhere, and the two thoughts collide and confuse me completely. All at once I blink, my head suddenly shakes and my shoulders hunch, throwing my arms to the centre. Sometimes my knees kick too. I managed to startle a girl in the cafeteria by doing this whilst exclaiming "Wuuhuuhh" rather too loudly.

Some miserable thoughts to end on:

A Film: The introduction to Trainspotting.

A Book: Cloud Atlas. I don't know if it was Robert Frobisher, the oppressive side of human nature or the future of humanity, but this depressed me lots.

Some Music: Like a Rolling Stone and From Ausschwitz to Ipswich.

If it's too much for you, why don't you take a break from it all? Go to Desolation Island or the Disappointment Islands.

Pölen with the VfL.

WARNING: this blog usually carries no advertising, in order to save your souls and because the income would be laughably small. If you go on to read this post, you could end up fat as fuck, addicted to green food colouring, overdosed on caffeine and supporting a football club for whom UEFA cup qualification is a sure-fire sign of approaching relegation. I'd leave now if I were you.








Ah, I see you're still here. Let us begin.

German TV advertisements are notoriously bad. They usually involve some Bavarians prancing around a meadow consuming beer or milk or sausages. I was thus surprised whilst watching the ZDF Sportstudio last night to see them feature the new advertisement for the VFL Bochum.



It contains no Bavarians at all, and carries on my good work of bringing the concept of Pölen (or Pöln, nobody seems to know the official spelling) to a larger audience. At 0:39 the guy in the white vest exclaims "Hömma... pölen is wieso aufm Hof verboten, weiße, ne?". This translates to

Please listen carefully. You are, I'm sure, aware that playing football in the yard is, irrespective of the present circumstances, not allowed.

This advertisement has nothing to do with the rest of the post, but is great: Fresh from the sewers to you. If you're convinced, why not sign this petition? Top reason for signing so far: "I am diabetic and need the turtle pies to survive."

Having first poisoned the youth of america with their pies and cereal (with Ninja Marshmallow!), at least the Turtles tried to save them from Marijuana and preemptively deal with the munchies.

(Sorry for the third link in. It's below the level of this blog, and I don't wish to promote some shitty coffee stuff by viral advertising, but I found it whilst looking for traditional Bavarian-style adverts and I'd just watched the two Milka ads. It got me completely.)

Juggling

I've not achieved much of note in the past months, but I learnt to juggle a four-ball Mills mess. This requires the juggler to keep crossing and uncrossing the arms like in some song with a custom dance. The routine looks a bit like this (around 1:40 he gets it to work very nicely). According to all reliable sources, the balls which start in one hand are never caught by the other hand, but every time I try to confirm this I drop them all.

Whilst looking for that animation, I read about Rupert Ingalese (a Yorkshireman, note) and his juggling book from the 1920s. Ingalese, although recommending his readers to start with wooden bottles and enamel plates, gives an idea of what people did before there were shops selling special juggling items: it seems they took whatever was lying around at home: lampshades, billiard balls, china plates, champagne bottles and midgets. Nowadays you can easily buy soft balls, plastic rings and weighted clubs, but juggling midgets are hard to come by.



In a laboured effort to connect the previous two paragraphs, I would point out that Ingalese probably never managed a Mills mess, as it was first popularised at some time around 1973. Had he been around at the time, I'm sure he would have mastered it whilst also balancing a couple of lampshades.