PhD Hat

It is traditional to grant students who complete their PhD a souped-up mortarboard. My department in Erlangen went for relatively simple yet personal and loving designs: mine had a red lamp, a green lamp, a cricket bat with some ashes, a bicycle, a crossword, a union jack and franconian flag, some alcohol labels, a broken glass tube, a high-frequency solenoid and another glass tube filled with little red balls.

The department in Bochum, being electrical engineers, seem to favour the major electronic approach. I spent most of Thursday helping to solder 30 Diodes and 160 Resistors onto a circuit board. The hat itself is in the mechanical workshop, and the ultraviolet LEDs and fluorescent foil should arrive on Monday. I'm not quite sure what this hat should do when it is finished, but it should be impressive.

Apparently some hats in the department have been considerably more complicated than the work for which the PhD was awarded, and this devotion could explain why it takes so long for anyone to finish their PhD.

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.