SG Sundern 1- Torpedo Entenhausen 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chirp

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

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

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

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

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

Torpedo Entenhausen 4- BW Bochum 3

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

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

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

3/ Except for the Hamburger SV.

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



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

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

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

Problem group

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odd bit of english culture: Cheese Rolling.

Things you may not wish to know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vfl Bochum 2 - FC Schlake 05 1

The best ways to annoy fans of FC Schalke 04 are

1/ To ask when they last won the title.
2/ To misspell or mispronounce their club name.

Credit must therefore go to Carmen Thomas for a now legendary slip of the tongue, and to the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, who today reported the Bochum full-back Oliver Schröder as asking "Do we feel sorry for the Schlaker?" (his answer was no, by the way).

Ob uns die Schlaker [sic] ein bisschen leid tun? Warum? Ich glaube nicht, das sie andersrum mit uns Mitleid gehabt hätten. 39 pubkte [sic] sehen in der Tabelle nciht [sic] schlecht aus.

Torpedo Entenhausen 2 - Dead Trousers 2

Musical memories from german lessons at school in England:

1/ Singing a german cover of Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega, with something about a Currywurst, and the line "Wo ist Roland, oder Meier, oder Herbert Grönemeyer". This translates as "Where is Roland, or Meier, or Herbert Grönemeyer". I don't know who Roland or Meier are, but Herbert Grönemeyer is a famous singer from Bochum, who once sang a song about a Currywurst.

2/ Reading an article about the contents of Herbert Grönemeyer's dustbin, which had been sifted through by intrepid journalists, and then building a shrine in the classroom to worship this rubbish container.

3/ Finding out that a top band were called "The Dead Trousers", and finding this funny.

Over ten years have passed: I have no idea who covered Tom's Diner, I have forgotten quite what Herbert Grönemeyer had thrown away, and I have discovered that the Dead Trousers are actually quite good, despite coming from Dusseldorf. [1]

As you may have guessed from the title, "The Dead Trousers" is also the name a football team in the second division of the spare-time league in Bochum, and they are not very good at all. Torpedo Entenhausen should have won easily, having led 2-0 for most of the match and enjoyed most of the possession, but we then conceded two quick goals in the final minutes and drew 2-2. Still, that was at least the first point of the season.

[1] This may appear uncalled for, but in order to get a residence permit in Bochum, you have to sing a song by Herbert Grönemeyer and agree to dislike Dusseldorf.

EeeyEe0e

Yesterday I had a confidence crisis at work. It started off with an equation with too many E's in it. It looked to me pretty much like the post title, and described an electric field entering a region, whilst oscillating according to a power of Euler's number (e), and pointing in the direction of the y-axis, but only one unit (einheit) long.

So in summary, Electric (E), Einheit (e), Eintritt (e), Euler (e). I looked at this equation and was thrown into despair. It is an amazing ability to be able to look at an equation and immediately recognise the significance of each term, to see that the direction of a vector doesn't depend on a constant value, or that the time-dependence doesn't depend on the direction. I looked at the equation, and could only see and say "EEEEEE". That was it. The same understanding as a five-year-old.

I recovered slightly, read the foreword to Calculus made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson, and found a book where they used "Incidence" instead of "Eintritt", and worked around the e for "Einheit". With most of the E's gone, things made sense again.

This happened to me once before, when I found an equation consisting of 17 J's and pretty much nothing else. I remember intensely wishing to never see a physics book again. The next time this happens, I will try to remember this advice: drop the book (or lecturer), but keep at the subject.

Gletzenbrod

I was looking through photos of a Party in the kitchen in Erlangen, and saw a recipe for a christmas fruit bread in the background. I baked this bread for christmas, but then lost the recipe. The resolution was just good enough to figure out the words, so I decided to bake one. The recipe came from my flatmate Martin's mum who lives in Zwiesl. The name should actually be written "Kletzenbrot", meaning "dried pear bread", but in Zwiesel the pronunciation is more like "Gletzenbrod". It is most nutricious and tastes even better when buttered.

This recipe involves soaking things overnight!

Ingredients

For the dough:

500g flour,
150g sugar,
1 packet of yeast.

For the fruit:
500g dried pears
500g dried plums
A few dried figs
Some nuts
Raisins/sultanas
Candied fruit peel
Cinnamon
Cloves

This list is quite flexible, but the dried pears must be included. A rule of thumb is to make sure you have more fruity stuff than dough.

Procedure

1/ Soak the dried pears in sugar water overnight. Don't throw the water away until the very end!

2/ Get a good night's sleep.

3/ Get out of bed, then make the dough using the flour, sugar, yeast and pear water. The dough should be firm and give the impression that it could hold a bread-like form in the near future. Leave to stand and ferment a little.

4/ Chop up the dried fruit and nuts etc. In the meantime the dough should have risen slightly. If it hasn't, convince yourself that it has.

5/ Set the oven to 200 degrees Celcius.

6/ Knead the fruity stuff and spices into the dough. Make two (or more, or less if you wish) loaves on a baking tray, coat with pear water and bake until done (about an hour, but it never hurts to look before).

7/ Tip the pear water away.

Here are some alternative recipes for Kletzenbrote (in German).

Higgs Bosun

Having left the world of particle physics far behind, I missed the excitement of the Large Hardon Collider in Cern in the last couple of weeks. An accelerator which has been sexed up so much in the past years was heading for a fall. Phrases like "finding the God particle" and "recreating the conditions of the big bang" may be propagated by journalists in search of a headline, but must have originated with physicists overly keen to sell their product.

So a Magnet breaking from its support and blowing out lots of Helium can become a big story. I have long regarded broken, burnt, flooded or leaky magnets as an intregal part of a particle accelerator, but the public response to the Times article is strong and crazy in equal parts. Special attention should be paid to the comments by Amelie in London (surely a delightful piece of trolling),

'Bosun' or 'boatswain' not boson! Does no-one at The Times use their spell-checker?

to Walter E. Wallis in Palo Alto

It is a scientific breakthrough, but when something breaks it is an engineering error?

and to Mark Bergner in Chicago

Not to make light of a bad situation, but how seriously can you take a dozen scientists yelling, "Run for your lives" in a squeaky high-pitched helium-induced voice?

The Möhnesee

My easter weekend wasn't nearly as depressing as last year's. I finally got round to doing what I'd always wanted to do as a kid: play ducks and drakes on the Möhnesee.

The Möhnesee was the main target of Operation Chastise in the second world war, as planes of the RAF attacked the dam with Bouncing Bombs. The bombers flew over the jut of land visible here (this is where I took the photo, too) before releasing the bombs around 400m from the dam wall. The fifth bomb breached the wall, sending a wave of water down the Möhne valley and into the Ruhr.

I got the train from Bochum to the other side of Dortmund, then cycled to the dam, ate lunch at the rather expensive Seehof restaurant (the reservoir is now a major tourist centre) and walked to the jut of land in order to launch a flat stone or two at the wall. The water was too choppy for any serious assault, but I got one stone to make four jumps before it sank far short of the wall.

The dam wall has a promenade so you can walk across, or possibly even drive across with a car. I stood on the wall for a couple of minutes, wondering if you could hide a 3-ton bomb in a fake sausage van. Fit the bomb with a hydrostatic fuse, drive onto the wall, tip it into the lake and run...

I will now try to change the tone to a more sombre one. The raid was part of the "Total War", where civilian targets were selected in order to damage the war production. The aim was to kill workers, destroy factories and homes and to restrict water and food supplies and energy production. Over 1000 civilians were killed, including hundreds of Prisoners of War. Of the 133 aircrew involved, 53 died, and those who returned safely had remote prospects of surviving the war. I'm glad that I can go to the Möhnesee on a bicycle and not in a Lancaster bomber, and I'm glad that when I throw stones at a lake, nobody is throwing anything back.

The Game of Love, Unity and Murdered Coaches.

If you don't know what cricket is it's about time to find out, for the cricket world cup is underway in the West Indies. India look as though they are about to go out and Pakistan have departed minus their coach, who departed in the dearly sense of the word.

Here is a brief guide to cricket:

1/ How to bat for Kazachstanis.

2/ The game's jargon explained by Willow and Stumpy.

3/ The tea towel explanation of the game, and also in German.

4/ An actually quite helpful explanation of the game.

5/ Of course all this knowledge is no use if you don't play with style. Curtley Ambrose demonstrates.

So having got through all that you have deserved a few beers, just keep the number of the coastguard to hand.

Lame Ducks Fail to Quack

The Bochumer Cliche reports...

Torpedo Entenhausen looked like ducks out of water in their 12 (Twelve, 0b1100, 0o14) - 3 defeat. The defence had been hoping to be as mean as Scrooge McDuck, but instead it was open day at the money bin as the opposition went into an early lead. Fowl play saw both sides reduced to 10 players, and despite endofphil breaking his season's duck by feathering the ball into an empty net, the goose had thoroughly been cooked. The Entenhausen keeper twaddled off with 10 minutes remaining, and the performance has to be put down as "phooey, phooey and phooey".

The Fartela

Following on from the great interest in my discussion of the mole, I thought I'd move on to the Candela, a unit of light intensity. This is one of the seven base units of the SI system, and most people would assume that it is important.

Why, in this case, despite studying physics for longer than is healthy, have I never used the unit Candela? Or seen anyone who used the unit? Or derived anything from this unit? Or ever bought a 10 Candela lightbulb?



The Candela describes how bright a light source is. Whichever way you look at light, the important thing is that it transmits energy, and the energy in a certain time is a power, measured in Watts: Hence the 60 Watt lightbulb. A Watt is already defined in terms of metres, kilograms and seconds, so it would appear that light intensity doesn't need its own base unit. A pre EU-directive shopper may wish to disagree, though.

Imagine that you bought a 60 Watt light bulb, and found out that it didn't light up despite drawing the full 60 Watt. It might give you a warm feeling, or a sunburn, but if the wavelength isn't between 400 and 700 nanometres you won't see anything. This is why the Candela is needed: it combines the power emitted with the sensitivity of the human eye to find the perceived brightness of something.

[Mid post rant: German Gangsta Rap fucking sucks. Think 2 minutes of the same rhyme repeated with the odd different ending word, interrupted by gunshots. Kezboards fucking suck too, whz the fuck does windows think that opening a new tab makes zou want to tzpe differently. Smokers and internet cafes suck too.]

This seems fair enough, and most useful to know when buying a lightbulb, or looking for a new star to orbit your planet around. But why make it a base unit? The Candela is strictly only of any meaning to a human with working eyes. In the kingdom of the blind, how many Candelas does a lightbulb emit?

Seeing as the Candela describes the human perception (brightness) of an physical property (flow of energy), why not do the same for the other senses, and give them each an SI base unit. Sound is a wave, which transmits power, but humans only hear certain wavelengths (most people would say frequencies, but I'm trying to be consistent). Multiply the sound wave power by a human ear function, and you have a new unit: the Bella. Sounds for which the ear is sensitive would earn more Bellas than those at the limit of human hearing.

Smells are concentrations of certain molecules in the air, best measured physically as moles/cubic metre (although it may depend on the speed of those molecules, too, for all I know. Physicists don't worry much about smells, or personal hygiene). Multiply this concentration by a wuffiness factor which describes the sensitivity of the human nose and you have a new unit: the Fartela.

So why is the Candela a base unit? I think it is something to do with unification. This website lists lots of old units of perceived brightness: The Hefner Candle, the Violle, the Apostilb, the Blondel, the Footlambert, the Nit, the Skot and the Stilb. The world's photometric experts were probably so besides themselves with happiness when the Candela came into standard use that they made it a base unit.

Writing this, I've grown to like the Candela. It's useful, practical, and although it probably shouldn't be a base unit it surely deserves recognition in the google calculator.

The windscreen wiper.

I have learnt a most useful german gesture: Der Scheibenwischer ("The windscreen wiper"). The meaning is described here in german, and a quick translation is

Move your hand to and fro in front of your face. It looks like the windscreen wipers on a car. This gesture means "You must be crazy!".

I'm writing about this because Sascha Dum, a footballer with Alemannia Aachen, received a red card (video here, 3:40 in). Most neutral observers seem to think that only half a wiper cycle in the direction of the referee warrants only a yellow card, and that a red card should be reserved for a full double-cycled (left-right-left-right) wiper movement.

I wonder what happens if a player does this in an international competetion. What would a south american referee make of it all?

She's the 1.66053886(28) × 10-24 moles

Here's a useful google calculator calculation: How many moles is a baker's dozen?. The google calculator will return any dimensionless unit in moles if you ask nicely, such as lightyear/foot (both distances), or kilogram/electron mass (both masses). The former means that a mole of footsteps will transport you millions of lightyears, the latter that a mole of electrons will weigh much less than a bag of sugar.

Google calculator thinks that a mole is just a large number. This is how I would think of it, too. The official definition of a mole is, however, as follows.

1. The mole is the amount of substance of a system which contains as many elementary entities as there are atoms in 0.012 kilogram of carbon 12; its symbol is "mol."

2. When the mole is used, the elementary entities must be specified and may be atoms, molecules, ions, electrons, other particles, or specified groups of such particles.

An amount of substance is "defined to be proportional to the number of specified elementary entities in a sample".

This is of course a load of bollocks (number yet unspecified, but hopefully less than a mole). The phrase "atoms, molecules, ions, electrons, other particles" is ridiculous. Do other particles include cows, donuts, shoes, ships and tins of sealing wax? If not, why not? If so, why not add a couple to the list:

...the elementary entities must be specified and may be atoms, molecules, cows, ions, dildos or other particles.

And don't go all "complex objects" and "elementary particles": an atom isn't elementary in the slightest, and despite the name can be cut open at will.

Why do the SI want to make this distinction between "elementary entities" and everyday objects? Why not use moles to count things? The problem is that the mole is defined in terms of kilograms, and the definition of a kilogram is "equal to the mass of the international prototype of the kilogram." The fact that all known masses are dependent on a lump of metal in Paris staying intact has annoyed scientists for a while. One cow is presently 1.66053886 x 10-24 moles of cows, but if the prototype kilogram loses mass—and in the last century it did—it could in the future be less.

Another problem is that nobody knows quite how many units are in a mole. This is why there is a (28) in the brackets of the title. This means that you could add (or subtract) 28 to (or from) the last two digits (86) and still be within the margin of error. So a cow could as much as 1.66053904 x 10-24 moles of cows, or as little as 1.6605358 x 10-24 moles of cows.

So presuming google calculator and I are correct in treating the mole as a counting unit (and who would wish to doubt this), all scientists don't know how many things they have, and are continously losing/gaining them too, depending on a lump of metal in Paris.

One way out of this crisis would be to count in units (the one), and define the kilogram in terms of electron masses. Thus scientists could again count with with the rest of the population. I don't think the chemists would like it, though.

As a reward for sticking with this post, here is The Answer in moles.

[Disclaimer: The Answer in moles contains error bars and may increase or decrease with time. The author accepts no responsibility for future changes to The answer in moles.]

Some Other Team 3 - Torpedo Entenhausen 1

I joined a football team in the "Spare time league" and made my debut for Torpedo Entenhausen this week. I ran around a lot and caused a bit of trouble for the opposition, who weren't so keen on running but felt that at least one of them ought to run after me. This means that I can play again next week.

I have acquired the ironic nickname the "Kopfballungeheuer", which translates as "The heading monster". Despite being the tallest person on the pitch, I kept missing the ball, and on the occasions when I made contact the ball bounced off my head in a random direction.

Some links:

Elf defence for 'lingerie thief'

Comedy stretcher bearers

I have finally fallen for the google calculator. Calculations with units included are definitely the way forward and cut out many of my mistakes.

Intelligence and dental assistents

I impressed three young female dental assistents this morning by telling them where they were, leading them up two flights of stairs and sending them down a corridor. After passing halfway down the corridor they remarked that I seemed to be most intelligent. I think it was the map-reading ability that did it.

The awful (use of the beautiful) german language.

In an attempt to regain some of my interest in physics I borrowed a book from the university library: "Ideengeschichte der Physik" by Wilfried Kuhn. The title means "a history of ideas in physics". It is a most frustrating book, for once I get past the language barrier it is most interesting. Sadly, I rarely manage this.

I like to think that I can read german, but when I see these sentences (the translation and bold highlighting is from me) I give up.

Stephan Gray amazed his audience with "Homo electrificatus", A with threads of horse's hair on the ceiling secured free-swinging electrically charged lad

or

The discovery of Ewald Juergen von Kleist had been by the Physicist from Leiden, Petrus van Muschenbroek (1692-1761), author of the standard experimental physics textbook of his time, published.

My only consolation myself is the knowledge that I Mark Twain had similar difficulties. Twain claimed that some newspapers went to print without ever reaching the verb at the end of the sentence, and used this example to make his point:

But when he, upon the street, the (in-satin-and-silk-covered-now-very-unconstrained-after-the-newest-fashioned-dressed) government counselor's wife met

Twain then rants away,

A writer's ideas must be a good deal confused, a good deal out of line and sequence, when he starts out to say that a man met a counselor's wife in the street, and then right in the midst of this so simple undertaking halts these approaching people and makes them stand still until he jots down an inventory of the woman's dress. That is manifestly absurd

May I suggest that it is equally absurd to say that something yet to be revealed is being held from the ceiling by horse's hair, or to include an entire lifespan of 69 years between an auxiliary and a past participle. I really want to understand, but it is way beyond me.

For completeness, here are the original german sentences.

Der Englaender Stephen Gray (1666-1736) verblueffte sein Publikum mit dem "Homo electrificatus", einem mit Schnueren aus Rosshaar an der Decke befestigten frei schwebenden elektrisch aufgeladenen Knaben.

und

Die Entdeckung des Ewald Juergen von Kleist hatte der Leidener Physiker Petrus van Muschelbroek (1692-1761), Verfasser eines Standardlehrbuches der Experimentalphysik seiner Zeit, veroeffentlicht.

Practical problems arouse.

I continued learning English this week. I know now the difference between like and such as (explained here), and between using and utilising (explained here).

Now try to analyse these sentences:

1/ Your best friend says to you

"I wish to have a girlfriend like yours."
"I wish to have a girlfriend such as yours."

The first would be a fine compliment, the second a threat.

2/ I may say

"I used my keyboard to type this sentence."
"I utilised my keyboard to beat to death the guy next to me, who is still listening to Roxette very loudly."

I now read things with a keener eye, and spotted a lovely mistake in a book about ultrasound that I'm reading:

Ideas of three-dimensional (3D) imaging of organs by beam scanning in 3D directions, was first introduced in the 50'ies, but severe practical problems arouse...

The author of the book is Norwegian and knows a lot about ultrasound, so I firmly place any blame at the hands of his publishers and their proofreader. Every time I read this sentence, I find another mistake, but the really good one is arouse instead of arose. Getting turned on by severe practical problems must be quite distracting for most scientists.

A Witty Short Fresh English Electronic Blog Post.

I found out this week that I have a lot to learn about writing in English. My new colleagues assume that because I grew up in England, I know the rules of English grammmar and am capable of correcting their papers. To prove how wrong they are (I went to a compriensif skool, tha nos) I took this test on hyphenation and got 70%.

70% in an exam isn't too bad, but leaves enough mistakes. If you extrapolate a 70% success rate to an article several pages long, and include mistakes with commas and capitalisation, then the corrected article almost certainly contain several mistakes.

I am waiting for the first colleague to come and beat me up whilst holding a letter from a Journal saying, "We accept your paper for publication, but maybe you could get a native English speaker to proof-read the article before we publish it."

Of great fun is the "Royal Order of Adjectives", which explains why you drive an old red Italian sports car, and not a Italian red old sports car.

Change of profile.

I should have done this a couple of weeks ago, but now I have a new blog description. For the record, the old one was as follows.

The diary of a physicist being paid by the german government to go on holiday for 6 weeks.

The perils of prefixes.

It is possible to change the meaning of many german verbs by using a prefix. "Zer-" is usually bad and leads to destruction.

stören : to disturb => zerstören : to destroy

"Ver-" is not quite so bad as "Zer-", but is rarely good.

schlafen : to sleep => verschlafen : to sleep for too long

"Er-" is worse than "Ver-", and debatably as bad as "Zer-", for it ends in certain death.

schiessen : to shoot => erschiessen : to shoot dead

I once got confused between being stung by a wasp: "Ich wurde von einer Wespe gestochen." and being stabbed to death by a wasp: "Ich wurde von einer Wespe erstochen."

Today I made another prefix mistake. I was trying to say "I furnished my room" and ended up claiming "I executed my room". One letter, one prefix, and a rather different meaning.

Things I've been meaning to write about...

... if I managed to get my computer situation sorted out are

1/ The Kunigunde lime tree in Kasberg
2/ "The physics of the Ether" by Paul Drude
3/ The renaissance of English one-day cricket and the Duckworth-Lewis method of deciding the winner of a rain-affected cricket match.

My problem is thus:

a/ I decided not to surf the internet for private stuff on my work computer.
b/ I decided that it is quite nice not to have a computer with internet in my flat. In the past week I read two-and-a-half books, ate quite well, and kept the flat clean. I fear that I wouldn't have done all of this had I been hooked up.
c/ I can't be bothered to type all of these things in internet cafes which seem to be full of people talking in turkish (Ali! Ali!), playing the "Greatest hits of Roxette as interpreted by the Chipmunks" on their iPod or doing lots of other annoying things.

I think the solution is to try and find a computer at the university which is not in my office but which I can use for blogging purposes (maybe in the library).

Vfl Bochum 0 - 1. FC Nuremberg 2

I thought there was something symbolic about this football match, seeing that I've left Erlangen (which is close to Nuremberg) to go to Bochum. Seeing as there was nothing else I really wanted to do on a rainy Sunday in Bochum I decided to go along.

The fist goal for Nuremberg came in the 88th minute, the second shortly after, but the Bochum fans standing next to me sort of knew what was coming, having seen an impressive display of comical finishing from their team in the second half. The players had the good grace to fall to the floor having lost the match and the fans seemed to accept that they had lost due to a lack of skill rather than lack of effort.

Feierabend

I went to work today, and am now enjoying that relieved feeling at the end of a working day. Germans like to call this Feierabend (literally celebration evening).

My first work project is to help prepare an exam about electromagnetism. I've forgotten almost everything I knew about this subject, so I had to get a textbook from the library. I was most pleased to see my old friend "Electromagnetic Waves and Radiating Systems" by Edward Jordan and Keith Balmain. It is a delightful book, although a little dated. Luckily electromagnetic theory hasn't changed over the last 50 years, although labour relations, feminism and household appliances have come on a bit since the 50's, as demonstrated by the following quote from the book.

A man can do work for a 12-hour day at the rate of about 40 Watts, which is less than the power required to run his wife's electric washing machine.

Train Connections

I'm back in Erlangen from Bochum. On the way I tried to comfort a girl who failed to get off the train at Hanau because the doors didn't open. This meant that she had to take a round trip to Wuerzburg and back which took a couple of hours. I pointed out that it wasn't that bad, there was no need to cry and this kind of thing happens to me all the time.

And just to prove that I wasn't making this up I then got on a train in Nuremberg that went straight through Erlangen and out the other side. I didn't know that any trains did this (duh!), so I took an hour long trip to Bamberg and back.

The Model 3107 Chair

Today I got fed up with looking for flats, so I got on a tram and went to Strünkende Castle which is at the end of the line. It's several hundred years old and now houses a museum. The museum has lots of the usual stuff (armour, weapons, axes, pots, bones etc) and also a collection of 20th century chairs.

Possibly the most famous chair of the 20th century is now in the hands of the Victoria & Albert Museum. It belonged to the photographer Lewis Morley and was used in 1963 (the year that sexual intercourse began) for a photograph with Christine Keeler, who was then embroiled in the Profumo affair.

The museum in Strünkende Castle explained the appeal of this chair, which is a copy of the model 3107 chair by Arne Jakobsen. So if you ever run into this photo again, be sure to gaze at it with an open jaw and dribble "Phwoooar, that's a model 3107 chair".

Bogestra

I'm still in Bochum and still looking for somewhere to live. My favourite word in Bochum is "Bogestra". It stands for "Bochum-Gelsenkirchener Strassenbahnen" which is the company which runs the trams and buses in Bochum (and in neighbouring Gelsenkirchen), but I think it could be put to good use as a general-purpose swear word.

"Well Bogestra to all that!"

"Would you object if I were to fondle your Bogestras?"

"If you do that again I'll string you up by your Bogestra."

"Bogestra! Bogestra! Feckin' Bogestra."

"If I don't find a room soon I'm going to be totally Bogestra'd"

The great thing about this name is that the Trams are remarkably free of graffiti. I think that this can be linked to the fact that all seats are printed with "Bogestra" scrawled several times into the fabric. What more could any vandal add to that?

I'd best be off, as the internet cafe allows smoking, and had the Bogastra idea of venting the room by opening the skylights to let in some freezing cold air.

Bochum

My life had slowly been drifting into a totally lazy nothingness, so I packed a toothbrush and five juggling balls and got a train to Bochum. I hoped that things would become a bit clearer being there rather than in Erlangen.

I nearly missed two trains, the first one I only caught because the guy selling Bratwursts helped me buy a ticket. My last remaining screwed-up five Euro note kept being rejected by the ticket machine, despite receiving a good kicking. Luckily the Bratwurst guy was able to give me change.

This gave me five minutes in Nuremberg to buy a proper ticket, some breakfast (it was only 1pm) and a magazine. I then sprinted to the platform sidestepping lots of little people and was able to sneak in the door where the guard was waiting. The train left literally 5 seconds after I got on. After walking around Bochum for 20 minutes I gave up and booked into the Hotel Ibis.

That's the good thing about being completely disorganised: it gives you something to write about. The journey was quite nice, a little old Austrian women gave me a ham sandwich and the train went down the Rhein valley past lots of castles and the Loreley rock.

Frankfurt am Main

This is a Kryptikmo stzle entrz from an internet cafe in Frankfurt. Iäm stuck here for two hours because I just missed the onlz decent train connection to Nuremberg. I have a german kezboard and canät be bothered to tzpe properlz. Iäm going to go and see if I can get mugged now.

The Lancashire Derbyshire & East Coast Railway

If I walk out of the back door of the house where I grew up then within 20 minutes walk I can cross the Lancashire, Derbyshire and East Coast Railway, the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincoln Railway and the North Midland Railway. They all run parallel in the floodplain of the River Rother, and their owners presumably didn't get along with one another too well, cause they could have saved themselves a lot of hassle by just building the one. Now only one is left, the North Midland Railway, which is used by a few freight trains.

The first one I listed (that's the one in the title) must have been a bitch to build, as it was the last of the three and the flat and easy ground had gone. The railway dates from the 1890s and runs through impressively deep cuttings followed by huge embankments. Today I cycled, walked and slipped down the derelict remains of this railway. The lines were removed when I was small and the track has been mostly left to nature and to fly-tippers, which makes cycling quite a challenge. Here's a picture of the railway as it passes through a cutting.



click for google maps overhead shot of photo

Possibly the trickiest bit of cycling the Lancashire, Derbyshire & East Coast Railway to get past is the bridge over the Chesterfield Canal. In some weird parallel world the canal is filled with water and boats and the railway is home to the Killamarsh steam railway museum, and all visitors to the area would flock to see the point where the steam trains pass over the narrowboats going down the canal. In this world the canal is empty and filled with vegetation and the odd house, whilst the bridge has huge holes in it and is fenced off on one side. Here is a photo of the bridge. If you look carefully you can see the fence which used to block the way, but no longer does.



And here's the bridge from the other side. I didn't manage to get my bike across, but it's not too hard to walk round.



click for google maps overhead shot of photo

Anyone wishing for a serene pedal would be better advised to go down the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincoln Railway which is now a cycle path and part of the trans-pennine trail, but it isn't half as much fun.

If you read this far you might wish to see the three railway lines on google maps. They run fairly straight from north to south and are lined with trees. If you can't work it out, use streetmap for orientation. Note the lovely oxbow lake in both cases.

(I wrote this a few days ago, but only got the pictures up now).

Welcome to Chavland

I landed in Manchester airport this afternoon, and the first words I heard were a tannoy announcement 'Would the person who bought a bottle of Jade Goody perfume please...'. I can't remember the rest, as in my head the only words which made sense were '...kill yourself'.

It's going to be a long week at this rate. For the sake of England, the Queen and old maids bicycling across foggy airports drinking pots of tea please don't bother looking at the following wikipedia links.

Chav
Jade Goody

Juggling and the Coriolis Force

The Coriolis force is one of those things that I've believed in but never experienced. When it was taught at the university we were given examples of balls falling from equatorial skyscrapers, the British Navy making false corrections in the Falkland islands (possibly mythical according to wikipedia) and weather systems.

All of these are rather abstract things for a physics student as I rarely have a skyscraper or battlecruiser handy, and to me wind blows in straight lines. When was the last time you read "the icy wind was blowing from the north with a radius of curvature of 50km"? If I had a fully-crewed battlecruiser I would do nothing else but try to hit shipping at all possible latitudes in both hemispheres, but sadly I don't.

All of these examples are of the coriolis effect because of the earth's rotation. Things are much more fun and managable on smaller things which rotate every few seconds rather than planets which rotate once a day, such as roundabouts in this YouTube clip.

Last week I experienced my first ever difficulties with the Coriolis force. I was trying to turn around whilst juggling 5 balls, and found that if I turned clockwise then my right hand was catching balls far from the body and my left hand was catching them close to the chest. If I turned the other way then exactly the opposite happened. Was this the Coriolis force? Having read so many phenomena which are attributed to the Coriolis force but which aren't I thought I'd better check this out to make sure that it wasn't just bad aiming because of dizziness.

If you throw a ball from one hand to the other so that it stays in the air for one second, and your hands are half a metre apart, then the horizontal speed (v) is 0.5m/s. If you turn around every 12 seconds then you will have an angular velocity (omega) of about 0.5 rad/s.

The size of the coriolis acceleration is 2*omega*v, so to you the ball will appear to be accelerated inwards or outwards at about 0.5 m/s^2, which is about 1/20th of g, the acceleration due to gravity. The ball will land about 25cm further away (or closer to you) than you would expect. Maybe I wasn't turning that fast, because this seems a bit too much, but it's not far off what I was doing.

The centrifugal force depends on the square of omega, so it's not too important for slow rotations. Of course for fast rotations it quickly becomes important, see here, here and here.

Having had a few minutes of enjoyment (and then dizziness) experiencing this elusive force first hand I found that I'd got the hang of juggling whilst turning, and was automatically correcting for it quite nicely. It was fun while it lasted.

It took me a long time to understand why, if your throw an object in the direction of rotation, it should appear to move away from you or towards you. I only really got it whilst drawing the following diagram. Those blue squares represent a pair of hands, the small round thing is a ball, which starts from the left hand and is aimed at the right one. During the flight the hands rotate around the point in the middle, and if you're in control of the hands then the ball appears to make a curve. Of course somebody hovering above you would argue that your hands were curving and not the ball.

End of Part two

Part two of the blog (September til now) was pretty shite, to be honest. I wouldn't have bothered reading it, if I were you. It wasn't really more interesting than it sounded, but for the record here is what it said at the top of the page:

"The diary of a disillusioned physicist trying to get back on his feet by finding a job. It's more interesting than it sounds, honestly."

I will start a job in Bochum at the start of February, developing ultrasound scanners at the university. This means that I now have six weeks proper holiday.

Loss of Reality

Today I just about returned to the real world. I've had a damned annoying cold and decided to basically stay in bed for a week. I stopped reading emails, stopped checking post and prayed that the phone wouldn't ring.

I popped in once to reality to go bowling but spent the rest of the time asleep, or lying in bed or surfing the internet or playing freeciv. An afternoon nap has a great habit of shortening the day by a few hours. The most interesting activity was rereading a few books in a random but on the whole back-to-front order.

This laziness started off as being a fair enough reaction to a bad cold, but now the cold is gone and I'm left lying in bed trying to avoid anything happening. Time has speeded up so that December seems to be going in a flash. Three days are somehow nothing.

Well today I at least took the rubbish out, went to the bank, booked a flight and read my emails, and I'm going to go juggling. It's a start, at least.

Kenny Lunt

Asides from being nominally a Sheffield Wednesday fan, I am a fan of subtle humour. Wednesday beat Norwich City 2-1 on Saturday, with midfielder Kenny Lunt earning a booking. I looked up his entry on Wikipedia, but am at a loss to explain how he got the nickname "Lenny". And why does clicking on his nickname lead to the page on Spoonerisms?

I nicked this one of Jon Henley's diary from last weeks Guardian, but here is Sheffield's top eatery, the Polonium Restaurant.



I'd better be off, otherwise I'll be lucking fate for lunch.

William "Fatty" Foulkes

I've got a godawful cold, my nose is blocked, and I keep falling asleep and waking up with a parched mouth. I tried to get over this cold on Thursday evening by playing squash, but I just ended up with an even worse cold and very wobbly legs. This cold might explain why I'm writing so much, for in between sleeping and reading I've been looking at some good stuff on YouTube.

But to get you in the mood, here is a competition. Please identify, from the 1897 England team which beat Wales 4-0, William Foulkes. The only clue I'm giving is that his nickname was "Fatty".




Anway, I was watching this clip of the 1901 FA cup final replay between Tottenham Hotspur and Sheffield United (boo hiss, for I am a Sheffield Wednesday fan). I was struck by the size of the goalkeeper, and thought "Is it? Naa it can't be, no way, not the legendary Fatty Foulkes". But it was, and is. As United (in striped shirts) trot onto the pitch one of their players is a head taller and a few feet wider than all the others. We then see him taking a goal kick, before pulling up his shorts (perhaps he'd been on pre-final diet).

There are numerous stories about Foulkes, the Sheffield United website says that he hung from and broke a crossbar in the 1896/97 season, and this cartoon from the day after the cup final replay makes note of his famous punches (If I read it right then the caption bottom right says "Little Willie's little punch with all his weight behind it"), which were claimed to reach the half-way line. Here is a report from the Independent describing Foulkes "picking up the Liverpool centre-forward George Allan, turning him upside down, and standing him on his head in the mud".

He even found time between meals to play some cricket for Derbyshire, and his cricketing obituary appeared in Wisden.

A stick of rhubarb.

It took me a couple of days to work up to this, but England (without Trescothick) managed to throw away the second Ashes match. Having scored over 500 runs in the first innings and having declared (that means that they were so confident of not losing that they gave up their remaining wickets voluntarily) they were in control of the match, but they blew it on the morning of the fifth day. It took me a couple more days to see the funny side, but quite amusing in hindsight are the comments in the 25th over from Rob Smyth: "If England lose this game I'll run through Oxford Street tomorrow wearing nothing but a relentless glow" and in the 31st over from Brad in California "So let me get this straight, you're not watching, not listening to, but reading about a game that has been going on for five days, and is almost certain to end in a draw". England lost, quite disastrously, but at least that showed Brad in California, Haa.

For anyone who takes pleasure in English disasters, you can read all about it here and here too. There are lots of amusing quotes, such as "Let's face it," says Matt, "it is going to be a draw.", " "That was the biggest load of rubbish I have ever seen."

And now for something completely different, here's a YouTube link to a football match in the days that Referees wore impeccably straight bow ties.

Something I should have done a while ago.

The only thing I managed to do today was to go to a psychotherapist. There are two reasons that I made this appointment, and one of them is a bit embarassing. The first is my failure to go about getting a job in any kind of sensible manner. I just can't keep a positive mindset long enough to go through the process of reading an advertisement, writing an application, going for an interview and then accepting a job. I've got a CV which would suggest a job involving complicated physics stuff or some kind of responsibility or importance, and I generally don't feel up to it.

Possible jobs (I just opened up an old Physikjournal) include working with an "intense optical fs-laser in two-colour pump-probe experiments" or "non-equilibrium phenomena in multiphase flow through porous media"

This kind of stuff scares the shit out of me. Some other jobs require that you are "Belastbar": able to work under pressure, and I'm not. The second and real reason that I went to a psychotherapist is because of the England cricketer Marcus Trescothick. A couple of weeks ago he decided that touring Australia swinging a piece of wood was too much for him, and I knew how he felt.

Here is a report from Geoffrey Boycott on Trescothick's departure, and I found the comment from Melanie most useful.

Burnout is not solely a mental fatigue it is physical, the body no longer has the physical resources to cope with demands being made upon it and this leads to the mental stress and illness. Gastro-intestinal illnesses are induced by the body’s constant demand on adrenalin to keep things going – high levels of adrenalin in the body cause a reduced blood-flow to the stomach and intestines, this in turn affects the body’s ability to absorb nutrients from food, which in turn affects the body’s ability to renew its resources.

As far as I can work out this is what happened to me two years ago. I pushed myself too far in my PhD and broke down completely. Sleeplessness, depression, stomach pains, an ear infection and a general feeling of exhaustion and worthlessness. Now I'm alright, as far as it goes, but I'm scared to do anything with my life. I also still get really nervous whenever I'm woken up by a telephone. So I'll book an appointment for a therapy course on Monday.

The shrink asked me whether there had been a history of depression in the family. My honest answer is that I don't know. It's not the kind of thing we really talked about, and the only way I'd have known is if a relative had blown their head off, which they haven't, so I guess things can't have been that bad. This design for life probably explains why I haven't taken this step earlier, but I can't think of any good reason for not doing it now.

An Old Film and Bamberg

Well I'm still alive and well, so yesterday I took the RC for a nice trip to Bamberg. She wanted to take some photos, so I got my old camera out of the cupboard. It is a 20th century model which still takes film and I've not used it for a couple of years.

After taking one photo the film was full but I was able to buy a new one from the newsagents at the station. I'm going to go and let the film be developed now, and I don't have a clue what's on it. Probably some holiday with an old girlfriend or something.

What's that, you say that you don't care about an old camera, and want to know what went on in Bamberg? It was a lovely day out, and I got to have liver-dumpling soup, roast pork and smoked beer for lunch, but somehow things seem different to being in a disco, and explaining the tale of Queen Cunigunde and the ploughshares (see picture) was maybe a mistake. The story is that as a test of her virginity and she was forced to walk across a dozen glowing ploughshares, and emerged unscathed. I bet that she'd been round the houses and was probably fucking the blacksmith.

Aye m'Kaiser, them there ploughshares be straight out o' yon fire. Them be black hot ploughshares, so they be. (winks to queen)

Note for Interpol

If I should happen to be found murdered with an ice pick, it was presumably the siberian oil mafia.

The geeks' guide to pulling.

Experimental science is rather simple, and you learn pretty much all you need to know in school. You put on a white coat, set up your stuff and every 10 minutes change something, whilst looking and recording something else. Hopefully you will then see a pattern emerge between what you change and what you observe.

This is a pretty universal technique, and is fully described in this link for science projects. At any one time thousands of poor scientists are sat around twiddling their knobs (should I rephrase that?) and looking at the colour of their litmus paper, and some of them will be female.

Now here's the trick: If you wander into a laboratory at 5pm on a Friday evening you will find frustrated scientists trying to finish their measurements, one of which you identify as your date for the evening. She'll be twiddling a knob, waiting a while, and then looking at the colour of her litmus paper. This process will have to be repeated for several hours, and she's probably written the evening off.

As a geek, you can walk in and connect a computer via a digital-analogue converter to a motor which automatically rotates the knob, aim a digital camera at the litmus paper, wire the camera up to the same computer and write a program to fourier transform the colour information, plot the results and send them by email to her supervisor at 2am.

You then take your astonished admirer by the arm, whisper into her ear "the only buttons you'll be pushing this evening are mine" and walk off into the bright lights of the city.

I'm sadly not geeky enough to achieve this. I settled for leaving her to finish the experiments alone and picking her up later. Although it lacks the style of the real geek method, it does have the advantage that she'll be so frustrated with the futility of experimenting that she'll be desperate for alcohol.

Some crap pun on chemistry, or lack thereof, like dating, but with a chemist, like.

A couple of weeks ago I experienced one of those "you're a pathetic fantasist, endofphil, you wish, in your dreams" moments. I had managed to stay awake during a physics colloqium, which is an achievement in itself. The typical audience member of a physics colloqium is male, bearded, over 50 and quite probably asleep. He will wake up a few minutes before the end of the talk to ask whether the topic being discussed has any relevance to his area of expertise.

Being a special colloqium there were a couple of crates of beer at the end of the talk, and thus the audience got to drink a beer and discuss beard trimming techniques and whether their areas of expertise had some overlap somewhere. The thing that didn't fit in here at all, in any way whatsoever, was a young female Russian Chemist stood with a bottle of beer looking bored and homesick (honestly I'm not making this up, I may be a pathetic fantasist, but this is straight up). She was most certainly bored, as the whole evening had been held in German and she hadn't understood a thing.

I'd drunk enough to work up some courage, so I explained that I could in principle speak English and offered to take her out of the physics institute and show her the sights of Erlangen (I took here to the Schlossplatz, I don't know why but I had to start it somewhere). In one of those wonders of German organisation she is living in an office in the physics institute, so she was in no position to turn me down. This evening we went for a few beers, but I think she just wants me for my social life (WTF !?), although that could be one of those numerous excuses I make to avoid ever making anything of anything.
____________________________________________________________________________________

Youtube link of the day: This is probably a waste of time, as all Germans know it and any non-Germans won't understand it. Anyway, this is the first "go away and spend 5 years learning German, it will be worth it" clip that I've come across. Ein Klavier, Ein Klavier

Product Warning

Before we get to the product warning, first a blog warning. Having covered vomit and urine in recent days, today we are dealing with poo, cack, crap or whatever you like to call it.

So now the product warning, you know the idea: "This product may contain nuts", "wearing this superman costume will not necessary enable the user to be able to fly" and so on.



May I suggest that those little toilet freshener things which hang over the rim of the loo ought to be issued with the warning

Freshening effect only occurs on rim of toilet. If the freshener is somehow flushed down the toilet it will no longer give 'a feeling of springtime' to your bathroom. In fact, if you accidentally flush it whilst taking a shit, it will probably block the toilet and thereby hinder the effective removal of faecal matter, leading to your toilet being filled with and smelling of shite.

Nobody in the flat knows how exactly this blockage happened, and the rest of the story involves a few bottles of beer, a rubber glove, a plastic bag and a building site. Suffice to say that we can now poo in peace again and my flatmates owe me a beer or two. Hurray!

Amplifier Operational (until I broke it)

I finally plucked up courage to wire up my birthday present today. It is an home-made amplifier with lots of inputs and outputs and no labels or manual for idiots like me.

Bollocks. I think I just broke it. It was happily playing a song and then stopped all of a sudden. Maybe it has a "Shitty Britpop" recognition unit built in? "Pulp? I'm not amplifying that crap". I think I'm going to start to cry :-(

Zombie Nation.

Nights out in Britain have always been a bit scary, but things seem to be getting worse, according to the Sun.

"It is thought trouble started when the dead man became involved in a fight with another man."

Tumblers and other old stuff.

I decided to make use of my excess leisure time and look round the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.

I only saw less than half of the stuff as it is a big museum and I have a limited attention span for historical relicts. After a while I got a bit depressed by the exhibits: it seemed that the extent of human achievement over the millennia has been finding new ways to kill each other (axe, dagger, sword etc.) and finding new ways to depict the death and torture of Jesus. My favourite was one which had the crucifixion in the foreground and a lovely harbour scene in the background. Most picturesque, although it is a shame that Jesus was looking the other way, probably at something much less soothing.

For me, the "I wonder if I could steal this" exhibit was a 7th century franconian drinking pot. The great thing is that it had a rounded bottom so that it wouldn't stand up and you had to down the contents. I just looked around the internet to see if you can buy such a thing, but I can't find any. I did however learn the following quite interesting fact: a tumbler is, according to the Merriam-Websters dictionary, "a drinking glass without foot or stem, and originally with pointed or convex base". At some point people must have gone all puritanical, and designed the flat-bottomed tumbler which no longer tumbled. For years I've drunk out of these things, and never asked why we called the most stable of all glasses a tumbler. For some reason the name has stuck, though, so here's to franconian drunkards. Cheers.



For comparison, a raucous 7th century tumbler (top) and a sober 20th century tumbler (bottom). The tumbler in the picture is not the one in the museum, I just borrowed the image from wikipedia

Walking on Broken Glass, Mud and Sangria.

If the success of a party can be determined by the mess created, then last night's was a definitely a good party. After cleaning the flat from broken bottles, fag ends and a bucket filled with urine right next to the toilet we found that the floor has a few cigarette burns and a lingering stickiness you get in bad discos, so that each footstep is accompanied by a faint "squelch".

During the party I made plans to learn to speak italian, to visit some village festival (Kerwa) near Ansbach and to go cycling to remove the hangover. These are the things I can remember agreeing to, and I did actually manage to go cycling today whilst wearing my new "skeleton" jersey and red polka dot "King of the mountains" socks.

It's strange how alcohol can solve major personality deficits. I spend most of my time when sober thinking of how things can go wrong, and why it would be bad or pointless to do something. When drunk, all plans seem like great ideas which can't fail, even plans like "Let's go piss in a bucket".

So if you were here, or weren't here but helped buy a present (one of which deserves its own blog entry and is way too good for just a passing mention), thankyou very much.

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.

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

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.