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.

Why my feet are wet.

I'm sitting, waiting for my coffee to brew, with dripping wet feet. I was eating lunch with my colleagues when the subject of conversation turned to Matlab colour schemes. I made my excuses and left for a walk in the rain. I then jumped from some steps into a large puddle. I thought that this may change me from a boring engineer into an exciting fun-loving interesting person. I fear it just makes me a boring engineer with wet feet.

Torpedo Entenhausen 3 - FC Polterberg 1

or

Welcome to the Porno Villa

The football season has restarted after a short summer break, and the league position of Torpedo Entenhausen received a massive boost. To quote from the news page of the spare-time league (second class):

NEW. The team of Soccerteam Bochum is no longer taking part in the spare-time league. Their place has been taken by FCP Villa. The schedule (date, kick-off time and pitch) remains unchanged. All games, for which FCP Villa replace Soccerteam have been classified as 0-2 defeats and have been updated in the table.

Now the funny thing is that we lost our home game to the Soccerteam in a disgraceful 12-3 ignomony. Miraculously, this has now turned into an automatic 2-0 win, boosting our goal difference by (do the math) quite a lot.

The other funny thing is that the P in FCP Villa stands for porno. I play with some of them on thursdays, and they explained that the nucleus of the team live in a house together, which was pimped up by the landlord so that it looked like a porno villa. Maybe Aston Villa and Villareal had some influence in the naming too.

Last night we won another match in the more conventional manner of scoring more goals than the opposition. For our first goal, I played a perfectly weighted 30 yard pass with the outside of the foot, which striker Aziz headed past the goalkeeper as he belatedly rushed out of his goal. I made up for this uncharacteristic poise and vision with a couple of foul-throws and lots of hacking around in the corners of the pitch, where rain has caused ruts which have been baked hard by the sun, so the ball now bounces around unpredictably. Whilst in the lead, I decided that kicking the ball into the unplayable corners was a good method to frustrate the opposition. Somehow they equalised with a scrappy effort.

Andy, our attacking midfielder with a good shot, drew a couple of fouls and eventually a penalty, converted by Aziz, and he then sealed the win with a good counter attacking goal. FC Polterberg put down the loss to poor fitness after the summer break due to excessive barbecueing.

So over the course of one match we gained 6 points (more than doubling our previous total) and boosted our goal difference by 13.

What the hell am I doing here?

I spent two hours this morning trying to solve an exam question, and completed a quarter of it. Students are supposed to be able to solve the entire exercise in 20 minutes. I kept writing alphas instead of gammas (90 degree rotation syndrome) and 3s instead of epsilons (180 degree rotation syndrome, aka mirror reversal syndrome, aka L337n3ss syndrome). This is not good, at all.

I've done pretty much nothing useful this week, and spent most of Monday morning in tears. These things aren't very good at all.

Sinking

I knew this was going to happen soon. Having stopped doing anything interesting 9 days ago in a bid to let my body recover from whatever was wrong with it, I've sunk into depression. I thought that it would happen sooner, but it only really hit me at lunchtime today. I feel like crying, but the tears don't quite reach the eyes, and I feel like sleeping, but the eyes don't quite close.

I saw the doctor this morning, and she explained that my blood was fine, my organs were all right, my pulse was the right shape and only 50 beats per minute. She suggested that I try to get a grip on my life, find a girlfriend and live more healthily. I think it was the admission of smoking the odd joint that tipped her off, but she quickly grasped that I'm slowly fucking up my life.

I just don't know where to start. Movement would be good, but my legs feel knackered: I got left behind by my colleagues whilst walking to the canteen. Working would be good, but my eyes feel tired and my mind is somewhere else.

Summing up the past couple of weeks, it looks most likely that I took three days off last work to recover from exhaustion caused by an alcohol-fuelled weekend in Hamburg and two football matches.

Wasting time on Wikipedia

When I started my new job in February, I decided to stop sending emails and surfing the web during worktime in a bid to improve productivity. This didn't really help, as I decided that wikipedia was too useful not to use, and whenever I am not feeling up to working I look at occasionally interesting articles, such as the tale of Lieutenant Hugh Goldsmith and the Logan rock near Treen. Never underestimate a dozen seamen with a lever and a place to stand.

Walking not very fast

The residents of my street might have been surprised to see a young man break into a sprint and then stumble along for several yards, as if he was starring in a bad western and had just received a poisoned arrow through the shoulderblades. I was that man, and this morning I was trying to work out what was wrong with me.

The last four days I've been walking around at a sub-pensioner pace. I was overtaken by a guy with a walking stick (he was just holding it, not supporting himself on it—fucking show-off) and I just got some sympathy from a couple of spanish girls who thought that I was going to fall asleep whilst changing escalators in the U-Bahn. I considered running after them to explain that I was ill and am not usually so slow, but I decided that they might be freaked out by a madly stumbling wanabee matinee hero.

They weren't far off the mark with their idea that I might fall asleep, as I have spent most of the last days sleeping: a good night's sleep, followed by a morning nap and an afternoon nap. And the naps are long, deep and dream-filled, too.

Apart from sleeping lots and being unable to walk normally, there is nothing much wrong with me, which is how I came upon the idea of sprinting. Maybe the illness was imaginary, and I just needed to snap out of it, I thought. So I suddenly changed from a slow and sleepy trudge into a sprint and then a stumble. I'm now convinced that there is something wrong, but I don't know what.

I saw a doctor on Thursday, and I think she was wanted to prescribe me a girlfriend and some career ambition, but she eventually plumped for the more conventional blood test and ultrasound scan.

Hermes 4 - DESY Old Guys 4

I'm back at DESY in Hamburg for one last time. The Hermes experiment has stopped running, as has the accelerator where it was situated. To mark this occasion all past and present workers were invited to a 2-day-long party.

The highlight of these celebrations was a football match against the senior team of the accelerator. The match was quite a light-hearted affair, with numerous substitutions and an age range of approaching 50 years. I played for both sides (the DESY team had a couple of injuries and no substitutes) and ran around a lot.

A player from the DESY team told me that there are plans to build some new accelerator facilities on the DESY football pitch. This seems a pity, for the football pitch was one of the nicest things about DESY.

Pölen

I have a text message invitation for tomorrow evening, encouraging pölen. This is a word unknown to Germany's finest dictionaries, and is apparently only used in the area around Essen, Bochum and Dortmund. In case you haven't guessed, pölen means to play football, and Torpedo Entenhausen have begun their summer training regime.

The geographical limit of this phrase has been somewhat found here (you may wish to put on your sunglasses before opening the link), and a quick discussion in the U-bahn revealed that the term was unknown to test subjects from Stuttgart and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

Pölen has, oddly enough, a second slang meaning. The german word for oil is Öl, and oil from plants can be called P-Öl, or Pöl for short. Sticking -en on the end creates the verb pölen, meaning to run a vehicle with vegetable oil, which is apparently all the rage in Germany due to a generous tax break.

Strawberry, Cherry, Cream and Custard flan.

I keep coming to Erlangen with the intention of moving out of my old room, but as soon as I arrive I get drunk and am then too hungover to go and get some packing cases and move my stuff out. This time the drunkenness was predictable: my housemates had organized a big garden party with 40 crates of beer, three large punch bowls and a chili-con-carne so large that it could only be stirred by a length of 2" by 1" wood.

After several hours of partying, I decided it would be a good idea to bake a cake, so I went to the market to buy the ingredients at 5am, thinking that this would allow me a nice lie in. When I woke up I found that I had acquired a punnet of strawberries, a bag of cherries and half a watermelon. This evening I finally got round to baking a cake with the ingredients.

Strawberry, Cherry, Cream and Custard flan

(There is no real need to buy the ingredients while drunk, but it won't hurt).

Base: Shortcrust Pastry, about 5mm thick. Find a suitable recipe and make enough to fill the base of your container. Bake at 200 deg. Celsius until done.

First Layer: Custard, I used Bird's custard powder, which thickens nicely when cooled. Pour the custard on the base, and place in the fridge.

Second Layer: Strawberries and cherries. It is OK if they sink into the custard, but they don't have to.

Top Layer: Whipped cream. I used just enough to cover the top of the fruit.

This recipe is rather vague, but is based on the hope that anything involving strawberries, cherries, cream and custard is going to taste good, even if it ends up as a collapsed mush in your fridge. By some miracle, my flan had a good shape at the end, and was swiftly devoured by my flatmates, who were admittedly quite hungry.

Hocheschwindigkeitsaufnahmen

The jumble of letters in the title is almost a german word. Only almost, for, believe it or not, it is missing a letter! This word was the title of a slide during a student's talk which I was listening to today. If you insert a 'g' after the second 'h', then you have the german word for high speed photographs.

When the talk was finished, the assembled students and supervisers were asked for comments as to the style of the talk. I immediately pointed out the spelling mistake , and followed up with a tirade against the german language, which is full of words so long that a spelling mistake somewhere within the word approaches a statistical certainty.

I am worried that most of my co-workers fail to see anything odd about words with 29 letters in them. It's like english people who think that 5 days for a game of cricket is most reasonable; you can only see these things from the outside. Having grown up in a country where 28 letters is enough to make a word notorious, it is worrying to work with people who can happily throw around 29 consecutive letters without any sense of guilt or humour.

I later received a minor ticking off from a colleague who explained that the idea was for the students to do most of the analysis, which I guess was a polite way of saying to stfu. The poor student hopefully went home crying and will be emotionally scarred enough to check her slides more carefully in the future. Let this be a lesson to her: there will always be at least one annoying pedant in the audience.

The perils of wearing a cricket helmet.

or

A good excuse to write dislodged lots

Today England beat the West Indies in the Old Trafford test match. The oddity of the match was Kevin Pietersen being out, "Hit Wicket", due to his helmet being dislodged by Dwayne Bravo.

This wouldn't have happened 25 years ago, as players then played without helmets, despite the rather hard ball being aimed at their heads often enough. Here is Ian Botham showing how to do this successfully and without bothering to look at the ball, and here is Brian Close facing a much more dangerous West Indian fast bowling attack than the current one with a lack of protection.

When I started this post, I thought that this danger started with helmets, but having read the wikipedia article for hit wicket above, apparently the weight of a cap is enough to dislodge a bail, and caps can be removed from heads by either the ball or the wind. Several such incidents are recalled here anecdotally, including one of being out "hit wicket" via a dislodged toupee.

Blasphemy

At the end of a disappointing football season, the usual excuses are rolled out: injuries, suspensions, poor refereeing decisions, the state of the pitch, etc. I present my excuse for Torpedo Entenhausen's low league position: Herbert Fucking Grönemeyer.

Today we should be playing a "basement duel" against Megolomaniacs Herne, but crucial members of the squad are watching Bochum's favourite son in a live concert, so we had to concede the match.

I'm feeling a bit down, as these matches are usually the highlight of the week. I'm not getting anywhere fast with my job, and none of the publications or theses I'm told to read make any sense to me.

Today I managed to go through an entire lunch break with my colleagues without uttering a word. They were deep in conversation about abstract rating scores and conference hotels, something I don't care about. So I just ignored them all for 45 minutes. They probably now think I'm a boring fucker too.

Football hooligans ain't what they used to be.

Last night Torpedo Entenhausen took on the Bochum Ultras. These are the hardcore fans of VfL Bochum, and I thought that they would be a bunch of violent thugs. It turned out that they were very well behaved. They told the ref not to give them a corner he was going to award, and left their dressing room in perfect condition. The only slightly annoying thing they did was to take the three points with them.

We played the cunning trick of starting with 10 men and bringing on the 11th after 15 minutes, and at times we played some good football. I scored a header direct from a corner; the ball flew into the net and the keeper didn't even bother to dive for it. Somehow we conceded 6 lucky goals and lost by the even 2 goals in 10.

Today we had a meeting at work. The only topic of discussion which generated any debate was the plans for the car park. It is possible to spend lots of money on new electronics without anyone disagreeing or asking questions, but any discussion of parking places causes uproar. The car park for our institute is going to be flattened (don't ask) to build a new building. I made no friends by suggesting that a brisk walk across campus from the other car park wouldn't do anyone any harm. I was tempted to say that this development may delay the point at which the number of chins in the department double the number of employees, but I refrained.

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.

It is impossible to stand on one leg.

I'm in Erlangen again, and drunk again. The most telling signs of irresponsible use of alcohol and other intoxicating substances so far:

1/ The two bottles of exploded beer in our freezer. Someone put them in to chill, but now the beer can only be consumed as an ice slush. Maybe someone will drink it soon, as we have even run out of Oettinger and are getting desperate.

2/ My flatmate Timo playing the theme from the A team whilst drinking a beer and smoking something or other for breakfast.

3/ My housemate Katja using the scaffolding on the building site next door as the most convenient path between first and second floor balconies.

4/ Me walking straight into a set of traffic lights at 4am without a shirt on.

The beer festival in Erlangen has another week to go, but I only have to stick it out for 2 days.

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.