Torpedo Entenhausen 3 - Taxi Zentrale 2

In his book "Fever Pitch", Nick Horby describes the perfect football match for a fan. Of course it isn't a game where your team wins 5-0 and play like brazil. That is just boring. The perfect match is one where your team win after going behind, one with amazingly bad refereeing decisions, stupid mistakes, fouls, lots of goals and a scene where the TV commentator claims "Nobody wants to see that kind of thing".

This may have been the perfect Freizeitliga game.

1/ We went 2-0 down.
2/ We won 3-2.
3a/ The referee gave us a throw-in, but the opposition took it, and he let them play on!
3b/ The referee blew for a free kick, I played on, and he gave me the advantage!
4/ A Slanging match between the trainer of the opposition and our hattrick hero Sajid.
("Nobody wants to see that kind of thing").
5/ The winning goal arose from a terrible pass in the Taxi-Zentrale defence. It started in the wrong direction, curled even wronger, and stopped by the feet of Sajid, who nonchalently lobbed the ball into the top corner of the goal.

Säumnisgebühr

That funny word in the title would be the German word for a library fine. It literally means something like "Missed deadline Fine". I forgot to return a book and had to pay 3€. The book was "The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul" by Douglas Adams, and I think he would have approved of my disorganisation. Certainly none of his characters would have gone to the terrible effort of returning a book to the library just because they'd finished reading it. I wonder what, normalised to the number of times it has been borrowed, the most overdue book of all time is.

VfL Linden 3 - Torpedo Entenhausen 3

One of the major benefits of being able to touch type is that you can pretend to be the Grandstand vidiprinter. Whenever I post a Torpedo Entenhausen result, I always type the name of the club as quick as I can, and then pause for a second before hitting the number. If you don't know what the Grandstand vidiprinter is, this video may help.



I scored two goals to help Entenhausen grab a point despite lying 2-0 and 3-1 behind. For the first I swung my leg at a mishit shot without looking where I was. The shot caught the goalkeeper wrong-footed and the ball rolled just inside the post. The second was a shot from a narrow angle following a short corner. I still don't quite know how it went in.

Anyway, back to the vidiprinter. Whenever I get bored, I like to type my favourite fantasy results in the vidiprinter style. If you're reading this, my fantasy results probably looks a bit static, so feel free to type your favourite results too. If you haven't learned to touch type yet, now may be the perfect time. Use the following simple format, and don't forget the pauses.

United [mini pause] X - Rovers [longer pause] Y

Forfar 5 - East Fife 4
VfL Linden 3 - Torpedo Entenhausen 4
Sheffield United 0 - Sheffield Wednesday 4

SAD

Some people get sad and depressed in the winter. I like to think that I am above such stereotypes, and last year got depressed in the summer. There were a few reasons for this. I'd been in Bochum for four months, and had realised that my job wasn't going anywhere. My incompetence in moving house was also catching up with me. My belongings were split between Bochum and Erlangen, my post was mostly being sent to the old address and I still couldn't remember my new postcode. I hadn't worked out why there wasn't a recycling skip for tin cans in Bochum and had collected four months of tin cans in my flat. These things were all related to being four months in a new city and not giving a shit about anything, but had nothing to do with summer.

Then came the summer. I played lots of football and drank some beer, but couldn't be bothered to prepare food. The food lay on my shelves and was eaten by fruit flies. I hoped that the spiders that populated the corners of the flat would eat the flies, but they didn't. My flat smelt, but I was too tired and too depressed to do anything about it. I'd look at the rubbish, look at the washing up in the sink, look at the pile of clothes on the floor, decide that it was all too much for me and juggle a bit. I learned some good 3-ball juggling tricks, because I could only ever find three of my balls under all the rubbish.

I was reminded of this last week when I looked into my bottle of white wine vinegar. I was trying to clean the cooking pot I used to burn my hat, and wondered whether vinegar would be any good. The bottle didn't have a top on, so I poured some vinegar out, and found that it was 25% fruit fly by volume.

I had cooked some food with the vinegar last summer, but hadn't put the top back on the bottle. I thought back to last summer and remembered looking at the bottle, looking at the top sat next to it, and thinking how screwing it on was too difficult. The fruit flies took advantage of my sloth, but to excess. They must have gorged on the vinegar, bathed in the vinegar and died in the vinegar, for the vinegar was full of literally hundreds of dead fruit flies. I'm sure that I put a tablespoonful of the fly-infested vinegar into a stir-fry last autumn, which probably wasn't very healthy.

Torpedo Entenhausen 2 - Team USA 2

This week we got to play on the grass pitch. This was a blue moon event, for in the grass pitch importance ranking nothing comes below the second division of the spare-time league. For Torpedo Entenhausen to get to play on grass, the following criteria must be fulfilled.

1/ It has to be dry.
2/ It must have rained within the past 4 days.
3/ The womens hockey team must be on holiday.
4/ The groundsman must be in one of his better moods.
5/ Jupiter can't be in alignment with Saturn, unless it's a month ending in 'r' or it's a leap year.
6/ ...

Playing on grass is a chance for diving headers, sliding tackles, dives and overzealous goal celebrations without tearing holes in your knees. I slipped over once, and sent one of the opposition tumbling with a nicely timed sliding tackle. We went into a 2:1 lead with three minutes remaining, but still didn't win.

The Ashes part II

Pet funeral directors are much more fun than your standard undertaker. The one in Bochum has a window display of its products, so it felt like any other shop and I didn't feel like an idiot going in to buy an urn for the ashes of my PhD hat. Once we'd got past the initial misunderstandings (Hut and Hund, the german words for hat and dog, sound rather similar), the assistent was very helpful. He sold me a nice green urn for 40 Euros and stuck on some slightly tacky letters too.

Just as we were finished, the next customers came in holding their recently deceased dog, Maxi. I was quite surprised by this, and I think that the shopholder was too, but only for a second. There were three of them, and they brought in two living dogs too, maybe to show that they were serious dog people and going through tough times, and maybe to prove that Maxi was atypical and that they were quite capable of keeping most of their dogs alive.

I decided that my cheerfulness of having acquired an urn didn't really fit the scene, so I left, wondering whether anyone has ever walked into a funeral directors with his dead grandma draped over his shoulder.

A Theory of Everything

I had lunch in Cafe Konkret and had a theory of everything explained to me by another regular. Volkhard Radkte has spent the past years developing theories of the development of planets and stars. From what I can understand of his theory, things come into existence in pairs, and suns can be born from planets. He has also developed his own model of the atom.

He presented his ideas to a physics professor at the University, who told him "If your ideas are shown to be true, I will personally recommend you for a Nobel Prize". I think this is a fantastic way of telling someone that you're not entirely convinced of their work.

I tried to read some of his book and asked him if his theory made a prediction that differed from accepted physics, and could be tested in the future. He couldn't tell me one. His work also contained a bit of numerology and some Excel graphs, so I decided I probably wasn't talking to the next Copernicus and concentrated my efforts on the Guardian Crossword.

Anyway, here is his model of the Hydrogen atom. I asked him about it, as I did my PhD on something similar. The accepted model of the Hydrogen Atom includes a proton, which is composed of three quarks, orbited by an electron. He includes all these components, but his model has a rigid arrangement for the quarks and has the electron in a fixed position between the two up quarks.

The Ashes

On Tuesday I was on a 6-2 away win football high. I'd only slept for five hours and my legs were burning all day. I felt up to anything and started cleaning my flat. Lying in a corner were the remains of my PhD hat. I broke it when I first put it on; it was top heavy and fell off my head. Since then I broke the broken glass tube, and a miniature cricket bat and some charred remains representing The Ashes had also fallen off. I was faced with the choice: repair the hat to it's former glory, or burn it and put the ashes in an ornamental urn. I decided that I'd never make it as good as it once was, removed the electrical components and cremated the hat in a large cooking pot.

"It's alright, nobody's died." I tried to put the funeral director at ease and reassure him that I wasn't in grief. "I've cremated a hat and am looking for an urn. It's kind of symbolic." He showed me his collection of urns, but they were all so big that I could have put the whole hat in, which might have been kind of amusing, but I'd already burnt the hat and thought 80 Euros was a lot for a hat box. "They're all a bit big. It was quite a small hat, really," I explained.

I wondered whether the guy who bought the original Ashes urn felt such a pillock.

It's alright, nobody's died. I've cremated a cricket stump and am looking for an urn. It's kind of symolic.

The funeral director recommended that I buy an animal urn, and told me that a shop on the Hattinger Strasse sold them. Looking at the Ashes of my hat, which are being temporarily stored in a freezer bag, I guess a canary or rat sized urn might work.

Megalomaniacs Herne 2 - Torpedo Entenhausen 6

I got a bit fed up of writing how Torpedo Entenhausen kept throwing away leads, so I "forgot" to write posts of our last two defeats. Tonight we did the opposite, and recovered from a 2-0 deficit to win clearly.

The reason for the poor start was only having eight players because we thought the kick-off was at eight and not half past seven. The opposition were considerate and only had nine men at the start, despite correctly adjudging the kick-off time. More tellingly, they never got the full eleven players on the pitch.

I ran a lot, and dribbled so much that people told me to pass the ball earlier. This has never happened to me in my footballing life. I've always been a "hoof it up front" kind of player. The Germans call this Kick and Rush, but I can't find or remember any english person using this phrase. I think they call it the long ball game or direct football.

Tonight I also headed some goal kicks in the right direction. When I first played last year they used to bounce off randomly but mostly backwards. Tonight one of my headers from the centre circle went straight back to our striker, Axel, who stuck it past the keeper for one goal towards his hat-trick.

Sheep on the Line

People in Britain, and especially the press, are always amused and amazed when the railway is obstructed by foreign objects. The good old "X on the line" headline is rolled out. X stands "leaves" in the autumn, but in other seasons can stand for other object. Whatever the obstruction is, it gives cause for mockery of the second-rate railway in Britain. Everyone then agrees that this kind of thing wouldn't happen in civilised countries like Germany.

Well, last night a high-speed train on the Hamburg-Munich line hit a flock of 20 sheep and derailed inside a tunnel. A spokesman for the federal police in Koblenz explained that "It is an everyday event that a deer or a sheep is caught on the line and hit by a train", but that the unusually large number of sheep caused the train to derail. I wonder if there a german phrase, "To follow like sheep?"

This is of course not a new problem. Steam trains used to have a Cowcatcher on the front for such occasions. These have fallen out of fashion, which is a shame. It would be fun to see how far a sheep would be propelled by a 200km/h train fitted with a cowcatcher.

The Irish had another solution: On Irish rural lines one of the duties of the fireman "included pelting coal lumps at sheep on the line."

A rural line in Shropshire took a more relaxed approach.

One day, while travelling along the line, her train, which ran slowly enough at the best of times, juddered to a halt.She leaned out of the window and asked the driver what the problem was.

"Sheep on the line," came the reply.

After a few minutes the train started again, only to grind to a halt after a few hundred yards. "What's up this time," asked our impatient passenger.

"We've caught up the sheep,"

ps. Keen followers of my descent into denglish will like to know that I first wrote a "herd of sheep", but then noticed that it wasn't right. Germans have a herd of sheep, looked after by a sheep-herder. The English have shepherds who watch their flocks.

Lost in Bochum

The only map which I have of Bochum is cheap, small and inaccurate. I came to this conclusion while stood with my bicycle in a muddy field with a muddy dog jumping up my trouser leg. I was looking for the road which, according to my map, connects Prinz-Regent Strasse with Springorumallee. I can report that this road doesn't exist.

While lost, I took a photographs of a partially dismantled railway which, according to my unreliable map, used to connect the east of Bochum to the River Ruhr in the souch via the Opel factory. It made me feel at home.

Bicycle

I have acquired an old bicycle from a juggling friend. I had to spend 11 Euros (a bell in the form of a teapot and a stand to stop it falling over) to make it roadworthy. The bicycle has five gears but no gear lever. I went to a bicycle shop to ask for a new lever, but the guy didn't have one and couldn't order one. He thoughtfully changed the gear from second to third by giving the shifter a pull, and told me to dismount and push it back in if I ever found myself at the bottom of a big hill. He claimed that one-gear bicycles were all the rage this season, but might have been taking the piss.

I feel much better when I cycle than went I get the tram. Cycling requires movement, responsibility and has an element of danger, whereas getting the tram requires sitting around, which I do too much.

Sell yourself

Self-Marketing is the key. Be pro-active. Take the initiative. I'm trying to look for a job and am finding it scary. I'm feeling depressed and about to cry.

I read a book about references today and it got me thinking too much about my last job. I've been better since I left and I've not thought about it at all. The book said I should fight for my right for a good reference, but I don't want to. I want a reference that says "Mr. endofphil came unprepared into the job, was unable to master life's basics such as eating and sleeping, showed a complete lack of interest for anything whatsoever and subsequently spent 6 months staring into space. His only lasting impression was drunkenly juggling lots of mandarines at the christmas party."

I need a job to recover my self esteem, but it's hard to get one when you don't think you can do anything. I will go and see the employment agency tomorrow, explain this, and ask for help.

More on King Franz

Eighteen months after you read it on endofphil, the British press have finally got in on the story.

Ernst Schad 4 - Torpedo Entenhausen 3

No Bundesliga report is complete without a mention of the "Werkself". Literally "factory eleven", it refers to the team of Leverkusen, who are backed by pharmaceutical giants Bayer.

The spare time league of Bochum now has it's own Werkself: Ernst Schad is a leading manufacturar of cogwheels and is based in the neighbouring city of Dortmund. The company proudly claims that it is

Certified by the DNV according to EN ISO 9001:2000

and I'm sure we all know what that means.

The Bochumer Cliche reports:

The factory eleven suffered from teething troubles in the first half, but after a 3-1 half-time deficit they stepped up a gear and had Torpedo on the rack. The 4-3 decider was a typical clutch goal.

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A football related story from the Daily Telegraph, about some posh totty getting a cab to the wrong Stamford Bridge. When I studied in York I cycled to the Yorkshire Stamford Bridge. It was a very nice little village, but could have used a few marauding vikings to add realism to the battle site.


Größere Kartenansicht

Perceptions

I was feeling ever-so-slightly depressed at the weekend. I wasn't unhappy, but was a little tired and dispirited, and most of all I was feeling inadequate.

So when I went juggling in the park on Sunday morning I had the feeling that I wasn't much good at it. The throws that should have gone straight up in the air went a bit to the side, and the crossed throws looked ragged. I could do a trick with my right hand well, but with the left hand it looked all wrong. All in all I seemed to spend much of the time picking up dropped balls.

There were a few kids out with their mum and dad to fly a kite. They were amazed how good I was, and couldn't believe their luck that someone so unbelievably good was juggling in front of them. When the kite was successfully launched (launching a kite is so much more fun than flying it), they turned their hands to juggling two balls. One of them was really good and is well on his way to juggling three balls. This success cheered me, and I realised that I can juggle enough balls to start a minor workshop.

Young children give the best feedback, as they are so bad at fake politeness, lying or hiding their feelings. I know there are other things in which I'm not as useless as I think I am, but sometimes I don't know exactly what they are. Maybe I should be less scared at overestimating myself. What's the worst that can happen?

Schon wieder ein Deja Vu all over again.

I'm back where I was in September 2006: unemployed, looking for a job, and trying to fill out all the necessary forms. I'm trying to do things better this time and not get annoyed as quickly. The most difficult part of becoming officially unemployed is filling out the form which certifies that I had a job. The employment agency gave me six working days to get this form completed, and told me to ring them for a personal appointment by today.

In these six days, I had to take the form from the employment agency to the Personell department of the University, who had to send it to the central administration in Dusseldorf, who had to stamp it and post it back to me. Of course I haven't got it back yet.

I rang the employment agency this morning, but before I could apologise for my slackness and ask for an extension, the man asked whether I had got this particular form. I could tell in the tone of his voice that he knew I hadn't. He knew that it was impossible to do it in six working days. He told me to piss off and ring back when I had the form.

A year ago, I would have finished the post here, annoyed, with Muzak ringing in my ears. Now I will try to think what positive steps I can do...

thinking...

thinking...

I can't influence the speed of German authorities. I can't ban Muzak. I can't decimate the ranks of German beaurocrats to improve their efficiency. I can't redesign all government forms, banning any font less than 10pt and the use of their beloved abbreviations.

All I can do is try to chill out. Say it doesn't matter. Say that one pointless phone call isn't that bad. Appreciate that German beaurocracy always seems to get there in the end.

Here is a reward for getting this far.

edit: I see that the "reward" picture is quite old, and was already featured on Snopes

Snow

I was the only person on the University campus trying to start a snowball fight this morning. As nobody else was in the mood, I settled for throwing snowballs at concrete pillars and juggling a quick 3-Ball Boston mess. I think my relation to snow depends on where I grew up, and how often it snowed there. It is also easier and more fun throwing snowballs if you don't have to go to work.

Kitchen WTF

I looked at my loaf of bread, which was topped by a large fluffy green mass, and wondered how it had turned mouldy so soon. I looked on, and thought that the mouldy mass was too big and too green, lacking the white and brown tints. I then looked more closely and saw it was a lump of fresh Broccoli on top of a fresh loaf of bread.

I managed to buy food for three whole days over Easter, and cooked and ate it too. I may need to rethink my storage system, though.

Muggelangelegenheiten

As you will know, it is possible to make new words in German by stringing other words together. As no hyphen is used to show which the original words were, it is possible to misread the long word. The standard example is Urinstinkt, but I prefer Zugreifen, which can be read either as Zu-greifen (go and grab) or Zug-Reifen (Train Tyres).

So while reading a Harry Potter book in German, I took several seconds to correctly read the word Muggelangelegenheiten. This word, meaning "Muggle Affairs", contains the following possible German phrases which have nothing to do with the real meaning: Mugge, Gel, Elan, Lang, Lange legen, Angel and Gen. The words translate as follows: gig, gel, elan, long, to lay for a long time, fishing, and genetic, which is enough to form the plot summary of a short novel.

Language experts think that constructions such as
Muggel-Angelegenheiten or MuggelAngelegenheiten are ugly. Maybe I should stop reading Harry Potter books and get a job.

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A letter to the editor of the Guardian had me laughing this morning. I think the credit goes back to the Marx Brothers.

Jonathan Powell on Tony Blair (Weekend, March 15): "He would get up at 4 o'clock in the morning and write in his underpants." No wonder it took him a long time to learn how to use a computer.
Bryan Morgan
Worksop, Nottinghamshire

In fact, having looked at the link, the original extended quote is even better

Blair felt he needed to pen his own words - in longhand. "He would get up at 4 o'clock in the morning and write in his underpants, then we'd have to dash downstairs and give it to the Garden Girls [the No 10 secretaries] to type it up... it was complete misery for the rest of us."

Any Chance of a Game?

Following on from Monday's game, where our supporter saved the day by coming out of retirement for 30 minutes, I was intrigued by the plight of Gretna FC. They are rooted to the bottom of the Scottish Premier League and in the hands of administrator David Elliot. The club is in debt, losing money and struggling to put out a team on Saturday. The BBC say that

Just 10 players have indicated that they are willing to face Aberdeen on Saturday as doubts surface over insurance and future payment.

and the administrator is quoted as saying

Failure to play on Saturday would mean we are in breach of league rules and would leave us open to be fined and face other penalties.

The solution is obvious: In the best interests of the club, Mr. Elliot should lose his suit and don his football boots. Surely there is time tomorrow to fill out the necessary forms.

Kezboards

I reread my list of things to help me decide where to live, and I wondered whether to remove the point of "never having to see another kezboard". Surely this is a triviality. Is the transposition of the letters 'y' and 'z', and the goddamn ugly placement of 'ö' onto a homekey really that important? Does it matter that entering a '{' requires the right hand to be bent into an unnatural position. The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that the answer is yes. The German kezboard is a all-time disaster of bad design, and I don't think I can ever adjust to use one.

In my last job, I set the computer to recognize the US English layout and just ignored the symbols on the kezboard. However, when I first turned the computer on, it required a password using the German layout before it changed to English and then needed the password again. Every morning, without fail, I entered the wrong password both times. This put me in a shit mood for the rest of the morning.

I then probably annoyed my colleagues by typing 'ss' instead of 'ß' in important documents. This is why these funny letters are on the kezboard: they are considered important. Typing a document in Word was mental torture, and the text-speak message at the top of the screen only added to my misery.



So either I find a technical solution to this problem, or I get a job in Germany that doesn't need a keyboard, or I move to an Anglo-Saxon country. It is really that important for me. Make me work unpaid overtime, cut my pay, insult my intelligence, but please don't fuck with my coordination. It's like someone switched the cables going to your fingers, so you try to bend your index finger but end up bending the ring finger. It may sound crayz (I did that one on purpose to show that my sense of humour is not completely gone), but I'm making the requirement not to have to use a kezboard a non-negotiable part of my future.

I also want my word processor to permanently display the message "UrSTpDCNT" at the top of the screen.

Dead Trousers 3 - Torpedo Entenhausen 4

Being a supporter of Torpedo Entenhausen is a dangerous business. If the number of fit players drops below 10, anyone with two legs is press-ganged into playing. If the number drops below 8, even the cripples are called into service. So when Axel left to put the kids to bed, having scored the first two goals to leave the match finely poised at 2-2, Horsti was called out of retirement for a match-winning cameo. The decisive moment came as he beat one man, found space to shoot and drew the keeper into a parry. Following up, I scored my customary rebound to give Entenhausen the decisive 4-2 lead.

Torpedo Entenhausen 2 - FC Polterberg 5

It's times like this that playing in orange shirts, green shorts and yellow socks pays off. The groundsman turned the floodlights on only 5 minutes before the 8pm kick-off, so we warmed up by running round in the dark hoping that there were no potholes in the pitch. It was a clear night and, having just avoided bumping into each other, right-midfielder Georg and I took to a bit of star-gazing. We could only identify Orion and the Great Bear, and had an educated guess that the Northern Star was somewhere over the Opel factory.

Georg had been the hero of last season's dramatic comeback against Polterberg, but this time we had little chance, despite going 2-0 up early on.

Make Do and Mend

The pockets of my jeans always seem to be the first thing to go, and for the past few days I've been leaving a trail of small change and Stabilo pens wherever I go. I then bought a needle and thread, and sewed the hole together. I did the right pocket with them on, and the left pocket with them off, and found that it is easier and safer to sew when not wearing them.

This kind of thing goes against the spirit of my generation: if it's broke, or old, or no longer in fashion just throw it out and head to the shops. I found the sewing to be quite therapeutic, despite dropping the needle a couple of times.

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I was listening to the radio this morning, and tried to decipher the words to "Back to Black" by Amy Winehouse which is getting a lot of airplay on WDR 2. I could have sworn she sings

Life is like a pie, and I'm a tiny kidney rolling up the walls inside

An expression of the futility of life and its pastry ceilings using the imagery of old-fashioned british cookery. Sadly these are not the real lyrics. It's probably a good thing that nobody can tell what she's singing about, as "He... kept his dick wet" isn't really what you want to hear over breakfast.

Profile Change

About two years ago, when I started this blog, I wrote in my profile that I was "bitter, pessimistic, depressive, downhearted and confused". I have started a course of psychotherapy and am trying to change all of these things. I still sometimes feel this way, but I'm no longer happy using these words to describe myself.

I feel the Earth move

England was hit by an earthquake this week... England was mildly shaken by an earthquake this week... Small Earthquake in England, not many tea cups rattled. I asked four of my relatives, who all live about 100km from the epicentre (or Ground Zero, Lincolnshire, as I call it), whether the earth moved for them, and two said they slept through it. The others were shaken, but not stirred.

Having used up all the standard earthquake jokes and cliches in the first paragraph, let me tell you that Lincolnshire has a history of earthquakes. In 1185, the cathedral suffered structural damage, and had to be rebuilt. The rebuilt Cathedral was the tallest building in the world for over 200 years, until the central tower was destroyed in a storm.

Further earthquake news: the Saarland (memories of learning the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles for GCSE history come flooding back) was also hit by an earthquake a few days ago. This earthquake was due to mining subsidence. I think the human race should be given more credit for this kind of thing. Bacteria and plants got there first in changing the composition of the atmosphere, Dinosaurs lived ages, got fossilized and stomped around a lot, but we can cause significant earthquakes by digging out the earth from beneath our feet and waiting for the ground to fall, with only the loss of the odd chimney. I visited a mining museum near Essen last year, and the guide said that the Ruhr area had sunk by 30 metres over the last couple of centuries due to mining subsidence. I think this is a much greater achievement than a high building, and as a monument to human endeavour it is less prone to fires, storms and earthquakes.

Using the rather tenuous connection of Chile to earthquakes, here is the legendary Battle of Santiago from the 1962 world cup.

The game you are about to see is the most stupid, appalling, disgusting and disgraceful exhibition of football possibly in the history of the game.

Blue Star Oblomow 5 - Torpedo Entenhausen 1

The new season has started in Bochum's spare time league. I was going to write some excuses for the scoreline, but in truth the opposition were better. We kept trying, though, despite going 2-0 down early on. I hope that next week will see an improvement, and if not that the opposition aren't very good. On a personal note I beat the full back and skipped down the wing a couple of times, which gave me a good feeling.

Antidepression

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

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



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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

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

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

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

Stream of Consciousness

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

Bochum

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

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

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

Erlangen

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

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

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

Leeds

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

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

Distance to Leeds: N/A.

Somewhere Completely Different

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

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

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

New Mission Statement

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

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

The Perfect Crime

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

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

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

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

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

20 Million Cubic Litres

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let it Bleed

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

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

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

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

Unemployment

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

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

Standing on Stairs

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

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

Clock Watching

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

New Year's Equivalent of "Bah, Humbug"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy New Year!

Marvels and Mysteries

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



The back cover explains what the book does:

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Chevin Chase

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

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

Otley 42 - Wharfedale 9

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



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

Has the Cat Died?

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

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

Mills Mess (with an effect of vagueness)

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

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

Thanks to my photographer.

I've walked out on another Ceremony!

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

The Rock and Roll Years are Over

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

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

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

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

and then includes a table of 200 exceptions.

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


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

p.s.

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

United Kingdom



United States

Fired?

Clear your desk by the end of January

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

Torpedo Entenhausen 2 - Blue Star Oblomow 3

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

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

Can Anyone beat Seven?

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

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

The Natural Order of Things

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

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

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

...No One Said it's Fair

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

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

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

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

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

I quit

Warning: Rant.

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

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

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

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

FC Polterberg 2 - Torpedo Entenhausen 2

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

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

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

Torpedo Entenhausen 4 - Megalomaniacs Herne 0

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

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

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

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

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

Some things I did and didn't do

Thursday 1st November

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

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

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

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

Health Warning

Wednesday 31st October, 8pm

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

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

Presentation

Wednesday 31st October, 8am

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

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

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

Doubt

Tuesday, 30th October.

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

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


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



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

World Series

Sunday, 28th October

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

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

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

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

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

Gala

Monday 29th October, 9pm

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

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

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

Word Count

Monday 29th October. 5pm

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

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

Central Park

Sunday 28th October

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

Pumpkins

Saturday 27th October

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

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

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



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

America

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

BW Bochum 0 - Torpedo Entenhausen 1

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

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