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.