It is impossible to stand on one leg.

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

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

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

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

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

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

SG Sundern 1- Torpedo Entenhausen 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chirp

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

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

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

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

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

Torpedo Entenhausen 4- BW Bochum 3

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

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

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

3/ Except for the Hamburger SV.

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



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

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

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

Problem group

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odd bit of english culture: Cheese Rolling.

Things you may not wish to know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vfl Bochum 2 - FC Schlake 05 1

The best ways to annoy fans of FC Schalke 04 are

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

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

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

Torpedo Entenhausen 2 - Dead Trousers 2

Musical memories from german lessons at school in England:

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

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

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

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

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

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

EeeyEe0e

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

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

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

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

Gletzenbrod

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

This recipe involves soaking things overnight!

Ingredients

For the dough:

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

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

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

Procedure

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

2/ Get a good night's sleep.

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

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

5/ Set the oven to 200 degrees Celcius.

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

7/ Tip the pear water away.

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

Higgs Bosun

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

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

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

to Walter E. Wallis in Palo Alto

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

and to Mark Bergner in Chicago

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

The Möhnesee

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

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

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

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

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

The Game of Love, Unity and Murdered Coaches.

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

Here is a brief guide to cricket:

1/ How to bat for Kazachstanis.

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

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

4/ An actually quite helpful explanation of the game.

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

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

Lame Ducks Fail to Quack

The Bochumer Cliche reports...

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

The Fartela

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The windscreen wiper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Other Team 3 - Torpedo Entenhausen 1

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

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

Some links:

Elf defence for 'lingerie thief'

Comedy stretcher bearers

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

Intelligence and dental assistents

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

The awful (use of the beautiful) german language.

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

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

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

or

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

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

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

Twain then rants away,

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

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

For completeness, here are the original german sentences.

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

und

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