It's saturday night in Erlangen. The place is called "The Fat Lady sings". The lady who sings isn't fat at all though, actually it is a really good looking blonde. The band plays Grateful Death and Crosby, Stills and Nash. The pub is crowded. A nice looking curly blonde sits at the bar, smiles at me, but keeps on talking to an ugly old guy. Sitting there, having a couple of beers with a good friend. Behind me a guy looking like John "Maddog" Hall, around us people who seem to be nice, you can talk to them, when you listen to their conversation you do not want to bang your head on the wall. It's a nice evening, you feel good being in that pub, you feel like home, the owner of the pub recognizes me, chats a few lines. It really is like being home.

A week ago. Some pub in Hamburg. It is brighter, looks a bit more silish. The waiter is nice, but has difficulties speaking my language. People sitting in the pub mind their own businesses, look like you do not want to talk to them. If you listen to their conversations, you wonder how stupid people can be. Just on the next table sits a gay flight attendant with his boyfriend. Amazing how people fit to the stereotype. He is talking about how he really does not like olives. Just if a bad novelist wrote the dialogue. Everybody is closed in, all of them look like they are trying really hard to be cool, to show off. It is like a fashion show, nobody is normal. Everybody has picked a role model and wants to be exactly like it. Like a convention of Barbie dolls, it just seems like plastic, not real...

I do not want to fit in there. I just like being me, not following a trend how to be cool. Hamburg people are really stressed to be like their role models, and they seem really frustrated because they do not really reach their ideal. Maybe they just should try to be normal...

Christmas seems more promising this year...

Ah! a selvajaria desta selvajaria! Merda
Pra toda a vida como a nossa, que não é nada disto!
Eu pràqui engenheiro, práctico à força, sensível a todo,
Pràqui parado, em relação a vós, mesmo quando ando;
Mesmo quando ajo, inerte; mesmo quando me imponho, débil;
Estático, quebrado, dissidente cobarde da vossa Glória,
Da vossa grande dinâmica estridente, quente e sangrenta!

Arre! por não poder agir de acordo com o meu delírio!
Arre! por andar sempre agarrado às saias da civilização!
Por andar com douceur des mœurs às costas, como um fardo de rendas!
Moços de esquina - todos nòs somos - do huminitarismo moderno!
Estupores de tísicos, de neurasténicos, de linfáticos,
Sem coragem para ser gent ecom violência e audácia,
Com a alma como uma galinha presa por uma perna!

excerpto de Álvaro de Campos - Ode marítima

Yesterday I sent a mail to our groups mailing list, stating that after 11 hours sitting in a loud environment and breathing dried air I reached my limit and will go home now (actually, the main message was something else...)

Today I got a response (CCed to the group list) from one of my bosses: when he was doing actual work, 11 hours was his average spent in the same hall, and he could be there much longer. Well. SOD OFF! I am feeling motivated, valued etc now.

Things that make me feel like a valued member of our collaboration: getting forgotten when everybody goes for lunch. Things (like specs) change, but nobody tells me. I have to set something up, but nobody tells me the important pitfall everybody but me knows. Yeeehaaa for my collegues.

Just watching a TV documentary ybout the cosmos (called cosmos or space or someting like that...) Somebody should shoot TV producers...

BE AFRAID! There is meteors hitting earth any time soon now, killing every bit of live on it. Billions of tons of stone will fall down just in your neighbourhood. Then there is supernovas, black holes, dangerous stars nearby. Every 30 million years earth passes a region of higher density of stars in the milky way, risking comets getting kicked direction earth. And: the average lifetime of a species is a couple of million years. We have been around a couple of million years, so we will ALL GONNA DIE SOON! RUN! FEAR! BE AFRAID OF THE DANGEROUS COSMOS...

But thank god, the american army is doing a lot of research how to prevent these terrorist meteors and communist comets hitting civilized world. And Kevin Costner (or whoever that stupid presenter was) warns us about it...

No wonder Science is not really fashionable, if it is presented this way.

Just had a meeting again. This meeting is supposed to be a working meeting, where all problems we had the last week and all stuff which has to be done this week is addressed. Tha last few meetings BigBoss kept on showing up, so now this meeting has become a Explain-BigBoss-your-Hardware-the-umpth-time meeting. I just love it...

I just passed by an advertisment for an exhibition called "100.000 years of sex". Not to be confused with the erotic and fetish fair, which happens to be at the same time in Hamburg. This exhibition is in a well known museum, so it is culture, it is art. No pornography. The difference is that the explicit pictures are no high quality photographs but antique pots. And they show the fornication of young boys which is now only allowed for artistic purposes...

The title made me think a bit. 100.000 years of sex. Just imagine the time before. Homo erectus sitting in his cave, being bored, all day just hunting and being cloned by aliens. One lucky day, some idea strikes him. That thing between his legs, erected all the day (that is why he is called homo erectus), maybe could be of some other use than to hang your fur on or fix the fishing line...

And there is that other being in the cave, which is same species, but somehow wrong... Connecting the dots, he figures out something. And now knowing things, he passes being homo erectus to being homo sapiens, the knowing human. Evolution finally got rid of those stupid aliens cloning humans even more stupid...

Wer also allgemeine Aufklärung verbreitet, verschafft zugleich eben dadurch allgemeine wechselseitige Sicherheit, und allgemeine Aufklärung und Sicherheit machen Fürsten und Staaten entbehrlich. Oder wozu braucht man sie sodann?

Adam Weishaupt

Just returned from Fresher's Weekend (or whatever you want to call it, going with some 20 first year students into a youth hostel and telling them about university...). It seems, there is only a limited amount of different types who study physics or mathematics. You have the sociophobic, wiseassy geek, there is the MacGuyver-Type and there is the Physics-Teacher (everybody had one of them in school, so no need to explain deeper). Mathematicians also fall into these categories, but sometimes they vary a bit more...

After the freshmen left, we went to a bath in Amberg. If there is something like really deep Provvinzz, I think Amberg is very close (although looking like a nice little town). I am still amazed about how dump people can be. And I really start hating german ways of doing things. Take the way germans behave in a Sauna: In the Sauna there is either absolute silence, nobody talks, if somebody has to say something, it is whispered. Or you have some dumbasses boasting around, shouting there stupidities around.

You have the people who run into the sauna, when water is thrown onto the stove, then run out after a few minutes, just to return a few minutes later. In, out, in, out, like they work on a strange Carnot Cycle, transporting heat out of the Sauna into the resting area. Then there is always some walrus, getting into the sauna, climbing with an amazing effort onto the topmost seats, sitting there, after a few seconds making sounds like a steam engine, after a few minutes like a steam engine close to explosion, staying there until close to a heart attack. Jumping out of the Sauna, maybe showering and coming back after a much too short time. For germans, Sauna seems like having to be stress, pain and hush. Annoying people, who can't relax, who cannot have fun.

Some time since the last post... There's been a lot of stress lately, it will keep on some time, so do not expect a lot of posts until February. Short Version of what happened since then:

My bosses in HH finally discovered that it is not a long time until February, when our detector has to be ready. So everybody starts panicking now and wants new timelines and other useless stuff. It is getting more and more like a Dilbert Cartoon....

I should be in HH right now, but this weekend I spend down south together with some friends, just because. I am fed up with HH...

Personal stuff: being stubborn is good for being a physicist. You keep on insisting that your stuff works until it really works. It is not good for getting a relationship. Some time ago, I figured out, that after fifteen years of constantly trying, it is not going to work with a girl I know since school times (Actually, what I really like about her is, she did not say I am a really nice guy blabla, she said: "forget it"; I like people being straightforward). I am now good friends with her, but I still keep on trying. It kind of turned into a hobby. She by now knows how to handle me, so it is fun to be with her...

There is another girl, I tried to chat her up nearly a year ago (this expression just sounds harsh, but I do not know of any english expression more subtle....), I got the usual answer, that I am a really nice guy (well, phrased differently, nore like "Well.... Aehm.... You know...." , but essence the same...). I still keep on trying, convinced that it is worth the pain. Well, seems I am a really strange guy. Sometime I should learn from experience...

Sometimes I think I got it all wrong...

America is going to vote tomorrow (or so). Arte is showing Wag the Dog, Pro7 Fahrenheit 9/11, all other stations have something about the election as well. And me? I am reading a book. About Cartography...

The people in the states can vote without me. They will get the president they deserve (that is why it is a democracy). And the world will go on anyway. Maybe one or too countries will be bombed out of existence if Bush wins, maybe one or too countries will be bombed out of existence if Kerry wins (also Democrats tried to do Damascectomies). Who knows...

I managed to get speech output working for my IRC program! Yoohooo!

Happy Halloween!

Strangely enough alot of reasons why I prefer Erlangen to Hamburg involve headaches the day after...

WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence.

Hakim Bey - TAZ

Sounds Interesting: The works of Hakim Bey. He is an american anarchist, sees himself as the last pirate and invented the TAZ, the temporary autonomous zone.

i just like spam. "We sell you a completely worthless degree. MBA, MSc, PhD available. yours kindly, Adam Branch, MBA, MSc, PhD"

Anybody else sees the ridiculousness of this?

The European Constitution is going to be signed today. It then still has to be ratified by the member countries of the european union, but it is already a great step towards a more unified Europe.

The big ceremony is in Rome. Lot of people do speeches, they cite Victor Hugo and Erasmus of Rotterdam, they mention the great achievements of european politics in the last 50 years, they talk about future, war on terrorism, and a lot of other stuff. What they do not talk about is: the constitution is 400 pages thick, it weighs nearly 2kg. Who will read this? And even worse, you just cannot read it. I tried. I gave up on page 4. (And I managed to get to page 15 in Joyce's Finnegans Wake...) It is completely ununderstandable, I tried in german, english, french, portuguese. Not a word. It is all in Law-Speek.

A constitiuon is something so important, that it should be short and readable by everyone. And it should not regulate everything, it is a foundation for laws, not a substitution. But I am just a stupid phyisicist, so I may be wrong. I will just keep on being amused by the TV commentaries like "Oh, now he switched to a language we do not have a translator for..." (like Dutch and Portuguese...)

Mana Mana, didee dididee.

If you use Evolution to read your mail, do not switch on the remote spam tests. They take forever and do not really improve your spam filter results, if you have got a decent filter (like spamassassin with roules du jour...),

Something is seriously wrong. Bayern3 is playing really good music tonight...

Conservative Punk What a strange Idea. And thank god, they own the real TRUTH, they want punk music be freed from those left wing propagandists which prevent the youth of today from thinking and knowing the TRUTH. Yeah, VOTE BUSH because he is PUNK!

engrish.com not only has people with similar problems, it also offers solutions:

Women just can't say no to me. They always answer something like "Well, ehm, you know, ehm, can I call you in twenty years...?"

Stories of a science slave part 15: This saturday I got a call from somebody in our management (or whatever you want to call it). She does not understand some graphs a collegue made and therefore needs urgently his phonenumber. I offered to phone him, because I do not want to give away his number without his prior consent. This started a discussion, that if we wouldn't be so stupid (to make graphs she does not understand?), this all wouldn't be needed and bladiblabdibla. I said goodbye and hung up. I am still completely pissed about that. Not the phonecall itself. But that was the last bit to really annoy me (and a lot of people can tell you that it needs a hell of a lot to annoy me for more than 15 minutes...)

Enough about work, I will talk to my Prof tomorrow what to do...

I went out to buy a new car radio on saturday. My old one still worked, but it started skipping bits from CDs and it started falling apart. And it had too much nobs, which were to easily touched: if you wanted to turn the volume up or down, you could forget that on a slightly bad road... So went out to buy a new one. I wanted one with classic design: two big, heavy nobs which you can only turn with some force and maybe some buttons for station memory. It also should play CDs and have some way of connecting external sources as an iPod. OK. So far, so easy.

In the store, they had a display of different radios. All with price tags I could afford where complete crap: all of them had SuperHyperMega Organic Displays with a gazillion of colours, they had JKHGSD and EBBBC and FFFHGQT and UMMMPF and a lot of other fancy abbreviations. They had customisable screensavers! They had at least 5000 nobs and buttons, joysicks, movable frontplates (and I do not mean removable, I mean you turn it on and then the techno-ballet starts, bits and pieces are moved by motors, sliding in and out, turning around...) And they had an amazingly bad sound.

The ones I liked (with two nobs, one line-text only display in black and white...) started at 700 Euros. And you needed a Mercedes to put them in, everything below that would be just wrong. So I ended up buying a much too expensive Blaupunkt-Radio, which has only a black and white display, you can switch of the annoying flashy animations and it has two AUX-inputs. And it is a solid, robust Blaupunkt with a good tuner...

Another one passed away. Inês disappeared from the blogging world. I will miss your posts about Bogart, about films and about everything. Say hello to the Real Life for me and tell it, I will come around some day, maybe :-)

Yez, Yez. Se Spiegel will be afailable in Inglish as vell. Now you inglishspeakers can se best internet news-site read! And without using the fish...

That's advertisment... Simple message, we build planes that bomb britain. No naked women which distract you from the product. Yeah, they could do publicity then.

(That is where you end up when searching for a description of an old geiger counter (Frieseke & Hoepfner FH40T)...)

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Sewing machines belong to the machines I do not understand. I just spend half an hour to sew some shorts (some small hole, 5cm sewing). The fifth attempt looked good, maybe it even survives the next washing :-)

The other is a singular other and completely different. Every other is different. (In German: Der Andere ist ein singulärer Anderer und ganz anders. Jeder andere ist ganz anders., found in the WIkipedia Article about Jaques Derrida)

I just like modern philosophy. It is so straightforward and shows deep intellectual understanding of the otherness of the others. Or so...

Just finished reading the Status Report our Project has to hand in to the Comitee of Big Bosses. Once more I realize that I am only a stupid grad studend who has no clue about the big picture.

This report contains a table of the current manpower situation. It lists the FTE (Full Time Equivalent) for each sub-project and the whole project. A typical line is: Subproject 1: 7.8 FTEs, Subproject 2: 5.3 FTEs, Subproject 3: 3.0 FTEs, Total 26.7 FTEs.

Conclusion from this table: either I cannot do math (as addition of Manpower is nonlinear and synergy effects multiply everything by enormous factors) or we have 10.1 FTEs in Management. Which is too much, and besides that these 10 FTEs are not doing much (at least usefull).

Besides that I do not understand where the numbers for the sub-projects come from. In my counting I only get something like 4 to 5 FTEs for Subproject 1, which I (officially) belong to... So: is 1 PHD-Student (who gets paid for 20h a week) something like 2 FTEs (working 80h a week)?

But maybe I am just too stupid to understand management...

Aniversaries today:

• 30 years ago, the first Ikea opened it's doors in Germany
  
• 10 years ago, the first Netscape Beta Version (Link to Navigator 0.91 for Win3.1) was made public (For you Archeology Geeks out there: All Netscape Versions...)
  
• Roger Moore turns 70
  
• ...
  

When I grow up, I want a library like this...

Browsing my 1000 Lire Edition of Dante's Divina Comedia...


Per me si va ne la città dolente,
per me si va ne l'etterno dolore
per mi si va tra la perduta gente.

Giustiza mosse il mio alto fattore
fecemi la divina podestate
la somma sapïenza e 'l primo amore.


Dinanzi a me non fuor cose criate
se non etterne, e io etterna duro.
LASCIATE OGNE ESPERANZA, VOI CH'INTRATE.

Discovering the marvels of Wikipedia...

This day 512 years ago Indians discovered Columbus...

Why don't they make DVDs of good movies for a change: Moebius and La Estrategia del caracol for example...

Hallo, Hallo, Ich bin dein Ohrwurm...

Tonight we have a really kitschy Bob Ross(TM)-Sundown(TM) in Erlangen and I left my Camera in Hamburg...

15 years of re-unification of germany... And still no flowering landscapes, Mr. Kohl...

O meu amor me deixou
Levou minha identidade
Não sei mais bem onde estou
Nem onde a realidade

Ah, se eu fosse marinheiro
Era eu quem tinha partido
Mas meu coração ligeiro
Não se teria partido

Ou se partisse colava
Com cola de maresia
Eu amava e desamava
Sem peso e com poesia

Ah, se eu fosse marinheiro
Seria doce meu lar
Não só o Rio de Janeiro
A imensidão e o mar

Leste oeste norte e sul
Onde um homem se situa
Quando o sol sobre o azul
Ou quando no mar a lua

Não buscaria conforto nem juntaria dinheiro
Um amor em cada porto
Ah, se eu fosse marinheiro.

Maresia (se Eu Fosse Um Marinheiro) - Adriana Calcanhoto

Holiday's over, back to work... It might still be from the holiday, but I just do not care anymore. If the experiment blows up, so what...

Just a thought...

Instead of Postcards: Greetings from Portugal :-)

Interesting thoughts about the colour of LEGO bricks...

Some people are really serious about toys.

You know you are old when you still remember the tracks of LEGO trains being blue. (OK, I had the grey ones, but a lot of my friends had the blue ones...)

Random Picture...



Only one more week to holiday!!!!!

I understand quantum mechanics. I can calculate the tiny world of an atom and the enormity of a star. I have a general idea how the universe works. But I still have not the faintest idea how women think... and I never will.

The universe as a whole is so incredibly much simpler than its inhabitants.

For some reasons Blogger did not accept my last posting, so this is the second try. If you see something posted two hundred times, blogger went berserk...

The American Library Association published a list of the 100 books most banned from school libraries, public libraries etc. Interestingly it contains not only sexually explicit books or books like the Anarchists Cookbook, but also World Literature and childrens books. You find: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain; Harry Potter by JK Rowling; The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

The strangest entry on the list is Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford, which is a book with pictures where you have to find Waldo in a huge group of people. And these people are not involved in group sex or anything which somebody might object.

I would like to make fun of these stupid fundamentalists on the other side of the atlantic. But, here in good ol' Europe, there is not even such a list of banned books. I am sure, some school banned books from their library, but there is no outcry heard (although that for sure exists as well...) And seeing what is happening now in Portugal to the Women on Waves ship shows we are not better than the fundamentalists on the other side of the atlantic...

I do not understand politics, part whatever...

A ship from the dutch organisation Women on Waves is coming to portugal. This organisation is in favour of legalising abortion, which is prohibited in portugal (with the exception of pregnancy after rape (until 16th week), serious danger for the woman (12th week) or serious illnesses of the fetus (until 24th week)). Interesting about this is not only the discussion about legalisation of abortion but also the way the portuguese politicians react.

A minister said, that the agenda of the portuguese government is only to be defined by the portuguese. "It does not depend on the arrival of any kind of vehicle"... What I do not understand about it: it is a dutch ship arriving. It triggers a discussion in portuguese media and portuguese people start to think (again) about abortion. So, if portuguese people discuss abortion and they are supposed to define the agenda of portuguese government, why does portuguese government not discuss it but declares they do not want to be annoyed by strange dutch women on a ship... And just to prevent comments from my portuguese friends: no, it is not only because your government is especially incompetent. (Maybe because of governments being incompetent in general.)

What annoys me about that is the lack of consitency in argumentation. If you ignore the people, then tell them why. Not just declare the people being stupid. They generally do not like that...

The chain of communication is getting better day by day. A tells B that we need some stuff, B tells C, C says D could buy it, so B asks D. D asks E to call F (that's me...) if A really needs stuff. F tells E to call G, because there was some confusion some weeks ago. E will get a mail from G that B already got that stuff. B will be confused. D will buy that thing, A will be happy, F will discover a spare thing, so that D did not need to buy it in the first place. And there was not alot of rejoicing.

Today I wanted to do some short bike tour. Just from Erlangen passing Marloffstein and Atzelsberg and then going back, some 15km. I ended up doing Marloffstein, Atzelsberg, Baiersdorf, Eltersdorf, Tennenlohe and back, some 45km... I hate when I get taken away doing things... :-)

Strange thing is, I am not even tired. I should stop doing all these sport things. They make me much to healthy... For compensation, I had some beers now.

My boss in Hamburg is on a conference on the other side of the world. It is amazing how much stuff you get done without any stress when nobody is around having IDEAS. Usually when I am in my office my boss drops in two or three times and has some idea which has to be done NOW. The next day he aks why the hell I did this...

There is one guy in my collaboration which tries to survive by presenting other peoples work as his own. He managed to get a Post Doc position! He just behaves important, fetches enough buzzwords to throw random phrases into a discussion, makes a lot of proposals at meetings and asks everybody, if he can have a look at their work, which he then copies and presents as his own. He has not done anything himself the last two years (or more...) His best proposal at a meeting was that we should remove one of those big shiny chips on our read out electronics board, so that we can implement some stupid stuff there. The big shiny things are our read out chips, his proposal was like removing the heart to have place for another appendix...

In other news: I am putting some photos on photo.net, you can find them here...

Googling for Christians for decent literature leads to interesting results...

Archive.org is a great site. It even has the the night of the living dead...

Those bloody communist perverts are trying to corrupt us citizens for decent literature by selling p0rn!. Darn them...

"A computing device is disclosed. The computing device includes a housing having an illuminable portion. The computing device also includes a light device disposed inside the housing. The light device is configured to illuminate the illuminable portion."

Apple is patenting blinkenlights...

Been to Helgoland, to the exact spot where Werner Heisenberg discovered Quantum Mechanics. At least the monument suggests that...

Helgoland is a small Island in the middle of the North Sea, until 1890 british, then came to germany as exchange for Sansibar. To get there, you can take the fast ferry from Cuxhaven, taking two and a half hour, right to the port of the island. Or you can take the traditional way from Hamburg with a sixties ship, taking five hours to get close to the port, there change to smaller boats and get transferred to the island.

The island itself is just a big lump of rock in the middle of nowhere, after some terraforming attempts of the british navy in 1945 not entirely flat (5700 tons of explosives were involved...). There is a small village mainly consiting of alcohol and cigarretes shops, as the island is tax free. You can stay exactly three hours on the island before the ship leaves again, which is nearly the time to circle it and buy some stuff (Helgoland is one of the few places where you can get Absolut Vodka with 50% of alcohol, it normally has only 40%...)

It is a really fun trip, you get serious sun burns on the ship, you are on the sea for a day and you can get cheap alcohol. Kind of mini-cruise...

Just read an article about a guy who wants to keep german language "pure" and wants to get rid of americanisms. Sometimes you can overdo things... For sure we have to much anglisisms in our day to day speech, most of them even are complete nonsense to any native english speaker, but to rant about everything which has the slightest touch of english is just mad. English uses a lot of words from other languages, if you read "Mother Tongue" by Bill Bryson you get the impression that english is just words stolen from any other lingo... And nobody bothers (or maybe they do and I just have not heard of them...)

If you use Welthandelszentrum instead of World Trade Center, I think that is just plain wrong. It is a name. Names are not translated. You would not call Pepe Carvalho something like John Oak (or to stick with german and english: Henry Miller is not Heinz Müller...). There is a point in not using anglisisms if there is a german word for it, mainly because these anglisisms are just plain wrong. But sometimes there is no german word, or the german word is just too complicated. Mobiltelefon is just too long, so if everybody calls it "Handy", why not, even if every native english speaker looks at you strangely...

Where that guy is right is that there are too much english phrases in publicities. And most of them are just nonsense like "Come in and find out". Yeah, just go in and then leave again. People who do slogans like that you should't buy anything from anyway...

And do not call them americanisms. They are mainly anglisims. Even if you don't like the states, it is still english they speak. At least kind of... English can complain about americanisms, but then they complain about the difference between colour and color.

Ah, and don't complain about my spelling. Just came home from a pub crawl...

Another one surfing the blog wave... This place is just crawling with physicists :-)

One of the reasons why I never will be a good physicist: I can't stand the way of presentation.

My problems with physiscists way of presentation:

• There is no excuse for bad typography.


• I like to target my presentations to my audience: if experts, do expert talk, if non-experts, do non-expert talk.


• Use as few formulas as possible.


• Do not put as much as you can on a slide.


• Do not use any of those fancy powerpoint effects if you do not need them.


• If you got 15 minutes, do not put 60 minutes of content in your talk and just speak faster.


• Do not use more than three colours.


• Bright yellow on white is bad.


• Using Comic Sans does not make your talk more understandable, nor does it make you cool.


• and so on and so on...

When the outside temperature rises
And the meaning is oh so clear
One thousand and one yellow daffodils
Begin to dance in front of you - oh dear
Are they trying to tell you something
You're missing that one final screw
You're simply not in the pink my dear
To be honest you haven't got a clue

I'm going slightly mad
I'm going slightly mad
It finally happened - happened
It finally happened - ooh oh
It finally happened
I'm slightly mad
Oh dear

I'm one card short of a full deck
I'm not quite the shilling
One wave short of a shipwreck
I'm not my usual top billing
I'm coming down with a fever
I'm really out to sea
This kettle is boiling over
I think I'm a banana tree
Oh dear

I'm going slightly mad
I'm going slightly mad
It finally happened - happened
It finally happened - uh huh
It finally happened
I'm slightly mad
Oh dear

Ooh ooh ah ah
Ooh ooh ah ah
I'm knitting with only one needle
Unravelling fast it's true
I'm driving only three wheels these days
But my dear how about you

I'm going slightly mad
I'm going slightly mad
It finally happened
It finally happened - oh yes
It finally happened
I'm slightly mad
Just very slightly mad

And there you have it


I'm going slightly mad - Lyrics and Music by Queen...

Random Picture



Searching for some different pictures I finally found the missing slides from some holiday in Italy. I was looking for them since about eight years...

Just put up on the web some emberassing pictures from school times...



This one is from our class trip to Bonn in 1991, where we met the chancellor (Helmut Kohl, for those who cannot remember that times...) opening the youth hostel.

About 5 years ago we changed the spelling rules in german from overly complicated to slightly less complicated. At that time there was a big fuzz about killing the language of Schiller and Goethe and the death of the occidental culture in general. Now one of germanys greates newspaper publishing house announced that they will return to the old spelling, as people are still mixing new and old spelling, and as some books are only published in old spelling, which confuses people.

I right now read a book in the spelling of 1860. I am not confused (let's say not more than normal...). To be on the safe side I think I will return to Lutherian spelling (like back in fourteenhundred something), this will for sure not confuse anybody, as it was Luther who invented german in the first place...

Went rowing yesterday. My hands are now full of blisters, but it was fun. Something different if you get together with 15 people who hardly now each other but organise themself into working teams in a boat. Just the opposite to work...

Went out with a really nice girl I know since 15 years and had a nice evening. Not a day totally lost... (Although my chances with her are damn' close to zero, at least she keeps on telling me :-) )

Sometimes I think doing a phd is like being in a game show. You get an impossible task, you have to do it in no time. If you achieve 20 in 1000 of them, you get your phd...

These stupid anal oriented parking nazis gave me another ticket. Some day they will make me obey parking laws... Bloody fascists. ;-)

Not a lot happened the last days... Went to work, worked like a horse (ok, horses do not stare at computer screens or clean up experimental halls...), got drunk with collegues, went to bed. Repeat...

But I managed to finish some books I was reading (I always read some books in parallel...) So here now my rants on them:

Marco Polo - Il Millione or the wonders of the world

Nice book, one of the first travel books. Although I am quite sure Marco Polo only saw half of the things he describes it is a pretty impressive book. Written shortly after 1200 it draws a vivid picture of the orient and how it was viewed by the europeans. Sometimes it is a bit boring to read, especially when he just goes like "This is City XY, the inhabitants are heathens, burn their deads and pay with paper money" for pages and pages.

Henry Miller - The Tropic of Capricorn

I am not really sure if I like it. The first half is Miller complaining about being poor, living in Paris and fucking beautiful women. The second half is less complaining, but keeps on the tenor. He for sure can write, the only problem is, he has not a lot to write about. A story would have helped, like this it is just a brilliantly written account of some not really interesting life in Paris.

Bill Bryson - The dictionary of troublesome words

This is one of the few dictionaries you can actually read from top to bottom. Bryson shows how to use some of the more or less obscure words in english as well as pitfalls with words you think you knew all your life (or at least for a long time). If you are writing english texts, you should at least have borrowed this book once from the library :-) Non-native speakers like me will be astonished about the richness of english language having special words for lying face up (supine), face downwards (prone and prostrate) or non-specified but comfortable lying around (recumbent).

James Joyce - Dubliners
I would call it a book of short stories if it were actual stories. It is more a collection of sketches. Joyce portraits people and everyday situations, but there is nothing happening. Like Miller he is a really good writer but this book just seems to be just some warming up. Like a sketchbook this is not the real picture but already shows some genius. If there is a real picture I do not know, the only other thing I tried to read by Joyce is Finnegans Wake, and I stopped on page 14.

Another one on the blog train :-)

On the weekend when I was in Erlangen they just build a huge crane in front of my house. Looked pretty impressive...

They say that the left side of the brain
Controls the right
They say that the right side
Has to work hard all night
Maybe I think too much for my own good
Some people say so
Other people say no no
The fact is
You don't think as much as you could
hmmm
I had a childhood that was mercifully brief
I grew up in a state of disbelief
I started to think too much
When I was twelve going on thirteen
Me and the girls from St. Augustine
Up in the mezzanine
Thinking about God

Maybe I think too much
Maybe I think too much
Maybe I think too much
Maybe I think too much

Have you ever experienced a period of grace
When your brain just takes a seat behind your face
And the world begins The Elephant Dance
Everything's funny
Everyone's sunny
You take out your money
And walk down the road
That leads me to the girl I love
The girl I'm always thinking of
But maybe I think too much
And I ought to just hold her
Stop trying to mold her
Maybe blindfold her
And take her away

Maybe I think too much
Maybe I think too much
Maybe I think too much
Maybe I think too much


Song by Simon and Garfunkel, written by Paul Simon

Random Science Picture:

Don't you just hate it if you sit on your sofa, reading, trying to have a quiet evening and out of a sudden a salsa band creeps out of the woods beneath your window and starts to party...?

(No, it is not a Monty Python Moment. Today is fiesta latina in the cultural centre just next to my flat...)

Carlos Paredes died yesterday. He was one of the greatest players of portuguese guitar...

I just like dictionaries... The former "Penguin dictionary of troublesome words", now just called Troublesome Words by Bill Bryson just arrived from Amazon and made me pick up my "Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers". Interestingly enough it just fell open at the page describing 42. 42 is the constant of the smallest magic cube. (Vaguely remember some article in nature about a cube shaped universe...)

Diving into the blogosphere I hit theomorph.

Not unlike the real world you are only seperated from any person in the blog world by a few degrees of seperation (you might want to call it clicks, though)...

Some Ideas turn out not to be as good as they sounded in the beginning...

The only thing you learn in university is learning. You do not learn actually doing things. This might happen during your phd. Sometimes it doesn't. You are basically dropped into the water: "you have learned something, so now just do something completely different. No we won't tell you how to do it, figure it out." Sometimes I wish to be back in the days of studying, where you just sat in the library and read books (and sometimes did math stuff)...

People who program stuff like while ((bk = bg + ((*(int *) bg) >> 1) + 4){} should be shot.

I called this blog gajo simpático, as I heard quite often that I am a really nice guy, but. (Here the sentence ends usually.) I just hate that.

There is one thing I hate more. Having to listen between the lines because you actually get a lot of talking but nothing said. "Yes", "no", "I do not know" are all valid answers, but only one at a time. Sometimes a "well, no" is better than talking about weather and having to figure out what we are actually talking about.

PHD life sucks (as micat already stated...). I am trying to squeeze in two weeks of holiday some time in August to visit some friends in Portugal. Sent a mail to my (kind-of-)boss in Hamburg. Every five minutes came an answer: No, this has to be done, that has to be done...

Seems I am the only one in Hamburg at that time and have to build the *****ing detector myself. So I will spent August with two mad russians in a cellar building a detector, turning into a gollum like creature and having a nervous breakdown in September. What a great life.

There is still hope for a week of holiday, but I am sure, there will be something why I cannot go.

Just to be clear: it is OK that I cannot make a holiday whenever I want. But our project is so badly organised that everything (which has to be done in Hamburg) dumps on me. Our so-called management manages by asking everybody to do the work for them... Asking for time to make a holiday I got the response: Make a detailed timeline for the project and then figure out yourself. Fun.

What would Jesus drive? Well, I think he would ride a mule. Or a donkey. I cannot imagine him trying to go around the deserts of palestine in a small japanese eco-car, nor driving there with a hummer. So Americans, do like Jesus did. Get a donkey! (Or do like Jesus did: get nailed to a cross, but that would be a nasty comment.)

Welcome to micat aboard the blog-train. One more way to procrastinate :-)

Another Bibliotaph on the net...

Geek level still low: 31.6%

Os americanos se passam! Vi no slashdot um Thread sobre uma pagina para fazer comunidades, que começou em inglês, mas agora ja há muitos que falam brasileiro (ou brasilês). E qual é o problema? Há paises, que não falam inglês. Tambem no net. E há pessoas que falam mais que uma lingua. Aber anscheinend nicht in den Staaten...

And there is the fish...

the last time somone listened to a Bush, a bunch of people wandered in the desert for 40 years

found on bash.org

Around 2000 BC some egyptian priest sat together around a pyramid and were frolicking around a big jar of grape juice turned bad. One of them started to think aloud: "." (This translates in modern english to something like "Why don't we take some wheat, let it sprout, rost it. Then put it in water, boil it, add yeast and hops, wait some time for it ferment and drink that stuff. Might be a jolly good Idea, don't you think?") Well, it worked. Beer had entered the world's stage.

Some 2000 years later romans were the masters of the world. Egypt was just one of the provinces of rome, but the idea of beer had kept on. Roman soldiers transmitted the Idea of beer to the germanic tribes they were fighting in the cold and wet north, what is now known as southern germany. Teutons by then were used to mead, honey mixed with water let rot for some weeks. Despite fighting the romans they caught some ideas from them. What is now Frankonia used to be teutonic border region, heavily influenced by the romans. That is why franconian wine comes in "Bocksbeuteln", a bottle modelled after roman bottles (the shape has been source of many disputes with Portugal. There they use the same shape for Vinho Verde, everybody wanted to have it patented...)

Teutons got the idea of beer. Some time later the christian monks found out, that beer is something to keep you alive during lent. Beer got perfected by the monks, a variety of thousands of different beers was born. And then, sometime somebody got the idea of putting some benches outside a cloister, beneath some lovely trees, maybe serve some food... Thus, the biergarten was born. The best invention of mankind enters world history. Not even electricity can come up to the ingenuity of a biergarten. Maybe the running hot water is better. But not much...

In a biergarten, there are no social differences. The only difference is if people are prussians or non-prussians. This is something not defined by where you were born, but how you behave. If you are narrow minded, chances are high to be a prussian. If you are narrow minded, but after a beer don't care, chances are high not to be a prussian. Biergarten is the best thing germans (or teutons?) have ever given to the world.

In case you wonder why there are so many quotes today...: getting bored I just read big part of the fortune database. I just put up some I liked, to find them again; some day I might need them...



A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.

Nietzsche

The worst thing one can do is not to try, to be aware of what one wants and not give in to it, to spend years in silent hurt wondering if something could have materialized -- and never knowing.

David Viscott

The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged, I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad. And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors, and they are squeamish about technology to this very day. So it is natural for them to despise science fiction.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., "Science Fiction"

Just googled for fish shops in Nürnberg. One of the links said "Offers for fish at eBay". Cool. Just imagine, fresh tuna fish, starting bet 1 Euro, auction ends in two weeks. Can be send by express. Whooohooo.

I am always amazed about how much we talk, how little we say. Sometimes I should say things instead of hoping that people will get it. Sometimes people should say things instead of hoping, that I will get it... Life is complicated enough, there is no need to make it more complicated.

<>When I was a young man, I vowed never to marry until I found the ideal woman. Well, I found her -- but alas, she was waiting for the ideal man.

Robert Schuman

Being a nerd: On Heise there is a discussion thread about the shadow of the earth moving with more than the speed of light if you are far enough away. I am really amazed how stupid these argumentations get... (Yes, it is Heise, yes, I know people are dumb. But this dumb?) Seems that we are still deep in the dark middle ages concerning the physics knowledge of ordinary peasants.

Happily returning to ivory tower, staring at my computer screen and trying to figure out why my program dies...