Found on the Website of O Publico

It's mine. Hands, lots of hands, are trying to get the first Stein of beer distributed at the opening of the Bergkirchweih in Erlangen (Germany). Inhabitants and tourists celebrate the 250th anniversary of tihs traditional festival.

(Very loose translation by me...)

[Edit] Sorry for the spelling errors...

I just like bars where they play songs like Paracetamoxyfrusebendroneomycin
(More info about the album here, more about the bar on Cogumelos Aporcalhados).

Dear people who are not yet born,

if you read this post somewhere in the google archive after google has taken over the world organisation, or if you read this in a handritten note somebody made just shortly before the internet broke down: please ask your friendly neighbourhood mad scientist to borrow you his/her time machine and set the coordinates to here...

Very Bad Idea (TM)...

Famnous last words: "Du kommst doch noch mit ins HaWo, oder?" "Hmmmmm. Warum nicht".

Brazil is also an option...

Congrats, Pool. As a wise man keeps saying: the horizon is red.

What a crap day. I am seriously considering going into a monastery for the next couple of months...

Not only I fucked up the data taking, the students lab experiment I had to tutor died today, I have a huge pile of work which never will get done,...

So, maybe becoming a monk is an option.

Just discovered that by making a little mistake in a script I fucked up a week of datataking. Seems I am really good in working in a chaotic environment... I should not show up the next couple of weeks up in HH, as I will for sure be killed by some people, multiple times.

Just talked to one of our coordinators (we have a big bunch of them, actually we have more coordinators than people who actually do work...). So, the last two weeks we recabled the whole detector, changing the paths where the cables are running. We shorted some of the cables, glued front plates to some of our electronic boards, took data, analised the data, discussed how to procedd, tried to figure out how to beat the noise down, programmed a bit (This might not sound like a lot of work, but it keeps you busy for some time...). That only being the stuff relevant to the detector. I also had stuff to do for general university business, like attending faculty board, writing the minutes for that, meetings with various people, tutoring, etc.

Comment from our coordinator: "So nothing was done the last two weeks." Well, not really. We just hung around and did nothing...

There are people who work more, and yes, I could have done a bit more, as there was still a significant amount of time I spent for hanging around with friends and doing stuff I did not really need to do. But you might get my point...

Foto: Ding Xiaochun/AP/Xinhua, via Publico

There are some problems if you get old...

I just chatted quite a long time with a really nice girl, she's something like nineteen or twenty. As I am getting quite old now, I also start being hard of hearing. So I turned always my ear towards her. Which looked a bit like I was staring at her breasts (they were something to stare at though...). Not quite the best impression to make...

[Edit] Well, maybe it's not because of old age. Maybe it has something to do with aclohol. Which is a shaky theory, because I only had too much beer and cocktails, not much too much beer and cocktails. And some of the beer would not really qualify as beer. I also remember most of the evening...

Time Management for Anarchists: The Movie. If you want to do a revolution, organise yourself. Organisam-se! Organisam-se!

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." - Douglas Adams

found on publico

Back in Erlangen after a bit more than a week of fun in the pit in Hamburg. Being in at the experiment makes me definitively more aggressive, wise-assy, annoyed and dump. Hope to recover soon, I'll be here in Erlangen for a whole month.

Today was faculty board. I not only was volunteered for writing the notes, I also volunteered voluntarily (all on my own) for making a redesigning proposal of the departments website. I always thought of it as not usable, ugly and generally bad. Then I saw this.

Physicists invented the web. And as usual the got interested by someting else and left the first attempts of making websites untouched. It seems that all physics departments in Germany have webpages which suck.

Now take a look at this.... No comments on why we are considered mediocre.

Either I need to get new friends or I need to get new stories. I think I have told all my friends the same stories at least fifteen times (including the all time favourites "Back then, when I was in portugal" and "How I was kept at the Romanian Border")...

Yesterday 70 years ago Emmy Noether died. And nobody knows it. Too busy with the Einstein-Year. Sad...

Just another reason to live in Italy. Although I would not have thought of italians to win by that...

The last couple of weeks in Hamburg haven't been too bad. I did work a lot, but I also started to get along much better with my fellow collegues and sometimes got convinced, that they know what they are doing. Having returned to Erlangen and just getting digest of what they do via mail, I am back thinking that they have absolutely no clue about what they are doing.

Either I got used to that back in HH, they did not behave that stupid when I have been around, or I also got stupid while being there. I think the latter. Working in a big research center makes you dumb, you do not think really about what you are doing, everything is only taken so far, that it just nearly works, nobody really understands his stuff. Mediocrity is the goal...