My old grad school officemate, Eugene, stopped by for a visit, so we went to Berlin for the weekend.
We stayed right in the center of the things on Unter den Linden and walked to everything. The first day we visited the Jüdisches Museum, which was certainly worth the visit but more interesting architecturally than in the content of the museum -- tracing the history of Judaism in Germany.
Getting to the Jüdisches Museum meant walking right through what used to be Checkpoint Charlie from East Berlin to West Berlin. Very little of the original Berlin Wall is still standing. Here the sign and the checkpoint are recreations. 
The original sign is in the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie museum, but admission was an outrageous 12.50 euros (it was 5 for the Jüdisches Museum) and we figured we could skip it.
Touristy Communist stuff is everywhere here. 
If you follow path of the wall to the west, you do run into a little stretch of the original stuff. Here there's an outdoor exhibit ("The Topology of Terror") on the ruins of the old headquarters for the Secret State Police. A piece of the Berlin Wall is right above it. 
Further to the west, turning north at Postdamer Platz and just south of Brandenburg Gate, we saw the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (the Holocaust Memorial). I had read descriptions of it, but it definitely surpassed my expectations. A field of concrete slabs erected in a precise grid. The slabs vary in height, growing unevenly to the center of the grid as the ground between them simultaneously slopes downward. At the edges, then, the slabs are short enough to sit on -- which I and many other tourists did despite their uncomfortable resemblance to coffins. From there, the memorial looks rather like playing field in the old arcade game Q*bert. Several children and ... sigh ... adults treated it as such, leaping from concrete block to concrete block. It also, however, resembles the old Jewish cemetary in Prague, tombstones piled on tombstones. 
Walking through the exhibit, the slabs quickly rise over your head and you find yourself in a quiet and dim concrete forest.
Brandenburg Gate. It's big and near a bunch of foreign embassies and the Reichstag. It's on the east end of the Tiergarten and is the west end of Unter den Linden.
That was day 1.
We devoted the next day to musuems. Heading east from Brandenburg Gate on Unter den Linden, you would pass a few embassies, a lot of expensive stores, our hotel, the old National Library, Humbolt University, a giant statue of Frederick the Great, Neue Wache, Bebelplatz (where the Nazis held a book burning ceremony), and the Berliner Dom, as well as a few others I'm forgetting. 
We went to the Pergamon Museum, which has a lot of cool Babylonian stuff (e.g., the Ishtar Gate) and to the Altes Musuem which has some cool Egyptian stuff (e.g., this bust of Nefertiti).
By the way, the hotel, Brandenburg Gate, and all the museums were in East Berlin, where the old Communist authorities came up with these very cute icons for the walk signs. He's called Ampelmännchen (little traffic light man) and is enough of a cultural icon to have souvenirs with his likeness and to resist standardization after reunification (really, just read the wiki page). 
For dinner we wandered up Oranienburger Straße where there's a ton of restaurants (one with a fantastic and fantastically cheap Sunday brunch) and the Neue Synagogue. Although the original was mostly saved from Kristallnacht, it was mostly destroyed by Allied bombing during the WWII. Aside from some foreign embassies, it was the only building we saw that had police guarding it.
Our last day, we wandered through Tiergarten. It includes the Soviet War Memorial which is very Soviet looking
and Siegessäule (Victory Column). 
By the way, we stayed at the Westin Grand Berlin. It's a four or maybe five star hotel, but Eugene had hotel points so it seemed like a good deal. We could afford the hotel but not anything else: our room had a view of the Bugatti showroom across the street and coffee at the hotel bar cost 5 to 8 euros. But they had complimentary 85% chocolate pieces (from Ghana). 
Monday, September 08, 2008
Berlin
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Convenience, German-Style
I've made my frustrations with Germany's lack of convenience pretty clear, but the title of this post isn't meant to be derisive: I'm actually going to point out one aspect of living here that is convenient.
Bonn is a fairly small place made up of even smaller places. What used to be several different villages is now all part of the city. This means that street names change every few block (not convenient) but also that a few minute walk will bring you to a different neighborhood. In addition, places to go for a walk or for a run are abundant around my apartment.
To illustrate, I made a map with Google Maps (illustrated with a few old pics) and I annotated (with links!) below:
View Larger Map
I live in Poppelsdorf (I left off where exactly to give all my stalkers at least a little bit of a challenge). Work is the red flag, a 10 minute bike ride away (no commutes for me). It's next to a large field that's mostly farmland. It's a good place to go running, but who needs to go all the way the work, when I've got 3 alternatives right next to my apartment? (Also, I'm a terrible, terrible runner, so I'm fine with some very short routes.)
The two blue dots are Poppelsdorfer Friedhof and Kreuzberg Kirche. It's a nice, but steep, walk up to a Kreuzberg Kirche where you can sit and enjoy the view or walk or run through a wooded area.
I usually run around Poppelsdorfer Schloss (the green dot) and down Poppelsdorfer Allee towards the Zentrum. It's nice and flat for a quick morning run and the path isn't all concrete. (It's also around mile from my apartment to the Zentrum and the Rhine. The path along the river goes 50 km, all the way to Koblenz.) Unlike going up to Kreuzberg Kirche, though, there's always people on this route.
Finally, 5 months after I was embarrassed by how long it took me to discover Kreuzberg Kirche, finally, I found out how to get to the wooded area clearly marked by the purple flag on the Google Maps. (So embarrassing.) But I went today. It's a little steep getting there, but run-able once you're there. While the wooded area is probably less than a square mile, it was pretty empty at noon on a Saturday and I couldn't see the road at all. (It's also an Escher drawing of unmarked, criss-crossing paths and I spent a lot of time memorizing exactly how I got to where I was.)
During my last year in Chicago, I'd occasionally run from my apartment to the Lake in the mornings, crossing Lake Shore Drive via the pedestrian underpass across from the Museum of Science and Industry and running north to the Point. A ten minute run in Bonn can get you from Poppelsdorf to any of 4 neighborhoods. A ten minute run in Hyde Park will get you somewhere else in Hyde Park. But on the lakeside path at the Point, you leave the 6 lanes of cars and run straight east. As you reach the end of the point, the field house blocks your view of the city and the sound of the cars dies away and for maybe 20 steps, you're totally alone. And, then, you circle around and it all slowly comes back. But, you know, in the last year of grad school, those few seconds were probably the highlight of my day.
I suppose that was still more convenient than when I lived in New Haven and the two options were to run 10 minutes toward the Physics building (really did I need to spend more time in its vicinity?) and past it in the vague direction of East Rock Park. Still you never quite shook off the feeling of being on campus. The other option would be to run through the ghetto and through an industrial zone to Long Wharf and out on the pier. (Hilariously, New Haven is a port city that's totally turned away from the water. I'd guess that the vast majority of Yale students have never been out to the harbour, not that there's any reason for them to go out there. Aside from a restaurant or two, there's nothing out there but empty lots and what looks like an oil refinery.) It was always empty and a good place to get away from everything (well, except for that one time when a homeless man asked me how to get to the bus station).
And look at that; I made a new post mostly out of links to old posts. How very ... efficient.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Globe-Trotting in Latitude and Longitude
In the past few years, the realization that I've never been to the Southern Hemisphere has slowly worked its way it into my consciousness. Thankfully, it's not something that's going to bother me for long, since I'm going to Sydney in September (yay!). But it's got me wondering just how much of the globe have I covered in latitude and longitude?
Until today, I had assumed that the furthest south that I have been is Taiwan, which sits on the Tropic of Cancer, the 23 parallel. As it turns out, Honolulu is slightly further than even the southern tip of Taiwan (which I've been to) at 21 degrees and Maui is south of Honolulu. The furthest north I've been (not counting, of course, while on an airplane) is Amsterdam at 52 degrees. I admit, not very impressive at all.
My east-west coverage is a little better. I've hit both coasts of North America and Hawaii, which gets me from 158 W to 71 W or so, although I'm missing some points further east in the Carribean and South America. And I've gone from 15 W (Canary Islands) to 19 E (Budapest), but then there's a big swath from Eastern Europe to the Pacific coast of Asia (120 E back in Taiwan) that I've never been to.
So there you have it: the (lack of) breadth of my globe-trotting in precise geographic coordinates. I'm sure you are all more impressive. Go ahead and gloat in the comments.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
A PhD in Horribleness
Is it possible that there's someone who hasn't heard of Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog (you've got all weekend to watch it free)? I can't get the music out of my head.
[Updated 29.07.08] Free again here.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
The Most Idiotic NY Times Article Today ...
is this one. At least I think it is. I couldn't bear to do more than skim it.
[I'm sorry, Mr. John Tierney, did the bit about how your male offspring played with trucks while your female offspring played with dolls get cut for length?]
[10 hours later, still mad] Okay, having read more of the article, who are these totally unnamed 'critics' that, as Tierney claims, fear that a quota system for women in the hard sciences is on the way? He's not willing to quote anyone -- is that because no one actually thinks that this is going to happen and he's just using the specter of quotas to scare people into ignoring the fact that his article is entirely one-sided (i.e., everyone hates quotas, don't they? therefore, women must be innately uninterested in the hard sciences).
Friday, July 11, 2008
Stuck in Poppelsdorf
Today, Saturday, there will be a demonstration by Neo-Nazis in Duisdorf (that's two miles down the road from my apartment). Concurrently, the counter-demonstration is scheduled to go down Endenicher Str. That's one of the streets I cross to get to work (maybe a 20 minute walk from my apartment, just down the street from work). There's supposed to be 1000 police officers for the demonstrations. So is your intrepid blogger going to go and check it out for your blog-reading entertainment?
Nu-uh. No way. Aint happenin'. I'm not even going to try to go to work. I've got 5-6 weeks of waiting for a new passport starting yesterday, and this is the last thing I need. I'll keep an eye on the papers and point out any interesting pics I find.
[Updated - 13.07.08] Here's a link to a photo of many police vehicles in the field outside my office.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Birthday
I'm back. And here is what 30 is like: jet-lagged. I spent the day flying from Chicago to Amsterdam (at least the woman at passport control wished me a happy birthday) to Bonn. And with my laptop still being repaired, I spent the evening watching old Veronica Mars episodes on my iPod. And, now, the day after, I'm totally rested but completely foggy. It's quite weird.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Packing
All of this
is going into this backpack.
Okay, maybe I cheated a little bit. 
See y'all back here in 2 weeks.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Arnel Pineda
So this story has gotten some mainstream press, but it's possible that some of you may not spend all your days reading the news on the internet. You can read the Time magazine article here.
Arnel Pineda is a 40-year singer from the Philippines (here's his wiki page). He's spent the past 25 years playing in various cover bands. Today, he's the lead singer of Journey. Yeah, there's a lot of youtube clips.
Last summer, after Journey had parted ways with their last lead singer, Journey guitarist, Neal Schon, spent some time trolling youtube. He found clips of Arnel Pineda singing the The Zoo, his most recent band, and couldn't believe what he heard. And it was as simple as that. God bless the internet.
Pineda doesn't just sound like Journey's original lead singer, Steve Perry, he sounds better. His ability to mimic some very distinctive voices is nearly uncanny. And though they played 3-5 hour shows (according to Wikipedia) to some half-empty clubs (as you can see) with crappy youtube video sound quality, Pineda's covers sound better than the original studio recordings with all their fancy equipment.
And his story is nearly unbelievable. His family hit hard times, so he struck out on his own when he was 13 years old and has been singing professionally since he was 15. Youtube has dozens and dozens of clips of him singing with The Zoo (this is just a random selection; some of the best weren't embed-able).
Covering Journey:
Red Hot Chilli Peppers:
Aerosmith:
Heart:
Boston:
Bon Jovi:
And here he is with Journey:
Saturday, June 14, 2008
A Little Vacation
I'm taking a little vacation at the end of the month. I'll be in Chicago for a day (need a new driver's license) and in San Francisco for a week (need to play with the baby). I'll try to fit in another post before I go computer free for 10 days.
I'll probably try to drop off my laptop to get fixed before I leave and pick it up when I get back. It won't charge the battery anymore and the battery's shot anyway, so I've been losing 1% of the battery during the 30 minutes per day that it's unplugged (and asleep) while biking to and from work. No Apple retail stores in Germany, so I'll have to take it to an "Authorized Service Provider." I'm nervous: wish me luck.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Ask and Ye Shall Receive
Doug complained in the previous post that I should have critiqued Heretic Pride instead of just soliciting opinions. You got me, Doug. I was remiss. Here you go:
My rule of thumb for good music is this: I listen to it a couple of times and then see what sticks in my head. If I'm hearing it in the shower in the morning, it's good.
That said, in my limited experience, a classic Mountain Goats song has at least one of three key characteristics: (1) a hilariously absurd premise, (2) beautiful and innovative lyrics, and (3) a catchy refrain encapsulating a pessimistic yet not hopeless world view.
For the first, think "Golden Boy," an ode to a particular brand of peanuts: "There are no pan-Asian supermarkets down in Hell, so you can't buy Golden Boy peanuts there."
For the second: "Held under these smothering waves, by your strong and thick veined hand, but one of these days I'm going to wriggle up on dry land."
For the third, think "I'm going to make it through this year, if it kills me" from "This Year" or "I'm coming home to you, with my own blood in my mouth" from "Sax Rohmer #1."
(By the way, I think that strictly following those criteria would make "No Children" the best Mountain Goats song ever. But I'm not sure I believe that.)
In my previous post, I said that I thought that parts of Heretic Pride were "kind of weird." In addition to that criticism, I would also add Doug's that several of the songs "sound pretty similar to earlier stuff." On the other hand, that includes several songs that I really like -- they may not be groundbreaking, but they're still good stuff. But there are also several songs that, upon first hearing, my reaction was "what is that?" For example, "In the Craters on the Moon" has a more wailing than I enjoy; there is more than one odd use of falsetto ("So Desperate" and "Michael Myer Resplendent"); and, as Doug also pointed out, "Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident" may feature backup vocals more appropriate for a bad prom song. I think that some of the problem is due to the fact that I don't really know what the album is about. (Recent albums can be described fairly succinctly: The Sunset Tree is about John Darnielle's terrible childhood; Get Lonely is a breakup album; and Tallahassee is about a couple on the verge of divorce.) Without a sense that the album is going somewhere, it's harder to be patient when songs take chances.
Some notes on the songs themselves:
Do I really need to explain again how awesome "Sax Rohmer #1" is?
I kind of see "San Bernardino" to "So Desperate" as the easy listening section of the album. You might think that bad, but really it means I listen to this portion of the album more -- it's easy to listen to while working. "San Bernandino" is the kind laid back with plinky strings song that I'm not big on and that seems like it might fit right in with the last album, Get Lonely. A few songs in the album, like "New Zion," just slide by my consciousness, even while I'm listening to the album in order to blog about it. But I like "Heretic Pride" and I really like "Autoclave," which to me is a classic Mountain Goats song.
I admire "Lovecraft in Brooklyn," but I don't see what Doug sees in "Tianchi Lake." I prefer "How to Embrace a Swamp Creature." And although I feel like I should make a defense of "Sept 15 1983," I can't really articulate what I like about it.
Finally, "Michael Myers Resplendent" is indeed a song about the horror movie character or maybe the actor portraying him or maybe the victims in the movie. In addition, it's either brilliant or overwrought to the point of ridiculousness. I first thought it was the latter because there's a section where John Darnielle sings in a totally crazy and ridiculous falsetto. And, yet, I listen to it. A lot. By my own rule of thumb, it's good.
Regardless of any criticisms I've mentioned, I've been listening to the whole album obsessively which as an objective measure makes it better than 90% of the albums I have.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Lazy Blogger
Yeah, there's basically no excuse for my rampant blog-ignoring and in the entire time between my last post and right now, I haven't thought of a single thing about which to blog.
That said, the guilt induced by my blog is nothing compared to the guilt induced by the constant GoodReads update emails I receive: I get it, you're all much better than me for spending your time reading instead of surfing the web for random stuff.
And speaking of random stuff on the internet, one of the things I noticed reading The Box of Paperbacks Book Club feature on the Onion's AV Club Blog is that old paperback covers are often more interesting than the books. I found this list of The Best (Worst) Fantasy & Science Fiction Book Covers. I'm still chuckling over the cover with the ninja.
By the way, I recently got my hands on the whole Heretic Pride album from the Mountain Goats. While some of it is full of typical Mountain Goats awesomeness (I still love "Sax Rohmer #1"), some of the songs are kind of weird. What did you guys think?
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
May Day
May 1st is a holiday here (and a lot of other places that aren't the USA). One of the local traditions is that people will cut down a birch tree (or a good fraction of one) , decorate it with ribbons and a sign with the name of their beloved and install it in front of that person's house. My German teacher says that most years the men do this for the women, but it should be reversed this year because it's a leap year. Of course, I took pictures.
Most of the trees had women's names on them, so I don't know if that leap thing is real. Here's a tree, but I was too far away to see the name on it.
This one's a little cheat, but it's for "Richard." 
And the "Lisa" tree. 
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Clash of the Cyberpunk Titans
Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk classic Snow Crash was published in 1992. I read it in 1996 and thought it was awesome. William Gibson's Neuromancer was published in 1984. Would it be possible to read it in 2008 and still find it brilliant and groundbreaking? Unfortunately, no. It's hard to read it fresh when you've read and seen it many times already. If you've read Snow Crash or seen The Matrix; Cowboy Bebop; (the hilariously terrible) Hackers; Ghost in the Shell (especially Ghost in the Shell); or any number of other books and movies I've never seen or forgotten, then you've already seen some or all of Neuromancer.
That certainly doesn't make it a bad book to read, but the relentless ripping off of Neuromancer does give Snow Crash an edge in the clash of the cyberpunk titans. That's also all you really need to know if you want to read either of those books. For kicks, I'm going to break it down and match up the two books point by point.
Characters: Neuromancer features Case, a drug addict and hacker, and Molly, a badass street-samurai, who for reasons totally unfathomable, and in a scenario that screams fanboy wish-fulfillment, repeatedly has sex with Case. The protagonist of Snow Crash is the aptly but incongruously named Hiro Protagonist. He is also a hacker and his female sidekick is Y.T., a hilariously obnoxious 15-year old skateboard Kourier. They do not have sex -- which the author wryly comments on.
Case and Hiro are bland compared to Molly and Y.T. In the battle of the sidekicks, Molly is a lot more badass, but she's also basically masturbatory material and in an supremely annoying character development, the author lets the plot grind to a full stop so Case can go running after Molly to make sure her feelings haven't been hurt by the mean man and she can reveal that, in order to pay for the cybernetic modifications that made her the badass she is, she prostituted herself. Sigh. Since I've been on this science fiction reading kick, I've lost count of the number of times a female character has been portrayed as a literal or figurative whore. Oh, science fiction! You've given me so much and yet enraged me as a woman so often. Was is that Molly was too much of a badass that she required a sad/tragic past to make her seem more fallible? Or is there some sort of mandate that all female character in science fiction need to be literal sex objects? Y.T. isn't exactly perfect: she's rather postfeminist in the "Ally McBeal on the cover of Time magazine" vein, when I'm much more a fan of old, reliable feminism. Still, Snow Crash prevails.
Plot: I was a little surprised to find out that Neuromancer is basically a heist movie: Case is recruited into a team to do a job. That said, it seems to be missing the element of a heist movie that I like the best -- the part where they show exactly how they plan and prepare to pull off the job. The plot in Snow Crash is a little more free form -- Hiro and Y.T. investigate a mysterious new drug, "Snow Crash" -- and, like other Neal Stephenson books, it has a beginning and a middle, but it doesn't quite have a ending. This one's a draw.
Setting and Tone: Both books feature dystopic futures where corporations have made an end-run around governments and where technology has allowed humans to interface with each other and with computers in an artificially created environment. This is where Snow Crash really starts to kick Neuromancer's ass. Stephenson takes the same premise and brings it to its logical conclusion -- creating whole corporate governments and instead of focusing on the nameless/faceless nature of corporate bureaucracy -- a trait, he instead assigns to the federal government -- he gives them brand identities. And aside from the purposefully mysterious Tessier-Ashpool group, places and corporations in Neuromancer serve only as backdrops to the overall feeling that the characters exist outside of any authority.
The differences aren't an academic matter of artistic choices but lie deeper. Put simply, Stephenson is one of us: he's a geek. And he uses Snow Crash to geek out about computers, linguistics, and Mesopotamian mythology -- topics which, coincidentally, I'm interested in too. Gibson's book, on the other hand, isn't really about computers; it's all 1960s counterculture, a cyber acid trip, manipulated human or machine consciousness. Cyberspace in Gibson's world is humans interacting with mainframes. Stephenson's Metaverse is a lot more familiar as the virtual reality version of today's internet -- 2008 probably looks more like Snow Crash than 1992 does. And it's built on code not hardware. Gibson's ambivalent and slightly wistful about the rapidly shifting technological landscape, while Stephenson's written the ultimate young man's book, running entirely on adrenaline.
Movie Aspirations: Unbelievably, neither book has yet been made into a terrible Hollywood movie. Yet. I thank whatever nerdy powers that be for having prevented a Snow Crash movie long enough that when the time comes the appropriate movie executive probably will not be saying, "Ooh, cyberpunk action movie. Can we get Keanu Reeves?" I hope. But still, somewhere, right at this moment, someone in Hollywood is pitching Y.T. as 'sassy' and I die a little more on the inside.
Random Thoughts: In Neuromancer, in order to distract the authorities while inflitrating the corporate headquarters of a media conglomerate, several people call in fake terrorist threats to the police from pay phones.
Near the end of Neuromancer, while Case is breaking in via cyberspace, he also needs to sneak in via the real world, so he spends time moving his computer around and looking for a place to plug it in -- it's like he's you or me at the airport.
Also, Bonn is a nuclear wasteland in Neuromancer.
Conclusions: It wasn't a fair fight, but I'm giving this one to Snow Crash. It's just more fun.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
I Need a Theme Song
I have no idea what this blog, The Sneeze, is about, but it has its own theme song by Cloud Cult. I've blogged about Cloud Cult before and they're real, professional musicians (with a new album, I haven't heard yet). How cool is that? And why don't I have my own theme song?
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Expandable Posts with Peekaboo View
I've got a few blog ideas that I haven't had time to write up, but somehow I did have time out my day to fiddle with my blog layout so that I could make expandable posts with peekaboo view for my longer entries. I found the instructions on this blog, Hackosphere. I tried it out on all the posts on this page. I'm super excited because I've been feeling like some of my posts are too long for a single page, but I would really hate to add "read full entry" links which appear whether or not there's more to read (that really annoys me). I haven't yet mastered the art of knowing what to hide and what to show, but what do you guys think so far?
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Effelsberg
I went to see the Effelsberg 100-m radio telescope Saturday morning. There isn't much to say about it, but I thought I'd toss up a few photos.
In the photo, it looks like a tiny dish pretty close, but probably less than half the distance to the trees next to it. It's ginormous. I noticed you can see it from a nearby village (wonder what the neighbors think of that view?).
Closer, but still not very close.
The back side of the dish and some of the structure.
We put on hardhats and went up to the platform where the motor that changes the altitude is (the bottom of the black arc on the picture above). You can see all the way down. The telescope sits on four of those red 'feet' (for comparison you can see someone standing not too far from it) and spins around on a track. When the telescope was moving, and the clouds were moving pretty fast, it was kind of disorienting.
The control room is that entire glass wall (with nice view of the telescope from there).
Effelsberg is also a LOFAR site. Not too impressive, is it?
Monday, March 24, 2008
Kreuzberg Kirche
I've spent a lot of time wandering around my neighborhood, yet somehow I never went down one street a mere block from my apartment. I finally tried it a few weeks ago when I noticed (on Google Maps -- although I have a physical map, and I should have just looked at that) that there might be a running trail or something.
As it turns out, it's not long. It ends here, after a block, at Poppelsdorfer Friedhof (cemetery).
You can see that there's a path straight through the cemetery, which is surprisingly large with a lot of very tall trees.
It's very steeply uphill and although the cemetery is on either side of the path, the path isn't really inside the cemetery.
After 10 or maybe 15 minutes walking (it's far too steep to run), I emerged from a wooded area and was surprised to find myself right in front of this church:
I peeked inside.
There's a path around the church's grounds and this (what is it?):
Once I was done being surprised by the church, I realized that I was really high up (for Bonn) and definitely one of the highest points around (it slopes down pretty steeply on 3 sides and gradually on the fourth. By the way, on the way home, I took the wrong path down and ended up pretty far from home at the bottom and had to climb back up and down again). I hadn't been able to tell how high I was while I was stuck on the path. I think that in the future I'm going to spend some time sitting on that bench.
Behind and past the church, there are some running trails through a wooded area. In this direction, the view is very green.
In front of the church, there's a big empty field and a view towards the Rhein (but, of course, you can't see the water).
I think that building in the distance on the right must be the Post tower, the tallest building in the state (it's pretty close to the river, as I recall).
As it turns out, you can see Kreuzberg Kirche from work.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Pop Quiz
For no reason at all, I've had this song in my head all day and I thought it be fun to put down the pertinent lyrics and see who can guess from which TV show and episode the song is (Googling is cheating, obviously).
By the way, when I Googled it to double-check the lyrics, I found two distinct sets of lyrics. Unless there were actually two different versions of the song, I feel like one version is clearly more correct than the other (i.e., the lyrics make more logical sense one way versus the other) and all those music lyric websites must steal from each other and propagate bad lyrics. Anyway, just in case, I'll put down both sets of lyrics.
The right:
When it's time to change, you've got to rearrange
who you are into what you're gonna be.
Sha na na na na na na na na, sha na na na na!
The wrong:
When it's time to change, you've got to rearrange
move your heart to what you're gonna be.
Sha na na na na na na na na, sha na na na na!
There are no prizes, just the satisfaction of being right.
[03.24.08 -- No one? Bueller? Bueller? How sad.]
Monday, March 10, 2008
I No Longer Fear Hell
I had a doctor's appointment today at 11am (don't worry, I'm not sick).
I get there at 10:45am. The waiting room is full. That means there are 7 people in front of me. The waiting room is behind a glass (translucent from knee height to over my head, but transparent at the top and at the bottom) door and wall, some sort of weird fishbowl. It's a nice room; they have bottles of water (bubbly, of course) and coffee set out (with real glasses and cups -- they don't do styrofoam or paper cups in Germany). I sit by the wall and wait to see footsteps through the door, signaling the receptionist arriving to fetch someone else. My last couple of appointments have been at the beginning of the day, so I've usually been alone in the waiting room and haven't had to wait for long. I've forgotten that even though everyone in the waiting room studiously ignores each other, when someone comes back to the waiting room to fetch their coat to leave (people in Germany actually hang up and leave their coats in the waiting room), the person leaving always says 'auf wiedersehen' to the room and everyone says, 'auf wiedersehen' back. At first I'm surprised, then unprepared. After 45 minutes, I've become one of the group, robotically saying 'auf wiedersehen' in sync with the rest of the room.
I start to fear that I've been forgotten. But I haven't; it's much worse than that. I wonder what would happen if I started some sort of performance art piece. What would happen if I lay down on the floor or started to bang my head against the wall? At 1 hour and 25 minutes (70 minutes after my appointment time), someone comes to fetch me: she takes my blood pressure. At 1 hour and 50 minutes they usher me into an exam room. The receptionist doesn't speak English and she knows I don't know much German (at least, I think she knows), yet after I confirm that I don't understand what she's saying, she continues to talk very fast, gesturing to the changing area as she leaves. I sit. 10 more minutes. I've now been here for 2 hours. I grow paranoid. Was I supposed to undress? Will a doctor show up if I undress? Maybe I need to perform the doctor-summoning equivalent of a rain dance. Is this all some sort of terrible behavioral/rat-in-maze-like experiment?
The doctor arrives! And the appointment is done in 10 minutes, and I don't have to do this again for another 9 months. When I go back to the waiting room to fetch my coat, it's finally empty.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
New Label
By the way, I've added a new label, 'sightseeing,' which compiles all the touristy things I've done and photographed, just in case someone wants to do a little virtual world tour. Of course, now it'll be that much harder to get all the labels on a single post.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Lisbon
I went to Lisbon for the weekend with one of the other postdocs a few weeks back. The idea was a short escape from winter. Instead, it rained.
This is the Castle of São Jorge:
It's actually not much to look at: a few courtyards and the castle walls and towers.
But as the castle where you're most likely to kill yourself, the Castle of São Jorge -- of the many castles I've seen -- is now definitely my favorite. At other places, you'll see something cool and wonder, 'why can't I go over there?' Here, you want to walk the paths on top of the walls and climb the towers? No problem. Is it pouring rain and slippery? No problem. Is water running down the steps (nice and narrow and steep) as you're climbing? Sure! Are there only low or no railings/walls? Yup! Is it really windy? You bet. And are you holding an open umbrella? Well ... yeah, maybe I should put this down and just live with getting soaked.
Of course, the rain really started when we got to the castle, and right after we decided to leave, it stopped. Here's the view from the main square of the castle:
We arrived on the rainy Saturday and before and after visiting the castle wandered the city center:
We could actually see the castle from our hotel room. It's the tree in the distance on the right hand side of the photo (very Castle in the Sky-looking, isn't it?). On the last day, we tried to find the nearer tower seen on the left but didn't before we had to leave for the airport.
On Sunday, we went to Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, an art museum with a nice ancient art collection, then took the bus to Belém, a neighborhood west of the city center on the river (the Tagus). We took the bus and the metro to get around; it was all very easy and convenient.
The first thing we did in Belém was locate a pastry shop recommended by a Portugese postdoc. It wasn't hard to find: it's the place with the giant line of people in front of it.
There and every day we were in Lisbon, we ate these pastries (thanks to Sherry for letting me use this picture):
Down the street is the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The church:
The cloisters:
By the water, is Padrão dos Descobrimentos, where a few German tourists who were Jehovah's Witnesses tried to proselytize to Sherry in Mandarin.
And further down the water, the Torre de Belém:
So I'm a little low on text today. Hopefully the pictures and wiki links made up for it.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Free Sci-Fi/Fantasy E-Books
This may not be so interesting for those of you 1.) uninterested in science fiction or fantasy and/or 2.) living near a public library in the United States, but as part of some promotion (revamping their website or something or other), if you go and sign up at www.tor.com (they ask for very little, just a name, an email, zip code, and age), they'll send you a free e-book every week (for 12 weeks, I believe). It comes pdf and I've heard (on Slashdot, of course) no DRM. The first book is Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, who is the author slated to finish off Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Can Someone Explain to Me What's Up with astro-ph?
I suppose the vast majority (4 out of the 5 of you) of people who read this blog are astrophysicists (the other person will just have to wait). So maybe one of you can explain to me what's the deal with astro-ph these days? Hm, that's just asking for a bunch of punchlines, isn't it? But I have a specific problem in mind.
The average astro-ph entry looks like this:
Title: Halo X-ray Something Cosmology
Authors: X. PhD ((1) Please Donate to Me U.)
Comments: 20 pages, 10 figures, submitted to some journal
Subjects: Astrophysics (astro-ph)
Abstract:
Last week, I noticed something new. Between "Comments" and "Subjects," some entries have a new field that often reads (this appears only in the listing and not the abstract page):License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
That URL states
This seems to be pretty typical stuff but what's the point? Isn't this the terms under which all astro-ph submissions are accepted (that is, isn't adding this field redundant)?
So it didn't seem so important and I tried to put it out of my mind. Today, though, I saw something truly mind-boggling. The very first entry (arXiv:0802.1210, although once again, you can only see this on the listing page not the abstract page) has this "Comments" and "License" field:Comments: 21 pages, 5 figures, submitted to ApJ
Now wait a second. It's true that everything I know about licenses and copyrights and such comes from skimming Slashdot, but something's not making sense. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (which that URL redirects to) says that the author has the copyright to this work and dedicates it to the public domain where "the Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived." I think this means that anyone can take any part of this paper and reuse for any reason without express permission of the author. That would be well within the authors' rights and, I think, acceptable to it being listed on astro-ph.
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/
But this paper is also submitted to ApJ, where presumably, they intend to publish the paper. And before they can publish, they have to sign the publication agreement (that link opens a pdf), which states "you grant and assign the entire copyright for this paper exclusively to the Society" and, later, "the Society, in turn, grants to you the non-exclusive right of republication, subject only to your giving appropriate credit to the Journal." Reading this, I think that if you are writing a book, some company (not self-publishing) has agreed to publish it, and you want to include a plot from this paper, you would need to have the express permission of ApJ. How is this not in disagreement with the Creative Commons license?
So this is probably the most obscure, geeky, and pedantic blog post I've ever written, but I'm hoping I'm not the absolute only person who finds this interesting/puzzling.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Wrapping Up January
Even though I don't have anything really bloggable to write about, I didn't want to end the month with paltry two posts ('oh, the shame!'). So here's the quick round up of the month:
1.) I estimated (probably while waiting in the airport) that I spent 25% of my time away from Bonn in 2007.
2.) I got a favorite bar in Bonn finally. Blow-Up has a cute little dance floor, lots of couches, and always interesting music (Motown and Funk one night, French covers of American rock standards another).
3.) I'm patiently waiting until 6pm to pick up my bike from the shop ('Ich habe ein Problem mit meinem Fahrrad.').
4.) January represents the fourth straight month of obsessively listening to the Mountain Goats (hell, I spent month one, obsessively listening to just 8 songs). I've mentioned them briefly in other posts (and Tim's blogged about them twice too), but let me say it one more time. If you've ever had any inclination to take my advice about anything, the advice to follow would be to spend some time listening to the Mountain Goats. And once you get your grubby little hands on some songs, don't just play them while you're working or doing the dishes, etc.: it's all about the lyrics. A roomful of monkeys on typewriters may produce Hamlet in an amount of time smaller than the age of the universe (I'm not clear on the probability of this), but I could never imagine to produce anything as beautiful, smart, and funny as John Darnielle manages to pack into a few lines in his many, many great songs. Is that enough of an endorsement? Sound off on your favorite lyrics in the comments.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Not Much Going On Here So ...
I haven't had a lot of blogging material lately -- all living in the code and obsessively listening to the Mountain Goats -- so I thought I'd better at least point you to something else to read. My recommendation is the Onion's AV Club blog, specifically The Box of Paperbacks Book Club (there's no label for that, sadly, I just go here and skim for it). In this feature, the writer 'purchased a large box containing over 75 vintage science fiction, crime, and adventure paperbacks. He is reading all of them.' Each entry reviews a different book.
Monday, January 07, 2008
December Was a Rousing Success ... Blogwise
Yes, for the first time in a long time I did 7 posts in a month. I'm finally back in Germany -- arriving this morning and I didn't sleep a wink on the overnight flight from Boston. By the way, sunrise here was at 8:32 AM and sunset will be at 4:43 PM. I clearly don't have much to say, so why am I blogging? Well, as long as the sun is up, I should be too. I'm at work, so I don't fall asleep, but I can't actually do work, since I'll certainly do more harm than good.