Mein letzte Tag bei iFQ

Room 77 doodle

Yesterday was my last day at iFQ. It has been a fantastic year because it allowed me to re-start my research career after that dead-end stint at the Ministry of Incompetent Management. Even more importantly, many colleagues have become my friends. No organization is perfect, but iFQ has attracted a bunch of great people.

Intellectualz

So after work, we all went to a bar in Kreuzberg to celebrate. Haiko Leitz knows all the good burger places in Berlin and he guided us there. "Room 77" is a funky hangout for all the bobo hipsters with their Macs. How hip? Because it is a hangout for members of the Pirate Party (a cyber-anarchist Federal political party), you can also pay with Bitcoins. A guy in the corner played guitar and sang some Tom Waits. They make a delicious hamburger (Christian Klode also described the texture as "fluffy") and serve it with thick country-style french fries (pommes des landes).

Haiko conducting a seance with the ghosts.

I was glad to be able to sit for a spell and sip Jamesons with Kalle Hause. Despite having moved on the weekend across the country with his family to a new apartment, he was as mellow as if he'd been surfing all the time. Pei-Shan Chi took silly photos of us (Daniel Sirtes makes brilliant serious-funny faces), and Nathalie Huber showed up to play along with the boys.

Daniel and Pei-Shan

Photographic evidence of the evening is provided for your amusement. I really hope I will be able to see all these super people again. Can it really be true that I am leaving in two days?

Christian & me

Weinachts special on TV

Flipping through the channels the other night we stumbled across a Christmas special. I sat transfixed as the most painfully awkward people I have ever seen lip-synced to traditional German music played on synthesizers.

Now, I must preface this by saying that Canada has done more than enough to pollute the airwaves with sappy singers. From Anne Murray to Michael Bublé (to say nothing of Celine Dion), the Great White North has produced hundreds of forgettable songs that sold a zillion copies each. There's tons of good music in Germany too: The whole summer is a series of huge open-air rock concerts. Just not on TV around this festive season.

To describe the Christmas special as "cheesy" is like saying that Mount Everest is "pointy". Musically it sounded like artificial syrup being poured over processed cheese and then topped with a sprinkling of saccharine. Christine even pointed out that the performers were not even provided with microphones so that they could do something with their hands. The German word for this is Fremdschäme (feeling shame for others). My personal favourite is Hansi Hinterseer, a former Austrian downhill-ski champion who parlayed a sportscasting gig into a career as the Tommy Hunter of Austria. He's got looks like Sting and talent like Lawrence Welk. As he slowly walked around the faux-snowy mini village set up on stage, singing slowly, the camera panned (yep, slowly) over the audience: a sea of jiggly arms and wobbly chins, swaying in time to a beat that only they could perceive.



I loved it: because the lyrics were so simple and slow, I could sort of understand what they were singing. It was all about love or something: good, olde-fashioned, tradional love.

Icabaren

Today I went to see the Berlin Eisbaren play the Munich Something-or-others with my pal Benni.

Although I have not seen a hockey game live in many years, I must say that I was impressed. We got there a few minutes late and could only get tickets for the standing-room-only "fan zone". This was actually a bonus, as the wildest fans were there, banging drums and chanting rude songs. The wider European ice surface made for less of the jamming and obstruction that one sees in the NHL. The game was faster with less scrambling in the corners than in Canada. Benni was impressed. He had never seen a hockey game before and enjoyed the action.

The national fast-food of Germany is the "Curry-Wurst"

45000 rabid fans packed the O2 arena

Benni likes hockey!

The flip-side is that there were not enough smashing-into-the-boards as I am used to seeing. And for some strange reason there were no fights. Hockey without fighting is a sin (it says so in the Bible). I think the 7 Canadians who play for the Icebaren think they are on some sort of fancy European vacation, because unless somebody gets hurt, they are not upholding the fine Canadian tradition of international pacifism combined with bloodthirsty savagery on the ice. That is why the Zamboni was invented: to sweep up the teeth of players who gloriously sacrificed their smiles for the team. Seriously: the one time there was a hint of shoving-after-the-whistle I was expecting the guys to drop their gloves and start punching each other (it`s only natural). But nothing happened, I am ashamed to say.

Despite the lack of bloodthirsty Roman-spectacle-on-skates, my team won. Notice how quickly I adopt the Berlin hockey team as my own (Senators suck!). The Munich Sissywussies (actual name) were sent home with a 3-to-2 loss. After 12 months of not understanding a ficking thing that is happening, it was nice to be the expert for a change and to explain what was going on.

Checkpoint Charlie

My office is at Schutzenstraße 6a, which is just around the corner from Checkpoint Charlie. I have perhaps mentioned this before, but I now have photos (kindly supplied by my colleague Pei-Shan Chi). We got off the U6 subway at Kochstrasse this morning and passed this relic of the Cold War on the way to work.

Jeff at Checkpoint Charlie

A few steps further on there is a line of cobblestones tracing where the wall used to be. One minute you're in West Berlin, then - hop- now you're in the East. This line of cobblestones zig-zags through the city and it is common to cross back and forth from (the former) East to West Berlin a couple of times on the way to lunch.

The wall was here

In the 'West' looking east. The old guardhouse is still there.

Of course now there is no indication that half the city was Communist just 21 years ago: it looks like a big city no matter which side you're on.

A picture of a US soldier is all that is left to welcome you to the West

Of course this is a very touristy site, so there are Turkish and Eastern European hawkers on the sidewalks with tables full of Chinese-made faux Soviet knick-knacks. What must it be like to work in a factory in Guangdong making replica memorabilia? I wonder if it is the same factory where they make 1950's - themed Americana that is used to decorate suburban chain restaurants in Generica. Consider that there are far more of those restaurants today than there were gas stations in 1957, so all those "vintage" Coca-Cola signs could not have been found at rummage sales. Besides, they build three new TGIFs every week - head office can't wait for someone to find a stash of antiques in a barn.

Review of eSciDocDays conference

I gave a presentation at the iFQ today for the benefit of my colleagues. In it, I report on a conference I attended on October 26-27, 2011 at the Max Planck institute in Berlin. The locale was Harnack House at what is (today) the Frei Univeristät. It was humbling to realize, as I sat listening to the presentations, that Albert Einstein gave a lecture in the very same room way back in the 1920s.

Harnack House, Max Planck Institute

It was a fascinating conference and I am glad that I was able to share the issues with my colleagues. That's why I love working here. The first half of my presentation is spent just explaining what "eScience" is.

E scidocdays review

View more presentations from jdemaine

That's awesome!

Aohw - Wow!

That's Arianne's saying when she is interested in something new: "Ao-oh, Wow!"

17%

The Durban conference on climate change began this past Monday with a whimper, not a bang. After the let-down of the Copenhagen conference in 2009, expectations are pretty low this time around. As near as I can figure it, the boffins of the international community spent years hammering out an approach that everyone - from coal-devouring China to nearly-seafloor Seychelles - thought was equitable. All that remained were some signatures. With a bit of brinksmanship at Copenhagen, a deal was in the offing. Then Obama flew in and started making side-deals that circumvented the tortuous UN process. Chaos ensued, a face-saving compromise statement was issued, and the subsequent IPCC conference in Cancun was devoted to patching up the feelings of the aforementioned boffins who had just wasted a decade of their lives.

At this point I have no idea what the background story for Durban is. There's someting about rich countries and poor countries and extending Kyoto. Complicating matters is that when all of this jibber-jabber started twenty years ago, it was very clear who was rich and who was poor. Now China has TGV trains and a manned space program, wheras a major chunk of Canada's greenhouse gas emmissions are generated not from first-world economic activity but from distilling petroleum from the wastelands of Alberta.

So Canada is not seen as a leader in this debate. Be that as it may, let us consider what the conservative goverment of Canada did promise to do some time ago, independently of any agreement. Regardless of the outcome of the current conference in Durban, Harper's Junta (trust me; it rhymes) has pledged to reduce the CO2 emissions of the Great White North by 17% BELOW those of 2005 by 2020. This is a good start. And because it is the official policy of the Government, we should all be preparing today for the not-too-distant future when the various policies kick in and we all have to reduce our fossil-fuel use by 17% below what we used 7 years ago.

I was going to calculate what that looks like, but a relevant article by the Pembina Institute beat me to it. Here is Canada's (purported) future:

And this is the future the Conservatives have reluctantly agreed to

Of course, no such thing will happen. Canada will be nowhere near the target of 607 megatonnes per annum in 2020 because we have not even begun to think about how to live on 25% less than we do now. As I have said before, the longer the world stalls for time, the harder it will be to bring this runaway train under control.

Which is why today's column by Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail is so infuriating. Instead of moving the debate forward so that we actually do something to achieve our goal for 2020, we get a  dismissal of climate research that wears the guise of a defense of the scientific process. She actuallly sounds like she thinks she is so clever to be doubting climate change.

No one knows with any certainty the exact impact of carbon dioxide emissions, what long-term climate trends will be or the effect of other factors, such as the sun.

For more of this cleverness, I dare you to read the hundreds of comments that follow this article. As with any piece of journalism on climate change, most commentators have a bizarre world view in which climate scientists have conspired to engineer a ponzi scheme of fake data in order to award each other taxpayers' money. Their objections are a mixed salad of conservative invective against anything the government does and a litany of the same urban myths regarding climate change that have been debunked many times before ("It's the sun spots.", "They said it was cooling in the 1970s").

Her statement is correct in one sense: Nobody knows anything with certainty. The beauty of science is that it can be expressed mathematically, allowing us to know very precicely the probability of the impacts of carbon dioxide emissions. This comes after she (unbelievably) brings up the "re-hacked" emails from the original Climategate that were recently released in an effort to undermine the Durban talks. Nine separate investigations have exonerated the climate scientists who were targeted in the Climategate affair. Yet for Wente, that these re-heated emails have not suddenly undermined decades of peer-reviewed research is somehow proof that something is wrong with science. Smarmingly, she wraps up with:

The suppression of legitimate debate is a catastrophe for climate science. It’s also a catastrophe for science, period.

Would Wente write such an article about the debates within proteomics, or graphite photoreactor research? The catastrophe for science is that everybody thinks of themselves as an expert on the weather and politics.

Lesson at Humbolt University

Last Friday and today I gave a presentation (along with my colleague Jasmin Schmidt) at Humboldt University. The director of the iFQ is a professor of Sociology there and he asked us to give a gentle introduction to the field of Bibliometrics for his students.

Note that while the pictures of Humboldt Univ. online are of a grand neo-classical building covered in statues, the place where I was 'teaching' was a mid-century, dirty building next to some train tracks. It was actually more dilapidated than Concordia University (where I did my undergrad), which is saying something.

It was great to be able to talk about my field and I hope I inspired some of the students to try a bibliometric analysis in their studies. The students didn't fall asleep (a good sign) and Prof. Hornbostel remarked afterwards that he liked the presentation, so it was a successful day.

Wissenschaftler ausser Atem

Here are some pictures of me and my running team from the relay-marathon. Here we are before the start of the race. Clemens (far right) ran 12K in a good time. Patricia (red coat) was our team leader and as "coach" was there to make sure we didn't wimp out.

Wissenschaftler ausser Atem

A nice bonus is that I now Ihave a running shirt emblazoned with my running nick-name: Speed Weasel.

Marathon Staffel at Tempelhof Flughaven

I ran another race this past Sunday (the 20th of November). I ran a 10K leg in a marathon relay at the old Tempelhof airport. My team was called Wissenschaft ausser Atem (meaning "science out of breath") and consisted of a motley assortment of academics who are in some way connected to Patricia Schulz, one of my colleagues here at the iFQ. As often happens, somebody pulled out last week and Patricia needed someone to fill in, so I got on board. Then she had some emergency dental work last Wednesday and had to pull out herself.

It was a fairly warm day for November, and the coldest part was just waiting around in the airplane hangar. This is a pretty big event and there were over 7000 people participating. I ran a pretty good time of 49:01, although I could tell that I was not in top shape and was just plodding along. Our team (Clemens, Jesse, Nadja, myself, and Sergiu) came in 602nd in our category (there were 1043 mixed teams) with a total time of 3:35, which is pretty good for a marathon. Running on the concrete infield and runways was hard on the legs, as that surface has absolutely no "give" (one doesn't want any of that when landing a big airplane!).

A nice touch was to be cheered on by Christine just as I turned the corner for the last few hundred meters to the finish. Thanks, Chweee!

3:57 - what a bunch of slowpokes!

The German Character

Let's compare national stereotypes. Canadians must endure the perception that we are lumberjacks who live in harmony with the bears. Germans get all misty-eyed at the mention of the word Canada, which for them represents a magical land of open spaces and mountain vistas. It's really just a big version of Austria. Germans associate Canada with the Rocky Mountains and Vancouver is the only Canadian city that Air Berlin flies to, as the nine provinces to the east are irrelevant.

The reverse holds true as well. While I don't think the German landscape brings anything to mind for most people, the German character is a well-known cliché. The stereotype of Germans is that they are gruff if not downright rude. They are always portrayed in the movies as shouting commands. This is because “Germans” in movies are invariably the bad guys in uniform. The ones that are not barking orders are stuffy and cerebral and play the role of psychiatrists. Another stereotype is that German men all wear lederhosen and drink beer from huge mugs while listening to oom-pah-pah music. In summary; a nation of very organized, but rude and impersonal beer-swilling soldiers.

But Germans of my age and younger, and certainly those who are educated and cosmopolitan (like my colleagues at iFQ), are in fact very pleasant. They have modern, international cultural traits that make them almost indistingushable from the same cohort found in Calgary or Halifax. But I have noticed that older people tend to exhibit some of the negative aspects of the stereotypical German, and that leads me to believe that a cultural change is taking place, with younger urbane Germans being more like Canadians or Americans (of the same age) than previous generations.

This dynamic is also expressed in terms of geography. There are actually a fair bit of regional differences within Germany, and my colleagues have remarked on this as well. We have noticed that people in North-Rhine Westphalia (the state in the west that holds Koln and Bonn) are nicer and more easy-going than Germans from the south and/or east. And this is regardless of age. My German teacher, a born-and-bred citizen of Bonn (Bonnizen?) recounted how he and his wife move to Bavaria when he retired. After two years they moved back to Bonn because they couldn't stand the stuffy loudmouths in the mountains. So there is some truth to the stereotype, but it varies from region to region, and is too broad a brush to describe all Germans.

In the lead-up to the move from Bonn to Berlin my colleagues warned me that Berliners are known (within Germany) for their grumpiness. It's called the “Berlin snout”. I actually haven't noticed anything like that. That is not to say that Berliners are cheery folks: this is a big city and people are busily going about their business, so it's naturally a more impersonal place than the small-town feel of Bonn.

So the German character is actually a range of personality types. Younger people from the cities of North-Rhine Westphalia would be the most friendly and international, wheras old folks in rural Bavaria would tend toward the old stereotype of grumpy, hide-bound Germans. Though this country is never going to have the extroverted national culture of (say) Spain, the “new” Germany is increasingly a land of nice, friendly people.

Wildlife in the city

Walking home last night from the train station, I spotted a furry creature out of the corner of my eye. I instantly recognized this as not your average city pooch. I followed it around the corner to a grassy area behind an apartment building, where it eyed me from a distance. Sure enough it was a fox, with a white chin and chest.

I don't think I have ever seen a fox in the wild before (although this one was not very wild, as it was eating leftover scraps). Amazingly, this was just across the street from my apartment in a fairly heavily-populated area of a big city.

On a completely different topic, I (along with Christine) will be running a race this evening. It's part of the Berlin Festival of Lights, and goes along Kurfurstendamm street, one of the big boulevards. I think that we are supposed to pass by various colourfully-lit attractions. I am doing the 10K and for her very first race Christine is doing the 5K. Then we race home to get some sleep before She Who Must Be Entertained starts a wonderful new day of discovery and Sesame Street.

The most important protest of our times

Over the past month or so there have been some public protests in the U.S. concerning the pivotal issues of our times. I have been meaning to bring one of these to your attention for some time, and have been waiting for the opportunity to bring all the complexities of this topic together. This protest garnered some coverage in the media, but is not on the radar screen of most people. At the end of September a protest against the pipeline took place on Parliament Hill, but the most impressive popular action was a sit-in in Washington D.C. where people (including James Hanson, who needs no introduction because I have blogged about him before) were been willing to get arrested in order to voice their opposition to this project.

On the surface, the proposed KeystoneXL pipeline would simply carry tar sands from Alberta to refineries in Texas. What could be wrong with that?

From a nationalistic perspective, this is a short-sighted move. Canadians have always been the "drawers of water and hewers of wood" for the British, and then for the Americans. It is always easier to just ship the raw material south to make a quick buck than to add value to it in Canada and then export the resulting product. Even Peter Lougheed, the former premier of "Saudi Alberta" thinks that the tar sands should be refined in the province and not pumped all the way to Texas to be upgraded there. Heck, for the cost of such a pipeline you could build a new refinery in Alberta and see more profit on the first day of operation than by pumping the "black gold" to Texas.

In defending the need for such an arrangement, the proponents of the pipeline claim that this will (parroting a phrase that every American President since Jimmy Carter has repeated) "reduce America's dependence on foreign oil". This worn-out meme is doubly irrational. First of all, in case I missed the memo, Canada is still a separate country and therefore the oil from Alberta is necessarily foreign oil. Secondly, the reason Texas is the destination is that it is a large port from where the refined tar-sand-gasoline can be shipped by boat to the highest payer. Proponents claim that building the pipeline will lower the price of gasoline in the United States. It is fascinating to watch people delude themselves into thinking that it is a good idea to pump petroleum 2,673 kilometers to Texas so that a different form of petroleum can be shipped a similar distance to gas stations in Chicago and Boston - at a below-market rate. For all the jingoism of "jobs for America" and "FREEDOM" nobody seems to have realized that by seeking assurances that the tar-sands oil will only be used within the lower 48 states, these politicans are effectively cornering themsleves into a socialization of the oil industry. You can be sure that the minute the Chinese want to pay 1 cent more per gallon, the oil companies who own the refineries in Texas are going to want a publically-funded subsidy if they must only sell their product domestically.

However, all the above is merely incidental to the real reason why this pipeline must never be built. If the Keystone XL project is approved, it is game over for our climate.

The significance of the Keystone XL pipeline in terms of confronting climate change is hard to overstate. If society cannot draw the line here, against a form of energy that is so inefficient to extract that it is only profitable when natural gas prices are low enough to make boiling the bitumen out of the sand worthwhile*, then there is no limit to the rationalizations and justifications we will come up with in order to keep the status quo going. We will burn every last drop of oil we can get our hands on even if we have to run the drilling rigs in Antarctica with solar panels.

There is so much oil in Alberta's tar sands that its consumption will put a vast amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, increasing its concentration past the 450 ppm that is generally considered to be the point at which irreversible feedback effects will be triggered. To be absolutely clear, the benign term "irreversible feedback effects" is actually a terrifying prospect. It means that we will have lost the battle against climate change and that there will soon be place on this planet for much fewer than 7 billion people. Agriculture in the southern U.S. and Europe will cease, the tropics and oceans will be a dead zone, and coastal cities will be abandoned. Once the feedbacks start, no amount of recycling or electric cars will stop the Earth from becoming too toasty for us. Consider that Venus, our "sister planet" has an atmosphere that is 96% CO2 and its surface temperature is 467 degrees Celcius. Nobody is saying that is what will happen here, but it is an example of what a really nasty greenhouse effect can do.

So the protests against Keystone are not a NIMBY complaint arising from vague personal values ("I don't like how windmills look"): they are a fundammental test of what we as a society consider to be progress. If the pipeline gets built it will be as a result of the inability of our political and economic processes to factor in anything beyond short-term gain. The actions on the ground will overwhelm any efforts to stop the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations because no amount of legislation will be able to reverse the effects of burning the oil held in the tar sands. We will lock ourselves into a retrograde version of the future by creating an environment over which we will have lost control. An environment that is so hostile to modern society that the future will be very Hobbesian (a lifestyle that is "solitary, nasty, brutish, and short").

Finally, the protest against the Keystone XL pipeline is related to the Occupy Wall Street movement that is receiving a lot of media attention. Both are expressions of popular frustration at the bias in our society towards short-term gains at the expense of the common good. While Occupy Wall Street protests against (among other things) the bailout of the banks (which puts their debt on the backs of citizens), the protest against the Keystone pipeline is against the offloading of the risk and damages associated with unrestrained climate change onto future generations. A gross simplification is that corporatist power sees the common good as something to be exploited (or at best ignored) in order to achieve short term monetary gains (by transferring bad debts onto taxpayers in the case of Wall Street, and by externalizing the societal costs burning all that oil).

We have to change the dialog from more vs. less to how to all lead rich lives without mortgaging the future.
--------------------------------

* = The "return on energy invested" or ROEI of the tar sands is only 3 or 4 times, which is about the same energy intensity as cabbage. Sure the resulting gasoline goes boom in your car's engine, but the amount of energy used to create that gasoline is almost as great as the energy in it. So the net amount of energy is a wash. The tar sands are in many ways an arbitrage business that simply trades one form of energy for another.

Last day in Rungsdorf

Today we are moving to Berlin. We have been saying goodbye to our lovely neighbourhood of Rungsdorf (founded in 804!) over the past week. After 9 months here, we feel that it is "our" neighbourhood and we will miss it. The locals have been very friendly, and whenever I ride by someone I know we wave to each other. That sort of lifestyle is priceless.

Living here is so great because of the convenience. There are 2 nice restaurants, 2 pubs, 2 biergartens, a bakery, 2 pharmacies, and a grocery store all within a 5 minute walk of our place. It is easy to meet up with friends for a drink after work or to go for a bike ride by the river. No need to drive halfway across the city to find a decent place to eat.

Romerplatz.

At Lindemann's bakery; a Rosinensnecke and a croissant by the Rungsdorf square.

Then of course there are the views. We had a little fire by the Rhine yesterday (Christine's super idea).

Campfire on the banks of the Rhine

Early morning sun over the Siebengebirge mountains.

We'll miss our wonderful life here and hope to return some day.

Our address in Berlin will be:
Gontermannstrasse 59
12101 Berlin

More photos from Vienna

For the capital of a western-European country, Vienna is quite far to the east. Budapst is only 230 km further east. So although it's a German-speaking country, the city has vaguely Slavic feel.

View from the Prater. The structure seems to be engineered along the lines of a 19th-century bridge (but round).

Hills to the north of Vienna. Building on right looks to be a monastery/church.

 

The Turks besieged Vienna in 1683. Although the siege was eventually lifted, the Turks forgot to go home and still live in the neighbourhood we stayed in.

View from our window. Young Turks hanging around on the street corner.

Our apartment for a week: Webergasse 23

View over the canal

Getting on the Air Austria to go back

Nubbelverbrennung

On Monday evening (September 19), we had just returned from Vienna when we heard a marching band off in the distance. This was kind of strange because it was about 9PM and dark outside: what kind of parade could this be?

I ran down the street (who doesn't love a parade?), following the drums and glockenspiels. I caught up with the procession in front of the old Rüngsdorf church (built in 1131). There were less than 100 people, some carrying torches (real fire, none of this flashlight business) walking down to the Dreesen Hotel. There, next to the Rhine, I witnessed the strangest event I have seen in a long time. (The photos don't show much detail: it was pretty dark after all.)

Procession in front of old Rungsdorf church

Everyone was gathered in a circle, and a man was dancing about in the middle of the circle holding an effigy high. There was some singing as the man danced, and this seemed to be some ritual. Then he laid the effigy down in the middle of the circle.

Flags

Three teenagers entered the circle carrying flags. These were square in shape with a green border. In the centre of the flag was a black cross, with two black arrows crossing through the cross diagonally such that the whole motif resembled an asterisk with eight arms. There was some band music while the kids twirled the flags around. What with the fire and the vaguely militaristic flags, this was a pretty gloomy ceremony. Not that it felt like a funeral, but it was definitely much spookier than the goofy Karneval parades we saw back in February.

Then a priest in a black robe read a story. I understood even less than I usually do, and even he couldn't make out some of the words, so I think this was spoken not in German but in the Kölsch dialect of this region. 

Chopping the head off of the effigy. Red sandy "blood" spills onto the ground.

After the speech, a big guy carrying an axe walked to the centre of the circle and with a full swing chopped off the head of the effigy (wierd enough yet?). The headless body was carried down to the riverside and set alight.

Burning the Nubble by the Rhine

The whole thing was visually quite amazing, as the lights on the ships going up and down the Rhine mixed with the torches and the burning body. I approached two different young people to ask them "WTF"? Amazingly, neither of them spoke English. This would indicate a particularly backwards cultural environment, as all students must study English in school and (for crying out loud) it's the language of all the movies, videos, rap music, and video games these kids soak in daily.

This strange ceremony is called Nubbelverbrennung in Köln (meaning "burning of the Nubble") and Zachaies here in Rüngsdorf. It has been going on since at least the 18th century and is loosely connected to the Karneval (I told you in a previous post that the folks here prepare for Karneval all year long). The effigy does not represent a particular historical person (a la Guy Fawkes), but is supposed to embody the sins of the past year. By killing the effigy the sins are burnt away and yadda, yadda, yadda.

None of my (urbane, Berlin-raised) colleages had ever heard of this, and I they sort of dismissed it as just one of those silly proto-religious things that the barbarians here do in their free time. They tell me that this sort of superstitious hocus-pocus does not happen in Berlin.

Views of Vienna

Here are some pics of this past weekend in Vienna. Saturday was Arianne's first birthday, so we went to an amusement park and did the only ride that is appropriate for that age. The Prater is the oldest ferris-wheel in the world. It's actually a dozen small train wagons that you ride inside. Later, Christine drove a go-kart, and then we both rode the "Sombrero" (separately), which pulled some real G-forces.

Riding the Prater

Of course the public-transit system here is fantastic. The old streetcars are still around with wooden seats.

Riding the #5 tram together.

On Sunday, the 18th I took the D tram north to the suburb of Nussdorf (Nut-town). I walked up the hill through vinyards where this year's crop of grapes was being harvested. It was a hot day and the view was spectacular.

Eichelhofweg

Peasants

The pointy tower at the left (the Donauturm) is the highest in Vienna. I went up it on Thursday.

The Danube

Off to Vienna

We are off to Vienna for 9 days!

I am going the European Summer School for Scientometrics for most of next week (September 12th to 16th). I am not simply attending the conference: Along with my friend William I will be teaching a workshop on the h-index all day Wednesday! Paradoxically, the h-index is both a widely-known yet rarely used measure of scientific productivity.

Small earthquake yesterday evening

I felt the house shake a bit yesterday evening. I knew right away that it was an earthquake as our street is pretty quiet (no big trucks passing). It only lasted a few seconds. Here's the news report.

Seal hunting in Turku

Some photos from Turku. There were "art seals" scattered around the city. I caught 6.

Another wierd thing about Turku was that in the neighbourhood near the university, some of the cobblestone streets were made up of round rocks from the river. I don't have a photo of that, but you can imagine that this created a very bumpy and uneven surface.