Whereabouts and Whatnot

Deer in the 'hood

2012-01-24T14:13:00.000-08:00

There is a very large field behind my house that has become a sort of wildlife refuge in the middle of the city. The area used to be part of the Rockliffe Air Force base, but that was abandoned by the military a decade ago. Over the years the houses have been torn down and now there is nothing but a few street lights left standing.

Spotted from my balcony

There are of course lots of squirrels running about, but those are everywhere. Over the past few days I have been seeing some deer in the field behind my house. This is quite remarkable because although Ottawa doesn't have many large industrial zones, it is still a pretty big city.

This morning I counted five deer munching on the tall grass that pokes up through the snow. I am fortunate to be able to live in a place where I can drive to downtown in ten minutes, yet also look out my kitchen window and see so much wildlife.

Back in the Great White North

2012-01-01T14:47:00.000-08:00

We flew back to Canada on December 23rd. First a hop to Frankfurt, then 9 hours to Ottawa.

Halfway through the flight I awoke from a nap and looked out the window. We were flying over Labrador and northern Quebec. Endless small lakes and evergreen trees as far as the eye could see (and from 36000 feet, the eye can see a long way). All covered in snow and without a single road, light, or dwelling. A few hours later we were still over the same vast forest and nameless lakes.

Amazingly, this is not the arctic, as it's all south of the 60th latitude. It's just what most of Canada looks like, and the main reason why we stay huddled in a few cities next to the U.S. border. A fantastically desolate place that was really awe-inspiring.

ahh...home

Little Arianne was a real trouper and spent lots of time crawling on the floor (when not crying). The landing involved a big bump and she thought that was lots of fun. Although the temperature in Ottawa was forecast to be the same as it was in Berlin on our last day, by the time we emerged from the airport it had dropped to -17°C. Oh yeah: that feels more like it.

The next few days were a whirlwind of Christmas dinners and conversations. It is strange how un-strange everything felt. My house did not burn to the ground while we were away and everything is where I left it. My putty-cat is still soft and friendly. Many "welcome back" greetings from the neighbours and here I am one week later exactly where I was a year ago. As if all that time in Germany was simply a little vacation. Life goes by quicky: a year here, a year there. Time ticks away, but hopefully the friendships and positive experiences will stay with me.

In summary, our voyage back went by without any problems and all is well. I hope my new friends will visit so we can go and find out what the heck is up there amid all those trees.

Mein letzte Tag bei iFQ

2011-12-21T10:24:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-20T06:25:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-11T13:15:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-09T05:47:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-07T04:14:00.000-08:00

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!

2011-12-05T01:54:00.000-08:00

Aohw - Wow!

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

17%

2011-12-03T02:42:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-02T08:45:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-01T02:47:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-22T01:25:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-19T07:03:00.000-08:00

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

2011-10-20T05:25:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-11T06:20:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-02T01:02:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-28T03:57:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-23T23:52:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-19T02:49:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-09T08:42:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-09T04:47:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-09T03:17:00.000-07:00

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.

ISSOME 2011 presentation

2011-09-08T02:07:00.000-07:00

The presentation that I gave in Finland is available online and can be viewed below:

Author disambiguation for enhanced science 2.0 services

View more presentations from jdemaine

Bonn Gamecocks 44, Dortmund Giants 20!

2011-09-03T10:36:00.000-07:00

We just watched a football game. The Bonn Gamecocks play in a municipal stadium just a few kilometers from where we live. We loaded up Arianne in the Burly trailer and rode there in no time. It was neat to watch real football again, and I really liked the low-key community atmosphere.

There were maybe 150 people in the stands, a small kitchen serving bratwurst and pommes (frites; i.e. french fries). Interstingly, the beer was served in the bottle. Unlike in North America where laws would require plastic cups (if a community sports club could even get a liquor license). Whereas here you are trusted not to smash the bottle, and to return the empty.

This sort of semi-pro football is apparently quite widespread in Germany. There's a whole league and Berlin has at least 4 teams. While not at the level of the CFL or anything, it was still a great time. Arianne clapped when the crowd did, so she's a big fan.

Finnish bicycles

2011-09-01T05:33:00.000-07:00

In the winter Finland is as bitterly cold and dark as Ottawa. That does not stop the Finns from having a thriving bicycle culture. There is no need for BIXI bicycle-sharing programs because lots of people have bikes. There is no need for bicycle lanes because drivers are not aggressive greed-heads. Cycling is just a normal part of everyone's transportation options.

I noticed a particular brand of bicycle was very common. The Finnish bicycle company Tunturi has been around for 90 years. Their city bikes have a caliper front brake and an internal-hub rear brake. It is odd to see bicycles with only one brake lever. The emblems are quite nice.

That must be a rare one: Tunturi made in Turku

In addition, there was a particular style of bike I had never seen before. With 24-inch wheels and a unisex frame with oversized down-tube, the "JOPO" bicycle struck me as an ideal runabout. These single-speeds were fairly common and were ridden by adults, not children. I wonder what the reasoning is. Pehaps the smaller wheels give some advantage in terms of ride or quickness off the line. I sure thought they looked cool.

One of the original stamped-frame JOPOs

Actually, the JOPO website explains the origin of these typically Finnish bikes:

jopo story begins from the 1960’s when Eero Helkama had a dream. He wanted to create a bicycle that all people could use, no matter what age, size, sex or financial status. Almost 50 years later the same dream is a crucial part of Finnish cycling culture. Three generations of jopo bicycles live in perfect harmony, and do not care about fashion trends.

An old (JOPO-style) Tunturi PONI

After seeing the widespread popularity of bicycles in hilly Turku, I know there is really no excuse for Canada to not have a vibrant 3-season bicycle culture. The Finns put up with long, dark winters and icy winds coming off the Baltic Sea. But when the snow melts they don't make up excuses to not ride.

Turku experience 1

2011-08-30T13:39:00.000-07:00

I got back from Turku, Finland on Sunday evening. I notice that travelling long distances seems easier in Europe. Of course a direct flight to Vancouver would be easier, but to go between countries and switch planes was pretty seamless here. There wasn't the same hassle at airport security. Or maybe it was just that the airports were smaller. I dunno.

In any case, Turku was neat. As soon as I got there I felt like I was in a small Canadian city on the edge of the boreal forest. Think Sudbury or Quebec City: big enough for a theatre and concert hall, but only a few kilometers from endless pine trees. On arrival and departure, our turboprop was the only plane on the tarmac. This makes it easier to find your luggage (there's only one baggage carousell!).


Turku airport

The emptiest airport.


Turku's cathedral is the oldest in Finland. Aura river in foreground.

Some unusual facts about Finland:

Many (most?) Finns are lactose-intolerant, and all the coffee-creamers are lactose-free.
Much of what is now Finland was controlled (or was technically part of) Sweden. So Swedish is a sort of second language. The university in Turku is a Swedish-language institution.
Although a free and democratic country for most of the 20th century, Finland was careful to be friendly with the Soviet bloc during the Cold War.
The Finnish language is unlike any other, and bears only structural similarities with Korean and Hungarian. So all Finns under retirement age also speak English (perfectly).
In Finnish, there are 15 different ways of saying "the". That is really silly because "the" is not an interesting word. I can understand that the Inuit have 15 words for "snow". Or the Australians have 15 words for "vomit". But what's with all the "the"s?
Vladimir Lenin lived in Turku for a while, while plotting the overthrow of the Tsars.

Comrades

Also, Turku is the "European Capital of Culture" for 2011. I am pretty sure that this is just a marketing ploy that Brussels cooked up to help down-and-out cities make a few bucks off of tourism. What is central government (supposed to be) for anyways except to spread the largesse? There were many public sculptures around, including a series of seals.

Seal eating fish

Turku, Finland

2011-08-22T06:54:00.000-07:00

I am off to Turku, Finland on Wednesday. I am presenting a paper there on Friday at the "Information Science and Social Media" (ISSOME 2011) conference. I will be staying at the Holiday Inn until Sunday the 28th, then it's back to Germany.

The presentation is entitled "Author Disambiguation for enhanced science 2.0 services" and describes how I have implemented a simple algorithm at iFQ to split publications written by identically-named individuals into distinct groups. It's not very cutting-edge, but it has the advantage of requiring no human guidance and works with very meagre data. Hopefully that makes it of interest to the conference attendees, as the metadata associated with the community-generated content on science 2.0 websites is also pretty sparse. Such websites would be more useful if they could automatically generate new structures based upon their data.

My colleague Kalle is half-Finnish and he told me bluntly that Turku is not very pretty. I think its main purpose is to serve as a place where Swedes can get off the ferry and purchase lots of lightly-taxed vodka. Nonetheless, the city is the 2011 European Capital of Culture. There are lots of public art installations that I hope to check out (including a see-through sauna). I will look into taking a boat tour and may go for a run on the island of Ruissalo.

Toy Town Berlin

2011-08-16T04:56:00.000-07:00

There is a website for the expat community in Germany called "ToyTown". I don't know what that name is supposed to refer to, but I guess some towns are so cute that one could imagine that this country was designed as one big LEGO theme park.

Sometimes I can imagine the trains I see rolling along between rolling hills are just a grown-up version of those miniature train sets. So which is a charicature of the other? I never understood the appeal of that hobby until I came here.

Anyways, Christine is off to Berlin this weekend to check out an apartment. Here is a smurf-sized view of Berlin:

Tiny Town - Berlin from Sam on Vimeo.

Noord Holland

2011-08-12T08:05:00.000-07:00

Here are some more photos from our little vacation last week. It was a big week for my daughter, as she got to crawl around on grass for the first time, swing in the hammock, etc. In addition, Arianne got to interact with a whole range of new animals that she had previously only seen in cartoon form. The family that runs the B&B has a young cat called "Pip", and Arianne was fascinated with this small furry thing. Later that week at another B&B near Utrecht she got right up to the snout of cows, large pigs, sheep, and a horse.

Here she is all decked out in adventure gear: Army green cargo pants, black tactical jacket and helmet. Ready for anything! Except sand - she was not keen on sand at all. Very strange stuff the first time one sees it.

We rode along the bike paths between the huge sand dunes (really hills) and eventually found a beach. The Atlantic at this time of year is damn cold (and that is as warm as it gets). But there were a few hardy souls splashing around out there.

View from back yard of "Pears and Apples" B&B

Vacation time

2011-08-07T02:20:00.000-07:00

Here's Arianne and me by a canal in Amsterdam:

From Monday August 1st to Friday, August 5 we stayed at a great B&B near the Wadden Sea. The "Apples and Pears" B&B was surrounded by (very) flat fields, many full of flowers.

I spent some time in the hammock watching the giant windmills on the horizon spin around. Arianne learned about grass and was soon crawling all over the place.

The cute part of HamsterDam

2011-08-04T11:46:00.000-07:00

After about 10 minutes of jostling with tourists and freaks, we went a few blocks Westward into a more sedate area. For four blocks there is another canal at every intersection (that is to say, the blocks are defined by canals). We stopped at this pub to rest our feet and feed Arianne. Just watching the people go by on their bikes and scooters is endlessly entertaining. A cyclist passes by every second or two.

Note how the windows are a bit crooked? That is normal.

The pub we stopped at is the third-oldest in Amsterdam. It dates from the mid-1600's and is known as a "brown café" because the wood interior was turned brown from all the patrons smoking that new-fangled thing called "tobacco" that had been imported from the New World.

Scooting by (no helmets, naturally). One of hundreds of two-wheeled passerby we saw. A few minutes later some guy drove by in at 1972 Chevrolet Chevelle, all rumbling V8 and shiny chrome. Who cares about some old muscle car, you say? But take it in situ, and it becomes special. First of all, cars are pretty rare. You can't park anywhere. Gasoline is more than $2 a liter. And the streets on either side of the canals are wide enough for only one vehicle. If you saw a muscle car from the 70's at the Drive-Thru back in Generica, you wouldn't look twice. But given the context, cruising around medieval cobblestone streets in a candy-ass purple hot rod with racing stripes borders on performance art.

The intersection of canals right next to where we were sitting. Note the folks in the foreground lounging in the boat, perhaps enjoying a glass of wine, while putting along the canals.

North Holland

2011-08-03T10:56:00.000-07:00

For the past few days we have been exploring Amsterdam and the region north of Amsterdam called "North Holland". Because Holland is a real society that exists in the modern world, it isn't all just a fairytale of legalized drugs and prostitution. That's fun to see, but there are other aspects of the country too. From modern art to 500-year old pubs, there is such a juxtaposition of sights in this city that it is hard to convey it all. I'll cover a few different aspects in the next couple of posts.

So over the weekend we stayed in a super-hip hotel in the southern outskirts of Amsterdam. Here is a view of the (entire) room. The green-lit cylinder is the shower. All trendy and post-modern, this is Monocle magazine turned into a hotel. Very nice, although the kids at the "front desk" (there is no front desk) could never figure out if we had paid for breakfast or not.

This area (Amsterdam-Zuid) is very different than the touristy areas at the centre of the city. It's mostly residential and the apartment buildings date from the mid-twentieth century. Right around the corner from the hotel is the World Trade Centre business park, where tens of thousands of sleek, well dressed 20/30-somethings work in finance and shiny insurance offices. It's actually reminiscent of the "La Défense" area of Paris, with its gleaming office towers and futuristic open spaces. Of course, this being Holland there has to be a quirky twist to things. Note the architecture of this office block:

This sort of playful take on things permeates Dutch society. Look very closely at this sculpture: this piece of industrial equipment is made up of a filigree pattern of coats-of-arms and fleur-de-lys:

Then it was off to the core of Amsterdam. Within only five minutes of stepping off the tram, Christine had already remarked on the smell of pot, we had seen a rastifarian dog (all covered in dreadlocks), and a posse of Hell's Angels rode by. It was very crowded and filthy.

House rules at McDonalds in Amsterdam

The main (Dom) square was full of guys posing for photos in wierd costumes.

This is not the Amsterdam that you were expecting to see, is it? Where are all the cute canals and bicycles? That will be the next post....

Urlaub!

2011-07-29T05:16:00.000-07:00

We are going on a vacation for the next week. We'll be in Amsterdam for two nights at a trendy hotel. Then we are off to a B&B near the town of Den Helder in what is called "North Holland" on the Wadden Sea. Next weekend we'll be staying near Gouda, where we may eat some cheese. We'll have lots of photos of windmills and water-works when we get back.

6

2011-07-25T06:24:00.000-07:00

James Hanson is literally a rocket scientist because he works for NASA. In fact he is the director of the Goddard Space Flight Center. He is also one of the world's top climate scientists. Besides having written many papers on the topic, he also has some extra standing because a few years ago he stood up to the Bush administration and refused to let them water down one of his official reports on climate change. In essence becoming a whistleblower on the abuse of science to suit politial ends. So when James Hanson writes a scientific paper, you can be sure that the best minds in the world (who work in this field) have contributed to it or have reviewed it. The fact that he is unknown outside of this field is all you need to know about how screwed we really are. Which is why I call your attention to a recent report of his which calls for reductions in CO2 emissions of 6% every year. Starting now.

Let me just put that in context. Consider that economic growth is roughly equivalent to energy consumption: It takes energy to make the widget, energy to bring the widget to the store, energy for you to drive to the store and buy said widget, etc. All of that energy generates CO2. (Yes, I know that some energy can be generated by windmills and solar panels, but that's not really how we do things, is it? The world does not burn 90,000,000 barrels of oil per day just for fun. That's the real number, by the way.). So while we are all trying to figure out how to make more money in order to buy more stuff (which we call progress), some very smart people are saying that we're going to have to start doing a lot less of that. This is going to require an enormous re-adjustment of our society. In fact, the concept of earning 6% less every year is so unacceptable as to be heresy and is dismissed as the crazy talk of wierdo commies. I am personally not looking forward to using/earning/travelling 6% less every subsequent year.

However, that is exactly what the developing countries were asking of the developed countries at the climate-change talks that were held here in Bonn a few weeks ago. We are not talking Vanuatu or Tobago: the big countries like India and China want the rich countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by the year 2020 (that's only 8 years from now). Although this was not a core part of the negotiations, it is an indication of the magnitude of sacrifices everyone is going to have to make very soon. In nine years you must take home half the salary you make today (or you can take home the same salary, but can only buy half the stuff you want).

The amazing thing is that the original Kyoto protocol, signed way back in the early 1990s, called for developed countries to reduce their CO2 emissions by 6% under 1990 levels by (I think) 2000. I don't know what the GDP of Canada was in 1990, but you can bet it was much less than it is today. So we were talking about a relatively small cut in today's terms. If we would have done that then we would be in a much better situation now. But of course nobody wanted to be the first to take a 6% cut in their standard of living back then. So here we are looking at much more drastic belt-tightening.

And if we do not start cutting our emissions right now (as Hanson et al. suggest), then how much of a cut in emissions/energy/economy do you think we will have to make in 9 years? The challenge will simply get bigger and bigger the longer we ignore it. Or we can simply go along and "not believe" in climate change.

Time for Stinkenfuß

2011-07-13T09:26:00.000-07:00

And now for some cute picures of little Stinkenfuß* herself.

You underestimate the power of The Force!

Nom, nom,


Benni, Manuella, and Arianne

* = "Stinkyfeet"

63rd in Citylauf Bonn!

2011-07-11T05:16:00.000-07:00

I had a great race yesterday. A bit hot, as the Citylauf (lauf means "to run") started at 1PM. It wound through the cobblestone streets, alleys and market-squares of downtown Bonn. In the background is the old church in Bonn, built in the middle ages in the Roman style.

There were not many spectators (aside from the general population sitting at cafés eating sausages, wondering what's up with all the joggers?)

I kept a good pace of about 4:40 per kilometer throughout the race, and the 5 laps slipped by easily (no cramps or soreness). Here I am crossing the finish-line:

46:02 - a very good time!

For the record, I came in 63rd of 198 men, and 7th of 33 in my age-category (men between the ages of 40 and 45, which is a more realistic comparison). I can hardly believe that I ran such a fast time. I don't remember what I usually run a 10-K in, but anything under 50 minutes seems awfully quick. It's almost as if I skipped a lap, but my watch says I did run 5 laps, so I wasn't cheating.

However, I think the course was a bit short. My GPS watch recorded a distance of 9.66 km, so I think a more realistic time (i.e. if it were a full ten kilometers) for me was a bit over 47 minutes. But that is still far better than what I was expecting (54 minutes).

In any case, I recognize that I am fortunate to be able to run like that. If feels great to be able to run up stairs two at a time and to bounce along the trails near my house. I think I will reward myself with a new pair of running shoes.

By the way, I appreciate when people post comments to this blog, as it lets me know that somebody is reading it. I don`t know if what I write about is of much interest to others, but at least you can keep tabs on what I am up to.

Speed Weasel is running today

2011-07-10T00:44:00.000-07:00

Clark Kent changed into Superman in a telephone booth (remember those?). By day Spiderman was Peter Parker. While I am no superhero, I do have an alter-ego when I run races. I am Speed Weasel!

Today I will run the in the Citylauf Bonn 10-K race. I am aiming to do it in 54 minutes (which, just in case, also includes 54:59). It is a 2-K loop on cobblestone streets in the old city, so I have to be careful not to twist an ankle.

This is how you do it.

2011-07-07T05:43:00.000-07:00

The EU Commission has decided to increase its funding for science by 45%. Wow: I thought that science budgets were only for cutting. We're talking about 80 billion Euros for actual research (not the glorified industrial-process streamlining that seems to be the NRC's focus now).

Dear Conservative party of Canada: This is how you do it, you idiots!

The implications of neglecting science are already being felt in terms of Canada's ability to innovate. A recent report by the Science, Technology and Innovation Council finds that Canada is slipping as compared to its peers. It's not just about money, of course (there are always lots of reasons), but money is definitely essential.

Atomkraft? Nein Danke

2011-07-05T04:46:00.000-07:00

Germany has 18 nuclear reactors and generates 23% of its electrical energy with them. There is however a fairly clearly-defined opposition to their use. The "Atomkraft? Nein Danke" symbol seen here is a fairly common sight. I have seen it as a bumper-sticker or a backyard flag.

Politically speaking, opposition to nuclear power has always come from the Left. The Green party is fairly strong here in Germany and has been in the Bundestag for years. Although always as a minor opposition party, they do have a voice and perhaps a bit of influence. A strange thing happened recently, the significance of which should not be overlooked. As a result of the meltdown of three reactors at Fukushima (which has now rendered the immediate area around the plant radioactive, and thus uninhabitable, for a long time to come), Angela Merkel made an about-face on her government's position. Although she leads a government that is to the right of center, she (unilaterally and without pressure from the opposition) decided to phase out all of Germany's nuclear power plants by 2022. At the same time, Germany plans to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by 40% over the next 9 years.

That's only ten years to figure out how to run a large modern economy without either nuclear reactors and while burning less fossil fuels. This type of political leadership is unheard of in North America and must truly be commended. It is going to be tough to achieve either goal, and very tough to achieve both. But the prudent thing to do is cut CO2 emissions and move away from nuclear power. It just took some vision and leadership to make it happen. In comparison, Canada's government (with the notable exception of some provinces) has been trying to weasel out of its commitment to the Kyoto Accord since it was signed. And the U.S. has half-heartedly discussed how to implement a cap-and-trade system just so long as it will not cost anyone a cent nor change how many pickup trucks are sold to poseurs.

Personally, I have always been pretty sanguine about the dangers of nuclear energy. Even after the horror at Fukushima, it still is the safest form of energy. When you think about it, it is amazing that only a handful of people died at Fukushima (which is quite remarkable considering that it was hit by a tsunami, a magnitude-9 earthquake, and a couple of buildings blew up). So one can objectively say that nuclear power is much less risky than coal, which we are certain (i.e. no doubt, 100% chance, inevitably) will kill thousands of people this year, as it has every year for centuries. Many of these deaths are from nasty mining accidents in the Chinese hinterland, but many more come from lung cancer brought on by sooty air. In terms of safety, nuclear comes out far ahead.

Where I think nuclear energy falls down is the sheer expense and impracticality of it all. For all its (relative) safety, the Fukushima accident is expected to cost TEPCO about $25 billion.
As long as one has an steady supply of engineers and infinite amounts of money, then all is well with nuclear energy. But as various (all?) U.S. states are currently heavily indebted and are being forced to cut police, fire, teachers, and road-maintenance because they just don't have the money to run society as it was when times were good, how long will it be before there isn't enough money to run nuclear reactors in pristine conditions?

Even Ontario's reactors, some of the safest and best-regulated in the world, end up costing far more than anticipated. Residents of Ontario pay a special fee every month to help pay off the vast sums of money borrowed to build Pickering and Darlington, and then to shut them down for costly maintenance every few years.

There has got to be a less complicated and less expensive way to boil water (in the reactor) so that I can boil water (in my kettle). Germany is going to show how its done.

Greenwoods B&B in Maastricht

2011-07-02T23:25:00.000-07:00

As my previous posting outlined, we spent last weekend in Maastricht. In a lucky turn of events, all the hotels in town were fully booked. That led Christine to look further afield and to discover a great little B&B in the countryside just outside the city. Greenwoods is run by Ruth and Eddy Archer. She is Dutch and he is British. They have a horse, some cats, and a bunch of chickens that we got to feed.

Late day sun, June 24

Christine and Eddy in the garden. Note the cat in the background.

It's a rambling country house with lots of books and magazines piled high on every surface, which was convenient when sitting by the fireplace after a drizzly day walking around the city.

Here is Christine feeding the chickens. The rooster is named "Blackjack".

Holland is always neat. Although it is only a hundred kilometers from here, it feels a bit different. The Dutch are all multi-lingual and almost everyone speaks English. The Dutch language also seems to be a bit less complicated than German, although you can see that many words are the same. In addition, it is easy to find wierd, sweet Belgian beers there too. We are planning to vacation in Holland for the first week of August, so I will report more on the cute wierdness of the Netherlands later.

Here is a photo of a rolling party in Maastricht. It would seem to be a sort of stag-party or office team-building excercise. A company rents out a couple dozen Vespas and everyone scoots around. We later saw a similar number of women on electric mopeds. Apparently helmets are not necessary, and presumably neither is a licence. Does one even have to be sober? Holland is definitely more relaxed.

With an Amstel beer

Maastricht

2011-06-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

This past weekend we rented a car and drove to Maastricht, which is only a couple of hours away. As the car-rental place was all out of the teeny car I had reserved, they gave us a VW Scirocco (6-speed manual, navigation system, Star Wars looks). Here it is in the nicest underground parking lot I have ever seen. The painted floor was so clean that the tyres squeaked. The concrete ceiling (the ceiling!) of the garage was painted in a light-blue pattern.

Sporty Scirocco

Although Saturday was cold and drizzly, we wandered around the downtown. It's your typical maze of cobblestone pedestrian streets packed full of people who are similarly window-shopping. This photo of an alley is typically Dutch: narrow alley, lots of bicycles.

Of note is the large bookstore located inside an old church.

The café in the bookstore

Christine remarked that the interesting Europe she remembered from previous travels was somehow missing there. Maastricht (or at least the old, downtown part of it) has fashioned itself into a one-dimensional shopping destination (perhaps because of its location between Germany and Belgium: there might be tax advantages). So after a few hours it feels a bit artificial, like a shopping mall back in Generica (but nicer). The décor of old buildings and quaint little alleys is the setting for hyper-consumerism. I got sucked into buying a shirt that I didn't really need (but it was on sale!).

The following day (Sunday) was much nicer and sunny. We went to the Bonnefanten art gallery. Then we had to scoot back to Bonn (briefly hitting 160 km/h on the Autobahn). Just over the border in Germany are a series of gargantuan windmills. Really impressive and even mesmerizing when spinning. There's also a large nuclear reactor a few kilometers further along.

Maastricht for the weekend

2011-06-24T05:55:00.000-07:00

We are off to Maastricht for the weekend. It is in the very southern tip of Holland and is (apparently) quite culturally distinct. We'll be staying at a B&B.

I don't believe in the Higgs-Boson particle

2011-06-22T09:32:00.000-07:00

Have you ever heard someone say "I don't believe in the Higgs-Boson particle."? How about "String theory is not going to bring us any closer to a Grand Unified Theory."?

We never hear anyone disputing the veracity of these theories because they are so complicated and abstract that unless you have years of training in that particular field you cannot even begin to understand the debate. So to comment on them only makes the lay commenter sound foolish. I will therefore not dwell on them further, as I know little of the details and simply trust the scientists know what they are talking about.

But if one reads the comments section on any news item about climate change and you will see many people believe that climate change is some sort of communist plot devised by the U.N. as a way of oppressing us in an Orwellian New World Order. Really, I am not making this up, nor am I using one bit of hyperbole. This type of vitriol also encompasses death threats aimed at climate scientists. Even Canadian and British newspapers print reactions in which readers scoff at the dire predictions of climate research, saying that the science is all a bunch of hooey and that, anyways, the climate has always fluctuated so there is nothing to worry about.

This is fascinating. Nobody would say such things about chemistry or nanotechnology, but apparently the general populace is more informed about greenhouse gasses than the dozens of scientists who wrote the IPCC report calling for atmospheric CO2 levels to be kept below 450 ppm in order to avoid a pretty bleak future for all of us. Polite conversation at a dinner party would come to an end if you said you thought that you did not believe in evolution but rather that Adam and Eve magically appeared in a garden 6000 years ago. But I have met people who say "You know, I'm not sure about climate change - I don't think it is true.".

Really? I don't know how to respond to that without insulting their intelligence. One cannot pick and choose the science one "believes" in. Science is logically consistent and any part of it can be asserted with confidence by building upon first principles. There is a direct line of "if...then" statements that lead from 2+2 = 4 to the calculations that predict the existence of the Higgs-Boson particle, or the predictions of drought and sea-level rise resulting from increased CO2 emissions.

Yet somehow many people have decided not to "believe" the numbers generated by climate models. This is foolish - and at a societal level - very dangerous. I do not doubt that the calculations behind the search for the Higgs-Boson particle are correct. Nor do I doubt that the calculations behind the climate-change models are correct. I have no reason to doubt the science and so must trust that others are doing their job.

We are in for some heavy weather and to make-believe that numbers are not real makes the climate-change denier sound stupid.

Oh would Greece just default already!

2011-06-20T12:22:00.000-07:00

Oh would Greece just default already!

It has been over a year now since the European debt crisis touched down in Greece (after Iceland went bankrupt and Ireland had to be bailed out by the IMF). Every week brings another crisis or secret meeting in Luxembourg or riot in Athens or rating-agency downgrade. These developments have become as regular as clockword and yet have changed absolutely nothing.

As near as I can make out, a simplified version of the difficulty is as follows: Greece owes a lot of money to private banks, mostly in France and Germany. The loans have to be paid back soon but Greece can only get people to lend them more money (to repay the original loans) at usurious rates (currently 30% per annum on a 2-year bond, which is way higher than what a schmuck like me pays on a credit card).

Much of the wrangling is about deciding who is going to be short-changed when the music stops. If the lenders (the banks in France and Germany) are "made whole", somebody else has to pick up the tab. Because Greece can't, it falls to either national or pan-national governments. Does France have enough money to bail out its banks when their loans to Greece turn to dust? That means the French taxpayer is on the hook. Or does the European Central Bank help the various private banks out, in which case the people of Denmark and Croatia are sending money to keep the suits in Paris and Frankfurt happy? None of these are very palatable solutions.

Let us not forget the Greeks, who are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The austerity measures that the Greek government is being required to implement make the future look pretty bleak for most citizens. Sure, there was some loose accounting and (very) wishful (fiscal) thinking, but the regular people are not to blame for the poor management of previous governments.

Greece could simply default on its loans, leave the Euro zone, and go back to using the Drachma. This would lead to a pretty rough few years and a rapid decline in their standard of living, but that's what is now going to happen under the austerity measures anyways in order to satisfy the ECB. It seems to be a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

The thing is, this has been well understood for some time now. James Howard Kunstler's forecast for 2011 (now 6 months old) describes exactly the sort of pickle that the EU is now in:

The serial bail-outs engineered by the European Central Bank have been shams based on an imaginary "fund" that really only amounts to more promises of back-stops by bankrupt countries to other bankrupt countries. In the grand gesture last fall, around the collapse of Ireland, promises were made by the ECB to give the appearance that the usual suspects (the PIIGS) would cover their quarterly debt service obligations to March of this year. No real money was involved, only assurances, which will soon be revealed as empty. Bottom-line: another graver round of debt crisis in Euro-land in the first quarter if 2011.
It can only be resolved two ways: by 1.) countries defaulting, dropping out of the Euro monetary system, returning to a currency of their own and activities that reality will admit; and 2.) Germany, France, and Holland taking the others in like poor relatives and paying their living expenses. I really don't see Number 2 working out. The voters in the bigger three economies will revolt. Of course, the Number 1 route implies the destruction of a whole bunch of European banks, perhaps all of them, and their shareholders positions, and big trouble for the wealthier Euro member countries - ultimately leading to the same place: a lower standard of living, even in Germany, for all its frugality and efficiency.

Back in October 2010 I attended a presentation in Ottawa by Nicole Foss of The Automatic Earth. I asked her afterwards whether she thought that the Greek debt crisis of May 2010 (that's a full year ago) had been successfully dealt with. Her answer was that things had simply been papered over and that the problem would re-emerge.

So it has been some time that smart people have been reading the writing on the wall. I think that even if this story has a happy ending with Greece paying back all its debts and the banks living happily ever after, it will only be a matter of a few weeks before the same debt crisis and escalating downgrades (down-scalating grades?) occurs in Portugal and/or Spain. Then it'll be another circus of special deals between Berlin and Brussels to insure that banks in Bruges don't bonk.

So Greece should default to put and end to this charade of a merry-go-round. It will suck for lots of people and the stock market will implode again. But it might give people a chance to regroup and rethink how Europe shares the Euro.

Gummi bear capital of the world

2011-06-18T02:17:00.000-07:00

Up until twenty years ago, Bonn was the capital of Germany. After the war left the country divided it was strategically unwise to have the capital of (democratic) West Germany surrounded by (communist) East Germany (which was confusingly called the German Democratic Republic). So the sleepy city of Bonn was made the capital. Then when East and West were re-unified after the fall of the Warsaw Pact, the capital was officially moved back to Berlin.

However, Bonn is still the Gummi Bear capital of the world! Yes, those delicious little chewy treats were invented here in Bonn. In fact, the company that makes them was founded here 90 years ago by Hans Riegel.

The name of the company is made up of the first two letters of his first and last names plus those of the city: HAns RIegel BOnn (HA-RI-BO, get it?). The factory outlet is about a kilometer from my office and is a paradise of every sort of squishy sweet you can think of. Packages of the cute & tasty bears can be found at grocery stores across the city (and probably all of North Rhine Westfalia).

When was the last time you ate a Gummi Bear?

Two days of extreme biking

2011-06-15T03:29:00.000-07:00

On June 11 and 12 I went to the Winterberg Bikepark. The previous weekend (June 4 & 5) this was the site of the European DirtMasters competition. I had a great time and aside from some scratches and blisters didn't get hurt.

First, a clarification about the type of riding the park is designed for. Note the chair-lift at the right in the picture below. This is how one gets up to the top of the mountain - one does not ride up because it is both too steep and the bicycle is way too heavy and inefficient for anything more than a few hundred meters on level ground. Conceptually this is no different from skiing: while one can cover long distances on cross-country skis, you would never try to go further than the parking lot while wearing downhill skis. So although I have done lots of cross-country mountain biking and a bit of enduro motorcycling, I was pretty much a novice at this sort of downhill mountain-biking. The first few hours I tried to take it easy and get familiar with the bike and the tracks.


My (rented) Nicolai at the top of the mountain.

I hope this gives a sense of the vertigo that comes with some of these trails. There's about a 5-foot gap until one lands on the down-slope. Got to build up enough speed and hang on:

View of a jump in the "Truvative Slopestyle" track

The same jump seen from the side. Wheeee!

Here I am in the protective gear. It came in handy on a few occasions. The wooden platform behind me is part of the trail: it ends abruptly and one must maintain enough speed while riding off the end so as to land (mostly) on the real wheel. It's actually much safer to go fast than to go too slow.

Me in protective gear. Bobsled track in background.

By the second day I was much more comfortable doing jumps and drops. Going fast is fun, but I particularly like the technical challenge of the wooden "features". Here is a spiral feature that requires one to control both speed and balance while turning.

And the "Continental" track had a fun feature that wound between the trees:

It's only a couple of feet off the ground and it is not very steep, so you really can't hurt yourself (do mind the trees though). I found it to be lots of fun and tricky to not fall off the narrow logs.

There were see-saws in which one rides up an inclined wooden plank that is on a pivot (just like the playground variety). At a certain point you've got enough weight past the pivot-point and the plank see-saws down. Then, if you have not lost your balance and are still on the plank, you can roll forward off the see-saw and continue along the wooden board-walk. I did that a few times and only fell off once.

In case you didn't know, B.C. is the Mecca of this style of mountain-biking. One of the trails at Winterberg is even named "North Shore" in reference to the north shore of Vancouver, where there are some very extreme trails (see below). Every time I rode the chair lift and the other passenger found out I am from Canada, they each exclaimed in wonder about how great Whistler must be. Perhaps one day I'll get to ride there.

NOT ME! Vancouver's North Shore

Thanks for your interest in reading my blog. Now it's back to the office where I do much less extreme stuff.

The sound of music

2011-06-14T02:04:00.000-07:00

The train ride back from Winterberg on Monday was quite the cultural experience. I had found a seat on the sunny side of the train next to a big picture-window and was ready to enjoy the scenery of contented cows, trimmed forests, and tidy villages as the train would be winding its way down from the mountains and into the industrial city of Dortmund.


Sauerland train in Winterberg

Cute village (not Winterberg)

Naturally, this peaceful little journey was shortly ruined as a pack of young men (dare I say kids) decided to occupy the seats across the aisle. They were all joking and trash-talking that is typical of such gatherings. I tried to eaves-drop so as to pick up some words, but it was pretty difficult. They were actually just regular kids - clean cut and squeaky-clean, lolling about in their shorts and sweatshirts, fiddling with their handheld digital devices. Naturally they brought out a mini-speaker gadget and soon the whole wagon could hear what was playing on one of the iPhones. So I was serenaded all the way down the valley by German rap.

It is heartening to know that the Blacks of Germany, who represent about 0.01% of the population, have been hard at work finding an equivalent for "Gangsta bitches" in the vernacular (rhymes with schnitzel). What with the phenomenal medical care, perfect public transport, and booming economy it must be hard for these DJs to make a musical career out of sullen posturing, but they are doing their bestest.

Of course I could have just gotten up and found a seat elsewhere. But if I went to the other car I would just be surrounded by the grey-haired wrinklies who are everywhere. Nope, this is the real Germany too I said, and it is just as valid even if it does not conform to the cuckoo-clock stereotype. So I stayed put and tried to grin and bear it, listening to the hit "Ficky, Ficky, Ficky" (try this fun do-it-yourself translation: replace the "i" with "u").

One of the kids then began to fiddle with the iPhone and suddenly the whiny tunes of "Wait a Minute Mister Postman" (by Shondelle and the Sha-Na-Nas) filled the train. That was the last straw: anything but 60's doo-wop! I wailed and covered my ears, imploring the guys in my primitive German to please turn it back to Ficky, Ficky. This elicited much hilarity, with some ribbing of whomever's iPhone contained such drivel. The ice was broken, and we joked around a bit.

Out of politeness the kids played English rap such that for the last part of the trip I was able to clearly understand the "motherficken" lyrics. So considerate of them.

Winterberg is the end of the line and a ski destination

Bikepark Winterberg

2011-06-09T07:19:00.000-07:00

Having exceeded the recommended daily dosage of castles, I am going to go mountain biking this weekend. I really have not seen much of Germany beyond the closest cities up & down the Rhine, so this is my chance to do something that does not involve herbal tea and little cakes.

Even though it is summer, I'm going to Winterberg. I'll be staying at the Hotel Steymann, which is on the outskirts of the town. However it is very close to the Winterberg BikePark. I'll be renting a downhill bike (so heavy and of such extreme geometry that you can't really ride it as a bicycle for any distance) to tackle the trails. In the winter the place is a bob-sled run and a ski hill.

On Monday I will either take the train back to Bonn or will be found here.

Wonderful May

2011-06-07T09:03:00.000-07:00

My apologies, I have been neglecting this blog for the past month as we have been busy. I will prove it with pictures!

So let me recap what has been happening:

My mom came to visit for most of May. We had a great time visiting castles, riding bikes, and eating well. It was also important that my mom was able to spend time with Arianne, and she got to see my daughter transition to being able to sit up unsupported.

At the BUGA garden show, Koblenz

We took the train to Koblenz and saw the national German garden show. It was situated in a hilltop fort overlooking the city of Koblenz. We took a big gondola over the river to get up to the fort. Here's the view of the Rhine and the Deutsches Eck.

Overlooking the Rhine at Koblenz

The Deutsches Eck is of some cultural significance, having been bombed to smithereens during one of the wars. Its rebuilding was a symbol of German resilience. It is a truly enormous statue. What's more is that the bas-relief carvings that decorate the base and surrounding monuments look like something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark: Immense snakes and stylized skulls give the place a sinister feel, even on a sunny day.

The Deutsches Eck ("German Point") where the Rhine and Moiselle rivers meet

Allie climbs all the way to the top of Europe!

One outing we all did was to take the ferry across the river to Koningswinter to see the Drachenfells castle. I can see it every day just by looking out the window, so I had been wanting to go there for some time. As advertised, it is a real mess.

At the Drachenfells castle ruins

There's a train that engages cogs between the rails to climb up the mountain. This mini-railway has been there since 1882.

The Drachenfels Zug

And here's the Drachenburg Palace, which isn't very old at all.

The Drachenburg Schloss

Also Christine's pal from Brussels came to visit last week and we had fun playing Parcheesi. No pictures of that, but it was great to hang out with her.

In other news, I submitted an abstract to a conference to be held in Finland at the end of August. I learned a couple of weeks ago that it was accepted. So it looks like we will be off to Turku! Good thing my research project is going well. Otherwise it would be an uncomfortable presentation ("And this slide show where my results would go...if I had some.").

My German course is going well and will wrap up in a couple of weeks. It has been a bit of a slog, and I am not used to not being able to understand a single thing, but I am getting there and am more comfortable saying simple sentences. The half-dozen of us who have stuck it out are friendly and the class has a good sense of camaraderie.

That's all for now.

Smurfland

2011-05-02T04:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we went for a long bicycle ride with a couple of friends. Here are some photos of the cute things


*Moby Dick* personenschiffahrt

My pal William had told me of a little ferry for cyclists only that crosses the Sieg river just to the north of Bonn. Our goal was to find this tiny fähre and go for a ride. It was such a magically cute scene that I almost expected to find a life-sized Smurf village on the other side. A slow river meandering through the forest, kids playing in the water, and a mini-ferry gliding silently back and forth across the river.

There was a restaurant on the other side. We had lunch there and everyone had a good time.

Manuela, Arianne, and Christine. Note flag and flowers in background (they go together so well)

Online literary magazines

2011-04-30T23:07:00.000-07:00

We are innundated with news all the time, so it's nice to read magazines that take a broader view of things. I have found a few online magazines that publish interesting articles. I think I stumbled across these because they publish some of Theodore Dalrymple's work. Theodore Dalrymple (a pseudonym) is a retired doctor whose years of work in the U.K. prison system led him to question some of the sacred cows of modern liberal thought. One is The City Journal, which tends to cover politics.

Last week I discovered The Social Affairs Unit, and have been reading a series of articles by Emily Kingham (another pseudomym) about teaching English in a U.K. prison. I think what I like about these magazines is that they have an unconventional take on things without being radical. In general they seek to expose the curious trends and contradictions in society.

How to do less with less

2011-04-26T05:35:00.000-07:00

The main web page of the National Research Council of Canada is not working today.

Ha-ha!

We are not talking about the website for Joe's Hot Dog stand being down, but that of the leading science institution in the country. Just a symptom of forced restructuring and departmental rationalization that I got the hell away from a couple of months ago (and the Nature reported on last week). Amazing to see the old place start to come apart at the seams.

No, no....dig up, stupid!

Burg, Schloss, und Fähre

2011-04-26T02:33:00.000-07:00

Here is a series of photos from the last couple of weeks showing what I did on the weekends. On April 17 I went to the Bad Godesberg castle with Marcel.

Marcel at base camp "Bad G" about to climb to the summit of the tower ("Berg")

The view from the top is amazing. To the north is the business district of Bonn. The shiny building is the Deutsche Post offices.

At top of Bad Godesberg tower. View is to the north.

Later that afternoon I met up with a co-worker and her partner for a bike ride south along the Rhine. Then we took a Fähre (ferry) over to the other side and returned along the east bank. I don't know if it is all part of a Commie plot to squeeze the secret of maple-syrup-making out of me, but my colleagues at iFQ are really nice and go out of their way to make my time here enjoyable.

Rolandseck ferry

Manuella on the ferry

Christine bought a Burly bicycle kinder-wagon a couple of weeks ago. Now we are much more mobile with Arianne. On Sunday, April 24 I loaded her into the Burly and biked downtown to meet up with a co-worker at the Poppelsdorfer Schloss (palace), which is now part of the University of Bonn. Kalle has two daughters, so our manly, extreme activities consist of feedings and nappy changes. But it was still fun. The botanical gardens aren't much to write home about, but they do have a giant flower (7ft tall) from Indonesia that blooms only once every seven years. The most entertaining thing to see were the Blumenschnappers that Kalle pointed out: Thse are wierdos with professional-grade DSLR cameras who are loaded down with utility belts that holster a range of mega-zoom lenses. They wander around the garden in Tilley hats and safari gear taking extreme close-ups of flowers. Fucking flowers.

Kalle and daughter Helena at the Botanische Gärten

Little Arianne was a real trooper. We were out and about for 5-1/2 hours on a hot day. We must have covered 15 kilometers in all. She didn't cry or make a fuss, and fell asleep on the ride home.


Wheeeee!!

Gleefully Gloating

2011-04-20T05:35:00.000-07:00

Remember a couple of months ago I detailed why I left the NRC? Well the shake-up is now the subject of a news item in Nature (one of the most important scientific publications).

Canadian research shift makes waves

Agency's focus on industry-driven projects raises concerns that basic science will suffer.

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110419/full/472269a.html

There will still be jobs there and they will still do some science. But their focus will definitely shift to making quick money by seeking contracts with industry. In the software industry this is called being a "solutions provider"; we'll make whatever you pay us for.

Today I bicycled along the Rhine as pink petals fluttered from the cherry blossom trees. The birds sang and the air was fragrant with flowers. I figured out how to use a probabilistic interpretation of the Jaccard Coefficient to disambiguate synonymous authors. And I did not have to make a pie-chart for some frantic suit who was desperately trying to justify the existence of their institute in light of the coming rationalization of programs that the NRC's new focus demands.

I gloat over my good fortune to have left that sinking ship when I did.

The economic establishment begins to question itself.

2011-04-18T13:48:00.000-07:00

You know things are getting strange when the Secretary-General of the U.N. calls for a revolution in our economic system. You see son (leaning back in my rocking chair and hooking my thumbs under my suspenders), time was that it was the poor folk who started economic revolutions and all. Not them high-falutin' folk in their fancy motor-carriages.

Perhaps you remember the economic crisis of 2008? The near-vapourization of all that electronic stuff we call "money" was narrowly averted one Sunday afternoon in New York when Hank Paulson bullied the major U.S. banks into a wierd semi-nationalisation-cum-bailout. The recent documentary "Inside Job" is an amazing peek into the willful ignorance and outright duplicity of Wall Street leading up to the crash.
A quick refresher course in political economy is perhaps in order: Those tumultuous weeks in the fall of 2008 completely discredited the notion that the free market could regulate itself. France's president Nicolas Sarkozy famously said in a speech that the Anglo-American economic model was dead. There is no "free hand" of the market. And if there is, it is sometimes psychotic and therefore cannot be left unattended. This was a golden opportunity for a reinvigourated Left to take the lead in shaping a more fair and stable economic system. But having themselves embraced free-market ideology over the past 20 years, (neo-)liberals now have nothing to bring to the table. Indeed, the silence from the Left has been deafening.

So we are in a bizarre situation in which a Left-leaning U.S. President hires a horde of arch-suits right off of Wall Street and puts them in charge of fixing the economic crisis. That they caused. These former bankers and stockbrokers launch a massive Keynseian spending program (the most Lefty sort of Big-Gubmint socio-economic manipulation) to keep the economy ticking. Yet there has been no fundamental re-think of how this all works. Regulation of the financial markets has not been strengthened. Heck, forget about writing regulation to prevent the next crash: how about using existing laws to deal with what just happened?

The recent article in Rolling Stone asks rightly "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?". Yes, an example was made of the most outlandish Ponzi-schemer, who has been locked up for 150 years (for 10 points, can you name him? Last name begins with "M"). Now it seems that people are starting to ask pointed questions as to why the "vampire squids" at Goldman Sachs, who made a killing swindling private investors and then connived their way into kajillions of dollars that was meant to help the swindlees, are not in Leavenworth.

All this is to put into context the recent statements by the Secretary-General of the U.N. who called for a revolution in our economic system. He feels that the banking system is out of control and that the environmental challenges of climate change require a new economic model. Remember, we're talking a mild-mannered career bureaucrat here, not some jungle-dwelling quat-chewing colonel. Of course, he means "revolution" in the intellectual sense and is not actually calling on people to start throwing Molotov cocktails. Still, the frankness of his message - delivered at a major economic forum to old men in suits - is shocking. Yes it sounds like crazy talk, but in light of the aforementioned scams that seem to form the basis for a large part of the financial sector, perhaps Ban-Ki Moon is on to something.

Some more photos

2011-04-15T05:33:00.000-07:00

Here are a few more photos on no particular theme.

A couple of weekends ago we went to downtown Bonn. It was a really warm sunny day (remember, we're talking about the end of March). There was some sort of gastronomy festival in the main square (where the statue of Beethoven is). This old Citroen van looked cool:


Old Citroen van in Bonn Markt

And here's another photo from last weekend's excursion up the Romantic Rhine valley. An old abbey or something. Note the steep vineyards in the background. They are arranged on the south-facing side of the mountains for maximum exposure to the sun.

Abbey ruins above Bacharach

And here's little apple-cheeks herself making a silly face:

No car, no problem

2011-04-13T02:23:00.000-07:00

It has been three and a half months since we left Canada. Put the car in the garage with some Sta-bil in the tank and stored the battery in a warm place. Since I have been in Germany I have not driven a car, nor have I even been a passenger in a car. There has been no need.

This is wonderfully liberating as I do not need to drive to the supermarket to fetch the daily necessities. Back in Canada, the endless rigamarole of schlepping to the mini-mall, parking the car, walking across the 4-acre parking lot to get to the airplane-hangar-sized store just so I can buy a bag of milk at non-usurious prices is a real pain in the ass. Of course, having gone to the trouble of getting there I might as well pick up a few other things so that I won't have to trudge all the way back here tomorrow. Then I get to stand in line behind a dozen fuglies in order to pay. Christ, I just wanted some frickin' milk! Then it's off to find some Molson because apparently society will come apart at the seams if we are permitted to buy beer at the same place we buy beer nuts. Naturally, the beer store is located in a different mini-mall a short drive (but a long walk) away. So I get to repeat the whole dance all over again: park the car next to a minivan with truck nutz, walk across another vast parking lot to the charmless commercial plaza, stand in line again behind folks who have tattoos on their necks yet who are also wearing clown-sized shorts and designer-brand flip-flops.

Besides being a colossal waste of time, it results in a really ugly built environment. The "generica"* we have chosen to build for ourselves is not an enjoyable way to live. This is the credo of the writer and social critic James Howard Kunstler who describes the suburbs as "the greatest waste of resources in history". Not simply because it takes a lot of gas to drive around in an SUV collecting packages of processed food, but also because our most important resource - our lives - is spent in such unnecessary ugliness.

So being able to walk to the local grocery store from home here in Bonn, even if the prices are a bit higher, certainly is nice. The only disadvantage is the difficulty in purchasing liquids in family-sized quantities. I can carry a few litres of milk, juice, and pop on my bike without any problem and that lasts us a few days. But it is hard to ride all the way from the getrank with a 10-litre crate of beer bottles. The solution is to drink more wine as there is a Jacques' Wine Depot a stone's throw from my place.

* = The homogenized land of mini-malls and 4-lane streets that are the same anywhere you go in North America

Mittle Rhine by train & boat

2011-04-11T13:20:00.000-07:00

Christine's parents are visiting us for a couple of weeks. After a few days to get their bearings, we hopped on a train and went South to explore the Romantic Rhine valley. We took a train to Koblenz, then switched to the Mittelrhein train for the next leg of the journey to Bacharach. (pronouned in German "Bahahhrah"). The trip took less than 2 hours and cost a mere 39 Euros (2 adults, 2 seniors).


Mittelrheinbahn train in Bacharach

This whole area is the wine-growing region of Germany. Because the climate here is not as warm as the more obvious wine-growing regions like Spain or Italy, the Rhein wineries have had to adapt. Here only the South-facing hillsides have been turned into vineyards in order to capture as much sunlight as possible.

Bacharach and the Rhein

View from hotel room

The olde towne is full of cutesy cobblestone streets and restaurants catering to tourists who like crooked architecture:


The oldest house in the region. Built in 1386 (without a ruler).

This morning we walked across the street and took a ferry downsteam to Koblenz. This was the real highlight of the trip, as around every bend in the river was another castle.

Look upon yonder hill-top; it's a castle!

The old towns, colourful trains, and passing ships (going upstream towards Switzerland) made for a great sightseeing. And they serve beer on board.

Ship go up, train go down

As a taste of things to come, note the graphics and signage on the modern ferry pictured above. The "BUGA" is the national German flower and garden show. It starts next week in Koblenz and I will drag my mom to it in May.

Ahrweiler

2011-03-28T13:23:00.000-07:00

This past Saturday we decided to get out of the city and explore the region a bit. We hopped on a train and went to Ahrweiler. This is up in the mountains to the south-west of Bonn; about half an hour by train.

Ahrweiler and its sister-town (Bad Neuenahr) are spa towns, with natural springs forming the basis for a whole medical industry based around the magical curative powers of the bubbly water that bubbles out of the ground, bubbling. The Appolinaris mineral-water company is located there. There is a spa and a water-slide-park for the young'uns.

It is an old, medieval walled city and we wandered around a bit. There is the obligatory cobblestone town square with a pointy church providing a picturesque backdrop for our hedonistic lifestyle. We had a so-so lunch in the sun (accompanied by some of the worst plonk I have sipped in decades) then wandered around some more. Meandering down a narrow cobblestone pedestrian street lined with cutesy shops, Christine and I both had the same brainwave: This is really boring. Can we go watch TV or something?

I am sure that we could have a great time there if we stayed in a fancy hotel and spent all day in the whirlpool. But it's hard to have much of an adventure with the little one along. Arianne was very well-behaved all day and did not cry on the train. But next weekend we are going to do something crazy-extreme. Probably involving cake and cappuccino.

Health care - part 2

2011-03-27T11:38:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I phoned a doctor's office to see about making an appointment. "How about today at 4?" was the answer. During the appointment I told the doctor that I have frozen shoulder, and she arranged for me to see a specialist two days hence. The specialist's office is a 2-minute bicycle ride from home. The young doctor was super-friendly, spoke great English, and gave me a cortisone shot right there and then. Also prescribed a half-dozen sessions with a physiotherapist, whose office is a 2-minute bicycle ride in another direction. The improvement in my shoulder over the past few weeks has been amazing. I still can`t raise my left arm sideways (at all), but there is no more pain, so I can sleep properly now. I saw the sports-medicine doctor again this past week, and although there's improvement, he is of the opinion that I won't ever get back to 100% functionality without an operation.

Contrast the speed at which this happened with my experience in Ottawa. Now, my doctor is good, and we had to determine if I did indeed have frozen shoulder, so that necessarily required an ultrasound and an x-ray. But the whole rigamarole in Canada is crazy: they can't do an ultrasound at my doctor's office, so I have to wait three weeks to go to a clinic on the other side of the city. Then another 3 weeks for the X-ray (which I should have booked at the same time). All this time the pain is getting worse and worse, and the disease is progressing. Finally I get to see my doctor, and the results are inconclusive. No cortisone, no pain medication. Just the possibility of seeing a specialist...in a few weeks. Way the heck out in Nepean. During rush-hour. Great, thanks.

Similarly, Christine had to have a minor operation 10 days ago. She was amazed at the continuity of care she encountered at the hospital. Three doctors were present for the initial exam, the pre-operative interview, and the post-operative debriefing. THE SAME THREE DOCTORS! In Canadian hospitals, doctors (actually, they are usually student interns) are part of "teams", and you never see the same face twice. This can't be good for the quality of care, as each one must ask you all over again whether you have any allergies, are on any medication, etc. You have to explain everything repeatedly and hope that some of that information is read by the next doctor whose shift you happen to fall into.

Christine also said that the food in the hospital was good (!). So although taxes are high, we are certainly benefitting from a first-rate medical system.

Okay, that's enough serious stuff. Back to pictures of castles and scenery.

Health care - part 1

2011-03-17T12:27:00.000-07:00

I am going to do a couple of posts about health care in Germany, comparing the situation here to how things work in Canada. Today, a look at the distinction between die apoteke and die pharmazie.

Back in Canada, a pharmacy (especially in recent years) has become a one-stop shop for all your vaguely personal needs. Shoppers Drug Mart now sells everything from cough drops to cameras. The big one near my house in Ottawa even has a post office, a photo-development lab, and a cell-phone shop under its roof. You can also get your prescription filled there.

On the other hand, here in Germany there are two types of what we would call "pharmacies", and their roles are quite distinct. At the pharmazie you can find shampoo and kleenex and that sort of bathroomy stuff (they even sell wine). But the apoteke only sells prescription drugs.

I went to the Burg Apoteke last Wednesday evening to get some pain killers for my shoulder. The place was empty except for two pharmacists. I didn't have to stand in line behind a bunch of old folks, and my prescription was filled in less than a minute. None of this "it'll be ready in half an hour" they give you back in Canada. The pharmacist explained (in English) how often I should take the pills, I paid a token 5-euro service fee (the pills themselves being covered by my health insurance). I didn`t even have to show my health-insurance card, as the bar-code on the doctor's prescription linked everything back to a central computer that magically keeps track of who pays what.

Interestingly, there are apoteke everywhere. Apparently Germans take a lot of pills, and the pharmacists here have a lot more leeway than those in Canada. I think you can just walk in to an apoteke, explain your condition, and the pharmacist will prescribe (and sell) something on the spot (although I am not sure if this is actually the case, so don't take my word for it).

And Christine noted that - oddly - for a country where people are so concerned with their health, there sure are a lot of smokers.

Somebody ought to do something!

2011-03-15T05:13:00.000-07:00

Remember how just a couple of weeks ago all eyes were on North Africa, and concern about the price of oil was again the subject of news items?

What I find really stupid is that every time the price of gasoline jumps, we get the same shortsighted "man on the street" interview on the 6 o'clock news. The last time was in 2008. Some young reporter would be sent to a gas station to stick a microphone in the yap of some random lumpenprole who was filling up his Canyonero ("It's a squirrel-squishing, deer-crushing driving machine."). Invariably, the interviewee would bemoan the price of gasoline, claiming that s/he could no longer feed his/her children: "Somebody ought to do something about the high price of gasoline!" they say. But not they themselves, of course. Take the bus? Are you kidding? I'm important!

The uprisings a few weeks ago in North Africa spooked the commodities markets, and soon enough the same reporters were going back to the same gas stations to get a sense of what the average person thinks about the run-up in prices now. Why they don't just use the tape from a few years ago is beyond me. Predictably, the same short-sighted whining is the common theme. "At the end of the month, once I have paid for the Blackberry, the cell phone, and the specialty High-Def cable channels, why...there's almost nothing let to feed the children!" And nobody does anything.

Actually, I am wrong: one time the debate did go further than simple belly-aching and "somebody" DID do something about it. In the summer of 2005 there were populist protests against the high price of gasoline in New Brunswick. Mostly it was truckers who were complaining that they could no longer make a decent living and that the government ought to do something (sick of hearing that yet?). They blocked a highway with their rigs. In response, the government of New Brunswick began regulating the price of gasoline to prevent wild fluctuations. In a sense it was a tax that moderated the ups and downs. Thus gas was cheaper in N.B. when it was more expensive in Nova Scotia, and conversely more expensive when prices fell.

The people went ballistic. How dare they pay more for gasoline when prices were low just so that they could pay less for gasoline when prices were high? Apparently what they really wanted but were unable to express coherently was for gasoline to cost less when prices were high...and also (get this!) to cost less when prices were low. They wanted water to run downhill AND ALSO uphill.

Why am I writing about this now? Well, the earthquake in Japan will put a crimp in their economic growth for a while. As a result, their demand for oil will be reduced (because oil is synonymous with economic growth: they are really the same thing. There is as yet no way to run an economy on pixie dust). This will in turn lower the cost of dinosaur-juice at your local Stop & Go. And suddenly everyone is happy. Yesterday's "pain at the pump" news item is forgotten. Nobody needs to do something about the high price of gas after all.

Until the next time there's a crisis in a goat-infested part of the world and the lazy house of Saud finds itself hanging onto their repressive dictatorship by a skillful use of repression. THEN somebody is going to have to do something. But not the person at the pump, and not now.

Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!

2011-03-10T09:15:00.000-08:00

Remember the future? We were going to have flying cars and robot servants and...MONORAILS! The following edumecational presentation from The Simpsons will explain it all:

Well it turns out that the future didn't turn out quite like that. Most people have trouble parking regular cars, so Fords in the sky are just going to kill everyone on their morning commute. But at least some of the wonderful technologies we were promised came true. Behold the monorail that sits behind the research centre down the street (where the big, bland cafeteria is).

It's a real, live monorail in the sky. It doesn't actually go anywhere mind you (that's the whole track you see right there). But it is really cool. Which is why Springfield bought one:

Just think: if Ottawa bought one, there would be no need to dig a tunnel under downtown. But knowing how poorly things turn out when a spineless city hall lets design-by-committee pander to NIMBYism, Ottawa would probably end up with the world's first elevated-yet-underground public transportation system.

All together now: "Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!"

Karneval!

2011-03-08T05:53:00.000-08:00

This past "weekend" (starting last Thursday and continuing into Monday) was Karneval here in North-Rhine-Westphalia. Although there were big parties and parades in Köln, we stayed close to home. There was a parade (umzug) in our little borough of Rungsdorff.

The overall theme is clown-military and this spoofing of army uniforms apparently goes back to the 19th century. There are floats pulled by tractors. People on the floats (dressed as clowns or princesses or whatever) toss candy to the spectators. This float is in the shape of the Bad Godesberg castle and is manned by the folks who work in the bakery around the corner.

One of the good costumes we saw was a "Canadian". Note the black eye, which makes it complete:

And finally, the piece de resistance and the cutest lil' monster...

That's all for now folks!

Word of the day

2011-03-01T08:45:00.000-08:00

I was listening to the news in German and was so proud of myself that I understood a bit of it. Then they used a phrase that contains 57 letters in only two words(!):

sozialversicherungspflichtigen Beschäftigungsverhältnissen

Which simply means "social insurance contributions conditions". Who makes these words up? These are such precise terms that you would never use them more than once in a lifetime. How would you get either word to fit into a single column in the dictionary?

Sometimes I despair of ever learning this language.

One Market Under God

2011-02-28T11:31:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you remember the economic crisis of 2008? The near-vapourization of all that electronic stuff we call "money" was narrowly averted one Sunday afternoon in New York when Hank Paulson bullied the major U.S. banks into a semi-nationalisation. Those tumultuous weeks in the fall of 2008 completely discredited the notion that the free market could regulate itself. France's president Nicolas Sarkozy famously said in a speech that Anglo-American economic leadership was dead. There is no "free hand" of the market. This was a golden opportunity for a reinvigourated Left to take the lead in shaping a more fair, stable economic system. But having themselves embraced free-market ideology over the past 20 years, (neo-)liberals have nothing to bring to the table. Indeed, the silence from the Left has been deafening.

So we are in a bizarre situation: a Left-leaning U.S. President hires neo-conservatives right off of Wall Street to fix the economic crisis. These former bankers and stockbrokers launch a massive Keynesian spending program (the most Lefty sort of Big-Gubmint socio-economic manipulation) to keep the economy ticking. Yet there has been no fundamental re-think of how this all works. Regulation of the financial markets has not been strengthened. The recent article in Rolling Stone asks rightly "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?". Yes, an example was made of the most outlandish Ponzi-schemer who has been locked up for 150 years*. But the rest of the Albanian-inspired** banking system remains unchanged.

The solution to the crisis in the financial sector is very confusing: Moneybags McScrooge doling out zillions of dollars (borrowed from the Chinese, BTW) so that Joe Six-Pack will keep buying stuff? Castro himself couldn't make this up. But if you look closely you will see that the money was borrowed against Joe Six-Pack's future earnings.

This all reminds me of a very insightful book I read over a decade ago. Thomas Frank's "One Market Under God" exposed the Faustian bargain of the investment-oriented economic system and drew parallels between Silicon Valley and the 19th-century coal and rail robber barons. He mocked those of us who were only too happy to give up (for some stock options in some dot-com) the social benefits that our grandparents, marching in the streets, had gained in the first decades of the 20th century.

The quiet dismantling of financial regulations has led to some of the most expensive financial debacles, starting with the Savings & Loan crisis of the late 80's. But this was all settled years ago. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, I guess.

* = for 10 points, can you name him? Last name begins with "M".

** = In the mid 1990s, Albanian society was caught up in a Ponzi frenzy the likes of which have not been seen since the Great Tulip Craze of 1637. One cannot blame the Albanian people, as decades of communist rule had left them innocent as to how money is made honestly. The entire society was almost fully invested in one pyramid racket or another: Generals, secretaries, and secretary-generals put all their savings in these 'sure-fire' paper companies. When the house of cards fell the country descended into chaos. The army deserted, the armories were looted and a nation of suddenly very poor people began shooting at stuff. It was in the news.

Redonkulously cute

2011-02-27T13:54:00.000-08:00

I know how boring it is when others push pictures of their darling offspring at you. But allow me this one indulgence. Arianne is 5 months old now (Sie haben funf monate) and is getting cuter by the day.

She's covered under my German medical insurance (from work), and got her second set of innoculations last week. There's a German/Canadian paediatrician about a 10 minute walk from here who lived/worked in Toronto. Like most professionals here she speaks perfect English. So at least that aspect of Arianne's care is exactly as it would be back home. She's in perfect health and hasn't been sick even for a day.

Sitting in the Bumbo

I am home alone with Arianne today and tomorrow while Christine is off to visit her friend in Brussels. We're having a great time just hanging out. She's even started to eat a bit of "solid" food (rice-powder-mush).

She gets her cheeks from me

It's Karnaval time at the office

2011-02-25T08:18:00.000-08:00

Strange sight in the lobby of my building yesterday: Bonn's Prince and Princess of Karnaval arrived for a visit. People who work in the medical offices on the other floors were all there for the party. There were balloons and streamers, apple juice in champagne glasses (it's an office party) and finger-food. Some folks were in costume and posed for pictures with me:

Of course, there is no actual royalty involved. The Prince & Princess are volunteers I guess, and they have an "army" of fieldmarshalls who are dressed like Banon Von Munchausen and who go from office party to office party spreading good cheer. The minivan behind the fieldmarshall says something about the "Washing Princes" (hence the line of hanging laundry)

This Karneval thing is not found in all parts of Germany. I gather that it's mostly the Western and Southern part of the country that celebrates it. Some of my colleagues who hail from other cities (Berlin) have themselves never seen a Karneval either and find the whole thing very silly.

The whole thing really takes place next Thursday (and for a few day thereafter). Apparently Köln (Cologne) is the scene of epic drunken debauchery. Our little neighbourhood is having a parade and children's costume contest which will be more our speed. We've got THE CUTEST outfit for Arianne.

Eine kleine maus in der Strasse

2011-02-14T05:48:00.000-08:00

A little mouse in the street.

I found this plump little fellow nibbling on a crust of bread on my return home one evening last week. It didn't seem to be the least bit concerned with my presence.

Windmill fashions

2011-02-12T03:23:00.000-08:00

One thing I find strange is the NIMBY-ism surrounding wind farms. People will swear up and down that they care about the environment, are recycling their garbage, etc., but as soon as some utility company wants to put one of those new-fangled twirlygigs on yonder hill to generate electricity, watch out. There's a hue and cry from the local populace and all the old bromides about bird-migration patterns and unspecified illnesses are used in protest against the new windmills. The local municipal or regional government gets dragged into an interminable series of public meetings, and compromises are made all around. Although people like the concept of green energy, I think they have simply decided that windmills do not fit with their vision of what the countryside should look like, and are therefore ugly. A local example of this is Wolfe island, near Kingston.

Claude Monet - Tulip fields with Windmill

And yet these same folks think that windmills of the old Dutch variety are pretty. Art collectors pay millions for Van Gogh's paintings of windmills. Even contemporary artists make a living painting bucolic scenes of ye olde windmille:

Peter Oldale - Windmill

Why the dichotomy? Why is it that old windmills are seen as more pastoral/rural/traditional/quaint, while new windmills are seen as techno-wizardry that is at odds with a "green" lifestyle? This is strange because high-tech and eco-conciousness are not at odds. The Toyota Prius is coveted by many who seek a "greener" lifestyle, and that is a highly complex product of 21st-century technology. Nobody shuns hybrid cars because they don't look like carriages, so why not view the modern windmill as equally picturesque as the impressionists did theirs?

Is this really so hideous?

Learning to speak German

2011-02-11T06:47:00.000-08:00

German is a neat language, and given the context, I can get the gist of things. More and more, I am finding that I can understand simple (written) sentences. My guess is that 15% of the words are similar to the English form (wasser = water), and another 10% are imported from French (Champignon = champignon) or another romance language. However, the remaining 75% of German words bear no similarity with any other form of human communication (Geschirrspulmittel = diswashing liquid). I found the first weeks here to be particularly frustrating because, contrary to a Mexican vacation, I can't bluff my way through simple interactions (Spanish is just like French, but with more flair). I can't even begin to put words together into a sentence yet.

So this past week I started taking German lessons. These courses are offered by the municipal Volkshochschule ("Folks High School").

The classes are after work two times per week (Zwei mal pro Wochen). The teacher is a multilingual retired geographer who is very patient with us. More importantly, he speaks slowly and is pleasant to listen to. Looking around the classroom, there are a couple of ladies from Chile, a young guy from Perth, Australia, and other bewildered immigrants (like me) from around the world. Although I can barely read a menu (oh, who cares? It's all sausage and cabbage anyways), I realize that I am fortunate to be young-ish and bilingual. Trying to learn another language gets harder as one gets older or when one has only ever known English is a bit of a handicap. As there's no homework or exam, I am enjoying the class.

Plus ça change...

2011-02-09T03:30:00.000-08:00

No doubt you remember that a couple of years ago there was a rash of car accidents involving Toyotas (oh, come on: you must remember! It was on the news every night for months. The 'news' is that show on TV before all the sit-coms start at 7). It seems that Priuses and Camrys were launching themselves of their own accord. The drivers claimed that they drove into a brick wall even though they tried to brake because the gas pedal got stuck.

Well the U.S. Dept of Transportation just released a report that got to the bottom of the issue. They actually borrowed rocket-scientists from NASA to work on the study (You see the space shuttle program is being wound down and now that the replacement rocket has been cancelled by Obama, I guess they have some time on their hands). The conclusion: dumb people were pressing the wrong (i.e. "gas") pedal.

The funny thing is that this is an exact repeat of what happened a quarter-century ago with Audis*. Now, as then, the government took pains to tip-toe around the real issue. You can't blame voters for doing something stupid. So they call it "pedal misapplication", a term brilliantly mocked by P.J. O'Rourke's review of the (original) sudden-acceleration hoax.

That's what this post is about. Others who remember both incidents have pointed out the irony of the same problem being papered over in the same way 20-some years apart. And thanks to P.J., it's as funny now as it was then.

* = You see, back in the 1980's the whole yuppie thing was in its infancy. There was no such thing as Lexus or Infinity, and there were no SUVs. So an up-and-coming stockbroker could only choose between a large American luxury car (which looks rediculous if one is wearing a pink Lacoste polo shirt) an a German import. So it was trendy to drive foreign. At the time Audi was not as upmarket as it is now, and specialized in 4-wheel drive rally cars. But they were less expensive than BMWs and Mercedes, and that lower price was correlated with the driving skills of some buyers.

Management of science

2011-02-08T08:56:00.000-08:00

Today I had a meeting at Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The DFG is the federal government's science-funding and science-policy department (Forschung means "research" and gemeinschaft means "company" or "organization"). They are just a few blocks East of here (and have the big cafeteria where we usually eat).

In any case, they fund iFQ so we meet with them from time to time. Unlike the NRC, they don't do any research themselves, so it is more like Canada's NSERC. In fact, they apparently signed an agreement with NSERC recently to encourage post-doc collaborations between Canada and Germany.

It is really nice to work in a place that values bibliometrics and which is interested in using the results of our work to shape German science. In contrast, while the NRC had heard of bibliometrics and was happy to give Montreal's Science-Metrix buckets of money for the simplest kind of citation-counting, there was never any awareness that it could be actively used to manage science more effectively. It seemed to serve the function of supplying numbers in order to bring some gravitas to reports.

Over on this side of the pond, while bibliometricians are not exactly thick on the ground, it is not uncommon for universities to have a staff bibliometrican. I doubt if there is a university in Canada that does the same thing, and as of three months ago, the NRC no longer has that sort of expertise.

My new Pegasus

2011-02-06T12:13:00.000-08:00

The cycling infrastructure here is fantastic. Many roads have bike lanes and there are bicycle-specific traffic lights at larger intersections. Moreover, the presence of cyclists on the road is respected and expected. It's not like in North America where a bicycle is an anomaly, and seen as intruding on the right-of-way of cars. The debates going on in Ottawa right now over the proposed bicycle lane on Laurier avenue simpy echo the stereotypical positions that haven't changed in thirty years. Cyclists want a bike lane that goes somewhere practical, not around some park. Business owners complain that there will be less parking. Motorists want the cyclists to get the hell off the road so that they can drive faster to the next red light.

It is so nice to ride in the city and not feel guilty for slowing traffic down or that I have to assert my presence to get a few feet of pavement. And I never feel that some pickup truck is going to run me over because they were posting a really important Tweet.

So while the tram is fine, for the past couple of weeks I have been riding the orange work-bicycle that belongs to the apartment. It is a single-speed with fat tires. Although slow, it has a certain presence and the 47mm tires really soak up the cobblestones. But this was only a temporary fix. This past Thursday I picked up my new bicycle! It's a Pegasus Premio SL, with 28 inch wheels and the full kit for city cycling. The price was right and it rides very nicely.

Jeff's new Pegasus - from Fun Bikes

It's actually hard to find a men's-frame bicycle that is set up for city cycling. There are city bikes, which have 7 or 8 speed internal gear hub (just like 3-speeds of yore). While this has some advantages in terms of reduced maintenance, I found the shifting to be very hesitant and clunky. The bikes with derailleurs are called touring bikes, and the ones with a men's frame always come equipped with straight, mountain-bike style handlebars. This forces the rider to lean forward, putting much weight on the hands. Completely impractical for riding in the city, but the style matches the Jack Wolfskin jacket that the rider is invariably wearing, so the effect is that they look like they could be going mountain-biking, and not actually to the grocery store. I got the shop to put on some regular bent handlebars and to raise them all the way up. It's such a beautiful city that it would be a shame to ride around staring at the pavement.

Art cars & pointy castles

2011-02-05T06:28:00.000-08:00

Okay, enough about the politics of work and how the NRC is mis-managing science. Here are some photos of neat stuff from the past week.

Last Saturday (January 29th), Christine, Arianne and I went for a stroll along the Rhine. Nice sunny day and I was able to get a good shot of the pointy castles on the other side of the river. Here you see the Drackenfels ruins (literally "Dragoncliffs") at the very top of the mountain, and a little further down is the Drachenburg palace, which is where Count Chocula lives (well, why not? The whole thing looks like something out of a J.R.R. Tolkien novel). I see these from the window of my apartment every day.

And on my way to work the other day I took a different route and came across these two old and tiny cars sitting there as objets d'art. I have no idea what either one is.

By the way, it is 10 degrees today. Overcast as usual but very warm. I have even seen potted flowers for sale at the hardware store near work: not in the garden centre/greenhouse, but out in the parking lot. I guess it must be spring.

Swinging from vine to vine

2011-02-03T11:36:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday, November 2 2010 I met with my boss at NRC's Central Business Support department. There was the usual awkwardness as the progress I reported on was undermined by shifting goals or missing data. Requests to find information somewhere 'on the computer' to support her latest tactic for departmental aggrandissement. And an offer of a permanent government job (only 17 more years until retirement!), with a signing deadline of Thursday.

On Wednesday, November 3rd 2010 I had an interview with iFQ via Skype. It went well and they asked how soon I could start.

On Thursday, November 4th, 2010 I received a job offer from iFQ. I met with the H-R ladies at NRC to discuss the technicalities of what severance benefits remained from the downsizing of CISTI (the burning ship from which I jumped a year previously).

On Friday, November 5th, 2010 I met with my boss and quit. And I accepted the offer from iFQ to work in Germany for at least a year. I had found a way out of the meaninglessness of bureaucracy.

This whole episode was stongly influenced by Christine. I remember that a couple of years ago she pointed out how retirement should not the goal of one's career. That she would rather work longer at an interesting job than to whittle away the years at an uninteresting one. That stuck with me. In regards to the whole burning-ship period, Christine encouraged me to quit the NRC and find a more fulfilling job. And most importantly, on the evening of Thursday, November 4th, she agreed to pack everything up and move to Germany for a year. This time abroad is all made possible by her adventurousness and support. That's only one of the reasons I love her.

The Stupidest Job

2011-02-01T08:42:00.000-08:00

Of all the jobs I have had, it was strangely the one that paid the most that was the stupidest. I have had some pretty menial jobs in the past (cleaning airplanes for Canadian Airlines), and more stressful ones (Copyright Librarian at CISTI). But for sheer pointlessness-per-dollar, being a Planning and Business Officer for NRC's Central Business Support (CBS) takes the cake.

On Mondays I would put on a tie and go to my beige cubicle with the goal of wrapping up the such-and-such report and making progress on the actual tracking of innovation. By Thursday of every week I would trudge home with the same thoughts looping through my mind: "How do I get out of this place"? Of course, I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth: the salary and benefits were great. I had zero commute. The NRC campus was a lovely place to go for a lunch-time run. All I had to do was push a mouse around and go to meetings (so many meetings).

Add all those things up and it becomes hard to leave. The years trickle by and before you know it, the cozy cubicle has become a trap: You are too old to find another job, but a decade or more from retirement. Quite a few of my colleagues were in that position. Counting the months, and years, with only one thought to justify all the pointless meetings: gotta hang on to that pension. Luckily my experience gave me options. Indeed, all three CBS employees who had MLIS degrees left within the first year (including me). We knew that this was a bizarre work environment and that we could find other jobs. The poor folks with MBAs were stuck: they had drunk the kool-aid and took these meetings seriously.

Projects were changed on a whim. Reports could never be finished because (A) we had no way of getting reliable data and (B) my micro-managing boss kept changing what she wanted. Although I am a published researcher and a bang-up programmer, it seems that I was being given ever-simpler tasks because I couldn't deliver on time (because the organization has no reliable data with which to work: every quarterly report took more than 3 months to complete because of the tooth-pulling required to get accurate numbers from such-and-such department). The twighlight zone of CBS was undermining my attempts to make any career headway. Was I really not capable of doing a simple report?

The NRC is sinking

2011-01-30T09:16:00.000-08:00

You may be wondering what I am doing here in Germany. The next few posts will describe the events that led up to this year in Bonn. I will try to keep a chipper tone, but some things can't be glossed over. I will get back to posting pictures of quaint things in a few days.

When the announcement was made in the spring of 2009 by the then-President of the NRC Pierre Coulombe that the budget of NRC-CISTI was to be cut by 70% starting in the 2010-11 fiscal year, I held out hope that that this would be more a "right-sizing" than a clumsy bloodletting. At the time, CISTI was largely staffed by aging Boomers who had hung around the place since the late 1970s. Some did great work and were open to new ideas. Others were biding their time and just wanted to keep doing the same routine for a few more years. A handful were blatant slackers who spent all day chatting and smoking on the loading dock. In short, it was a sizeable bureaucracy that I thought would benefit from some fat-trimming. Regardless of what I thought could be done to transform the cumbersome CISTI is another matter. This deep cut was emblematic of the NRC executives' shallow management. Having to find some tens of millions to save they chose to gut an easy target: the library. (Who needs it anyways? It's just a place to store books, right?)

Of course I also made backup plans. The day that the new org-chart was released in October of 2009 (with my name not on it, along with 200 others similarly pink-slipped), I also received a call from H-R that I had won the competition for the position of Business and Planning Officer. Same fantastic salary, different building, and a more high-level approach to the measurement of science. Now I would work at the head office of the NRC, ostensibly using innovation metrics to track the efficiency and performance of the NRC against similar organizations. To use a nautical metaphor, I walked the plank from a sinking ship onto a safe one.

Unfortunately what I found was a ship of fools.

Flitting from meeting to meeting, never having the time to read more than the executive summary of any report (no doubt because it won't fit on the screen of their BlackBerrys), the upper management did not seem to even be aware that there is an entire field of study on how to measure and manage innovation. They were under the gun to cut costs and were hampered by the Balkanized internal culture of the NRC in which each research institute is fiercely independent. Objective metrics of research performance be damned: How much money did we make?

The crazy thing is that we did not know. As the Planning and Business Officer, it was my job to liase with the Finance department and turn their numbers into pretty pie-charts for the bosses. You see, the NRC's Finance department and the vast computerized accounting system they use is designed to keep Treasury Board happy. It is of little use for internal management ("Who's our biggest client in Manitoba?" is almost impossible to answer). In the end, there was only one guy in Finance who knew how to generate accurate figures. Then he stopped answering my emails because the number of such questions from management is infinite.

You know it's time to quit when the daily Dilbert cartoon is an accurate reflection of the day to come.

Less than a year ago Pierre Coulombe was replaced by some guy well past retirement age...from Alberta. While he no doubt has plenty of qualifications, I am sure that Stephen Harper only asked how handy he is with an axe. During my final month at the NRC, 'Paul Bunyan' commanded the executive to develop a new research strategy for the NRC that fit into 6 hot-topic "themes", and to do it all in 3 weeks.

Now by this point I had grown accustomed to being re-assigned to "top priority" projects every couple of weeks because my boss suffered from ADHD. But to see the entire upper management drop everything and launch a frantic series of meetings was something else. Vice-Presidents with careers spanning 30 years pulling all-nighters. Directors-General trying to invent some scheme that would save their institute. Nobody but me seemed to see the absurdity of the task: to select research projects based on how much money they will earn "for Canada" at some point in the future. Besides the vague parameters of the question, the underlying premise that one can predict how much money one will make in industries that do not yet exist based on research that has yet to be done is a feat of divination based on a foundation of guesswork, all performed in the dark.

I began to detect the strong odour of smoke once again coming from the forecastle.

Now...where's that plank?

Niedrigwasser

2011-01-24T22:45:00.000-08:00

Just a short post today. I'm working on a more extensive series of posts that will explain how I got here and what I am doing. It was a rainy weekend but we went for a walk by the Rhine anyways. Remember that a couple of weeks ago the river had risen over its banks and had caused some flooding? There was a picture of a sign saying "HOCHWASSER". Well, here is another photo taken from the same spot. You will see the boats are much lower now and the little beer-garden is open for business.

Christine got to ride the big orange bike. It ain't fast, but with 28-inch wheels and high handlebars, it's got a regal ride.

Karnaval on TV

2011-01-22T12:51:00.000-08:00

I am not even going to try to explain what is going on on my TV because I don't understand it myself. First some background: Sometime in February (specifically calculated as some day before some Special Tuesday in the Christian calendar) many cities in Germany celebrate something with a Karneval (which means "Carnival", Einstein). This may have something to do with Mardi Gras, although I did not realize that that particular Tuesday also occurred in Europe (what with daylight savings and all).

Although we are still in January, it seems that preparations for this time-honoured tradition in which Germans pretend they are in New Orleans have already started. There is some strange ceremony on TV right now in which the folks on stage are dressed like the Jack of Diamonds:

Everyone is handing the microphones back and forth, declaring the start of festivities, etc. The audience/banquet-crowd of old people stands and claps. I swear I could be in Japan and would understand more. Anyways, this festival is called "Fashing" in some parts of Germany and "Karneval" in others (Big schism between those who call it one and not the other, apparently). My colleagues poo-poo the Bonn Karneval as being too prim & proper and encourage me to see the "real" one in Koln with its full-on debauchery. Everyone dresses up in a costume and participates in assorted revelry. There may be beer involved.

Corporate food

2011-01-20T12:46:00.000-08:00

Most days a bunch of us from iFQ walk down the street to the Wissenschaftzentrum (Research centre) for lunch.

I am not entirely sure what goes on there: it has variously been explained to me as a conference centre as well as a quasi-governmental science-funding body (like NSERC in Canada). Anyways, it has a big cafeteria. It's the closest, cheapest place to eat. I noticed on only my second time there that the cafeteria is run by...

You have probably never heard of this company, but it is one of the largest food-solution providers in the world. They run the kitchens for the US Marines. They are currently providing sustenance for the entire Paris-Dakar race event (which, for reasons I won't get into, does not run between Paris and Dakar). And they used to run the cafeterias at the NRC back in Ottawa.* The funny thing is that despite the fact Sodexo is a French company, it produces some very bland food. Everything else about it is great: It is efficiently prepared, with both a protein and a starchy item to provide a nutritionally balanced meal. The menu varies from day to day, and it certainly reads well (as much as I can understand the German ingredients). Yet it lacks flavour just as the food back at the old NRC did. Amazing how a corporation can engineer freshly-prepared food to taste the same all around the world.

* = Before the bean-counters found an even cheaper company to feed us. Gone were the salads and varied menus of a multi-national. Replaced by well-meaning, but mentally-challenged burger-flippers who grudgingly offered an assortment of oily muffins and mystery meat.

Jack Reimec

2011-01-19T05:54:00.000-08:00

In the US they have REI, in Westboro the Bridgeheads are full of yuppies decked out in MEC wear. In Quebec hipsters on the Plateau must wear a Kanuk coat to be correctly fashionable. Here in Germany, it's all Jack Wolfskin. The logo is omnipresent on backpacks, winter coats, and fleece pullovers. The paw print really makes it clear that you know how to get dirty.

It strikes me as a rediculous name, conceived to leverage a stereotype of what an outdoorsy person should be called. Sort of like the ubiquitous faux-Irish pubs (Grace O'Malley's, D'Arcy McGee's, etc. Taken to its logical extreme, why not open one called Micky O'McMickey's ?). Despite this being the most pleasant, orderly, and clean country I have ever visited, many people on the tram are dressed as if they are preparing for a weekend of camping in the (probably very clean) forest.

Bike to work day

2011-01-18T11:59:00.000-08:00

Today I bicycled to work. The apartment/hotel where I am staying has a pair of orange single-speed workhorses for residents to use. It is even quicker than taking the tram. The ride home only took 10 minutes.

Here I am behind the building in which I work.

And here is some fun graffiti on the way to work. It is rare to find decent graffiti that displays a bit of creativity. The rest of the urban surfaces are covered in scribbled tags.

Vibración

2011-01-17T07:55:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we went to the Bundeskunsthalle ("Federal art hall") to check out an exhibit of 20th-century Latin American art.

The exhibit is a selection from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection and covers modernist art from the 1930s up to the 70s. It is the kind of art I grew up looking at as a kid in Montreal, so I am familiar with the styles and evolution of the genre. I particularly liked the sculpture and some of the works that employed moiré visual-effects.

It was another lovely day. We took the bus past the large Rheinaue park that stretches halfway down the West bank of the river. Tons of people were out enjoying the sunny day, walking their dogs, riding bicycles, etc. At the back of the bus a Bonn resident was doing the tour-guide thing for a visiting friend and described how "in the winter, there is a skating rink in the park where many people like to skate". Christine and I have heard this old yarn a few times now and just rolled our eyes. Yes, yes; the winter (which must be quite harsh by all accounts) is coming any time now. But yesterday nobody was wearing gloves or hats. I even saw a guy in a T-shirt.

That being said, there was in fact a small outdoor artificial rink next to the art gallery (which must have been cooled by a small nuclear plant) and it was packed with (mostly young) folks going around in circles.

Habla Espanol!

2011-01-16T00:39:00.000-08:00

One of the advantages of where we are living is that there are several places to eat within walking distance. Having already sampled the delicacies at Hallo Pizza! in the past, we went out for dinner yesterday evening at a real restaurant:

Nice little place, friendly staff, good house wine, etc. Plus, get this: they speak Spanish! What a treat to be able to communicate in a foreign language again (why couldn't I have found a job in Spain?). I had a delicious garlic-chicken dish. Christine had some eggplant tapas thingy. Arianne sat quietly in her stroller and looked around from behind her massive cheeks.

One thing I noticed that I thought was a little strange is that dogs are permitted in restaurants here. This would contravene every health & safety regulation in Canada, of course. Anyways, the dog was well-behaved.

Max Planck

2011-01-14T10:18:00.000-08:00

Photo taken on January 8th. Note the lack of snow and the preponderance of dried leaves. Sheesh: and they call this winter.

Anyways, the sign next to the door indicates that this is the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics. The Max Planck institutes are a collection of a couple of dozen research labs in a range of hard sciences under the common Max Planck banner (he was a German physicist). Although some labs in the Max Planck 'consortium' are more prestigous than others, the organization is one of the major scientific forces in the world. I have read many academic papers written by folks at the Max Planck Instutute for Physics (which is located in a different city). So while it is not really the same thing, it's interesting by affiliation.

Sparkasse

2011-01-14T07:29:00.000-08:00

This morning Christine and I each opened an account ("konto") at a local bank. Thankfuly a couple of young people there spoke English. I have no idea what I signed, but then again the fine print for opening a bank account back in Canada would be just as boring and confusing, so it doesn't really matter.

Although they have branches and ATMs all over the place, this is the actual branch we used. The only slightly strange thing is that you still get an account book (really just an empty cardboard folder) in which you keep all the paper bank-receipts and printouts.

Hochwasser in Rhine-Westphalia

2011-01-10T08:21:00.000-08:00

"Hoch" means "high" and "wasser" means "water", so "Highwater".

The heavy snow before Christmas and the warm weather (and rain) of the past few days have swelled the Rhine. The water has risen so much that the road and bike path is completely submerged. The boats are floating way higher than their usual moorings (I think the gang-planks usually slope down). Christine's favourite café is in the arched door at the right, and that's flooded too. Nothing that affects us, but it's neat to walk down to the river and see what all the fuss on the news is about.

Strolling in Bonn on Saturday

2011-01-08T09:10:00.000-08:00

Here's us in front of the statue of Beethoven. He was born a few blocks away in 1770. Note the small white thing on the grass at lower-right: that's a flower, happily growing away in January. Today was about +9 degrees and sunny. Lots of folks strolling around.

Typical houses in the market area. Shops on the first floor selling all sorts of stuff.

Another square: the building has been decorated to look like a giant gingerbread house as part of the Christmas festivities (hence the large Christmas tree as well). I bought a nice shirt at H&M and we went for lunch at a typical German guesthouse/hotel. Thankfully the waiter was from California and we could order food with no surprises. Little Arianne was the centre of attention with her big googly eyes attracting warm smiles from passerby.

Free tickets!

2011-01-07T07:04:00.000-08:00

This morning I went to the Rathaus (it means "House of rats")* to register as a resident. Apparently in continental Europe one must register as a resident of a town or city - you can't just move around unannounced (Of course in the U.K. this is not necessary as there are cameras all over the place, watching your every move). Registering has some advantages for census and taxation purposes, but it does seem like an intrusion of privacy.

After interacting with a fat clerical worker for a few minutes (and by 'interacting', I mean staring blankly after not understanding a thing she said), I was re-directed to the Bürgeramt ("Pit of hamburgers")§. Things went smoothly as they spoke English (or else I would still be there trying to read the forms) and 15 minutes later I was done.

As a welcome present, City Hall gave me three booklets (Christine and Arianne get one too) of free passes to galleries, theatres, concerts, guided tours, and museums. In all, each booklet contains 400 Euros worth of culture!

Although 1200 Euros of free events is a wonderful welcome, I am a bit disappointed that it contains no coupon for a visit to the Pit of Hamburgers.

* = Kidding, kidding! It really means "City Hall".

§ = "Citizen's office" - almost fooled you that time!

Köln streetscene - bicycle and dogs

2011-01-07T03:09:00.000-08:00

This fellow came to the café in Köln to get a coffee and pastry. His dogs waited patiently outside for a while and then wandered in to see what was taking so long. Maybe they wanted a pastry too.

The pedestrian street is part of a network that stretch for at least a kilometer. It is lined with shops of every sort. When I was there the last couple of days in December, the street was absolutely packed with people wandering around and shopping. Although I wouldn't want to navigate such crowds every day, it was great to be part of a social environment. Back in Ottawa the only time I would be part of such a crowd is in the checkout lines at Loblaws - then it's back in the car to stare at the bumper of the large pickup-truck in front of me (or - in the mirror - the one right behind me). Here there are people walking around, riding bicycles, etc. - even though it is cold and dark outside. Springtime should really bring the streets to life.

TWENTY CENTS?!

2011-01-06T07:30:00.000-08:00

It has only been a week but Christine and I have located the local grociery stores and bakeries as required for provisions. Although the stores are quite small, the price of staples is very low. Milk, sugar, and other basics like eggs are rediculously inexpensive (I think I paid 0,29 euros for a kilo of sugar the other day - about 40 Canadian cents).

The most welcome surprise is that beer is also a food-staple. This half-litre can of Pilsener was only 0,39 euros (50 cents) - and that INCLUDES a 0,25 euro deposit for the can (At least I assume that's what "Gerwentzelstreiffenshaftsunderloshlüng" means. Could be mistaken.). So the beer itself cost me 0,14 euros (maybe 19 Canadian cents). That is just an unbelievable enticement to spend all day in the park guzzling suds and throwing empties at the pigeons (no - wait: two empties gets you a free beer).

And yet, strangely, nobody does that.

Kennedyallee

2011-01-05T04:42:00.000-08:00

Statue of JFK in front of the iFQ building

The office building in which I work is located at the corner of Godesberger Allee and Kennedyallee. There is a statue of JFK on the corner. My office is on the 6th floor (second row from the top), and is seen here at the far end of the row of windows.

Getting to work is a snap: I walk through the very posh neighbourhood of Bad Godesberg to the train/subway station, then take the tram three stops. It's fast and inexpensive. The tram stops right in front of the statue of JFK.

Bad Godesberg train station

Bad Godesberg Tower

2011-01-03T12:57:00.000-08:00


The view to the South from the iFQ coffee room.

The view from the sixth floor of the iFQ offices. Winter is pretty mild here (damp and cloudy). A sprinkling of slushy snow fell overnight and gave the place a few touches of white.

Bad Godesberg tower

Today was my first day at the office. Everyone is very nice and the facilities are top-notch. It is great to be back in a research environment where people are motivated by ideas. Considering that my last job was in a beige cubicle, it is quite a treat to see a castle from the office window!

2011-01-02T14:11:00.000-08:00

We took a high-speed train like this one from the Frankfurt airport to Cologne. It's as sleek inside as it is on the outside. A screen at the end of each wagon displays the next stop, time, and speed: I saw 194 km/h!

People have been talking about a high-speed train from Windsor to Quebec City for decades, but have made no progress. The biggest technical problem is not the snow, but that it would have to cross a provincial boundary, you see.

2011-01-01T10:17:00.000-08:00

A bateau-mouche on the Rhine getting ready to host a New Year's Eve 2010 party. The train bridge is in the background. (Photo taken with my little Olympus u-5010 using a tripod and quarter-second exposure).

2011-01-01T09:58:00.000-08:00

On the plane (an Air Canada Boeing 767) to Frankfurt. Arianne (AKA "Peanut") was fine most of the way but had a meltdown about an hour into the flight. Daddy made everything better. We have been really lucky: nobody caught a cold in the lead-up to the flight, and Peanut didn't have any problems with ear-pressurization.

2011-01-01T09:44:00.000-08:00

The Dom cathedral in Koln (Cologne) seen on New Year's Eve 2010. Took 600 years to build it. From an architechtural point of view, I can best summarize the Dom as being both "big" as well as "very pointy". Our hotel is at the left.

Arrived in Bad Godesborg

2011-01-01T09:07:00.001-08:00

Well, Christine, Arianne and I have arrived safely in Bad Godesborg (a swish suburb of Bonn). Just getting settled in, but it looks like everything is going to be fine. We`re staying at the Bonnhouse apartments for the next couple of months and maybe longer (you can see it at www.bonnhouse.de).

We`re a block west of the Rhine river in a neighbourhood that used to be full of embassies (when Bonn was the capital of Germany). Now the embassies are gone but the restaurants and cafes remain. There`s a pizza shop just up the street and I`ll use some of my excellent German skills there tomorrow ("Ein pizza, por favor!").

That`s all for now. Picutres coming soon.
-Jeffrey

Damn, that's HOT!

2007-01-17T00:47:00.000-08:00

So I understand that Eastern Canada is now actually getting some real winter after a green Christmas slid into an unusually warm January. Well, we've been having some unusual weather here as well. Every Queenslander I've met has remarked on how cool the summer has been so far, with highs of only 25 or 26 around Christmas (real hardship, eh?). This is actually a good thing, as it's supposed to be insanely hot, so cooler temperatures are actually welcome.

But who cares about the weather? It's the same whining you've heard a million times: it's always either too hot or too cold. What is exceptional, however, is the UV radiation. Today the UV index was 13, which really wasn't that bad. Note that these numbers are on the same scale as that used in Canada. However, back in Ottawa, people are warned to put on sunscreen and avoid going outside when the UV index is "very high" at 8. Hah! That's nothng: here the sun gives us an 8 at dawn, then proceeds to climb into the "extreme" range (anything over 11) before one gets to work. The UV alert for extreme radiation for today ran from 7:40 AM to 4:00 PM. As the sun sets at 6:30, that's effectively the whole day. It's so intense that you actually feel the light on your skin. And I don't mean "Gee, the sun is nice and warm." It actually feels like it's biting into your shoulders. Most days the index is 15, and futher north on the Sunshine Coast I've seen readings of 16! That's twice the level of UV as one would experience on a hot summer day in Canada (if the index is linear; I can't fathom what it would mean if the scale was logarithmic).

Any sort of physical activity must be done very early in the day. I've seen retired folks on the tennis courts at 6AM because by 8 it's just way too hot for any sport. So I wear a big hat and sunscreen.