Letters from Lausanne

Drawing and painting

2011-11-21T13:32:00.001+01:00

Two recent works I did in my drawing course:

The first is a quick sketch: the assignment was an old clown with one leg, holding an axe. I drew this without any references in about one hour, and am quite happy about it, even though I got some of the anatomy in the shoulder of my one-legged clown wrong. I do like his expression though, which is the exact level of grumpiness I was going for...

The second took me probably about 8-10 hours. The assignment was to paint a woman with child. My first try with Colorex watercolour ink, which I hate, hate, hate. It looks like watercolour, but behaves differently enough that I was fighting with it the whole time. You can tell that I started with the left leg of the woman, it is just awful.

I restricted my palette to Marine blue, turtle gray, natural sienna and Sanguine - my first time painting with a restricted palette, and I liked it very much. Last time I am using Colorex for the foreseeable future, though.

Post - apocalyptic swans

2011-10-24T18:16:00.001+01:00

From my photo archives. Playing with Vignette on the train, trying out a few filters. Too kitschy?

Public service announcement

2011-09-30T14:12:00.004+01:00

If you happen to use floats from the NumPy-module in your python program instead of the built-in floats (by, say, using a function like a Savitzky-Golay filter a kind soul has posted on the net instead of writing your own), your program will run 5 times slower: See also here.
Took me quuiiiite some time to find this out...

Socks

2011-09-28T07:26:00.001+01:00

Socks drive me crazy. I try to avoid them whenever I can, but now that I am gainfully employed, and in the clean-room almost every day, I can't just show up in thongs anymore. Oh heady days of academia!
Well, my pitiful pile of socks consisted of about six mismatched pairs, with variously sized holes in them, in differing shades of faded black. But no more! Behold, the solution of my sock problems: I ordered a motherload of the slippery little devils from the sock-shop. And not just any old kind of sock, but nifty embroidered dragon socks. Dragon socks! It bears repeating. Having thrown out all other socks, I will never again be afflicted by mismatched pairs, and if my girlfriend steals some, I shall know. Equally I shall notice if I take some of hers, for while the size difference of six whole points has been proven insufficient in the past, the lack of dragons will tell in the future. I hope. The sockless girlfriend is a terrifying thing...

Bio-terrorist

2011-09-09T07:55:00.003+01:00

This is either a bio-terrorist, or me after a holiday, in the clean-room of the company I now work for. Yes, it's true - I have sold my soul to the industry. More to follow.

Bollocks to this...

2011-08-13T18:16:00.001+01:00

... I am off to Croatia for two weeks, with the lovely F. Blogging will resume after we are back, dammit.

Bollocks to this...

2011-06-19T15:40:00.001+01:00

...I am off to Rome, with the fabulous F. Oh frabjous day!

Well, actually we already traipsed all over Rome today... Stupid bigger for droid didn't want to post this yesterday.

Wizarding propaganda

2011-05-30T09:35:00.023+01:00

Some time ago I painted a propaganda poster for the House Elf Liberation Front (HELF). Reading J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, I have always thought that house elves were a demographic ripe for revolutionary thought - all they needed was a charismatic leader, and the woe onto wizarding kind!

Now I have made another propaganda poster - the time is a few years after the (successful) house elf revolution. Witches and wizards chafe under the draconian rule of the house elves, and counter-revolutionary sentiments run high. Long-held pure-blood prejudices are thrown overboard as open warfare breaks out in Diagon Alley once more...

The drawing is 4B pencil on A4 printer paper, with colours and writing added in photoshop.

Golden 10 minutes

2011-05-20T10:33:00.001+01:00

Photographers talk about the "golden hour", the first hour after dawn, and the last hour before sunset. In this light, nearly any subject will look good - and the closer to sunrise/sunset you are, the better:

Apartment blocks in Lausanne, 10 minutes before sunset.

I took the photo with my Nexus S, and added some vignetting with the appropriately named app "Vignette".

Filter removal

2011-05-12T13:15:00.000+01:00

Shortly after Christmas I fell, while heroically chasing a suspected fox through the icy steppes of Kaltenleutgeben, Austria. Even though I tried to throw myself under my DSLR, the UV-filter I had put on my EFS 18-200 mm full-range-zoom broke:

But it did its job, i.e. protecting the lens. I subsequently removed the broken glass, but was unable to unscrew the filter ring afterwards. Applying pincers deformed the ring a little bit, so I stopped, leery of damaging my lens. The ring did not stop the lens from working, after all, except that I could not affix another filter.

Filter ring with pincer marks

Last week I finally went to the local photography store, where a very helpful girl told me that they'd only send the lens to Canon, anyway. Since I have recently purchased a circular polarizing filter, I was determined to get the ring off soon, and on my own.

I needed to apply force to the ring without deforming it, so I took it to the drill press and drilled two 2 mm holes in it. Tense moments there, as a slip could mean scratching the lens.

Holes drilled, it was a simple thing to insert a screwdriver through them, twist, and voilà:

Filter ring with screwdriver inserted through hole.

Removed filter ring!

Now I am off to take some polarising photos ;)

Beautiful Photovoltaics

2011-05-08T09:30:00.001+01:00

Sunset over photovoltaics, in Lausanne, pont chauderon

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.8

Installing a new car radio

2011-05-03T14:54:00.000+01:00

I got fed up with the very bad error-handling of the CD player in my Mitsubishi Colt, and decided to invest in a modern car radio, capable of playing music from USB sticks. I bought a Pioneer DEH-2200UB, and proceeded to install it, which I made more complicated than I had assumed it would be.

While popping of the front panel and uninstalling the old radio was not very hard

the new radio and the old radio did have two totally different connectors. Of course. I could have gotten and adapter, probably, but I wanted to try out my new radio now, dammit. So I had a look at the pin-outs of the two radios, snipped off the wires and connected them individually.

Against all common sense, I did not make any mistakes, and the radio lit up the second I turned the key. Lit up in a good , glowing-led sense, not in the bad, smoke-producing sense.

Who would have thought that automotive electronics would prove so simple?
By the way, those micro-SD stub USB key thingies (in white in the photo below) are perfect for the USB aux port of your car radio, I bought two 4 gb ones for 12 CHF each, more than enough space for music, and they are so small I won't accidentally rip them out of the radio by brushing against them.

Now I wonder how difficult it would be to install a keyless entry-thing on my own?

Aborted try for the Lac de Fully

2011-05-01T14:00:00.004+01:00

The day after our trip to Derborance the girlfriend and I got more ambitious, and decided to try for the Lac Supérieur de Fully, or even the circumnavigation of le Châtelard. But on ascending to our chosen starting point, L'Erié, we were foiled by the very forces of nature:

Snow-drifts at 1600 metres, blocking the road. We decided to enter the ravine you see in the photo above to the right, and make for Lui d'Août, with a thought of continuing around the mountain if feasible. Here is me trying to find our way on the map

Alas, it was not. I had packed all the right equipment, of course: Small gas cooker, blanket and food, as well as the right shoes

Ahem. After traversing several, extremely cold snow-fields we arrived at the refuge at Lui d'Août, but I had forgotten the coffee, so my girlfriend succumbed to sleep

and my energy-levels were not much better. We sipped some hot milk (condensed milk with hot water, not too bad actually), and then turned back, following another path along the mountainside to L'Erié. You can see our path to the right of the photo below:

this path is part of the way around the Châtelard, and it provides extremely nice views - we'll definitely come back in a month or so.

GPS-track:

Lousine - Lui d'Août - L'Erié at EveryTrail

Mario and Luigi

2011-04-30T14:21:00.001+01:00

live in Lausanne, Switzerland. Either that, or we have a sudden (and well-hidden) infestation of turtles.

Corner Avenue Bergières, Avenue de Beaulieu, Lausanne

That is all.

Dallying in Derborance

2011-04-29T14:00:00.001+01:00

Last week the fabulous F. and I went for a wee walk just south of the Diablerets, from Derborance to the barrage at Goedy and back. A very pleasant and not too long walk, it still had me puffing, but it wasn't too bad considering I had had 39 °C of fever three days before. Here is the GPS-track for your enjoyment:

Derborance - La Lui - Godey at EveryTrail

I am happy to say that the Nexus S is much better at conserving battery power while tracking than the iPhone 3G - after 4 hours I still had three quarters of power left.

Finally, here are some photos:

View near La Lui Dessous

Near Cirith Ungol

Spring is definitely here

Nexus S

2011-04-27T12:04:00.000+01:00

I have had my Nexus S for more than two months now - I got fed up with the iPhone 3G's slooooowness, and did not want to pay through my nose for the technologically already outdated iPhone 4. After a bit of research I decided to take the plunge and go Android.

Recursion

Now that I have used the thing for a while, here are my impressions. First, the good stuff:

zippedy-zippedy fast. This has mostly to do with the faster processor, and the fact that Apple doesn't give a shit about your old hardware when they update the OS.
no iTunes anymore on my PC. This sounds silly, but I swear I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I deleted that particular piece of crap software from my computer. How Apple think they can convince people to switch over to using their software and hardware when such an integral part of their user experience for windows-users is the worst #$%$ piece of crap software ever is beyond me. So long, iTunes, long may it be before I see your slow ass again.
Every setting accessible. I had jailbroken my iPhone, and was all set up to root the Nexus S, but there is really no need if you don't want to run a custom ROM. You can change nearly anything in the settings, and if you can't, there is an app that does it for you. I am currently using Swype as input method, for example, and got rid of the annoying and unnecessary fake shutter noise of the camera via the app silentSnap.
Multitasking. Handled excellently, and without burning resources needlessly.

But all is not flowers and buttercups in Android garden. There are some things that Apple is just better at:

Systems integration. This is a biggy. Apples iOS is really the smoother operating and eco-system. From the centralised App-settings to the way Apps play nice with each other, iOS just works. For example, in Android you can choose your music player, podcast-player etc. So far so good, but then try and controll your music with the button on your headphones? Disaster. I like to listen to podcasts on my bike, but if I try pausing them, random music from winamp will start up - or nothing will happen. There is, as far as I can see, no real policy for how various apps can hand off control over the headphone button, so it is a matter of luck, or rather the current specific state of the phone, including which apps are suspended/running/still in memory. Urgh.
The music player. Apples iPhone evolved out of the iPod, and it shows. This thing is made to play music, and simply better at it than anything Android currently has to offer.
Simplicity of use. Apple's iOS, by virtue of being less capable, is also simpler to use. The difference is not large, but noticeable - Android will use a bit more of your brainpower until you are used to it.

Aaand that's it. All in all, I much prefer my Nexus S to the iPhone 3G, even back when the 3G wasn't running 3.1.3 and slow as hell. Still, I don't have a direct comparison to the iPhone 4, so I can't really recommend dumping that one for an Android in good conscience. I am happy with the Nexus, but maybe I'd be happy with an iPhone 4 too? Yet... No. iTunes. Any. More. Ever. ;)

The reason for the recent silence on this blog...

2011-04-20T18:24:00.000+01:00

tl;dr: bla bla bla plasma bla.

my thesis, in nonuplicate. A hundred and sixteen pages long, including the French (the horror!) abstract. May the gods of academia, i.e. the experts judging it, be merciful to it.

Faux Yogi Biscuits

2011-03-31T08:49:00.000+01:00

The following recipe is, and I have this on good authority, extraordinarily healthy. It will make you live longer, happier, increase you jump height and your performance in bed. It will also help you lie better, c.f. the above.

If you are ambitious, you will of course want to make 'real' yogi biscuits, not faux yogi biscuits. Very well. That recipe is even simpler: First, go and catch yourself a yogi. They like to hang out near Buddhist or Hinduist temples, just follow the smell of incense. Rap the yogi smartly on the head - they generally do not put up a great struggle, as they are all vegan and hence very weak. Drag him home and grind him up. Add a bit of sesame if you want to, a dash of honey and put him in the oven.

Unfortunately, yogis are increasingly hard to come by here in Switzerland, probably due to overhunting by eager yogi-biscuit makers. Luckily my friend K. gave me the following faux yogi biscuit recipe, handed down in her family for generations:

You'll need:

*) 250 g of butter
*) 3/4 of a cup of sugar (brown, my girlfriend insists)
*) 3 cups of oat flakes
*) 2 cups of whole grain flour
*) 1/2 a cup of awesome grains or nuts. (Sunflower, sesame, almonds, walnuts, go nuts)
*) 1/2 a cup of raisins, soaked in water over night
*) 1 tsp of cinnamon
*) 1/4 tsp of salt or NaHCO₃ (baking soda)
*) pinch of powdered clove and ginger (the plant, not red-haired people without souls)

Preheat oven to 200°C.
Heat the butter in a water bath until liquid, then dissolve the sugar in it. Mix all the other ingredients in a bowl. Add the butter and stir. If its too dry, add a bit of warm water, the dough should stay fairly viscous, though. Use the lid of a nutella jar or something similar to form the cookies on a baking tray. Shove into the oven, and bake for about 20 minutes.
The biscuits will taste best after two or three days.

Green

2011-03-28T09:42:00.000+01:00

My sofa always had a white cover - until last weekend, when I decided to wash it at 95 °C, together with my green rug. The result:

A really pleasant mint green. Serendipity!

Ugh. News.

2011-03-25T16:07:00.000+01:00

The reporting about the Fukushima nuclear incident following the earthquake in Japan has been nothing short of atrocious. Even the BBC, normally my go-to place for serious world news, succumbed to inept comparisons with Chernobyl, gibbering headlines about 'melt-downs' and 'radioactive drinking water'.

Der Standard, a normally quite serious Austrian newspaper (with the best online-presence by far) even gobbled excitedly about a 'Super-GAU' - GAU is a german acronym for grösster anzunehmender Unfall, or worst-case scenario.

And on Wednesday this:

20minutes is a Swiss free-of-cost newspaper, so no aspirations of quality here, but still: The headline screams 'Le nuage radioactif passe sur la suisse', or 'Radioaktive cloud passing above Switzerland'. True, they do say (on page 2) that the radioactivity poses no danger to anybody in Switzerland, but still. Can you imagine a more lurid and sensational headline? Is a bit of journalistic integrity too much to ask for?

Forced to draw cute

2011-03-22T16:09:00.000+01:00

Sigh. I was accused of only producing dark and gloomy work in my drawing-course. Of course I protested that this wasn't true, but couldn't point to any recent non-gloomy work quickly enough. Therefore I was condemned to paint something 'cute'; more specifically, in the words of my teacher: "A princess. Riding on a dolphin. And the dolphin is smiling."

Hence the above. I also tried out water-soluble crayons for the first time, and am not too impressed. I think I prefer straight-up watercolour.
I am not at all happy with the sky - I am beginning to think that clouds may be my nemesis. Whatever I draw next (hopefully I am done with 'cute'...) will have to have some clouds in it, because clearly I need the practice.

Water-soluble pencils on 300 gsm A3 aquarelle-paper.

Motivational Poster

2011-03-16T13:27:00.000+01:00

F. and I are both big fans of Cannibal: The Musical, so I made her a motivational poster the other day, to get her through a long day of meetings.

On a completely related note, the camera of the Nexus S is fabulous.

Rye bread

2011-03-15T10:47:00.001+01:00

They don't know how to make bread in western Switzerland. It's all fluffy baguette and croissants - nice on a Saturday morning with du café and a pretty lady in your bed, but nothing you can really subsist on - not the wonderful, heavy and dark bread we have in Austria. So, after my success with the lazy-man's loaf, I decided to make my own.

First thing you'll need is a proper sourdough, since a 100% rye-bread won't rise properly on yeast (I know, for I have tried!). For the past two weeks I have been feeding my sourdough starter - I started from scratch with viscous paste of rye flour and water. My first attempt turned bad, but the second:

A sourdough starter. Each day I would feed it a few spoonfuls of rye flour and water, which it greedily devoured.

After two weeks its rising power convinced me, so I fed it up to about half a kg, made a very wet rye dough ( the starter, about 500g more rye flour, some salt, ground coriander and water). I let it rise for three hours, shoved it into the oven, and voilà:

Rye bread! I was a bit too light on the salt, and the next one will get some cumin as well, I think, but still, it was delicious. Next batch will be up tomorrow.

How to cut pizza

2011-02-27T20:47:00.000+01:00

I cannot believe I never thought of this before:

The dainty hand of F wielding the sacred pizza-scissors.

Saves the precious, precious edge of your knife. Doesn't scratch the backing tray. Doesn't make a mess. Thought to me by my ingenious girlfriend F.

More adventures in watercolour

2011-02-24T13:46:00.000+01:00

For three days now I've been painting watercolour sketches of myself with my new waterbrushes. I use a small hand-mirror, and give myself about 30 min after lunch. Here are the two most recent results:

A good way to get more comfortable with a new medium, I hope. I really like how you can't dither endlessly using watercolour - you make your stroke, and it's there. Erasing is nearly impossible, so you have to get it right the first time, or at least make the most of your mistakes. Or not, as is the case with the nose on the right portrait. Urg.

Waterbrushes

2011-02-21T14:02:00.000+01:00

My new girlfriend (and more on this most excellent subject on a later date) gave me some waterbrushes recently. These are brushes with a small reservoir behind them, which feeds a regular trickle of water or ink into the brush. They are excellent for sketching on the road, since you don't have to fool around with pigment and open containers and whatnot. I filled one with water, another with burnt sienna, and together with my pentel brush they allow me to make two-tone sketches.

Last weekend we had a Vo-Vietnam training-camp in Bern, and during lunch-break I used half an hour or so to sketch my friend Phong. It even looks a bit like him, if you squint a little.

Luzern

2011-02-14T16:36:00.000+01:00

Mi tresora F. and I spent yesterday in Luzern, with my friend M.

M. on the right. Myself on the left. Photo by the talented F.

Luzern is a very, very pretty city, on the shore of the Vierwaldstättersee, or 'lake of the place with four forests'.

In the background on the right the third of the four forests. I guess.

A famous sight is the newest bridge of Luzern, built in 1993 out of wood, which does not even carry cars or trains:

Seriously. You'd guess the bridge was a historic landmark or something, the way they carry on about it.

Frankly, I don't get why it is so famous, since it is only a copy of another wooden bridge, which coincidentally, burned down in the same year. Also, ware the attacking birds! Birds in Luzern are a constant threat to the unwary visitor, here is one on an attack run:

Look into its empty eyes and despair.

I hope you, gentle reader, will appreciate the photo I took instead of trying to safe myself! Thankfully my life was spared, since the birds of Luzern are also known to be myopic - a boon to all ugly men, or so it is said. I wouldn't know about that aspect, of course, since I had only eyes for the lovely F.

Luzern - lovely but lethal, at least for me.

Whether she wanted to or not. Did she manage to strangle me? Tune in next time to find out!

Concerning UV filters

2011-02-10T09:07:00.000+01:00

The UV-filter is an anachronism in the digital age, the chips in modern digital cameras are insensitive to UV-light. Yet the humble UV-filter is still sold - I have one on every one of my lenses. Why? Behold:

The front of my nifty full-range lens, after I slipped on ice shortly after Christmas. What looks like a major catastrophe was just a minor set-back - the cheap filter had given its life to protect the lens. Its noble sacrifice will not be forgotten, and I also ordered a new one immediately...

Alien & Liane

2011-02-09T15:23:00.000+01:00

Last year my big sister gave me a set of charcoals for my birthday. It took nearly a year, but I finally managed to draw something major with them - the assignment was 'Morphologies'. From a list of different body types I chose the extraterrestrial and the pregnant woman, since I hadn't drawn either so far.

It was really fun to draw with charcoal, and even if I did kind of mess up the poor girl's face, which looked much better in the sketch, I am quite happy with the result.

Lac de Tanay

2011-02-08T16:26:00.000+01:00

Last weekend I and F. (who may very well be the reason there have been so few posts here lately) went up from Le Flon to the Lac de Tanay.

View Larger Map

The weather was amazing, hence my state of near-undress (which had nothing to do with wanting to impress F. by my manliness and general imperviousness to the cold. Ha! Which cold, I ask you?).

We found an excellent spot for a pique-nique, under a southward-facing overhang heated by the sun

The lake was frozen, and exploration of the surrounding peaks will have to wait until the snow has receded a bit, but we'll be sure to return!

Kindle

2011-01-19T13:00:00.000+01:00

I got my new toy two days ago: Amazons Kindle, a Christmas present from my parents. Do I like it? Let me put it like this: If you are going to read books electronically, do it on an e-ink device. The difference to an LCD screen is amazing - it really looks like (albeit glossy) paper. You quickly get used to the page-refresh, which rapidly blanks the page before displaying a new one - this eliminates 'ghosting', where you can see some remnants of the old page because the electrophoresis in the pixels wasn't complete. The refresh only takes a fraction of a second, anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I love reading real books, but my book-shelf real estate is limited, and has run out some time ago. Plus, there is something neat in having a couple of hundred books stored on a device that weighs only a couple of hundred grams.

Close-up of Kindle display

I do hope e-ink continues to make advances, especially in terms of the refresh-rate, for I would love to see it used as a display for tablet PCs, phones and the like. Yay progress!

Bern and its mutant bears

2011-01-12T17:16:00.001+01:00

An old bear-emblem, pre-ninja era

Bern, the capital of Switzerland is known for its bears. Has been known for its bears for centuries, in fact. It was founded in 1191 by Berthold V, Duke von Zähringen. 1193 it suffered a meteorite impact. Said meteorite had an unusually high concentration of Cobalt-60, and as a consequence the local bears mutated, becoming hyper-intelligent tool-users. They proliferated in the fertile lands around Bern, and several skirmishes (also known as Bärenchriege) were fought over the next years. Eventually Bern fell in 1218, with the Berthold V. suffering a gruesome death at the claws of the enraged bears, being torn apart atop the Zytglogge, the famous clock-tower of Bern. Berthold V. having no heirs to continue the war, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II had no choice but to leave the bears in control, declaring Bern a free imperial city.

The Zytglogge, where Berthold V. met his end

The bears joined the Swiss Confederacy in 1353, and stayed in power in Bern until being occupied by French troops in 1798, during the French Revolutionary wars. The bears vanished from public live. How and when they managed to contact the Tokugawa shogunate is hotly disputed by scholars, but it is clear that when they reappeared in 1848, they had been trained extensively as ninjas. The bears, now hyper-intelligent mutant ninja bears showed no inclination of retaking the reins of power, even though they certainly would have been capable of it. Instead, the seemed content to hang out in the Bärengraben, vanishing from it from time to time to conduct secret missions and assassinations, an activity they have continued to this day.

View of the Münster and Bern, from the Bärengraben

I personally nearly met my end on the hands of a slightly myopic ninja bear, who afterwards apologized profusely for mistaking me for his target, before leaping onto the rooftops and vanishing.

It was shear chance that the bear noticed I was not his target, a split-second before tearing out my throat.

Apart from these rare, unfortunate incidents, Bern is a very safe city for tourists, and the "Bärenlugen", trying to spot one of the illusive ninja bears in one of their many disguises, or on one of their clandestine missions, is a popular national past-time. Everything and everyone can be a bear, in Bern.

Depicted: A bear in disguise, emerging from his cave in spring.

A new dawn

2011-01-10T10:02:00.000+01:00

Or at least one of the first I saw in 2011 in Lausanne.

Aiming for bi-weekly posts this year. Don't hold your breath.

Bollocks to this...

2010-12-17T08:43:00.001+01:00

I am off to Vienna, for the holidays. If I make my connection in Zuerich, that is. Seems the vaunted Swiss punctuality can't deal with 20 cm of snow...

- tales from the road

Location:Rue des Saars,Neuchâtel,Switzerland

Morphologies: Before the fight

2010-12-14T17:17:00.000+01:00

Another assignment in my drawing class: draw different morphologies. I chose to combine two: a long gaunt man and a fat, strong one.

Alternatively, I had a vision of an epic battle: the last chance of an impoverished teacher and his sole student. Every bit of money they can spare goes into the student's food, hence the teachers gauntness. Is it a wonder he prays loudly to the gods before the fight, which may be their last chance to earn some much-needed money?

I am quite happy with how the teacher turned out. Less happy with the sumo wrestler; I think I drew his hands and head a bit too big, they should be smaller on his (supposedly) massive frame. The background is a bit uninspired, I drew it as an afterthought, and it shows. I wish I would have given it a bit more thought before I started the drawing, I definitely will for the next one!

2010-12-13T13:40:00.000+01:00

A woman taking a photo of her son with her cell phone, in Lausanne.

Thanksgiving

2010-11-24T09:34:00.000+01:00

Being from the old continent, I don't really celebrate Thanksgiving. we have other feasts here, involving more interesting things than turkeys, such as pig's intestines or goose livers. Still, today the sudden urge struck me to hop on the wagon, as it were, and put something thanksgivensh up, so here is my most favourite video celebrating Thanksgiving:

Thanks, o Addams Family!

Batpigeon

2010-11-11T12:08:00.000+01:00

The thing is, you never think much about all the pigeons watching Batman these days. Or did you, recently? Did you ponder the psychological effects of immersing the flight-capable descendants of the dinosaurs in a fictional world where a deranged multimillionaire is imitating the flapping source of his childhood trauma in a futile quest for justice? Didn't think so.

Oh, it'll be all right, we say. Let the poor, disease-ridden blighters have their fun - what else do they have between poisoned pigeon-food and anti-pigeon spikes? What harm can it do?

What harm can it do? Well, have a gander at this:

Yes, this is a deranged pigeon, thinking it is batman. And while one, lonely schizophrenic pigeon might be pitiful, or even funny in a sad, retarded way, think about how you feel when hordes of vigilante pigeons descend on the streets in a psychotic frenzy. How many pigeons are there in your city? Have a look outside. Look into their beady little eyes, judging you. And ask yourself: How much does a pigeon know about the concept of justice? Do you want it to act as your judge, jury and executioner? Do you?

Emotions: Joy, or: Modern Faerie

2010-11-09T13:46:00.000+01:00

In my series of emotions (previously: surprise, rage, sadness and fear), I proudly present : Modern Faerie.

Life in the city is hard for faeries, and some fail to... adapt. Seeking solace in drugs, those poor creatures normally don't make it for long, and clapping your hands won't work here.

This is a drawing I've wanted to do for ages, but never felt up to. But when joy came up as a motive in my drawing course, I knew the time had come. Inked with a Pentel pocket brush on A4 paper, I am quite happy with how it turned out. Credit for the idea with the newspaper-wings goes to my teacher Julien.

In case you are curious about the process, here is a scan of the pencil drawing I subsequently inked. Unfortunately I don't have any of the many preliminary sketches I did before, but I think I did at least eight before settling on this perspective and composition.

I was thinking of doing the same image in charcoal and chalk, but I think I will work on something different instead.

I feel like a scientist now

2010-11-01T09:52:00.002+01:00

Pictured: Science

My first paper has been published:

Radio frequency breakdown between structured parallel plate electrodes with a millimetric gap in low pressure gases,

in Physics of Plasmas no less! It's the culmination of most of the stuff I did in the last three years, with maybe a second, more applied paper to follow next year.

If you really want to read it (and, frankly, who wouldn't?), but can't because you don't have access to Physics of Plasmas and don't want to shell out the thirty or so dollars they demand (shame on you! shame!), email me and I'll send you a pdf. Go on, email me! How else will you know how to properly construct your dark-space shielding?

Leather and drugs

2010-10-22T09:15:00.000+01:00

I am back! Survived a brief bout of the flu - it must have been the Parisian flu, since I first felt ill at the conference in Paris. I didn't want to miss anything of the rather excellent conference, so I showed the flu who is boss, by eating copious amounts of paracetamol, ibuprofen and aspirin. This worked, to a degree, until I came back, laid off the drugs and was struck down by the Revenge of the Flu. Ugh.

But now I am better, and yesterday I spent four hours sewing. A year ago my favourite leather jacket's zipper broke, and yesterday the stars were finally right (Gliese 581 must be in just the right place in Librae for leather work!). I purchased a new zipper, a leather needle and set to work - you can see the result on the right. It works, and turned out less ugly than I had feared - everybody wins! Well except the old zipper. I tossed that bastard faster than you can say Gliese 581g may or may not exist.

Bollocks to this...

2010-10-03T12:35:00.000+01:00

...I am off to Paris, to the 63rd Gaseous Electronics Conference. There may be some physics-related posts in the near future.

Sous vide, pork

2010-10-01T08:41:00.000+01:00

I made a 24 hour pork roast yesterday (despite RelaxMax's disapproval) - my thanks go to Frank who informed me on how to rise the temperature of a rice cooker: just wrap it in a towel, since the warm setting has no temperature control, depending on the thermal properties of the cooker to reach its temperature.

Wrapping the rice cooker in a towel raised the temperature to 64 degrees Celsius. I seasoned the pork roast with some rosemary and thyme, and left it in its zip-lock back to stew for a day. Then I seared its outside in my trusty cast-iron pan (a roast is a bit too large to comfortably sear with my blowtorch). Very tender.

Sous vide, first try

2010-09-29T16:21:00.000+01:00

I've been wanting to try out sous vide cooking for the longest time, unfortunately my kitchen is just too small to fit a water bath in. But recently I had a sudden brain storm - the rice cooker I recently bought has two different settings, cook and warm. And the warm setting maintains a temperature of 57 degrees Celsius. Perfect for a medium rare steak, but just too low for poultry. Yet a bit of experimentation showed that I could use the cook setting and a digital thermometer to set the temperature to, say, 63 degrees, and then the warm cycle would maintain it for two hours, easily. So I bought some turkey fillets and voilà:

Seal them into a zip-lock bag with some salt, pepper and herbs, drop it into the water and wait for two hours. The meat comes out delicious and tender. But Boris, I can hear you scream, what about the delicious Maillard reactions you get in a pan, the crunchy brown bits that impart so much of the flavour? Well, fear not, gentle reader: Enter my favourite kitchen tool, the blowtorch:

This is cooking the way I like it

Mmmh. Don't let the awful white-balance fool you, that piece of dead turkey was scrumptious.

Lab safety

2010-09-21T16:35:00.000+01:00

I recently noticed that an important safety feature was missing from our lab, so I rushed to supply it:

Note the red tassel. 'Raptors despise red tassels, true fact.

Do you know how many casualties per year there are, due to people getting sucked into space-time warps and having no arms to defend themselves against the lizard-men of dimension X? Or dinosaurs? Do you?

Didn't think so. You'll thank me when all that stands between you and a pack of hungry 'raptors is your trusty lab-spear. Here is a close-up of the safety-sign I made - you are welcome to use it in your own lab. Just don't forget to replace the safety spear if one of your colleagues has been sucked into the warp.

Sunrise in Quy Nhon

2010-09-16T13:45:00.000+01:00

It is a great injustice that the best light and the best colours happen at sunrise. You'd think sunset would have the same effect, but no. Dawn is where it's at, mostly because the gods hate photographers.

Half past fucking four in the morning, Quy Nhon, Vietnam

Of course, everybody else and their grandma is already up and chipper

Why not jog in the pre-dawn light? Why not stick a fork in your eye while you are at it?

The sky, it is mocking me.

I'd say a mellow yellow, only it is still not even bloody 5 am

To add insult to injury, the first morning I misjudged the time and trudged down 10 minutes too late. This is, of course, the time where the sky shows you the fading remnants of the most awesome colours ever, just to mock you. Thank you, sky of Vietnam.
But! There is a way to trick the forces of nature - just stay up until sunrise. Of course, you will be too drunk to take any good photos, although you'll think you are snapping the next Pulitzer. Oh well... back in the hammock.

More brush pen

2010-09-10T10:21:00.000+01:00

Blame Stephanie, who encouraged me when I posted my first sketch...

More imagery from Vietnam, the photo I based it on can be found here.

Brush pen

2010-09-07T10:08:00.003+01:00

Tried out a brush pen yesterday, below you can see a quick 2 minute sketch of a guy in a rice field. Very interesting way to draw, since you can't correct anything.

crappy iphone picture of hasty sketch

Edit: Rotated picture, added link to original

- tales from the road

Nasobem

2010-09-06T13:52:00.000+01:00

Ah, the Nasobem. Scant records exist of this elusive species, which is rumoured to persist in the Mekong-delta in Vietnam. Unfortunately I did not manage to see it when I was in Vietnam, although I did hear a curious snuffling noise in the underbrush once. Might have been a Nazgul, though. I did find this depiction on a piece of parchment in an old pagoda near Cần Thơ:


An octopus doing in the brackish waters of the Mekong? You just can't trust those ancient sources.

Mekong

2010-08-30T15:55:00.000+01:00

No time to properly blog, have this photo from the Mekong-delta instead.

Staff demo

2010-08-27T21:32:00.000+01:00

Not much time to post today - my parents are visiting. But here is an insanely fast staff demo I filmed in Saigon, Vietnam a couple of weeks ago. Enjoy!

Cooking in your rice cooker

2010-08-25T07:53:00.000+01:00

After reading this at lifehacker, I rushed out and bought a rice cooker. Best 25 CHF I've spent in a while.

But Boris, I hear you whine, can't you easily make rice in a pot?

Shaddup, and behold the

Fake Indian Rice and Lentils Dhalish Kind of Dish:

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups of rice
3/4 cup green lentils
a carrot, ~~diced~~ hacked into pitiful pieces
a clove of garlic, sliced into slices
an onion, likewise
a tomato, hexadecimaled
4 cups of broth

Put some oil into your rice-cooker. Add, in this order, while stirring: onion (stir until glazed), carrots and garlic (stir for a minute or so), rice (toss until coated with oil), the rest. Put in some curry powder, or ginger, salt and pepper, or five spices powder, or garam masala. I don't care, go wild. Heck, put in some diced chicken for all I care.

Close the rice cooker, it will do it's magic. Eat when finished.

Public Service Announcement, Sparring

2010-08-25T00:36:00.000+01:00

When you see a foot coming, block. Don't use your face, though.

Cao Đài

2010-08-24T15:10:00.000+01:00

Which religion venerates Victor Hugo, Jeanne d'Arc and Julius Caesar as saints?

No, it's not the Illuminati, it is Caodaism. Founded in 1926 in Vietnam (then, of course, Indochine) by Ngo Van Chieu, it is an eclectic fusion of Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism, with a sprinkling of Christianity thrown in. Then Ngo Van Chieu stopped and meditated for a while - something was not right with his new religion. It was not... wacky enough. Bright colours... check. Weird saints... hey, what about weird saints? And how about worshipping a radical rationalist French writer? How about making Victor Hugo one of our principal saints? Huh, how about that?
Fast forward to today, we have the Holy Seat of Cao Đài in Tây Ninh

Seemed to me that it was mainly designed for Tourism - a convenient gallery encircles the cathedral, full with tourists snapping pictures of the ceremony which takes place four times a day:

Here it pays of to have a long lens:

I think these guys are Caodaistic (?) laypersons, as far as I know only priests take part in the ceremony itself. Either that, or they are the Holy Seat's assassin squad.

Dragon!

Cold brewing

2010-08-20T14:20:00.000+01:00

No time today for a long Vietnam post, although the Cao Đài are waiting in the wings.

Here is something else I've picked up in Vietnam: Cold brewing your own iced tea. It's right simple: Grab a bottle, stuff some tea in it, leave it in the fridge overnight. Hey presto! Iced tea. Philistines may want to add sugar or other horrifying additives; me, I take it straight. 'Cause I am manly that way.

Hanoi: Streets

2010-08-19T09:04:00.000+01:00

Chaos. Utter chaos.

And yet... as you step gingerly (and slowly, ever so slowly, if you value your life) across a street of Hanoi, a hint of pattern starts to emerge. Not real order, no structure to the insanity - but even chaos has a few rules. First of all, you, the pedestrian, are at the bottom of the pecking order, no question about it. You do not have a metal body, you are soft and squishy, and while there are rumours about the existence of Vietnamese traffic regulations, they are not confirmed, and I frankly do not believe in them. Neither do the Vietnamese.

At first glance, stepping on the street seems paramount to suicide. And yet, the pavement doesn't offer succour either, since for a Vietnamese on his scooter, the pavement is nothing less than an additional, if narrow, lane. So eventually you get tired of clinging to a tree, and, commending your eternal soul to Victor Hugo, you step on the street.

It will take several seconds for you to notice that you are not dead, although you might wish you were. Scooters, cars, every style of motor transportation known to man is rushing by you, missing you by a hair's breadth, honking merrily away to compliment your misery (Oh god, the noise). Still, you are not dead yet. And then you realise the chink in the seemingly impenetrable mechanised armour that is the Vietnamese traffic: No self-respecting Vietnamese wants to scrape your squishy organic flesh from his shiny new scooter. Therefore, and with an inhuman faith in the reaction speed of their fellow motorists they swerve, they evade, and (inescapably) they honk.Use this weakness to cross the street. There is no need to look left, right or in any other direction - rather, if you value your sanity, it is advisable not to look at all. You will not spot a break in the traffic, for there is none. The side of the road has no correlation to the direction of the traffic flow, as the Vietnamese scoff at the notion that such mundane things as the side of the road should determine the direction in which they travel. So why look? Just step on the road, slowly, with a slightly mad grin on your face. Step on the road in the secure knowledge that the Vietnamese motorist will do his utmost to miss you.

Also, it is either that or being run over on the pavement.

Vietnam: cliché

2010-08-17T09:33:00.000+01:00

Vietnam was one of the most excellent countries I've ever been in. The energy in the streets of Hanoi (or any other city for that matter) is astounding - and while I am not too sure that I could stand the constant noise for longer periods of time, I would be willing to try. Anybody know of any post-doc positions for plasma physicists in Vietnam?

But Vietnamese street-life will be the topic of it's own post, for this opener I thought I would start with some stereotypical pictures:

Not what it looks like - she is working.

The dichotomy between rich and poor is nothing short of astounding, and sobering. While many in the cities are poor, you still get the impression of modernisation: Everybody (and I mean everybody and their dog) has a scooter, and you can sense the economic upswing that Vietnam has been having since the introduction of a capitalistic economy in '86. Leave the city, especially in the north, and you find this:

Dirt-poor farmers, grubbing in the muck. I know that my impressions may be a bit off, since even in the north a farmer generally has two harvests a year, and they probably won't turn out their Sunday best to work in the fields, but still. Seeing any kind of technology being used in the rice-paddies of the north is rare:

The South, as always in Vietnam, is better off, with mechanised or at least partially mechanised farming the rule, not the exception. Stay tuned for some thoughts about Hà Nội, tomorrow.

Teaser

2010-08-16T18:14:00.000+01:00

Finally started sifting through the photos, de-shaking the video-clips and whatnot.

First post about Vietnam will go up tomorrow, have this short clip from the International Tournament of Vietnamese Traditional Martial Arts, Ho Chi Minh City meanwhile; it's part of a demo of the three section staff versus double sabre:

Back

2010-08-10T13:36:00.000+01:00

Back home. I'll start posting my impressions and the best photos soon.

But first I'll have to sort them: more than 4000 photos and a couple of short movies.

Have this Vietnamese wanted poster meanwhile:

- tales from the road

Location:Avenue du Tir Fédéral,Ecublens,Switzerland

Cankon

2010-07-30T05:30:00.001+01:00

A. has not taken the charger for the battery packs of her Nikon D80, because she knew that two packs were good for three weeks of shooting. Except those three weeks were two years ago, and lithium- ion packs age.
Nobody else had this particular model, and of cours chargers are not compatible between models, let alone between brands.

But! All these packs use basically the same 7.4 V cells, so it stood to reason that in principle, a Canon charger should have no problem charging a Nikon pack. A bit of fiddling, and lo and behold! the abomination Cankon was born:

In other news, getting up at 5 to watch sunrise at Na Trang beach: totally worth it.

- tales from the road

Location:Tran Phu,Nha Trang,Vietnam

Mekong

2010-07-27T09:13:00.001+01:00

I know I said there wouldn't be any nice photos until I return, since I am too busy snapping away on my SLR to take out the iPhone, but today the battery on my camera ran out, so I had half an hour to kill before we got back to the bus where I had left my spare.

There you go, but don't get used to it.

By the way, I won't be able to reply to any comments until I get back, since the app I am using doesn't do comments - sorry about that!

- tales from the road

Location:Lê Thị Riêng,,Vietnam

Still alive

2010-07-27T01:46:00.001+01:00

I know you are all waiting with baited breath for news and photos from Vietnam - but there won't be any, because there is too much to do and see. I have barely time to steal a couple of minutes to type this, here in the Me Kong delta, the it is off to the floating Market, and some rat. Mmh, rat.

Here have a photo of a photo of the fish tanks of a small roadside restaurant ( hole-in-the-wall, to be frank), with some ba ba (turtle) swimming happily around, unbeknowst of its eventual fate. We didn't have ba ba though, but rather some nice grilled frog and sparrows.

- tales from the road

Location:Lê Thánh Tôn,Can Tho,Vietnam

Saigon

2010-07-23T11:12:00.001+01:00

We got into Saigon this Morning. Traffic is even more insane than in Ha Noi. Pretty tired, on account of not having slept. Went to eat snake yesterday evening, and then into a club. Afterwards party in the hotel room until 530h, then breakfast and off to the airport.
Snake is good, and a video of the poor thing is forthcoming, once I am back. Oh, and I got to eat/drink the heart with a shot of rice-alcohol!

- tales from the road

Location:Lê Thị Riêng,,Vietnam

Aéroport

2010-07-21T15:27:00.001+01:00

After much agonising I decided to take my iPhone to Vietnam after all - maybe I'll find some WiFi from time to time.
Thus you are treated to this short update, while I wait for my flight to Hanoi at the airport in Paris.

We already came to Paris Friday evening, with the nefarious Plan to meet some friends and party until Sunday morning. I am happy to report that the plan panned out, and that the 13ème arrondissement sports some excellent bars.

Now I am looking forward to catch some sleep in the plane, though.

Ps.: didn't have Internet after all, posting this from Ha Long Bay, a vouple of days later

- tales from the road

Location:Terminal 2,Tremblay-en-France,France

Bollocks to this...

2010-07-16T10:30:00.000+01:00

... I am off to Vietnam. The US-after-action report will have to wait for three weeks more.

source:wikipedia

I don't know if the internet grows in Vietnam, so there may be silence on this blog until the second week of August - I am sure you will survive.

Run run run

2010-07-13T15:19:00.000+01:00

While in New York (I know, I still need to do the after-action report. Before Friday, I swear), I bought these:

These are not my disgustingly dirty feet, these are my disgustingly dirty Vibrams, my new running shoes, after my first run with them. Here is how they look in the shop, before you run along the lake-shore for an hour or so:

source

The Vibrams are more gloves for your feet than proper shoes - all they do is protect your soles from glass and other pointy things. No cushioning, no air-soles, no support.

The idea behind that is simple: Our feet evolved over a million years for bare-foot running. It's what they do, and they do it well. Now we don't run around barefoot all day any more, so our soles are soft and can't deal with the ground and sharp stones like they should, but the rest of the mechanism works just fine. So just slap on an artificial sole, and everything should be peachy.

Does it work?
I am no stranger to hopping around barefoot, I train martial arts for a couple of hours a week. So I thought running in the Vibrams wouldn't be a problem for me, and in wasn't. At the start.
I am not a runner, but I am generally fit, and I know that running for 90 minutes or two hours is no big problem for me. Still, new shoes, and two hours of training coming up this evening, so I kept it down to about an hour. Here is the route I took, from the EPFL to the marina and back, about eight kilometres.

View Larger Map

First of all, running in the Vibrams is as much fun as barefoot running. Your feet adjust automatically so you land on the balls of your feet, your heels won't touch the ground at all. You can run on tarmac no problem, but the real fun is running over rough terrain, as you can feel the ground through the thin soles. Second of all, training for martial arts does not a runner make, and my calves are screaming at me right now because of this. Running on your toes puts much more strain on your calf-muscles, and mine were woefully unprepared, which is why I took an hour for eight measly k's. But my joints were fine, no worries at all. The feel of the Vibrams is also excellent - they are so light you don't notice them at all, apart from a vague feeling of having mud between your toes. But I happen to like mud between my toes, so no worries there. I am, as you may be able to tell, quite happy with them, and look forward to adding one or two midday runs to my weekly routine!

Three sketches

2010-07-06T11:29:00.000+01:00

I didn't have much time to draw during my stay in the US - too much to do, too much to see, and about a thousand photos to be shot - but here are three pages out of my sketchbook:

Smile

After a photo - I can't capture fleeting expressions from live subjects yet.

Layover

A girl sleeping a the airport. Her head looks a little bit small, but I swear that is how she looked like. Except for the hand, which could be a little bit bigger.

Roman

He was Dutch, really. Hanging around the common room of the youth hostel, concentrating on his laptop screen, as Romans are wont to do.

All three were done relatively quickly - about half an hour each.

Flying Home

2010-07-06T09:48:00.001+01:00

On Sunday I had to say good-bye to New York and fly home. Yes, I missed the US' Independence Day, due to forgetting all about it when I booked the flight.

My flight to the US (with United Airlines) was plagued by all kind of problems - the flight back with Swiss Air was a sheer joy in comparison. Of course I can't say anything in general with a sample size of one, but here are some thoughts:

The Airbus A330 is a much nicer and more modern Airplane than the ageing Boeing 767, which I do not remember fondly. No surprises there, since the A330 was first flown in 1992, versus the Boeings 1982. It shows.

Metal cutlery! Apparently the Swiss are not afraid of their passengers hijacking the plane with a metal butter knife. The Swiss are just bad-ass like that.

Babies can, and will cry for two and a half hours straight when provoked, and said crying will cut through earplugs, blankets, glass and any other material known to mankind.

Swiss Air uses Linux for its onboard entertainment system, which didn't prevent it from crashing horribly, twice. The stewardess eventually had to pull the circuit breaker to reset.

A 'thoughts about the US' post will follow soon.

- tales from the road

Location:Avenue du Tir Fédéral,Ecublens,Switzerland

Vietnamese Lunch

2010-07-03T19:34:00.001+01:00

It's probably kind of wrong to eat Vietnamese in Chinatown, but the place looked good, and more importantly, a horde of Vietnamese was trooping in when I happened by. Also, I do need to prepare for Vietnam later this month.

I had some Nems first

And then Pho, of which I never get tired of.

The excellent thing about eating at those places is that you get rather excellent tea, unasked for and free of charge. Quite a different experience to Central Europe, where tea (and a measly two cups at best) will cost you 3 Euros or more!

- tales from the road

Guggenheim

2010-07-03T15:26:00.000+01:00

The thing with the Guggenheim is that it has a very small permanent exhibition - thus your visit stands and falls with how much you like the temporary one.

Unfortunately, the current exhibition, Haunted, is not really my thing. Much too modern, it goes mostly right over my head. Furthermore, two other galleries in the annex were closed for the installation of new exhibitions. That being said, the Tannhäuser Gallery is small, but good. Two pieces I particularly liked:

Van Gogh's Paysage enneigé

source

and Picasso's Fernande à la mantille noire

source

In my humble opinion Picasso should have forgotten about cubism, and surrealism, and stuck with painting amazing stuff like the above ;) Although you can see, or so the Guggenheim maintains, that he already starts to move from expressionistic and romantic painting to abstraction, and I guess I could be convinced of that. Still, Fernande is much more accessible to me than his later work. Don't make my poor brain work too much!

Which, come to think of it, may be the crux of my problems with modern art (if you can call the 1950's modern) - I want to appreciate and enjoy art, not work for it. Sheer laziness, I am afraid.

Batman's Vet

2010-07-03T00:59:00.000+01:00

To the Bat-Vet, Robin!

Charles

2010-07-02T21:10:00.001+01:00

I met Charles at the hostel I am staying in, where he was helping out. We got to talking, and then some drunk Australian dude (you can always depend on drunk Australians) asked the question I was too bashful to ask: where you there at 9/11?

Turns out Charles was supposed to be in the twin towers for a job interview that day, but missed it because a co-worker in his old job was late that day.

Speaking to Charles made it clear to me why 9/11 was such a big deal to Americans. Because if you look at the dry statistics it wasn't, more people die on the roads every year by far. But looking at the dust clouds of the collapsing building and thinking: that could've been me, except for my drunk collegue - I guess that would get your attention...

- tales from the road

Street cleaning

2010-07-02T19:25:00.001+01:00

à la New York

More MoMA

2010-07-02T15:23:00.000+01:00

Please excuse the blurry picture, but I did not have much time to immortalise this classic situation:

Granny, Defiler of Art

It is a bit hard to see, but the old lady is resting her bag on a chair - she was searching for something in it. Only the chair was part of an artwork - the sign to the right of it reads out the dictionary definition of the word chair. I only had time to snap a quick picture before a horrified attendant chased her away. Now I wonder: does this mean the artist failed? If your artwork is mistaken for an everyday object, does it stop being art? Or did he succeed in some weird meta-commentary on how art is a reflection on reality, so mistaking one for the other validates his (for me) somewhat obscure point? Just goes to show I am better off as a physicist than an art critic.

Speaking of attendants, some artists hate them. Seriously. Take Bruce Nauman for example.

Nauman, professional dickhead

Briefly, he had this installation where seven voices recited the days of the week, continuously, out of fourteen speakers. The cacaphony was awful, and nobody stayed in the room more than a few minutes, if that.

The voices, they spoke to me...

Except the poor attendant. He was standing near a window, softly singing to himself. I didn't dare snap a photo of him, because he looked ready to snap and start murdering people with his bare hands...

MoMA

2010-07-01T19:03:00.001+01:00

The Guggenheim is closed on Thursdays, so I went to the Museum of Modern Art.

The painting I like most so far is Matisse's Musketeer. Not exactly modern art, I know. But I have to admit I don't get most of it. Some of it is aesthetically pleasing, some makes me chuckle (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), but most goes over my head. Even Picasso: I can somehow see that much thought and art went into his work - something that I can't say for many other artists: I can't tell Pollock's stuff apart from a paint spill - but I still don't get it.

Yet there is some hope for me: I didn't get Gaugin either a couple of years ago, or Matisses later stuff, but now I do. Yay me!

- tales from the road

Location:W 54th St,New York,United States

Views from the Empire State Building

2010-07-01T15:54:00.000+01:00

You don't really get a feel for how big New York is, unless you see it from above. Another thing you can see is the barrel distortion my new 18-200 mm full range zoom has on its wide end. I am still quite happy with it, though, and will tell you all about how it performs in a post in the near future.

The Empire state building throws an impressive shadow:

Or the Chrysler tower. Whatever. Big shadow!

Crane on top of puny skyscraper. Empire State Building laugh! Skyscraper puny!

The spire on top was ment as a docking station for dirigibles. Unfortunately, the huge updrafts created by the building itself prevented its use. Think of how awesome it would have looked like if the Hindenburg was moored to the tallest skyscraper of New York!

Something like this, maybe:

source

Lady cheese-eating surrender monkey

2010-07-01T02:10:00.000+01:00

Liberty & Ellis Island: about five hours. Excellent audio tour. And funnily enough, the photo I like most of the about hundred I shot today, I snapped with my iPhone.

- tales from the road

Tired

2010-06-30T02:33:00.000+01:00

Ran around the whole day, again. So I feel like this construction worker from the WTC site:

Ran around the financial district a bit. Trinity Church:

New York really is a green city, there's bloody trees everywhere

Some flowers in Battery Park

more tomorrow, sleepy now.

Good Coffee

2010-06-29T18:01:00.000+01:00

I have not been overly impressed by the quality of the coffee here in the states. A cliché that is firmly based on reality, it seems. Even the coffee in the Marriot was decidedly mediocre.

But! Enter the Bean&Bean, on Wall Street and Broadway. Guess them bankers love a good cuppa. Organic, of course, we wouldn't want to have an inorganic brew. Still, good stuff.

- tales from the road

Location:Broadway,New York,United States

Cathedral of St. John the Divine

2010-06-29T15:04:00.001+01:00

The biggest Gothic church in the world, also known as St John the Unfinished, and the White Elephant of Upper West Side. Impressive:

but unfinished. And you can see where the money ran out if you walk around and have a look at the backside.
It is hard to resist drawing a parallel between the superficiality of faith in general and American-style evangelism in particular, all façade and no depth, but for you, gentle reader, I shall refrain.

And thus the lord sayeth: Thou shalt use razor wire to keep out the unworthy, yea, and the poor so they shall not disturb thy peace.

But I have to give them this: very restful on a hot day (36 centigrade, relative humidity: insane), without the infernal rattling and whooshing of those blasted ACs.

Relax, and think about your mortality.

Mademoiselle Liberté

2010-06-29T02:35:00.000+01:00

as seen from Brooklyn Bridge.

Times Square

2010-06-29T02:32:00.000+01:00

The obligatory Times Square photo.

We went to a stand-up comedy show afterwards, which was decidedly mediocre. Mostly very bad (read simplistic) jokes about the ethnicity of audience members: genre, you are Mexican? Don't stab me!

Ha, ha indeed.

Museum of Natural History

2010-06-28T19:58:00.001+01:00

Eh. Bones, schmones. I was excited at first, but have since discovered that I like reading about dinosaurs more than I like looking at their bones. I am always am dissatisfied with the amount of information displayed.

I am looking forward to the Guggenheim, though. I could spend days in art collections!
Have an elephant.

- fresh from my iPhone

Location:Central Park West,New York,United States

More Food

2010-06-28T15:14:00.000+01:00

Oh, the horror. Went to a Diner yesterday (Big Daddy's or somesuch, 92nd and Broadway), to get dinner. I got a burger, and my mate Victor a club sandwich.

Please excuse the low quality of the photos, but maybe you can see that those burgers are about enough to feed two families. Each.

Don't get me wrong, they were tasty, but yeesh. I just can't enjoy a meal that is so big that I only have to nibble around the edges to get full. Want to know why you have an obesity problem, America? This is your answer, right there.

- fresh from my iPhone

Location:Amsterdam Ave,New York,United States

Brooklyn Bridge, sunset

2010-06-28T06:11:00.001+01:00

Mets vs. Twins

2010-06-28T02:10:00.000+01:00

or my first baseball match.

Well. I guess I can see the appeal, kind of. You hang out with your friend, munch some hotdogs, have some beers. It's kind of like a picknick, only without a nice lawn. But the game itself? Nothing happens! Ever!

But obviously I am wrong, because even the Mets drew a huge crowd:

about 40 000.
We had cheap places and were a long way from the action (such as there was), but my long lens caught at least this. Let's go Mets!

Really weird to my European sensibilities where the animation-jingles that played whenever nothing was happening on the pitch, i.e. pretty much constantly.

Clap, clap.

Chinatown

2010-06-27T18:34:00.001+01:00

A few photos of yesterday's walk through Chinatown. Started from the subwaystation Canal Street:

It's an eclectic mix of American and Chinese, and the back streets are much nicer than the very touristy and tacky Canal Street.

Asian beauty

Food! Lichis and...

Hummer!

Good bye, Sebastian, good bye.

Chilling out in the park

New favourite painting

2010-06-27T15:24:00.000+01:00

I think I spent half an hour before this painting in the Met. Sublime.

Claude Monet, Ice Floes, Metropolitan Museum, New York

Ramen place in Chinatown

2010-06-27T01:19:00.002+01:00

Getting some much-needed Ramen. Ordered the Devil's Ramen (the one with four little jot peppers in the menu, and 'extremely spicy!' underneath).

And here it is:

Not quite as spicy as it looks like, but very tasty.

- fresh from my iPhone

Jedi

2010-06-26T16:52:00.000+01:00

Two Jedi, fighting in Central Park, New York City.

Die, Sith-spawn!

That is all.

Busadventures

2010-06-26T01:39:00.000+01:00

Only the poor ride the bus, and the poor are obese.

I took the china town bus from Norfolk to New York. First of all, it is ridiculously cheap (35$). Second, I wanted to see who would take a long distance bus in a land that idolizes personal motorized transportation. This is what went down.

I got up rather early, slightly hungover thanks to a crazy (crazy, I tell you!) French professor and his Scottish lackey. I gathered up my things, had a last of the gratuitious coffees and bade the Marriot good bye.

Out of the automatic doors of the lobby, I immedeatly assumed a spreadeagled position, gasping in the wet, humid soup they laughingly call air in Virginia. Then I noticed that it had barely more than 30 degrees Celsius - it was just the contrast to the over-airconditioned lobby that made it seem unbearable. Why, americans? Why do you insist on keeping it 18*C inside?

But I digress. I took a free shuttle- bus to the main bus terminal, and waited for the right bus, the number 20. As I waited, I observed the crowd. The contrast to downtown Norfolk and the Mariott couldn't have been greater. I was the only Caucasian around. Not unexpected, if bus = poor and poor often equals black. The apparel was generally of the second-hand sort. And many of those waiting weighted in at somewhere in between the rinocerous and whale categories. 'Morbidly obese' sprang to mind. I don't mean the body shape where you think, 'oh my, that's a fat one', I mean the kind of monumental apparition which, when seen in Europe, would prompt me to follow it around for a block or two, just to make sure my eyes were not playing a trick on me.

And here I was surrounded by this. For a moment I became afraid - maybe they would eat me? - but then I realised I could always escape them by affecting a moderately fast shuffle.

I am, of course, exaggerating grossly (<- see what I did here?). But it is true that, in the western world ( and I am not excluding Europe here), obesity is perversly enough linked to poverty, and this was viscerally made clear on the bus. Upper arms the size of my thighs, I kid you not.

After asking the driver to kindly point out my stop to me, since the stops are neither indicated nor posted, I settled back and enjoyed the horror that is the suburbs between Norfolk and Virginia beach. Cars rule here, so much was evident. Perfunctory sidewalks if there were any, intersections for three lane roads without pedestrian crossings, baking asphalt as far as the eye could see. I got out at my stop and settled in to wait for the china town bus.

The china town bus was late. But, before I could get nervous, a fourteen year old Chinese girl and her seventeen year old brother turned up in a big van.

The bus was late they told me and the handful of other passengers. But no worries, they would load us in their van and get us to Newport, where another bus would pick us up. So off we went, with a slightly overloaded van, ment for 10 passengers but containing 5 men, 3 orca and 2 whales. The Chinese girl, clearly in charge, tapped away on her laptop and shouted in Chinese in her cellphone, coordinating the intricate and arcane dance of china town buses, while her brother grimly tried to kill us all by constantly overestimating the stopping power of the nearly nonexistent brakes of the van. I felt like being in an early William Gibson novel.

After an hour, which I spent mainly fending off a Chinese student who insisted on going to sleep on my shoulder and reading the much-too-near license plates of the cars in front of us, we arrived in another suburb. For a moment I was afraid we had gone in circles, for suburbs are indistinguishable for the European eye, but I should never have doubted the Chinese child goddess that had adopted us. The china town bus was indeed waiting, and only the ritual checking of our tickets stood between us and salvation.

Our driver, evidently only a lesser servant, got in a bit of an argument with one of us in the van, who had, as it turned out, no ID. This was, he argued eloquently, because he had just come out of prison, motherfucker.

Luckily for the tranquility of our journey, and the continuing health of the intrepid van driver, our goddess heard and intervened, shouting (her preferred form of communication) something in Chinese to her brother. Translated it must have meant something like 'who gives a rats-ass about his ID, oh brother mine', because the argument was settled and we could board.

The rest of the bus ride was long, uneventful and cold (@&£@ AC!), so I won't bore you with a description. I don't even have photos to gladden your eye, so I'll stop here. Also, typing long entries on the iPhone is a pain, and all errors in the above, orthographic or otherwise, are the fault of Apple Inc. That is all.

- fresh from my iPhone

Location:Between Norfolk and NYC

Met

2010-06-25T21:08:00.002+01:00

Been running through the Met for six hours now, it's amazing. Like in the Louvre in Paris, a museum that you could visit for a week without problem. Why don't they have a youth hostel here?

I still haven't seen the whole american wing, only scratched the surface of the rather excellent Egyptian collection (pictured above, the temple of Dendur), and haven't even been near the Chinese, Korean and Near East exhibitions.

Aargh, and I just noticed that there is a modern art exhibition that stretches over two floors! Not to mention the rooftop sculptures...

If I haven't seen anything of New York when I come back, you'll have the Met to blame.

- fresh from my iPhone

Location:Lexington Ave,New York,United States

Going to New York

2010-06-24T10:36:00.001+01:00

today, using one of those China-town buses. You have to hand it to the Americans, when they do offer public transportation, it is cheap. Norfolk to New York, about 35$ (28 Euros).

Eye of Sauron

Norfolk - cruise

2010-06-23T22:36:00.000+01:00

One of the social events during the ICOPS conference - a cruise on the "Spirit of Norfolk". And yes, some scientists know how to have social events. Not me, of course, but some.
Anyway, here is the Spirit in all her splendor:

Spirit of Norfolk: pretty, hm, big.

We saw some of Norfolk Naval base (I think), the biggest naval base in the world, which certainly is impressive.

Going back the sky lit up pretty nicely,

and even Norfolk itself is kind of pretty, at dusk.

Norfolk

2010-06-21T03:35:00.000+01:00

So, Norfolk. What's to see aside from religious taxi drivers?
First, supersized hotel-rooms:

I don't know why I suddenly rate two double-beds, but I won't complain!

Ran around a bit in the sweltering heat.

Hot hot hot humid hot. Also: barrel-distortion

What astounded me most was the Barnes&Nobles I peeked into: A whole wall with religious books. I couldn't even get them all on my camera, so you'll have to take my word for it. But it wasn't just one or two shelves, it must have been over a thousand books, everything from the bible to How to groom your dog like a Christian (not an actual title, although it should be) . I don't know if you could even find a bible in a normal bookstore in Austria or Switzerland. I knew that they take their religion seriously in the states, but it is one thing to know that in an abstract way, and another to really experience it.

Freemaison historic district: Very quaint.

Quaint like a quilted quail in a quagmire.

This little guy was singing his heart out, then dancing a little bit in the air, then back to singing. I feel I should now the species, but I don't.

or... is that bastard mooning me?

Tomorrow morning I'll give my talk - wish me luck!

Somewhere in Norfolk, VA

2010-06-20T05:03:00.000+01:00

Finally made it, and only seven or so hours late! Thankfully the taxi driver knew where to go, 'cause I am too tired to care. As an aside, when in the States, don't tell your taxi driver you are an atheist, even if he asks. Nearly ended up in the ditch, the poor guy was so surprised. Saw afterwards that he was driving with a bible on his knees ;)

Now sleep.

Stuck on the Tarmac

2010-06-19T13:09:00.001+01:00

Stupid piece-of-shit Boeing 767 ain't going anywhere. Some kind of pressure-valve problem. If we don't lift off in half an hour, and we won't, I'll miss my connecting flight to Norfolk.
At least the stewardesses have gone into crowd-control mode, and are dispensing sweets as fast as they can fling them.

Below: big waste of metal that doesn't fly.

Update: deboarded the plane, and it looks like somebody is opening up the turbine. The captain said he'll be able to tell us more in an hour - I am not holding my breath.
Update 2: boarding again. Maybe second time's the charm? 4 hours delay all in all, I hope they'll rustle up another flight to Norfolk for me, today. Still, I won't complain too much, because: Crossing the Atlantic in (now) thirteen hours? Still awesome.
- fresh from my iPhone

Location:Route des Batailleux,Grand-Saconnex,Switzerland

Bollocks to this...

2010-06-18T23:03:00.000+01:00

... I am off to the States. First Norfolk, VA for the International Conference On Plasma Science, then New York City and maybe Washington, DC.

I hear they have the internets in the US though, so I may post some impressions.

Emotions - surprise

2010-06-08T10:20:00.001+01:00

Next to last in the emotions-series (previously: fear, sadness and rage).

Do not forget your Tyrannosaur-EX^TM deterrent when venturing into the primeval jungle!

I am quite happy with how the riding-lizard turned out - I want one! I probably could have spent some more thime on the foilage, though. Also, the claw of the poor Tyrannosaurus is and looks lika an afterthought. But! I drew the trepid explorer without a reference, and her anatomy works, more or less. Horray for me!

Lastly I thought it would be interesting to show the preliminary sketch I made, where I figured out where everything would go. Normally I need to make more than one of these, but this picture sprang more or less fully formed into my mind, like a hungry tyrannosaurus, or a bad metaphor.

Grarr.

Both drawings pencil on A4 paper.

Edit: Ahem. I actually was drawing surprise, not fear as previously stated. Fear I've already done. Corrected in title and text.

Eastern Dragon

2010-06-07T10:32:00.000+01:00

Busy finishing my paper. Have a dragon while I work.

orientalischer Drache, aus Add. zu den Unaussprechlichen Kulten

Re: Your report of the 12 th of May, Anno Domini 1247

Your Excellency,

despite delving in the deepest archives, our librarians could unearth scant information about the creature you describe. The only clear descriptionn was found in Bloch's unholy De Vermis Mysteriis, and two of our brethren went mad before we knew only to use illiterate copyists which cannot be tempted to perouse the foul volume. We also had a few copies of the addendum to the Unaussprechlichen Kulten, one page of which I enclose in this message - it bears the only clear depiction we could find.

May our Lord be with you,
I remain you most obediant servant,
B.
-------------

Pencil (B, 4B) in my sketchbook, some patterning and cleaning up of the scan in photoshop.