From Vuiteboef to Ste. Croix

Sunday the student's union here at the EPFL organised a hike for the PhD-students. Personally, I think they were in collusion with the administration, and it was their way to tell us to, well, take a hike. But that's just me...














The hike was a big success - 49 people showed up. It was a pleasurable half-days walk, and while I was too slow to get the chamois, I did manage to snap a couple of pictures of a big heron we startled.














Unfortunately I do not have my tele-lens yet, so I had to crop the photos rather closely -but at least the silly bird is still recognizable.

Dagger and Fruit

Will you look at the cool dagger the best of all girlfriends brought me from India? It is made for killing horses I believe, although I kill my envelopes with it, most of the time.















See how big it is? On the photo on the left I put some bananas next to it. They were also slain with my new dagger, as were the horses of the wagon that dragged them up to my flat. And the teamster? Better not ask...














Well, okay, I admit it. I was using some weird kind of overpriced dwarf-bananas I bought. For some reason, the Swiss call it banane-pomme - I can't see what it has to do with apples. It tasted - well, like a banana. Perhaps a mite stronger than your normal, garden-variety banana, but not worth paying ten times as much - except if you want to lie about the size of your... dagger. Which is still good for slaying things with, you know. Only, it might take some time.

Lemon Cake

I tried another one of Mr. Olivers recipes this weekend.

It's one of those beat-butter-and-suger-until-creamy things, which were only made by masochists before the advent of the electric whisk. Actually, I think cakes like this are the real reason women were condemned to become housewives back in the day; it was all a confectioner-led conspiracy, you see. The electric whisk surely did more for emancipation than ... aeh ... all the rubber-suits in the world. Yes.

Anyway, I am accusing Mr. Oliver (or rather, his nan, for whom he invented it) of having an overly sweet tooth. About 315 g of sugar go into the making of this cake, and it was nearly to sweet for my girlfriend, I kid you not. In the lead of the recipe (yes, Mr. Olivers recipes have leads. Deal with it.) he mentions that one of his nan's friends liked it so much that he choked on his false teeth and had to be rescued by a Heimlich-maneuver. I rater suspect a diabetes-related seizure instead, but you never know.

If you want to try it yourself, mix equal amounts (115g) of butter, sugar, self-rising flour (beware of the flour-zombie crawling out of your waste-bin and strangling you at night) and ground almonds together with four eggs, 30g of poppy seeds and the juice and zest of two lemons. Try to take organic-ones, lest you grow funny-shaped appendages due to the anything-zides lemons generally come coted with.
Oh, and the right order is rather important, too: butter and sugar, eggs one after another, then the rest.
Bake at 180 Centigrade until ready, then drizzle with a sirup made from sugar (90g) and more lemon-juice, let cool down for a little bit and then glaze. Although you might want to cut down on the sugar a bit...

Update:

God damn it, I just read the wiki-page about Jamie Oliver I linked to above, and if you would like to meet the guy while he is still alive, hop into a plane to England as soon as possible, because he is not long for this mortal coil. Why? Because he named his children Poppey Honey and Daisy Boo. Gods, what was the man thinking? Talk about cruel and unusual punishment! Can you imagine what it must be like in school, nay, even in kindergarten to be called Daisy Boo?

If that is not a justification for fratricide...

Võ Vietnam

On Saturday, there was this big demonstration of my club. Thanks to the flu from hell, I couldn't participate since I missed out on training for it. At least that meant I could take pictures.

But.
It was dark, I didn't bring my tripod and I haven't yet bought a image stabilized tele lens, which would have been absolutely necessary.
Are you reading this, dear? Absolutely necessary, I say!

...

Well, well, well. I just wanted to add a link a review of the to the droolworthy Canon 70-200mm f/4 L IS on Ken Rockwells site (check it out if you are interested in photography tips and/or camera reviews, it's awesome), when I saw that there is a new lens out this october: The Canon EF-S 55-250mm IS (see photo on the left). The zoom range would work perfectly well with my 18-55 zoom, and it is image stabilized, and it's only about CHF 350, which is nice when compared to the CHF 1500 you will pay for the 70-200 f/4 IS.

But where is the drawback?

• It is a EF-S, so it only works on Canons small crop factor SLRs, like the 40D, 30D, 20D, 20Da (astronomical), Digital Rebel XTi, Digital Rebel XT and the original Canon Digital Rebel (which I happen to own). So if I ever upgrade to a 1.3 or even full-frame SLR, I would have to buy a new lens.
• You lose a stop at small angles
• There are no reviews out yet
• I am not too sure, but I don't think it uses USM focusing, meaning that you can't override autofocus manually, and it will be a bit slower.

I am going to get one anyway.

Ahh, where was I? Yes, bad image quality. I had to crank up the ISO, and use much too slow shutter speeds, hence graininess and overall blur.

The top picture is of Maître Cann, who has a school in Bin-Dinh (spelling?), and showed absolutely awesome Taos (or Katas, for the Japanese-minded of you) with the sword, the double-spear and weaponless. This guy can move! He is without doubt the best martial artist I have ever met.

His part was the best of what was an awesome 2 hours of martial arts, and I am looking forward to this evenings training!

Pretty Plum Pastry

Although I am not too sure if pastry is the technically correct term (it's a yeast-dough) - but I did it for the sake of alliteration, which excuses much.

I recently bought some plums which were not too tasty. They were quietly rotting away in some dark corner of my fridge, resigned to their eventual fate of being rejected as waste, when they unexpectedly saved the day:

I had, in a sudden fit of insanity, forgotten to buy a sufficient amount of chocolate for the weekend, an unforgivable faux-pas as the forlorn wailing of my girlfriend made obvious.
To safe the day (and my hide) there was nothing else to do than activate my mad cake-cooking-skillz:

• 500 g flour
• yeast
• 0.25 l milk
• bit of sugar
• salt
• plums
  

Let the dough rise to twice its volume, then spread (with my patented alcoholic rolling pin - the bottle 2006 Riesling above) and cover with plum-slices. Shove into the pre-heated oven at 220 centigrade until done.

Obviously I did something right, since Charlotte forgave me... eventually. Unfortunately I was too slow to photograph my oeuvre in all its glory - but at least I was able to snap a photo before it was all gone!

Diagrams and figures

I have been looking for a simple, lightweight program to draw figures and diagrams with. Apparently, those Apple-adherents swear by omniGraffle, but unfortunately that is Maclusive (sometimes I crack myself up, I really do).

Fortunately, a bout of ennui and the aimless web-surfing following it yielded a solution today: Inkscape

Very intuitive and fast, can export in encapsulated postscript, and has a wealth of hidden features that are, well, hidden. Hence the intuitiveness. My first oeuvre is to be admired on the right: The setup of the RF electrode in one of my experiments.


Also, I am following a course about Mathematica this term (hey, it's easy credits!). Mathematica is interesting, and I am playing with the idea of programming some simple evolutionary algorithms for my demonstration in december. But plotting data is a pain in the ass. This I found out when in the first ardour of learning a new software, when I wanted to plot my spectroscopic data. Bad idea. Formatting your plot takes all manners of weird commands that are cunningly hidden in the cryptic help system (I am using version 6.0, in which said system was overhauled and upgraded - go figure), and there doesn't seem to be a way to do the same over the GUI, if you want to just try out something quickly.

Consequently, I went back to Matlab for all my data manipulation needs. Here are some spectra. Pretty, are they not? Note the weird continuum of CF4, of which I have written before (see the corresponding plasma here). Only this time, it is pure CF4, not decomposition of Teflon.

The experimentalists best friend

The experimentalists best friend is the small red pin on the right. Push it in, and the nasty red light above will go away, and you can finally conduct your experiments to your hearts content under the warm glow of the green light above.




Correct, this little friend is the security override. I have written time and again about the host of safety features that hinders helps to keep us safe here at the EPFL. Here is how we deal with them:

In the picture below you can see a whole bunch of the little greedy green lights that have to be satisfied so that pushing the big blue button (see red arrow) will open the valve to your coveted toxic vapours. And if you look closely, you can see all my little friends below, keeping them happy...




Sometimes I think safety regulations were written by a representative of the pin-industry...

My precious

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

(One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all and in the Darkness bind them.)

Well, okay. It's Tetrafluoromethane-plasma. Still cool, though.

What's in a name?

For the longest time I have thought that my first name (Boris) is derived from the Slavic god Bor, a god of war. I don't even know where I got this information from - but I remember telling that to other children in kindergarten before punching them in the face.

The other day a sudden fancy pushed me to seek more information about my divine namesake. Imagine my surprise when I found out that dear old Bor does not exist! There is a nordic god named Borr, or Bor or Bur (the vikings weren't too wild on orthography) but he is not a god of war. Indeed, he is not a god of anything, because he gets only a couple of lines in the Edda:

[Búri] gat son þann er Borr er nefndr. Hann fekk þeirar konu er Bestla er nefnd, dóttir Bölþorns jötuns, ok gátu þau þrjá sonu. Hét einn Óðinn, annarr Vili, þriði Vé.

[Búri] begat a son called Borr, who wedded the woman named Bestla, daughter of Bölthorn the giant; and they had three sons: one was Odin, the second Vili, the third Vé.

Hmpf. Curse you, Snorri!
Well at least Borr was the father of Odin, that's at least something. Anyway, further judicious use of Google revealed to me the etymology of my name is unclear.

There are a couple of possibilities:

• The real Progenitor of my proud name was Boris the I. of Bulgaria (852-889), also called Bogoris. He introduced Christianity to Bulgaria, shopping around for the best conditions in Rome and Byzantium. After switching sides for a couple of times he settled on the orthodox church, because they granted him the right to autocephaly, i.e. self-government, meaning that the patriarch of the Bulgarian church recognizes no higher authority, while still being part of the eastern orthodox church.
  
  Eventually Boris I. abdicated in favour of his son, and became a monk. However, when his son became apostate, Boris took a brief sabbatical to smite and blind him, and give the realm to his next-eldest, not without mildly admonishing him to stay in the arms of the church, or else.
  
  Boris returned to his monastery, only briefly sojourning from it one last time to smite some uppity Magyars that had invaded Bulgaria.
  
  During his reign he also oversaw the introduction of the Cyrillic alphabet by disciples of saint Cyril. (The Cyrillic alphabet is a derivation of the alphabet invented by saint Cyril himself, called the Glagolithic alphabet because, being a saint, Cyril was too modest to name it after himself, leaving his disciples to rectify that oversight)
  
  Seeing that good Boris I. was a proto-Bulgar, and therefore of Turkic origin, the name Boris probably meant Wolf originally. Or short. Or bars, depending on your interpretation and the state of intoxication of your local proto-Bulgar expert.
  
  
• Another interpretation of the meaning of Boris a derivation of the ancient Slavic boron, "to fight" or "glory", meaning also "to become famous in battle". However, this site refutes this interpretation. Which is in turn contested in the comments.
  
  
• A third possibility is a link with one of the the Greek Άνεμοι (Anemoi - wind gods) Boreas, whose name meant "north wind" or "the one who devours". He also was quite the proponent of bestiality, fathering 12 colts to the mares of Erichthonius, king of Troy, by taking the form of a stallion. Later on Boreas rethought the whole offspring thing, and kidnapped the maid Oreithyia, an Athenian princess, and fathered two sons and two daughters.
  

Well, I am confused. Shall I name myself Boris, devourer of wolves? Short wolf who sits in bars? Sodomistic north wind? Glory of the mares?

Sod it. I'll just lie and tell everyone I am Boris, god of war. It worked in kindergarten, after all.

Toxic plasma

It's been some time since I have posted a plasma picture, so here are some hollow cathodes burning in hydrogen. Yes, it is true, I have finally graduated to toxic gases (at least in the context of safety, hydrogen is considered toxic because, well, boom.), meaning I get to fight with automatic safety systems and valves and detectors each time I want to do an experiment.

At least I can now say "Oh, I work with toxic plasma" when somebody asks me what I am working on.

Unfortunately, hydrogen plasma is very similar in colour to argon plasma. It is quite different in behavior of course (even in this photo you can see that it is much more contained than argon plasma. This is because of differences in the mean free path of electrons). I would love to do some oxygen at some point, because that would be blue, but it is even more of a pain in the ass to use oxygen right after you have used hydrogen ore vice versa. Because, well, double-boom.

Also I am a bit sick and tired of taking pictures of plasmas. It's fun, but I still have no idea what's really going on physically speaking. I want to start measuring, but what? I am afraid the first thing will be optical spectroscopy again - a real pain in the ass. Well, at least I know more about it now...

Sea

I really could go fer some sea an' sunshine right now. Jus' t' cure me curs'd cold, o' course. An' on accoun' o' 't being a shame t' sit in a landlocked country on "Talk like a pirate"-day! I be guessing goin' down t' Lac Leman might help, but th' godfersaken' lily-livered sweet-water scallywags down there be turning me beard gray wi' their incessant natterin'! Arr, 't jus' ain't th' same...

Funny bone

Recently (this is to be taken none too strict, it was before the flu from hell even) my funny bone decided that being funny once in a while wasn't enough for him anymore, no sir! He wanted to be hilarious all the time. All my pleading with the little bastard lead to nothing, he had to go and be a stand-up comedian. Well, I won't cry if somebody shoots him down.

The funny bone is on your elbow, where your ulnar nerve is exposed. If you are unlucky (or fighting a vicious and extremely skilled martial arts master) the bone might get hit, resulting in your hopping around comically, waving your hand in the air. Now imagine feeling that continuously.

Horrible, isn't it? Thank his Noodliness I don't feel that. Still, my ring and little finger have been asleep for weeks now, and those lazy bastards (and their associate, the bloody ulnar [which is an excellent viking name if you need one]) start to get on my (other) nerves. I am currently eating anti-inflammatory drugs in the hope of somehow waking them up, since the funny, sorry hilarious bone obviously isn't doing it.

I think I am getting old.

Zeppelin

No posts over the weekend despite my promise - what can I say, I lied. Also, I was still sicker than I thought.

Today is a public holiday here in Switzerland (something I of course only found out after getting up at half past six), so I am still home twiddling my thumbs.

But here is a picture of one zeppelin that nearly crashed into my roof on Saturday (the black strip on the right is the roof over my balcony). Seriously, the thing only cleared the top by about 10 or 15 meters. I guess the guy in there was a getting a bit frantic, at least he kept the burner going continuously...

I live... again!

Well, that was a nasty flu, thank you very much. From Saturday to Tuesday I was lying around in a fever-haze. When I measured 39.3 centigrade Tuesday night, I decided that a visit to the doctor might be in order. You can safely deduce from this that my girlfriend is still in India, because she would have sent me to get medical help Monday morning at the latest. Well, such are the privileges of men.

Anyway, the doctor told me that my flu got infected or something (My French was close to nonexistent at this point), and gave me about a kilogram of antibiotics, nice anti-fever and anti-pain and anti-soreness drugs and gargle-thingies and tablets and stuff, and today I am well enough to type, yipee! Unfortunately not well enough to hop over to Paris as I wanted to, so instead I will be moping around in Lausanne. Therefore there will be weekend-posts this weekend.

By the way, if you really want to loose weight, I can recommend my kind of deathly infected mutant flu. Here is a complete list of what I ate from Friday evening to Wednesday evening:

*) two small baguette, à 100g
*) a pack of zwieback, 120g
*) two bowls of muesli, ca 100g.
*) one cup of cottage cheese

Not bad for five days, eh?