The . . . Enchanted Forest?

The laboratory I work in is located in a rather remote area compared to the rest of the university and the center of the city.  Considering the offices and departments located here, I suspect that the campus was organized to house anything to do with the words "nuclear," "radiation," or "particle" in the last forty years.  It is a quiet campus, and a decent walk from the nearest bus stop.

With all the rain that Belgium gets as part of its normal fall weather, I was not surprised to see lots of mushrooms and moss popping up outside the laboratory.  I was surprised to see this one, though:

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physis: The Theory

October this year brought rain and a Nobel prize to Belgium, as Francois Englert of the Free University of Brussels won the 2013 physics prize along with Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh.  They were recognized for  “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”[1].  I think my field is witnessing the end of an era.

The first subatomic particle discovered as such was the electron in 1895, and in the following decades many, many more particles were discovered, including protons, neutrons, muons, pions, and neutrinos.  Different ways by which particles interact were also identified.  As the list of particles got larger, patterns in their properties and behavior began to emerge.  Theorists began to look for theories that explained these patterns.  Quark theory was the answer to describing all the hadrons, while the description of how particles interacted was built by Sheldon Glashow in 1960.

Things I don't understand

The two on the left are approximately the size of a nickel with a normal spread of their legs.  The one on top right is about the size of a quarter.  The one on the bottom left is about three inches/eight cm across.

1. Why Belgium is currently hosting so many public spiders.  I cross the ones shown here (plus a few more of the orange and black ones) every day on my way to the bus stop; they live in an archway connecting my apartment complex's central grounds to the street.  I passed a bridge this morning with a web, half of them occupied, strung in each gap between railing pillars.  I do not want to think about what this implies for the current state of the fly population, or what it could be like.

2. Why Ikea requires those buying a couch, a piece of furniture that is not flat-packed, to load the item on a trolley and drag it the full length of the warehouse to and through the check-out lines.  We then had to pull the thing to customer service and wait in line until one of the employees brought out the cushion covers for us.

The couch moved by customers and the cushion covers handled only by employees.

3. Why everyone in my building seems to have cheese with their lunch.  I understand that I am in Europe and cheese is a big deal around and inside the French border, but so are sausages and I don't see the refrigerator packed with them.  Even if gouda isn't the strongest cheese around, when the refrigerator houses more than a dozen specimens non-stop it can start to get a bit . . . whiffy.

4. Why if I print the values of variable x and get the list {172.15,172.25,172.35,172.45,172.55,172.65,172.75,172.85}, the test x == 172.15 never, ever returns true.  The test x == 172.25 returns true, but never x == 172.15.  The list is populated with ever possible value of x, and yet the test fails.  I lost the better part of a day and some of my trust in the logic of computers to that one.

That is a lot of incomprehension accumulated by a Tuesday.

Brussels and Ghent

August is the month of vacations in Western Europe, when all the local vanish and the train stations are packed with people carrying suitcases and speaking every language but the native one.  While I don't teach and do not get a summer vacation of that sort, my university closed for a couple weeks in July and I took the chance to see some sights with my family.  Some I'd seen and shared before, but I did get to a few Belgian ones that were new to me.

Brussels: The Manneken Pis

There are many varied stories about the origins of this statue.  Some hold that it was the gift of a father to the city when the townsfolk helped him find his lost son.  Others say it commemorates a boy who helped stopped enemies by peeing on their bombs.  The Manneken Pis (or little pee man) is one of Brussels' most famous sights.  The statue even has costumes for different seasons of the year and is decorated for city events.

That being said, it is a tiny statue, maybe two feet tall, on a fountain in the middle of an otherwise nondescript neighborhood in central Brussels.  The area looks like this:

 

The Manneken Pis is hidden just barely by the chocolate shop on the right in the photo above.  There are three chocolate shops visible in that photo, two of them being Godiva and Leonidas.  Neuhaus has a location just up the street, as do a few others.  There are also several waffle and ice cream places.  I found it an interesting cross-section of tourist interests in Belgium.

Brussels: Atomium

The Atomium was built to be the centerpiece of the World's Fair(?) in 19**.  The name is a mash-up of "atom" and "aluminum," as the main theme of the fair was progressing into the future through new technology.  At the time, it contained the fastest elevator and long escalators in the world.

 

The Atomium is a striking tower in Brussels' skyline, and it contains exhibits on the fair it was built for and a few temporary modern art installations.  That's all.  I wasn't overwhelmed with it.  The story of the exhibits didn't flow well, and the audio guide was difficult to understand.  In fact, some of the audio guide monologues were matched to the wrong parts of the exhibit.  The best part of the visit was taking visits of its exterior, and seeing Brussels from the highest dome, as shown below.

Ghent: Clock Tower

Ghent is a university town and one of Flanders biggest cities.  Its skyline noted for the three main towers, two churches and a bell tower all lined up in the central square.  I was able to visit the bell tower, and it was a lovely short trip.  The main attraction is climbing the tower itself, starting at the base with a room that originally stored important civil documents and now stores the remaining original of four guardians statues on the bell tower (accompanied by three reconstructions of the others).  As you climb, the higher floors hold displays about how the tower was remodeled over the years and the dragon statuette that used to crown it.  The dragons were built to breath fire on major holidays.  My favorite part was the bells, as the tower both has some of the original bells founded centuries ago and information on how the bells are founded.  You can also see the machinery that plays the carillon each hour and walk around a very narrow walkway at the top to get a view of the city.

Taking the stairs, though, is for people with strong calves and no fear of enclosed spaces.  The hallways are extremely narrow.  Most of the floors are also accessible by elevator.  My favorite part, though, was that I was lucky enough to be at the top when the bells rang the hour.  I felt surrounded by the sound, and it was amazing.

It does not say good things . . .

It does not say good things about the agency managing your apartment when they call you on Monday to inform you that your landlords are divorcing and selling the apartment you live in, and then call you on Tuesday to say that actually, that is happening to your neighbors and they got the apartment numbers mixed up.

I dearly hope this gets clarified to mean that we don't have to move.  I moved six times in the year 2012, and I would like to stop evaluating my belongings to make sure they all fit in two suitcases weighing less than 50 lbs each.

Chocolate Cake Tour

 

I think chocolate cake is one of the most perfect desserts.  This means I have collected several chocolate cake recipes, each suited for a different use.  At the easiest end of the spectrum there is the wacky chocolate cake recipe.  No butter, no eggs (making it an option for those who don’t eat those things), very easy to mix up with small people as assistants, and it turns out with the texture of a boxed cake mix but much better flavor.

Mon Bijoux

Once upon a time, I thought that using electrically powered appliances for baking was for wimps.  If our ancestors for ages untold had managed to churn out meal after meal with wooden spoons, whisks, and will power, I could do so as well.  I was a teenager, my mom did most of the cooking and my sister did most of the baking, and my favorite thing to make was a batch of brownies with melted butter.  A wooden spoon or spatula worked just fine, and I didn't have to worry about dangling the cord into anything sticky.  Furthermore, a lot of doughs, either for bread or cookies, were stiff enough that most hand-held mixers (the only kind of mixer I knew of ) couldn't handle them anyway.