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:

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.

Jokes about Units

One of the “joys” of moving from the US to just about any other country is the need to get used to SI, or metric, units.  Food is sold by grams, kilograms, and liters; street signs are marked in kilometers and kilometers per hour.  An attendant joy is that periodically, someone will mock the fact that the US still uses the old English units to your face.  As an American physicist, I have lived and worked with both, and also as a physicist, I can be annoyingly focused on the use of units past the attention span of those cracking the original joke.  So let’s discuss the metric system, shall we?

The metric system was introduced in 1799 in France an attempt to move beyond older and regional systems of units to something more logical and universal.  Today, the metric system has been replaced by le Système international d'unités, often abbreviated SI units.  The idea was to have units that related to each other in a logical way, that could be derived from a set of basic units, and (a bit more modern priority) that could be derived from natural phenomena.  The original basic metric units were the meter (m), the second (s), and the kilogram (kg); the SI system currently has seven fundamental units, adding the Kelvin, the candela, the mole, and the ampere to the original three.  All other units within the system can be derived from simple combinations of this basic group.  For example, the unit for force, the Newton, is defined as the force needed to accelerate 1 kg of material to a speed of 1 m/s in 1 s. 

Ah, Bravery . . . and hair

Living in a country where everyone else speaks French and I don't has made me reevaluate what bravery is. I currently have a new contender for bravest thing attempted in France: I got my hair cut.

I find it hard enough to communicate with a hair stylist about what I want done with my hair when we both speak the same language, so attempting that communication in French was intimidating. This is why I had put off getting my hair cut for about . . . oh . . . eight months.

Happy Birthday, Einstein

I find March a very interesting month. It is the tail end of winter, so it is still cold and frosty. But spring is also coming, so there is more sunlight and flowers start to pop up and the birds get very, very noisy arguing about whatever it is birds argue about in the wee hours of the morning. It doesn't really have any official holidays unless perhaps Easter falls during the month, so for the duration of my college career the entire month of March is a marathon of projects and tests that doesn't let up until you crash into finals in April.

This year is not exception, though tests aren't to blame this time around. Now it's shifts and a paper for my professor.

It's too bad, because I would like to celebrate the first flowers and actually make myself a cake for once. Besides, March 14 is Pi day (March 14 = 3/14 = 3.14 . . .) and Einstein's birthday, so every physicist should have a chance to celebrate.

You Know You're In Switzerland When . . .

Yup, that would be a weight-loss cereal with flakes covered in dark chocolate. The caption on the bottom translate to something like "our program for your weight." There is another version with a higher proportion to chocolate-covered flakes to not-chocolate-covered ones, and a milk chocolate one as well.

Truth be told, I compared calories per serving, and this version doesn't do worse than the honey and almond or fruit and nut versions it was sitting next to.

A Word of Advice on Phones

When buying a phone in Europe, one requires two pieces of technology. The first is a phone of the type that most US citizens are already familiar with; the second is a SIM card, or a small microchip-like object that comes attached to a plastic card roughly the size of a credit card. The SIM card must be placed inside the phone in a special receptacle near the battery, and I believe enables the phone to work across country borders. This ability is of course necessary around Geneva, with country borders a scant handful of kilometers away.

First, one's new phone will also come out of the box fluent in the native language of the country, regardless of what language the original box or contract or owner's manual is in. For Switzerland, that would be German. Looking up the words for "settings" and "language" in whatever that native language may be will ease that first meeting with one's new phone, until one and the device are on speaking terms.

One should also observe that the little plastic card the SIM card was attached to is marked with several cryptic numbers, and is the case with all such scraps with cryptic numbers, should be guarded zealously. Otherwise, when one returns to the US for Christmas and must shut down the phone for the flight, one will find that one's phone is demanding a PIN number that one doesn't have. Upon failing to accurately recall the PIN three times, the phone will then demand a PUK number to reset the PIN, giving one a total of eight tries for that before some more extreme measures will be taken. Thus, one will be rendered without a phone for three weeks after returning to one's current abode, while one methodically gathers up every scrap of paper that as squirreled itself away into every corner of one's tiny apartment in the process of looking for that little plastic card.

Image taken from www.technonix.com

Probably a bad sign . . .

It is probably a bad sign when the same security guard is on duty when you leave the lab at night as when you come back the next morning.

Yea, that happened to me on Friday. It's been a busy, busy week.

Busy three weeks, to be honest, and it will probably continue up until Christmas vacation has begun and I can safely ignore emails. Everyone is trying to get projects done before Christmas, so they can begin the collaboration review process and have results ready to present at conferences next January and February. It makes for very, very long meetings, and lots of quality time spent tweaking plots.

But, with an internet connection, it is always possible to take a few moments and mentally check out, preventing any violence that might get directed at Powerpoint/ROOT/the research scientist who just signed you up to give a talk in two days. My personal favorite mental time-out is webcomics. There are several I've read or follow (PhD, Not Invented Here, among others) but my favorite is definitely Sheldon. It's about a ten-year-old, who wrote an amazing computer program that sold like mad, making him suddenly the owner of a multi-million dollar company.

And, he's ten.

It only gets wackier from there. So next time you need a mental break and have a few minutes (and the fortitude to keep it to only a few minutes), I would offer you the chance to go visit with Sheldon and Gramps and Dante and Arthur. Enjoy!


Images taken from www.sheldoncomics.com and www.theseofficepranks.com.

How to fix a blown fuse

Reason 1,483 that Europe is not like the US: the electricity is different.

The physicist in me protested it should be something like 'the way electricity is distributed is different' but it's a weekend, that wording destroys any snap to the phrase and was edited out.

There are three aspects to this difference, ranging from obvious (the plugs aren't shaped the same) to subtle (the frequency is different). However, I would say that the potentially most damaging is that the voltages are different. European electric circuits run at twice the voltage of their American counterparts (220V instead of 110V). Voltage is the potential energy per unit charge, so you can think of it roughly as the energy available to the charged particles in the current, and begin to see why this may be a problem. Too much energy in a circuit = things melting.

Electronic equipment is protected against this sort of thing, since it runs on DC current and already needs to convert the AC power that comes from the wall. Anything that draws a lot of current, though (curlers, hair-blow dryers), is going to pick up four times as much power.

Voltage = Resistance * Current
Power = Voltage * Current

This is how foreign hair-blow dryers turn into circuit-blowing monsters when taken over seas. However, you can also blow fuses by plugging in American power-strips into European outlets. I know. I've done it.

I've also fixed it, at least from the apartment-renter's perspective on fixing. No soldering required.

1. Find the circuit box. Mine hides in the closet closest to the door, but I've also seen them on the wall in the corner.
2. Open it and see what's going on. When I blew fuses in the US, the blown fuse would be the only one flipped to an off position (as compared to everything else) and flipping it back would fix the problem.
3. If no switches are visible, find the fuses themselves. They look like little clear cylinders with metal ends. Unless they have some plastic bracket or other insulation, do turn off the master power switch (should be right next to them) before pulling things out.
4. Figure out which fuse you need to change. I do this by turning off the power, removing a fuse, turning the power back on, and running around my apartment flipping switches until I figure out what I disconnected.
5. Replace the fuse. The previous tenant of my apartment kept a little bag of fuses for different currents (it's the number followed by an 'A'), and I plan to continue his example. Pick a new one that's for the same current as the old one.
6. Add fuses for that current to your shopping list for the next time you pass by a hardware store. Find a different outlet to charge your camera battery so you don't actually need the power strip.