Friday 21/12/2012:

9:00: Last organizational meeting of the practicum I have to teach. Bit odd time for drinks and snacks though.

12:30: Cleaning the lab Students clean the lab, I boss them around.

15:00: What the heck, it is far too early, but lets head to the airport. Tram is rerouted a bit and makes an honorary lap around Bahnhof Oerlikon. At the airport the tram driver wishes everybody happy holidays.

16:00: Through security, first person I see is a colleague. Wondering if I will meet more people I know.

17:00: The Burger King at the airport is busy. Some guy is ordering a complicated custom menu. Alternative is a lukewarm slice of pizza, or some overpriced sandwiches.

18:00: Thinking that maybe I should have taken a tram later.

19:00: In the airplane, ready for departure, 20 minutes early or so.

20:30: Pilot is joking that the reason we see nothing out of the windows has nothing to do with the world coming to an end. We’re just flying in the clouds.

21:00: Time gained from early departure lost by landing on the Polderbaan (Schiphol Amsterdam Airport), which means we first have to fly over the whole country and then have to taxi for 10-20 minutes. The pilot does put the pedal to the metal though.

21:30: More time lost waiting for the checked luggage. Somehow the luggage from a flight from Athens was 5 minutes late, while that from Zurich was 5 minutes early. Typical? Or can those people from Greece really not get a break?

22:00: Having a drink.

Saturday 22/12/2012:

8:30: Leiden (where I am now) is 600 km northwest of Zurich. It is remarkable how much later the sun rises. I’m surprised that I notice it.

10:30: The other people in this house are not early risers either.

10:45: How complicated can a shower get? This one has more buttons and levers than my iPhone. I think you need a diploma to operate it.

11:00: I have an evil sock that is just too small. I think I have thrown it aside many times now, but somehow it seems to follow me around, even to the Netherlands.

12:00: rain

13:00: still raining

13:30: I have been away from Leiden for 11 years now and most shops have changed. Luckily, not my favorite clothing shop: “Henny’s Rits” (zipper). They have a wall full of jeans, they ask you which color you want, they look at you to determine the size, you try them and you’re done! Their motto is “one pant for two buttocks” (or should pant be plural?)

14:00: how different is the situation at bookstores. Three bookstores, all filled with people, all asking if book X or Y is still in stock. The demise of bookstores becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy this way.

14:30: I had luck with moderate rain until now, but now it starts pouring. Damn!

14:45: home again.

17:00: glass of wine

17:30: another glass of wine

18:00: making a lasagna

19:00: eating lasagna

20:00: making another lasagna

22:00: watching a movie on tv. Next, I’ll put something on a floppy disk, put it in an envelope with a stamp priced in Guilders and walk to a letterbox.

22:15: changing channels on a tv is really slow nowadays. It was faster even with the old black-and-white tv without remote control – you had to stand up and walk to the tv. That element is back now though, when you have to pick up the remote control after throwing it around in anger.

22:30: bloody tv ads. This makes moving GIFs on websites seem adorable.

22:45: time to stop the misery and go to bed.

23:00: still raining by the way

Sunday 23/12/2012:

8:00: did it stop raining?

8:30: hmm, lasagna-breakfast

12:00: doing some tech support for my mom. Now able to use wifi on the loo.

13:00: stroopwafel!

16:00: time for a Westmalle beer

18:00: preparing dinner

19:30: choice between 5 different types of ice cream

20:00: preparing the turkey for tomorrow (sort of brining)

This blog will be continued here

The streetparade is an event that feels a bit out-of-place in Zurich. Normally the streets are clean and the people calm. Not with the streetparade, when almost a million people come to see a parade of trucks with techno music and dancers. Yesterday was the 21st edition of this event. Despite the amount of people, the atmosphere is quite relaxed. I don’t mean the music, which is kind of loud and not really my style, but the people. I guess half of the people just want to see what the heck is going on, but there are also people who travel long distances to visit the event. Two years ago there was even a Dutch float – fully orange of course. The best are unknowing tourists who wanted to visit a museum or so and end up in the middle of a houseparty, looking a bit puzzled.
I went to take a look and make some pictures. It should give you some idea of the party yesterday.

One more time lapse video today, this time of Manhattan.

One of the nice perks of doing a PhD is visiting conferences. It is a nice way to meet colleagues, present and discuss results and, let’s be honest, to see other places. Two years ago I went to a conference in the US and I stayed a bit longer to visit a friend who was living in Berkeley (near San Francisco) at the time. This year I went to a conference in Berlin – not as “exotic” as the US, but I never visited Berlin before, so I was still curious to see it.

Just to get it out of the way, I went to the “Coherent Multi-Dimensional Spectroscopy”-conference. It is a more specialized conference, with about 130 participants. The conference was well-organized and I really enjoyed it.

Part of the conference was the dinner in the “Naturkunde Museum” – Museum for Natural History. We had a tour along some highlights, which included animals in (m)ethanol (not very appetizing) and some extinct and/or ancient animals, like the predecesor to the zebra and the elephant. It was a pity we had to hurry a bit because we had to be on time for the dinner – in the entrance hall, next to/underneath some dinosaurs. Yep, we had dinner underneath some fricking dinosaurs. Pretty cool.

After the conference was finished on Wednesday afternoon we went to see the city. We started the tour at the Potsdammer Platz, which was a no-man’s-land during the Cold War. There are still five old pieces of the Wall, but it is now surrounded by massive shiny new buildings. I guess it is nice when you like modern architecture.

Then we went into the direction of the Brandenburger Tor, passing the Holocaust Memorial. It is a lot of concrete blocks. First I was a bit disappointed: “just some concrete blocks?”, but what kind of memorial can represent something of such unimaginable proportions? Maybe it is better to keep the memorial “simple” and keep the story alive. The individual tales of the Second World War are visible all around Berlin. There are signs on buildings where notable people were murdered, there are small gold stones in the ground to commemorate people who died in concentration camps.

After the Brandenburger Tor and the Reichstag (not much to say about it, really), we ended up at the Siegesäule, a pillar with a gold statue on top. It is in the middle of a roundabout. I was a bit surprised by the amount of traffic in the tourist areas. The street between the Siegesäule and the TV-tower (with the Brandenburger Tor in the middle) is both very touristy and a major traffic artery. I didn’t really like that part.

It was nice to do this walk after three days of conference. We ended the day with a dinner in some restaurant in a less touristy area. By the way: with “we” I mean me and an American PhD student who also stayed a bit longer to visit Berlin.

On Thursday we visited the Berliner Dom – a large church. Then we went on to the DDR-museum. It is a very hands-on museum and gives an insight into life in East Germany. It does a great job, but it doesn’t really show how people elsewhere lived. It makes it hard to judge if something is old-fashioned or DDR-fashioned. They have a Trabant, a small and simple car. But the old Mini was also small and simple, right? Still, it is a nice museum that shows how life actually was – not how you can interpret it.

With that my stay in Berlin was basically finished. Berlin is a nice city and I had a good time there. Now back to the lab for the last half year of my PhD.

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More photos can be found here.

In Dutch there is a saying “even a donkey doesn’t bump twice into the same stone”, the moral being that you’re stupid if you try something again and again and expect a different outcome.* I had to think of it when Facebook last week changed everybodies email addresses without asking my, or any other users, permission first.

Over the last few years I have had a double feeling about Facebook. The positive side is that it is a nice way to stay in contact with friends while I’m living abroad. The other side is that you effectively hand all your personal data over to a company that uses it to sell ads. New features of Facebook are intended to sell more ads first and are improvements for the user second. There is a quote “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” and it fully applies here.

To a certain extend I learned to live with that. I sighed when I had to update my privacy settings and grumbled a bit when Facebook forced the new Timeline feature on me. But it also got me back in contact with friends far away. There was a nett positive. But now Facebook overstepped the line.

I first wanted to argue that there is a difference between changing the privacy settings, the introduction of the Timeline and changing the email address. In the first two cases you could argue that they are improvements. We now have more control over privacy and it is easier to search old posts. It is still shows your status updates but in a different form or to different people. Changing the email addresses is different because they are actively changing your content.

But the more I wrote, the more I was struggling to make that case. In the end, you post updates on Facebook with a certain expectation: that it will be limited to the public you choose. By changing the privacy settings Facebook went against my wishes. What is the difference with Facebook changing the email addresses? As I was writing, I more and more felt like the donkey bumping into the same stone over and over again. Do I really expect things to change?

I knew all along that the answer is “no”. Later today I’ll delete my Facebook profile. It is a pity to lose contact with friends, but it is also a relief that I won’t bump into the same stone another time.

* As an aside, isn’t this exactly what science is?