Charles Betz Blog

Link: http://www.kondolenzbuch-online.de/cgi-bin/2007/books/000191.pl

Fir déi Leit déi den James geschaat hun an senger Famill e puer léif Wieder wëlle schreiwen, ass hei en Link op säin Kondolenzbuch. Rou a Fridden James!

Starting tomorrow, I'll be sitting in Wirzweli in the Nidwaldner mountains for my only week of holidays this summer. Line will be joining me tomorrow by train. Hope we'll have decent wheather...

Link: http://justagirlintheworld.com/2007/06/28/the-police-were-hot-on-her-tail/

Man I had a good laugh while reading Lisa's story.

[...]All of that being said, you’ll understand my surprise when I got a midnight phone call from our local police. Chris and I were in Connecticut, on our anniversary mini-vacation, and my cell phone rang at midnight. Of course, my initial reaction is one of pure dread - - in my mind, there’s only a few reasons why you would get a midnight phone call from the police - - and NONE of them are good ones. When I realized it was the police calling, I’m answering the phone - - but mentally, I’m packing our bags and trying to decide who to call first and how we’ll get an immediate flight away from the East Coast back home![...]

Read the Rest! 

A couple of ingenious sites and blogs from Japanese photographers...

As you may already have noticed, I'm not a big fan of biased reports and claims. ESPECIALLY when they come from people lacking the needed qualifications to make such claims. It's now the third time in weeks that I can read an article about the planned Monsanto Gen-Corn (anyone calling a GMO a gene-corn/plant/animal has got something essentially wrong and should probably stop reading here...) legislation on wort.lu . Monsanto is a huge company that develops among other things agricultural plants that are resistant against specific pesticides. The idea behind this being that once you introduce a resistance to the vegetable of choice, you can use less harmfull pesticides to eliminate bugs etc. I know this can easily become a huge debate, so I'm trying to keep it short. I claim that there is a strong influence of Greenpeace, not only in Luxembourg, and that this may not be the best of things. Greenepeace is often regarded as last resort against all the evil pharmaceutical and biotechnological industries, and I'm not trying to condemn all of their actions, some that are intended to make people aware of certain facts and this is important. But if you consider that most of its members have no higher biological education or understanding and are "nothing but" idealist adolescents that try to make a better world (I don't blame them for that, but it's easy to point out what's wrong and protest instead of trying to find a better (feasible) solution). These are often the same people you'll find protesting against anything, or what I call Against All. Again, I'm well aware that those people are necessary to point out what's going wrong! What would the world be without utopists and idealists. But enough of that hippie-talk. I'm talking science here. I was shocked seeing the Luxembourgish minister Lucien Lux shaking hands with the Greenepeace protesters at the Kirchberg. This is in my eyes nothing but cheap vote fishing. Neither politicians nor Greenpeace activists have the proper understanding to tell if a certain study is well designed or not. Whether it has fundamental flaws and is biased or not. Therefor you need experts. What do the experts say? Not much. The study we're talking about, and which is not referenced in any article I found about the topic (except those in favor of the study) can be found here. Of course it was issued by Monsanto themselves and therfor prone to bias. But reading a number of objecting articles by so-called experts (in most cases PhDs from very unrelated fields of research that are either Greenpeace members or sympathizers), I found the claims and objections of absolutely no relevance. Please note, I'm not even talking about the study itself and whether or not it contains flaws. But just listing a couple of pseudo-scientific terms and arguments does not really prove that you have a basic understanding of what a scientific study has to look like. Of course people are easily frightened by things that are beyond their understanding. You see this in the fear of people that come from different cultures but also in new technologies. Activists and environmentalists are very often so convinced about the wrongness of certain things such as biotechnology that they wouldn't even consider the differences between each and every project. I'm not saying that each and every genetically modified organism developped by the industry is harmless, certainly not, but do people without the knowledge of what a gene really is even have the right to decide about the fate of such a technology? I'm not talking about democracy, but about the fact that people tend to believe those that make easy and uncomplicated claims, no matter how unlikely that appear to the neutral observer. Claims such as: GMOs/Nuclear Energy/etc are dangerous are easy to understand and reach people that wouldn't normally be interested in such technologies. If you really want to read an interesting and scientific book and the subject of GMOs, consider reading: Mendel in the Kitchen by Nina Fedoroff. To give you a taste: In the 1700s, people thought leprosy and tuberculosis were caused by potatoes and that planting them ruined the soil.[...] Grafting (used in all of our fruit trees today) was considered interfering with God's plan[...] In the US, GMOs can be found in all of the major nutritional products, without any effects on the health of people or the environment and without any effects to be expected with the current products in the future.

I'm just trying to convince you not to judge things that you don't understand. Try to inform yourself, read both pro and contra arguments. Don't run with the masses only because it makes things easy to argue (all of the others say it's such and such so it must be true). And please (to our beloved daily newspapers and politicians): Rely on neutral experts before deciding on the fates of us all or making big claims, instead of only writing/deciding what the reader/voter wants. Well I have been rambling again, I only hope my message went through... Oh yes, one final remark (I just can't resist): If you're not willing to consume food modified unnaturally by human hands, please consider going on an loooooong hunger strike, I guess you won't be able to survive without food.

You know there are some who drink tea when they're sick, and there are some who just drink tea. I belong to the latter ones. I'm a tea-maniac, you can call me Mr. Tea! I just can't get enough of it, always eager to try out new flavours and Tea shops. Please note, I'm not talking about infusions here, when I say tea, I do mean tea made from Camelia Sinensis, the only true tea bush. I have a whole collection of flavours, every single one for a different occasion. In the mornings I prefer a good Earl Grey or a nice Darjeeling, later in the morning then a tastefull Assam or Ceylon or a perfect Yunnan, followed by a flavoured Japanese Green Tea (e.g. with cherry or lemon), afternoons is for pure Green Tea (from time to time a wonderfull, rare Chinese one, but mostly Japanese), evenings is for White tea, and smoked teas (like Lapsang Souchong) or even a good old Wu Long. When I'm up for something special, I just go for the Pu Er. You won't believe how much tea can cost, but after years of searching and trying, I'm still convinced the the French company Le Palais des Thés, who also makes international deliveries and has shops all over the world, has the best teas, AND the best Price/Quality factor. Give it a try, if you're not sure what to pick, just drop me a comment or email. If you love tea, you won't regret it!

Here are some pictures from the fireworks in the capitol city for the National Day 2007. Sit back and enjoy!

Link: http://staater.blogspot.com/

Link: http://www.blids.de/

For all you lightning maniacs, this site could be of quite an interest. Offers diverse information about the location and forecast of thunderstorms in central Europe.

About three weeks ago, the RNA society held its annual meeting in Madison, Wisconsin. Four people from the laboratory where I work went to the exciting event to meet with like-minded scientists from all over the world. Among them was Prof. Keller, the laboratory head and my boss. Not without some pride I can announce that he has been awarded the "Lifetime Achievement in Science Award" by the society! Read all about it in the article of the Biocenter's PR department .

I don't know how you think of post mortem released music, but I'm generally not a big fan of this pratice, especially as you often don't know why the artist had not released these tracks during his lifetime. There's one exception to this, and that's one of my favorite song writers, if not poets, namely Elliott Smith. I became first aware of his music during the movie the Royal Tenenbaums, where one of his songs (needle in the haystack) can be heard during the sequence where one of the characters tries to commit suicide. Well, that's the kind of music you can expect from Elliott, deeply emotional, paining whimsical, melancholia at its best. Don't get me wrong, his music and lyrics are some of the best I've heard, but don't give this a try if you're all alone and feeling a bit down. It is known that Smith had a lot of emotional problems, cumulating in his suicide a couple of years ago. Anyhow, he gave the world a huge present with his works and for what it matters, I'm really grateful for that. He passed away just before the prospected release of his album From a Basement on a Hill, which was released after a few months, and now, a new album made of recordings that he had never released (and maybe had never planned on doing so). I like it, its got a nice and calm tune and feels a bit less depressing than the previous one, although something is missing, there's a certain lack of completeness that I can't quite tackle down. If you like him, give it a try, if not maybe start by listening to his best album Either Or. 7 out of 10!

I'm still slightly upset and deranged from yesterday evening, I did not have any tea this morning and in fact no breakfast at all. Just as an explanations for any typos of confuse syntax... As you know, I watched over our dog over the weekend while my parents were in Paris and as I'll be going to Wirzweli next week for holidays, I decided to go by car to Basel and to keep it there for that period. Everything went alright, it was a bit rainy but besides the ride went pretty smoothly until I arrived at Basel. Wohin geht die Reise? - Nach Basel, ich bin Student! - Wie lange bleiben sie mit dem Fahrzeug in der Schweiz? - Etwa 3 Wochen - Hmmmmmmmmm.... Silence and a doubtful look on the officer's face. Therefor I asked him how long I could stay in Switzerland with the car. Not a single day! Then he disappeared with my papers and talked to his collegues for some 10 minutes. Wie lange studieren sie schon in Basel und wie oft fahren sie nach Hause? Well he had the answers already printed on the letter he was holding... Okay, da fahre sie mal rechts übere! Every ten minutes he came and asked one single question, always first trying to address me in French. Okay, ich muss dann mal ein Report ausfüllen. After 40 minutes (did I mention it was 01:00 AM?), he returned and had some more papers for me to fill out. I had to sign that I'll be leaving the country with the car in 3 days, having to put a Stämpfeli on the letter he gave me to prove this. The problem being that I'm registered in Switzerland and therefor cannot drive a car that has no Swiss plates. Besides this, I had no Swiss Drivers License, that you have to get after being registered in Switzerland for over 12 months. Damn!!!! After 70 minutes I was given my ID back along with the license and drove off to find no parking space for another 20 minutes. Then this morning, at 7:00 I drove to the Hauptzollamt (the one for the trucks, which is kind of tricky to find), had to wake up some sleepy Zollbeamter from his stasis and he said oh well that's no problem, you're a Swiss student, I can write you a Bewilligung. - 25 Franken bitte. As simple as that! All the fuss for nearly nothing! When trying to leave the Zollamt with my car, I upset a control lady that had to blow her whistle energically, but to my defense, to get out according to her indications, I had to drive through a Einfahrt verboten road, but anyhow, now I'm sitting in my lab, all tired, hungry and thirsty and the car is in the front of the IMM. Probably the first car from Luxembourg to park there for a long time.

For my upcoming internship in the US next January, I've created a whole new Blog as I guess there will be plenty of additions to this one later on. For those who do not already know this from my previous post, starting in January 2008, I'll be doing an internship in the oncology lab of Prof. Kwiatkowski at the Dana-Faber Cancer Institute beig part of Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. I'll be going to the United States as Fulbright grantee, a sponsership offered through the Commission for Educational Exchange between the UX, Belgium and Luxembourg.

Yesterday afternoon then was the informational meeting in the American Center in Brussels where around 50 grantees including partners received their final contracts and further information as provided by Ms. Nicholson, the director of the Commission, and former grantees who told us about their first hand experiences. Later on, we splitted into smaller groups of shared fields of work, before going on to the US Ambassador's Residence for the reception held in our honor. It was quite a nice evening and I met tons of very interesting people even if I'm rather a reserved person. The embassy is a stunning building, heavily guarded as you may imagine. We signed to "Golden Book" and attended a speech by the ambassador Sam Fox who as I just learned is also a big supporter of the scouts. To tell the truth, it really felt like already being inside the US. As stressed by several persons, being a Fulbrighter will open many doors, and I must say I'm looking forward to experiencing all of this first hand.

Today I'll be returning to Luxembourg to go to Brussels tomorrow as I'll be officially receiving my grant and some useful information about it. Therefor I'm invited to the Amercian center and later on to the embassy of the USA in Brussels, I think it's going to be fun, I've never been to such a prestigeous social event (especially not if it's held in my honor). Later that evening I'll return to Luxembourg to celebrate it's festivities on Friday evening for our National Day and watch over Flo for the rest of the weekend as my parents will be in Paris. Then on Sunday, I'll be returning to Basel with my car, never had a car here, so I hope that won't be of a bigger problem.

 49°37'45.10"N - 6° 5'58.83"E

Link: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html

This post, found via slashdot quite elegantly shows why space colonization now and in the future is a futile act.

The High Frontier, Redux, by Charlie Stross

 I write SF for a living. Possibly because of this, folks seem to think I ought to be an enthusiastic proponent of space exploration and space colonization. Space exploration? Yep, that's a fair cop — I'm all in favour of advancing the scientific enterprise. But actual space colonisation is another matter entirely, and those of a sensitive (or optimistic) disposition might want to stop reading right now ...

I'm going to take it as read that the idea of space colonization isn't unfamiliar; domed cities on Mars, orbiting cylindrical space habitats a la J. D. Bernal or Gerard K. O'Neill, that sort of thing. Generation ships that take hundreds of years to ferry colonists out to other star systems where — as we are now discovering — there are profusions of planets to explore.

READ ON 

Jéinesch, Jenisch, Yeniche, Lakersprache, Lakerschmus or Lakermaud are all designations for an dead dialect once spoken in Luxembourg in the surroundings of Weimerkirch by a group of semi-criminal merchants referred to as Lompekréimer, meaning people that sell rags and old clothes. It was mostly used as a secret language to warn each another but also served as a means of ommunication. It contains western-yiddish and Romani  elements and some words can still be found in modern Luxembourgish without most people knowing that these are actually of Yeniche origin [1]. Here are some examples, more will follow:

• Strumm schiebes a beng nobis! Get lost and keep your mouth shut
• Béin net esou granech! Stop bragging
• An de Bolt strummen. To go to bed
• En huet keng Kitten am Nilles. He hasn't got any money left in his pocket
• Ech hu fock. I am hungry
• Schmonk mer de Gatt! Kiss my ass
• Kuff d’Schmull an dibber nobes! Shut up an go get lost
• Strumm eran an d’Kusch! Enter the house
• Kuff d’Löscht zou! Close the door
• Eng Meckes hunn. To be drunk.
• En huet keng Mécken méih hocken. He has no money left
• En Nilles Plömpert an eng Nisch. A pint and a glass of schnaps.
• Ech scheiwe mat der Schécks. I go dancing with a girl
• De Knöff schefft batze vu nobes, The guy doesn't understand anything
• Steck mer e puer Kitten! Give me some money
• Strumm schiebes! Go get lost
• En hockt quant gewammescht. He's well dressed
• Zopp der gett, dann hues de gett. Take something to have something
• Eng quant Schécks (Moss). A fine girl
• Mir hocken bäikanntech.We are sitting together
• E kritt Mackes gebaut. He's being yelled at

 48°16'54.39"N - 4°34'15.40"W

I have to admit I was a bit sceptical of what to expect with this movie that I watched yesterday evening. Fabienne had warmly recommended itif I remember correctly, and so I thought why not give it a try. My scepticism comes probably from having a wrong perception after having seen a trailer at the movies, which happens to me quite often... I don't know, sometimes I have the feeling that PR division of a movie does not get the essence of the movie at all, same happened to Donnie Darko which was partly marketed as being a horror movie... Well, I do not want to spoil you any of the hilareous moments of Little Miss Sunshine, let's just say that this is the story of a really messed-up family (father: promotes his 8 step succes idea; son: stopped to speak after a vow of silence; uncle: Gay Marcel Proust scholar who just tried to commit suicide; grand-father: likes dubious magazines and sniffs cocaine...) who happen to driver her 8 year old daughter 800 miles in a VW bus to California to the Little Miss Sunshine beauty contest. The movie depicts with painstakingly accurate precision the American society and openly criticizes the whole hysteria about the perception of beauty versus happiness. It offers a wonderful plot with plenty of twists and turns and there were hardly any 5 minutes of it that I wasn't crying tears of laughter. Great great movie, a must-have-seen! 9.5 out of 10!

I just completed coding an adaptation of my blog skin for the upcoming version B2evolution 2.0 that will probably be released in the next months. I optained a copy from their CVS repository and found the admin panel very nice with a lot of new potential and concepts. Of course this also means that the old skins will not work anymore, so I experimented a bit and had to go through the whole code and change many things. Anyhow, if you ever plan on testin the 2.0 out, give it a try with my skin, I'm sure there are a lot of bugs crawling around somewhere!



Download Skin Here!

Ever tried to purify transgenic plasmids from a Maxi or Mini prep and the darn spectroscope told you there was nothing in your tubes? Well then, this brand new and improved technique may just save your day! After 60 minutes incubation of your QIAgen column in the trash bin, carefully take it out and whipe off all the infectious gunk that's covering the tubes. Then take out the real elution buffer (not the suspiciously looking stuff that you poored in before checking the OD for the first time without paying attention), add the isopropanol, centrifuge, et voilà, miraculously there's suddenly something in there. Got 900 micro gram of DNA out of my prep after trash incubation ©, thinking about establishing this as a standart in our lab! Would make a great methods paper in my upcoming journal, still trying to make up a nice name for it! So far I'm at : Annual Proceeding Trends of the Luxembourg Society for the Promotion of Irreproducable Artifacts (Ann. Proc. Tre. Lux. Soc. Prom. Irr. Art.)

I just completed coding an adaptation of my blog skin for the upcoming version B2evolution 2.0 that will probably be released in the next months. I optained a copy from their CVS repository and found the admin panel very nice with a lot of new potential and concepts. Of course this also means that the old skins will not work anymore, so I experimented a bit and had to go through the whole code and change many things. Anyhow, if you ever plan on testin the 2.0 out, give it a try with my skin, I'm sure there are a lot of bugs crawling around somewhere!



Download Skin Here!

After going through a few very interesting papers yesterday, including one exploiting the MARCM strategy in Drosophila that some of us may remember, I updated some of the references in my Papers application. I wirte a few sentences every now and then for my thesis, so far I have around 244 papers in my collection, although not all of them will appear in the bibliography of course. At the moment, I went thoroughly through 25 of these 244... You see it's a long winding road! At the beginning, I got around 5-10 new references with every paper read, but that number has gone down of course to 2-5. We'll see... 

All day long it was warm and cozy, the mercury hitting 32 degrees (celsius), when suddenly at around 19.30 the sky exploded. The whole city of Basel was covered in huge amounts of water, the rain was dropping to the ground in thick threads. I could manage to resuce myself at the Barfüsserplatz tramway station, but still there was no escape, because the powerful wind blew all the water under the cover. Incredible demonstration of mother nature's force! It was a very intense moment and an acceptable break of the hot workday.

I tried to capture some of the drama, but obviously it's a hopeless undertaking.

On Wednesday, just before my lecture in the ZLF, we went to the cantine next to this building, mainly used by doctors, interns and medical students. Well the foods allways fine, they offer a salad buffet that'd convert every carnivorian to a vegetarian lifestyle, really fantastic, with a selection of around 30 freshly made salads. Well there is one thing that chews on my nerves every time I get near there. As a rough estimate, I'd say that 95% of all medical personal that eats there at luchtime will wear their medical coats, and 60% (mostly males) will not miss the opportunity of showing everyone off with their stethoscopes hanging either around their neck or out of their coat pockets. To be honest with you I felt like walking through the Basel Zolli and watching the peacocks performing ritual mating dances. And besides this showing-off that disgusted me is a very real danger to both the public and the patients of these "doctors". I know of course that they have a quite busy day, but so do I, and imagine me walking around with my lab coat covered with oncogenic lentiviruses or irradiated with phospho-32 (both things I'm working with) and just entering the university mensa! I have never seen anything like it with a fellow researcher, although I'm certainly not claiming they're all sheep. But it's certainly not my job to tell any doctor about the very real threats of spreading multi-drug resistent bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus into the public. Or some nasty bug, jumping off the coat of one collegue to the other one, carrying it right to his immunosuppressed patient. I was really shocked considering either the lack of knowledge or of responsability of these "doctors", especially when it only serves the own arrogance or sloth. Don't want to imagin which other basic rules of hygiene remain elusive to them. Please note I'm not attacking the medical personal in general, because all those playing by the rules wouldn't even be recognizable as doctors in such a place. I'm sure there are plenty of very capable doctors everywhere, it's just sometimes difficult to discern them from those few black sheep.

Tonight me and some friends headed out to St. John's Park, situated right at the river Rhine here in Basel. Luke and me brought our custom made set of wooden pieces with us, to play a game called "Kubb ", or unoffically: Viking chess. While very famous in Scandinavian countries, its popularity is still very limited in helvetic regions. You can either play 1vs1 or in teams. The whole game is a mixture between boule, chess and horseshoe throwing. Check swisskubb.ch for a nice tutorial on how to play this weird, but funny game.

I've never played it before, but found it quite enjoyable. It's very easy to play and thus just invites to be played on lazy evenings with maybe a beer in one hand and some friends around. Looking forward for the next time! Check out the very few snapshots I could take.

This weekend, I finally managed to watch the end of the 1950s WWII movie The Bridge on the River Kwai. Man, what a great movie. Every time I see a good anti-war movie such as Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket and Platoon I think that everything that can be said about the cons of war has been said, but sometimes I'm wrong. This movie is a not to be missed classic with great actors such as Alex McGuinness that you may know from his role as Obi Wan Kenobi. It plays in a Japanese prison camp in the Siamese jungle where a battalion of British soldiers is detained and forced to construct a rail road bridge that is important for the Japanese cargo transports. The Japanese Commander of the camp is Colonel Saitu, a brutal leader who forces even the British officers to participate in the building of the bridge, an act prohibited by the Geneva convention. The British Officers finally agree on participating and try to teach them a lesson by building a perfectly engineered bridge. I guess this descriptions sounds a bit childish but it's quite convincing in the plot. Parallel to this is the struggle of a small group of soldiers who fight their way through the jungle to blow that same bridge up. Ingenious plot, exciting movie without too much violence or special effects. Deserves a straight 8 out of 10! BTW, if you think the All work and no play quote is from the Shining, think again!

Very often I search through music sites for new artists and new music. Be it genre-specific sites likes metal.de or more open like laut.de; I always find some amazing and interesting new stuff. Months ago I came across a band called Ektomorf. I listened to a short sample and was immediately fascinated by their sound. At that time though, other bands have gotten more of my attention and so I purchased other albums.

Just recently I was looking through my bookmarks and rediscovered this very band. This time I made the right decision: Buy it!

The hungarian based Ektomorf play a strange kind of metal, I still have a hard time labeling it with some specific style. Maybe this music doesn't need it.. They sound like a cross between Entombed and Lamb of God. Take a punk band, roll it over with a steamroller and let the bloody remains creep towards you, the appearence amplified with a terrifying musical explosion.

I feel in love with their music almost instantly! On my iRiver, on my stereo.. Ektomorf everywhere! Get a taste at their myspace site.

This time, it's for real!

Link: http://molbiol.ru/eng/scripts/01_12.html

For some time I had been looking for a simple tool to just reverse the 5' to 3' direction of DNA sequences without showing a reverse complementations, e.g. for ordering oligos. This site offers all this and more, a nice bookmark in case you don't rely on those fancy aligning applications.

Something I wrote during my trip yesterday:

Die Schlacken schmiegen sich sanft an die getrockneten Körperausscheindungen, die auf diesen trostlosen Stahlschienen einsam und grau vor sich hin kompostieren. Trübe Wolken über der Hauptstadt. Eine sanfte Musik vermischt sich im Hintergrund mit dem monotonen Pfeifen das aus den Lautsprechern ertönt und unerträglicher wohl nur für eine Fledermaus sein könnte. Hin und wieder ein nervöses Auflachen des Nachbarn, resignierende Blicke. Nicht einmal des Tages letzer Sonnenstrahl trifft auf Wertschätzung in dieser Hölle. Sein Licht bricht sich in einem langsam kullernden Regentropfen, der mich auf der Innenseite des grosszügigen Panorama Fensters mit einer bezaubernden Kontinuität anpirscht. Strom, Stein und Stahl. Das Holz passt nicht dazu. Es wirkt wie ein knorpeliges Urzeit Gerippe auf tönernem Fuss. Wieviele Wolken kann ein Mensch innerhalb seines einzigen Lebens zählen. Wo beginnt der Weg, Zieleingabe nicht erforderlich. Nullen und Einsen füllen mit ihrer binären Zuverlässigkeit das magnetische Gebilde meines Hirns. Geduld ist für jene die wissen worauf sie warten. Geklonte Tannenzipfel verschmieren sich im dämmernden Zwielicht mit dem schmutzigen Horizont. Keine Beleuchtung, schlimmer, nichts was sich lohnen würde zu beleuchten. Stillstand, neue Gesichter, keineswegs freundlicher als die scheidenden, na dann. Blos graue Anzüge mit Koffer Anhang. Und ein gekünsteltes Blumenbeet mit Geranien die sich an flackernden Kunstlicht Röhren nähren. Endlose Urbanmauern, beschmiert, jeglicher Kontrast verschwindet in der Einsamkeit. Rauchende Industrieschloten die sich selbst verschlingen. Gleich dem Pfeil bin ich blos auf Durchreise, geklaut aber zutreffend. 

Warning: the following paragraphs may contain explicit language and are not intended for the weakly-hearted!
As I'm writing this, I'm sitting in the train on my way back from Brussels. Somehow, the last 6 or 7 (!) times I took the train, something happened and the train got delayed by 20 minutes minimum! Imagine that. One time it was a suicide, then difficulties on the rail, problems with the signaling lights etc etc! One time the train stood for 30 minutes 100 m away the Luxembourg train station, but of course they couldn't let us out because of security reasons. Well then, I guess today will top everything I experienced so far.
It started by a total and I do mean total chaos at the Gare de Nord in Brussels. There had been a problem with the rail track switches in the station before and therefor there was not a single train passing through the main rail backbone of Belgium. Good start, ey? Well it turned out not so bad after all, just a small head-delay of 15 minutes. Then, just before Arlon, the train simply stopped in the middle of nowhere. Ok, seen that one before you may think. Well I stopped thinking that after 30 minutes of inertia. Of course they tried to tell the people what happened, funny thing was that the speakers were malfunctioning too. After 45 min we had moved around minus 50m, as the train made a few steps backwards every now and then.
After 50 minutes and a rough ride, we had finally entered the Gare d'Arlon. Suddenly, a number of people from the other wagons rushed out and entered a train on the other side of the Quai, entering a train that left a minute later. People in our compartment, still not knowing what had happened, started getting all upset, until someone found out that the train, now with around 1 h delay, was waiting for a new engine, as our locomotive had just stopped working. Now we were waiting for a new engine that should arrive sometime in a couple of 45 minutes. Man we were pissed, especially those that were going to Luxembourg, as no one had told them they should take the train at the other side of the tracks. Great, now I can face still 4 or so hours (this is 21:30...), making it a total of 8 or 9 hours to get from Brussels to Basel. Now that's what I call a nice argument in favor of taking the train instead of the car. I mean, shit can always happen, but then take the responsibility and apologize to the people and explain them what happened and what they should do. Déi kënne mir de Bockel erof rutschen! as we say in the Grand-Duchy. I can accept a delay of 20 minutes every now and then but not if it becomes the rule, not the exception. I'm considering taking the car on a regular basis. Now we're in front of the Luxembourg station and they can't let the train enter because of our delay. Good stuff, but somehow my humor is fading away as evil thoughts are starting to appear on the horizon! And I'm generally not considered lacking patience! BTW even though the train's got nearly 2 h of delay, I will not get any refund. My ticket from the SNCF is only from Luxembourg to Basel, and the "problem" occurred in between Brussel and Luxembourg. So the SNCB would be responsible, but they don't give refunds for this kind of accidents...

Today, this blog under its current domain and appearence celebrates its first birthday. Here I am to thank all of you who contributed by sending feedback, posts or comments and also all of you regular and not-quite-so-regular readers!

Just as a note... in one year we had

• 48'240 unique visitors and 83'425 total visitors
• 1'887'582 accesses on the server
• a load of 32.79 GB
• 76% Windows users, 10 % Mac
• 57% IExplorers, 20% Firefoxes
• 24'901 entries from search engines
• 15'309 entries from external links
• a steady growth in visitors of around 20-100%, depending on the month

I'm looking forward to the next year, hope you're staying tuned. Thank you very much

Charles

spots of blazing light

a palmtree's golden shade

I'm not really there

We now got a new internet connection in our lab, feeding right into the university network... Not too shabby!

I thought, talking about back-ups and gigabytes, it would be a nice idea to show you some data and statistics about the number of pictures, I've shot since 2000 when I received my first digital camera, the Canon Powershot G1 (which I still have and which is still working perfectly). In 2003, I bought the Canon EOS 300D and in 2006 the Canon EOS 5D, not mentioning this numerous equipment and accessoires I aquired in between. So here are the numbers (talking about the pictures as they came from the camera, the edites ones are left out):

• 192 GB of pictures
• 74'687 photographs from nearly 1000 different shootings
• 13'000 of them shot with the Powershot (6.4 GByte)
• 21'000 with the 300D (57 GByte)
• 25'000 with the 5D (112 GByte), which I have now only for a year.
• The rest were shot with other cameras, or had not been registered with their EXIF data in my database

So I thought how to illustrate such a huge pile of pictures. As I had some experience working with mosaics, I decided to create one containing all (or nearly all because of the numerous RAW files) the pictures I've ever shot. As basis, I used the same panaorma than I have as a background in the header of the blog, it was stiched from 10 or so 6MP images in Sweden. Now talking about size, the reulting image contained 56'700 individual pictures, had a size of 612'00KB and measured 37'800x5'400 pixels. Each cell has a size of 60x60 px, the resolution is 1200 DPI and the size A0. It took my poor Athlon 64 Dual 4800+ 54 hours of calculation to complete, and the result can be seen when clicking on the thumbnail. Beware that this is a low quality JPG reduced to 25% size of the original TIFF, I did not want to jam my web server with a single pic.

Some days ago, I picked up a flyer advertising IFIL.ch, the Initiative For Intercultural Learning. The organization offers trips to countries such as Venezula and Israel. The purpose is to encourage cultural and political learning and exchange. In the course of the fully organized holidays, you will meet locals working for NGOs, politicians and other interesting people. At least this is what they promise! I am actually very interested in those holidays, but my financial situation does not allow me to participate. For example, the trip to Washington DC and New York (UN Headquarters) weighs in at CHF 2500.-

So for me, the next chance would be 2008 or even later. It looks like a very nice alternative to traditional holidays, but maybe it is pathetic to disguise as a intellectually inclined tourist to relax for a few days. What do you think? What other such organizations do you know? Alternatives?

Since the early years of my computing experience, I was eager to keep everything I got backed-up. At the beginning, it was the CD-ROMs, then came an external Disk of 250 GB and later on the DVD-ROMs. There are only a few occasions were I had to rely (partly) on them, so no big catastrophe yet. But still, tryiong to back up 500GB on DVDs can be a huge pain in the arse. Either you choose the complete backing up via Nero et co, and have to start right from scratch in case one of your media will fail while burning(and they always will) or you do it in different parts, which means more work and more pain. Then imagine one of your cheapo disks will have a scratch right were it shouldn't have... So my huge chunk of data, consisting mostly of my pictures and the edited versions of them was more or less unsecure for the past few months, which caused my a pain in the stomach. Especially if you consider that I'm running a RAID set of 3 drives, meaning that if one will fail (and that's not a matter of if but of when), all of your data is lost. I had distributed some partial backup on my two external disks, but one of them was pretty unreliable (Maxtor One Touch). So, as I had to have a copy of my data for my internship next year in the US (who has a 600GB HD in their MacBook???), I decided to look for a proper solution and bought an Iomega Desktop Hard Drive with 1TB capacity. It costed around 300€ on their website and arrived two days later (!). Now I can finally sleep well, ah, there's nothing like a good old backup of everything you've ever created on your computer!

Link: http://www.zeit.de/2007/24/G8-Staaten?page=all

I like reading the works of Germany's retired politician Helmut Schmidt who is an expert for relations to China, among other things. I agree with him on many points, although not everything of course. Here's an interesting article from Die Zeit about the G8.

Von Helmut Schmidt:

Früher war es ein intimes Treffen, heute sind die G8-Gipfel eine Riesenstaatsaffäre. Außerdem sitzen nicht die Richtigen am Tisch.Meine Erwartungen an den G8-Gipfel in Heiligendamm sind nicht hoch – aber, ehrlich gesagt, bin ich auch einigermaßen befremdet, wenn ich die jungen Demonstranten sehe, die dort am Zaun stehen und protestieren. Haben sie den rechten Sinn für Proportionen? Als ich ein junger Mann war, hätte mich eine Demonstration gegen die Nationalsozialisten ins KZ gebracht. Da bin ich auf solche Ideen nicht gekommen. Heute würde ich ebenso wenig darauf kommen, weil die reine Demonstration schließlich außer der Befriedigung des eigenen Geltungsbedürfnisses nichts bringt. Jedenfalls ist bei den aktuellen Protesten gegen den Gipfel nicht zu erkennen, was die Demonstranten eigentlich positiv wollen. Ich glaube überdies, dass kein 18-Jähriger sich ernsthaft einbilden sollte, zu wissen, wie die Welt organisiert sein muss.

Read ON 

Link: http://www.decemberists.com/

Click on the pic for a music sample!

A few weaks ago, I discovered this wonderful band thanks to last.fm. Their music is comparable to Neutral Milk Hotel or Belle & Sebastian and even Sufjan Stevens addicts will find their alike. It's actually an Indie Rock band from the US. One of my all time favourites is the Mariner's Revenge Song, Leslie Anne Levine and The Chimbley Sweep. Great band, great music throughout their whole discography!

When it comes to advertising for a product, you normally have to show some pretty good stuff to appear on my blog. This holds true for Thors Hammer, brewed by a good friend of mine, Fabian Käslin, who is not only a molecular biologist and Fasnacht enthusiast, but as we can taste also a master mind when it comes to the production of fine mead, or Met, as it is called in German. Starting out of frustration because of a lack of high quailty mead, an alcoholic beverage on the basis of honey. It was a very common beverage at the time, served in Egypt, old Greece and by the Vikings. It consists of around 15 % alcohol and is not to be confused with honey schnaps or liquor. Well if you happen to be a fan and want to taste a bottle or two, price is 6.5 CHF per 0.5 L bottle (with Porto 8 CHF, up to 3 bottles) and send a mail. Alternatively, just contact me and I'll forward the request.

I just saw that my lecture will be only next week on Wednesday (13. June), not sure how I could have mixed that up? The presentation's ready anyhow, 32 slides are waiting for ya!

Link: http://dlennis.wordpress.com/

Pay a visit to this wonderful site with amazing pictures! 

I gotta be honest with you, I'm a Moussaka-Maniac! For all of you that do not know what it is, I say you're missing one of the best Greek meals there are. And don't think just because you tasted it once in a cheap Greek restaurant in Paris means that you'll know it... No way, you just gotta do by yourself. Or even better (as in my case) have wonderfull parents that decide once or twice a year that their son is starving and then willl spend two days cooking 2 or 3 dishes of this wonderfully delicious thing (along with plenty of other good stuff)! So if you'd like to impress me, just send a bowl over!

It's been now a couple of times that I've had the chance of experimenting with this fascinating photography technique. Basically, it's not too much work, not too complicated or expensive. But of course, you'll need some mandatory equipment:

• a tripod. Don't even start to think about this without one
• a good DSLR, that can perform a good signal/noise ratio at around ISO500. Best'd be a full frame sensor.
• two long blacklight tubes, these are the near ultraviolet tubes you know from the disco. Be sure not to buy far UV tubes, unless you want to cultivate melanomas
• a dark room with non-reflective walls
• fluorescent (that means you actually have to induce its glowing by UV, as opposed to phosphorescent) body-painting colors. You'll find them all over the internet in theater make-up shops, here's an example that worked fine to me.
• Always take RAW pictures, best'd be RAW+JPEG for quick checks
• Position the models in between the camera and the background, in the middle of the room, not too near the wall, but close (1m) to the UV tubes
• use your external flash as metering system to measure the distance, but make sure to desactivate the actual flashing
• use M modus, with fixed aperture and opening time. I had best results with ISO300-500, 3.5, 1/40, but that's really up to you
• make sure to cover a high percentage of the skin with make-up, be reminded that this really are ultra-low-light conditions and you want to get at least some luminosity.
• pictures will become very grainy, cross your fingers that you have a good image processor, if not, there's always the Noise Ninja!
• if possible connect your camera directly to a computer, you'll produce a lot of shots and don't want to keep changing cards.

I guess that's all there is, if you have any questions just send me an email or comment! Good Luck!

One month to late I have finally uploaded the pictures I took at the Bierkistenlauf 2007 in Basel. For those of you who don't know what it's all about: Usually on May 1st, there are numerous anti-capitalistic protests and marches throughout the country and the world. As a reaction to that, some young skaters organized a "beer crate run" themselves, with only dozens of participitants. Years later, the event attracts thousands of young people and the inventors have stopped participitating, because of the massive littering and other reasons. Still, it is a hilarious event: The task is to drink one crate of beer in groups of two persons on a track of some kilometers. The destination is Grün 80, a park near Basel. The winner of the run gets all the crates (a profitable prospect, because you get quite a sum of refund for returning the crates to the shops).

So in the end it is just drinking lots of beer together, but in the light of the violent May 1st-protests, it is an interesting counter-movement. I did not participate, but went to the Grün 80 to take some pictures of the people arriving and meet some friends. Click on the picture to view the photo gallery.

Link: http://www.inpictureswetrust.net/

Great site with fantastic pictures!

Just in case you're interested, I got a Facebook and a StudiVZ account too like all the other monkeys... Maybe we'll meet there!

The title is a quotation from George Carlin, a famous satirical comedian from our friendly superpower, the USA. He's been doing comedy for decades now. Well known at the other side of the ocean, most people in Europe don't know him. Of course this is also due to the language barrier. So what's so special about him? Well, whenever I feel hate and anger because of humanity, I watch one of his shows and feel relieved and confirmed. He basically rants about the world, society, the USA, general people, religion, government... Whatever you can think of, he just bashes it all. And he does it on a intelligent level - I am always inclined to say: "Thank you for speaking that one out loud, George". Definitely worthwile to watch. The best thing: Some of his shows are available on YouTube for your enjoyment. I compiled a little link list pointing to his shows (they are split in parts because of YouTube's length limitation):

Playing With Your head (1986): Part 1, 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

You're All Diseased (1999): Part 1, 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7

Complaints and Grievances (2001): Part 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7

Life Is Worth Losing (2005): Part 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8

If you only want a quick intro to his work, enjoy his routine on the Ten Commandments. If you cannot watch videos right now, I'll copy and paste a quotation, taken from the wikipedia article about him (from Life Is Worth Losing):

"I look at it this way... For centuries now, man has done everything he
can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting
forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing
the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and
aquifers... so when nature strikes back, and smacks man in the head and
kicks man in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for
human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem
humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it
gets worse."

Since I had a bit of a cold these last days, and I wanted to get a good night's sleep, I felt like brewing a good old sleeping-draught. This would normaly be a simple grog, I was desperately going through my liquor shelf to find something at least comparable to rum. Nada! So I decided to do a little experiment:

• Take a big mug full of hot water
• Add plenty of honey
• add two bags of camomile tea (Kamille) and soak it for a minute or two
• squeeze half a lemon into the mix, make sure to leave some space for the best part:
• add a BIG shot of Pastis (Ricard et co)

That's it, make sure to consume in bed as combination with cold and fatigue can lead to quick and painless sleep!

Whew.. I have posted in quite a while. It's me, Ced, in case you forgot to look at the signature of this post. I have the pleasure of presenting you quite an interesting piece of software.

Recently, when I tried to help a good friend with his C++ exercises for his education as a licensed computer technician, we encountered a problem. Giving programming support over the telephone (=Skype) is very hard! The first thing which came to our mind was to use the chat feature of Skype. This worked reasonably well, but was still very cumbersome because there was no other way to see the whole code than to copy & paste it. Everytime you made a change. Very annoying.

So while my friend was doing some bugfixing, I googled through the waves of the world wide web and found a very interesting software, which allows online collaboration: Gobby . It is basically a multi-user text editor. Because it is available for Mac OSX, Windows and Linux, it was very useful for us; he is running Windows and I am running Linux. How does it work? I have created a session, to which he connected. For that to work, you need to forward a specific port to your workstation if you sit behind a firewall (NAT). Once both have openend the session, anyone can open documents in the editor. To view the other user's documents, you click on Document List, where you can choose to subscribe to any of these. After both have openend the same document, you can simultaneously make changes to the document. To track who was done what, each user can set a background color. His changes are then highlighted with the personal color, which is very convenient. We have already used the software productively and in combination with Skype it is really useful!

The big drawback of course is that it only works with plain-text files, because it is intended for programming. It also sports a nice syntax highlighting for numerous programming languages. Of course the two of us exactly need this functionality so it's perfect. But anyhow, if someone knows a similar program, please write a comment.

During the sessions I was really impressed by the whole experience. Going further than just using the Web, E-Mail and Instant Messaging, you can reach layers of communication with remote parties you've never thought of! I could also imagine many other users, such as preparing a letter, writing an abstract, whatever. Work, research and education could benefit from a more productive use of the Internet. Remember, its inventors had collaboration in mind!

You may have noticed the new widget I introduced in my sidebar... Not sure if I'll keep it there, it is a radiostation based on the music I'm listening over time plus related artists created automatically by Last.fm. I'm just not sure whether this is of any interest to anyone? What do you think?