Joris@Blog

Quo Vadis, Australia?

2011-07-05T20:33:00.000+02:00

About half of my time over the past three months, was spent back at the good old Parkes radio observatory. As you all know, I spent many a waking hour in that outpost of science, trying to push back the frontiers of human knowledge. It has been well over 18 months since my last visit, though, so I noticed an accumulated backlog of changes upon my return, several of which I found a bit silly and exaggerated, but more on that in a moment.

Upon my return home after my first recent trip, back in May, I filled in the observer's report, pointing out which recent changes were weird or just plain silly. However, as I generally do when asked to provide feedback, I wrote the feedback, proofread it and decided it wasn't worth the trouble, so it was scrapped before being brought to anyone's attention. Yet, this time, I wasn't getting away with it. Upon my return in June, I was kindly asked to put in an observer's report for my last trip -- which I clearly hadn't done. Once asked in such a clear and direct way, I couldn't help but bring the following to the attention of the Parkes (and general ATNF) staff and management:

I am a bit mystified by the increase in safety-related paranoia, though. In (European) cities I'm typically a fan of bike helmets but between the quarters and the tower? Really? That's just a bad joke. Also, I'm not quite sure why after all these years we have to switch to the impractical tiny plastic cups of spreads (Vegemite, Jams and peanut butter; in fact, ketchup as well) instead of the good old jars. Have people's immune systems really changed that much since the end of last century?

Normally, no matter how inflammatory your remarks are, you're hardly ever likely to get a response because either the comments are too lame to warrant response or they're too harsh to be taken seriously. Again, this time I wasn't getting away with it -- somehow, somewhere something resonated with some people, even though officially no one seemed to agree with me.

Now before we go on, let me clarify my point to those less acquainted with the Parkes observatory. It consists of the actual radio telescope (where you spend most of your time as an astronomer), with an administration and support building right beside it. Then there is a straight road of 1 km length, at the end of which is the quarters and the gate to the outside world:

The quarters are where a minority of the staff, as well as most (if not all) astronomers have their lunch; and it's where the astronomers spend the remaining part of their time. Given that the "Parkes Staff" sheet has 30 people on it and that most of these are brought to work in a minibus, it's easy to see that there really isn't much traffic on this straight road, especially if you discount the morning "rush" around 08:00 and the evening "rush" around 16:00. Now I admit this is not a broad road and at times (as in the picture) shadows worsen the seeing, but you have an entire kilometre to notice anything heading your way and to move aside (there's plenty of room on either side of the road to get to if you're really worried about getting hit). Moreover, even if something were to happen, you're always less than 500 m away from help. To me, who grew up riding without helmet less than two metres away from trucks doing 70km/h, this looks like something very close to the safest type of road you can get.

I know this in itself does not warrant a complaint -- which is partly why initially I didn't submit my report at all. But to me, it seems to fit in with a wider sociological shift that I do have problems with: the shift towards safety-related paranoia.

Within a week, I've had rather serious conversations with two different people in ATNF management, who happened to come through Parkes recently. Neither of them seemed to question the need for a bike helmet on a perfectly safe road in the least. They did take my comments seriously, though, because as one of them told me "I did propose [following your comments] to have big jars of Vegemite in the future. And I was a bit worried about us providing peanut butter because that stuff can kill people." (Or words to that effect.) So this is what my comments have come to: soon there will be no peanut butter on ATNF sites. While it is of course true that some fraction of people is hyper-allergic to peanuts and their derivatives, it is instructive to note that the Wikipedia section on prevalence of peanut allergy, uses the phrase "Mass Psychogenic Illness", continuing to point out that in the USA "about 150 people die annually from serious allergic food reactions. That’s the same number of people killed by bee stings and lightning strikes combined. About 10,000 children are hospitalized annually with traumatic brain injuries from sports, 2,000 children drown each year, and about 1,300 die in gun accidents" (This text originally comes from the New York Times and the original article can be found here.) Furthermore, the Wikipedia page links to an article in the British Medical Journal (nowadays BMJ), which states that: "Eight children younger than 16 died from food allergy between 1990 and 2000 in the UK [...] Milk caused four of the deaths and no child younger than 13 died from eating peanuts." (Original article here.)

What is particularly fascinating about this, is that while all these rules are put in place, the response to a big brown snake near the footpath leading away from the tower, was this:

Until a while later the local snake expert (a local technician, as it turns out), put his head down the hole in which the snake took refuge, saying "ah yeah, I can see it, it's right there", subsequently catching it (not bare-handed, luckily) and releasing it back into the wild a few hundred metres away. (You can see some of the catch on this Facebook video, though in admittedly low quality.)

Now, to be honest, as much as brown snakes (even little ones) are deadly and something us foreigners are typically not used to dealing with (while I know exactly what to do in case of a bike accident. After all, I've been there before.), I do think this sign is enough: it tells us there's a snake, so look out and don't do something stupid. Be careful. What more needs to be said? Yet, in a country speckled with flashy orange or fluorescent yellow signs warning us that the floor would be "slippery when wet", I wonder how long it will take for the safety-paranoia to reach its logical conclusion and label all doors with signs reminding us to "open door before attempting to walk through" (I'm not kidding you, someone actually walked through a glass door at the ATNF and had to spend a day in hospital to recover from all the glass cuts). Or even better: since we're so worried about the well-being of our staff and visitors, why don't we require them to wear diapers at all times, because they might -- God forbid -- wet themselves accidentally, which could cause a bad rash. Or safer still: why aren't we all put in straightjackets just to make sure we don't pick our nose?

My point is that you can take everything too far. When someone refuses to wear a seatbelt (in the back or elsewhere), I think they're being silly and irresponsible, but that doesn't mean we have to look out for every possible tiny little thing that might hurt us -- or someone, possibly, somehow, some day. Surely there's a middle ground and we can all just man up and be sensible. After all, we didn't use to be taken care of quite so much. Remember that not that much time has passed since Australia's population was mostly consistent of military and poor souls who were shipped here in the worst of conditions, in the dirty and disease-infested cargo holds of bulk transport ships; since the original Australian settlers went into the wild unattended, without really knowing what they were doing. Since the immigrant Westerners savagely fought and killed off the native Aborigines and lived a life in the bush, by himself, without believing in, or paying attention to, the government or its henchmen.

I don't mean we should go back to those days of high infant mortality and lawlessness, but I do find it striking that within a century the country has made such a dramatic shift which, in a way, seems immature and self-defeating to me. I don't claim Europe has all the answers -- I definitely don't claim that -- but at least we realise it's your own responsibility to realise a wet floor is a slippery floor. After all, winter doesn't warn us when it's about to give the roads that nice smooth coating of ice, either.

Joris' pdf in 2010

2011-01-02T12:37:00.000+01:00

If I were a quantum particle, where would you place your detector in order to optimise the likelihood of detection? Not in the blogosphere, that much is clear.

I've just done some calculations and here's the probability-density-function for me in 2010:

Note: the scale runs from red over yellow to white; I haven't been in Canada, but I've coloured it as a representative of "the Americas" and the biggest problem in constructing this figure was figuring out a scaling that wouldn't turn everything yellow (as a consequence of which Canada looks far closer to the German red than it should be). It's amazing how similar different shades of yellow look.

It's a bit disappointingly white, this graph, but maybe one day I'll make the pdf for my life so far (on a double log scale) and then you might see some more colour.

Also, because I love numbers, so I presume you might as well: I've spent at most 55% of my days in Bonn ("at most" because it's the default and therefore absorbs any trips I've forgotten). Second was Morgantown (WV, USA) with 16% and third, also not too surprising, Effelsberg with just short of 10%. Two weeks in Leiden corresponds to a bit less than 4% and finishing the top five is Valencia with about 2.5%. Word has it 2011 won't be too different, though the Effelsberg percentage should lower somewhat and good old 'straia should make a reappearance.

And time passed...

2010-12-17T17:38:00.000+01:00

Did things happen? Sure things happened. There was the Belgo-Spanish wedding -- and half a year later the Greco-Caribbean wedding. Beaches were walked on, mountains were climbed. Facebook was joined, hundreds of e-mails were sent, more still were received. Proposals were drafted, heaps of drafts were proofread and plenty of talks were given. There were many trips to Belgium (of course), a few trips to the Netherlands and England, single trips to Sweden, Austria, Greece, Spain and -- undeniably -- through parts of Germany. Languages were learned and just as quickly forgotten, shoes were worn, glasses were broken, visitors were led astray. Kebabs were eaten, beers were drunk, trains were taken, planes were flown and cars were driven. I've walked on crutches, ran many miles and played frisbee in heat, snow, rain and ice. Tournaments were held, games were won and lost, pulsars were sought for but never found. And then there's my ever-continuing attempt at dominating an observatory all by myself, trying to spend more time in Effelsberg than ever before in Parkes. "Home" became not much beyond a shower and a bed.

And through it all, I have neglected my faithful fan-base, aka Dr. Paul Fraser in Mexico and M.Sc. Anonymous in Tamil Nadu (and the silent crowd whose existence does, so far, not survive Ockham's razor).

A month away from the two-year anniversary of this blog, I wonder if the more-than-half-a-year-long-silence should be taken as a call to action or seen as the inevitable succumbing to the inherent, self-defeating diary conflict that there is either nothing to report or no time to report on the many things that do happen.

Now I realise the start of a new year is traditionally a moment when people pick up on forgotten goals, lost promises and past intentions to steer them back onto daily life and to pick them up where once they were left. However, I am old enough now to know that new year's resolutions are more often admissions of defeat than sincere convictions of the need to act.

So let's cut some corners. Maybe it's time for me to admit that I haven't got what it takes. Unlike the people you see linked on the right-hand side of this text (and some others whom I attempt to follow but who don't show up for some reason I don't fully grasp), I for some reason cannot make myself write blogs regularly.

There you have it. Admission of defeat.

Lune

2010-05-19T17:08:00.008+02:00

On Monday 12 April 2010 the generations in my family were shifted up by one: grandparents became great-grandparents; parents became grandparents; my brother became a dad and I became an uncle. Since my sister's wedding in Spain had only really finished less than 24 hours before the birth, our family was spread over at least four countries (five if you count the in-laws) so the couple had to cope on their own initially.

By the end of the week, though, cars had been driven through France, trains had been brought in from Germany and after yet another week, when the Icelandic volcano finally abated, planes were flown in from Lithuania. Being part of a geographically challenged family if oddly fun and somehow amusing: you know there will always be someone anywhere, but you can never tell who will be where when. During the second half of April, though, we were all down at the University hospital of Leuven at one point or another. (Save my sister who'll be getting there next week.)

Let this be a good time to update you on the marvellous trip from Bonn to Leuven, which is all but the most easily reached Belgian city from Germany. Normally I book these tickets well in advance, so I can get fast, direct trains without too much time going to waste waiting around for transfers. But because babies come regardless of our planning and because Europe became covered under a Nordic ash cloud only days after the birth, this time I bought tickets that were in high demand - and bought them last-minute. Surprisingly this didn't affect the price too much, but it did affect the time. If I had been a pessimist I would have been dismayed at having to travel twice as long. As it turned out, I was rather upbeat about the prospect of finally getting to see more than just a platform and a traintrack of some of the cities that lie along my route.

Commencing the trip in Bonn, I'll start with a nice - and appropriate from my point of view - building that I had omitted on my previous foto-shoot: the Sterntor or Star gate:

Depending on your source, the city in question may vary between Chicago, New York and Berlin, but the saying that Bonn is half the size of the central cemetery of city X and twice as dead, stays the same. I mostly disagree with that, of course, but there is no denying that John LeCarré's book A Small Town in Germany was appropriately titled for Bonn. Ergo: wherever you go from Bonn, you first go to Köln (Cologne) because in contrast to Bonn, Köln really is an important city with connections to the world. The most obvious landmark in Köln stands conveniently right next to the central train station: the Dom (or Cathedral).

Next stop is a lovely little city the likes of which you cannot find in North America or Oceania: Aachen lies right on the border of Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. The trouble with my stopover was that I only had about half an hour and the walk from the station to the city centre turned out to be at least 20 minutes, so this is the closest I could get:

The white building you see is the theater of Aachen - and behind it on the right, you can just see a spire of the Dom in the centre of the city - which must have been another 5 to 10 minutes away.

It's been a month now since I went there and took these pictures and I suddenly remember running on the way back to the station in order to make sure I'd catch my train. Ah. Running. How nice that would be... (I must be looking forward to late June almost as much as a high school student.)

Anyway. We'll get back to Aachen one day, but presently the train has departed for Liege, the first Belgian (Walloon) city on our trip. The station we stop at (Liege-Guillemins) is as new as can be and an architectural spectacle designed by Calatrava, who coincidentally designed about half the city where my sister now lives (Valencia, that would be). Sadly, it isn't anywhere near any interesting or beautiful part of the city so really the station is the only point of interest. Here's a view from the inside:

and Wikipedia has a really nice view from the outside.

Finally, I arrived in Leuven (which probably has the most beautiful city centre of all the cities I'd visited that day, but I forgot to take pictures and went straight to the hospital) and met my godchild, Lune:

Cute, isn't she?

"Good" news

2010-05-06T10:56:00.002+02:00

I've just come back from the MRI scan and things look much better now: the main ligament is fine but two smaller ones on the side of my foot are in trouble. This means that I can walk and lean on my foot as long as I keep it straight (or at least, that's what I've understood). It also means that the massive cast-like boot I've been carrying around for the past few days will not be needed anymore and instead I got a most unremarkable little ankle-support cast.

I'll admit that makes me feel a bit like a fraud - going through all that trouble just to be told "keep your ankle straight for a month or two", but it doesn't take away the fact that I'm thoroughly relieved!

Out of action

2010-05-03T21:28:00.006+02:00

To all those who haven't noticed on Buzz or Twitter: I've been incapacitated, though a pair of crutches has come to my partial aid and is helping me move around to some degree.

What happened was nothing other than a nice and friendly game of frisbee on a lovely (and only slightly rainy) Sunday afternoon in the park. I admit that I may have played a bit too seriously because really, you shouldn't try to catch a disk someone else is trying to catch at the same time (or should I?) Either way, the mid-air collision that ensued wasn't too bad in itself, but the fall back down (hello gravity! Yes, I love you too. At times.) was rather uncontrolled and so upon reaching Earth again, I must have twisted my right foot in ways unimaginable. And unrepeatable.

It is close to 30 hours now that I haven't been able to put any pressure on my right foot - which made me ponder (amongst other things) how often the reception desks at hospitals see people hopping past on one foot...

Once I had - with the help of some particularly friendly fellow "hurt people" - figured out how to work my way to the front of the emergency queue (with sincere apologies to my North American friends, but there is no way I was going to describe this mass as a line), it didn't take terribly long to get a doctor, an X-ray and a couple of crutches (allowing me to roam the hospital with a bit more dignity than before) and, eventually, a super-twenty-first-century-removable cast. Thank God for German efficiency, German health-care (no offense) and Swiss (?!) engineering. (Admit it: there's no way you had predicted that last one ;-)

The X-ray luckily demonstrated that my bones were intact, so notwithstanding the pain, I'm happy about that. Whether my tendons, ligaments and similar connective tissues are also in order, is an entirely different matter still, so I'm impatiently awaiting the results of an MRI scan on Thursday morning - stay tuned.

Bonn and surroundings

2010-04-18T13:06:00.009+02:00

It's been a while, I know. The problem with blogs (as everyone who's ever tried to write a blog or, more conventionally, a diary) is that whenever things start happening, there is hardly any time left to write about it - and vice versa.

But let's try and get you up to speed again.

First, I have of course settled in Bonn by now. A bed should be imported from Belgium next weekend but I have the essentials (internet connection, sleeping bag and radio). Also, I've found a few random moments to meander through the city and absorb some nice areas. Someone asked for photos, so (thanks to my iPhone since I still cannot stomach holding a camera) here we go:

First, Bonn's most famous inhabitant (so far):

That's right: Ludwig van Beethoven. (Interestingly, the "van" as opposed to "von" attests to his Flemish roots. Just thought I'd mention that in case someone had missed it.)

Then, the house Beethoven was born in:

It's the dark pinkish house in front of which you can spot some oriental tourists. In itself I doubt the house is terrifyingly interesting, but it also shows a few other fairly typical things about Bonn and Europe: the fairly narrow, car-free streets (this is Europe - most of which was built way before cars were invented) and surprising yet relaxing emptiness on Sundays: since all shops are closed on Sunday, there are literally no people in the centre of the city - they're all in the park or on the river bank: walking, running, biking,... relaxing and enjoying the good weather. I remember a beautiful spring weekend in Australia where to my great dismay the parks and riverbanks were virtually void of people while the shopping centre was as crowded as... the trains yesterday (but more on that later). Anyway - I like Europe, you might have noticed.

Continuing on our tourist trip, we reach the Münster (my impression is that this word means as much as "cathedral" - but Wikipedia seems to only reluctantly admit to that, so you'll have to take my word on it):

And of course, one of the most enjoyable things about Europe - the train station:

Then, the main building of the University and - right behind it - the field where I found a new and exciting frisbee group (bringing back great memories from Down Under :-)

An important thing to realise (and a major difference with both Morgantown and Australia) is that everything I've shown you so far is within at most ten minutes walk of each other - and at my pace probably more about five minutes. This is part of the reason I still haven't bought a bike, even after seven weeks: everything is quickly and conveniently reachable by foot. So too the track along the river (which, of course, unavoidably reminds me of WV):

(Note, though, that for all its width, well-maintained surface and length - I think it goes all the way to Köln and beyond - this track is not accessible to cars - just roller bladers, cyclists, runners and pedestrians. I'm pretty sure even motorcycles aren't allowed.)

Along the track is a scale model of the Solar System - Saturn is close to the centre of town and the Sun is several kilometres further South, where the track merges into a great park (which is so big that I really need a bike to discover it all) with ponds, some bushes and even baseball fields! (Browsing back through previous posts I notice I didn't post a picture of the Bois de Boulogne. In fact, in my post on Paris I didn't even mention it, which is a gross omission I feel sorry for.) Anyway, it isn't the same, but somewhat reminiscent to me (having seen as little of the Rheinaue park as of the Bois de Boulogne). Also, it's a great indicator of spring:

The weekend after these pictures were taken, I went to Spain to attend my sister's wedding and before that was well and truly finished my brother and his lovely wife announced the birth of my first niece, making me a proud uncle :-)

But more on all that in a later post - I wouldn't want to overload my faithful readers. (Besides: the weather is way too nice to write blog posts. I'm sorry!)

Flash update

2010-03-05T08:34:00.002+01:00

Just to quickly state that

Yes, I have left West Virginia.

And I have arrived in Bonn, Germany.

However, as you can probably imagine, I am terribly busy now getting things sorted - and the internet connection in my temporary accommodation doesn't work (yet) so ... this blog will remain fairly passive for some time.

I hope to return to some semblance of normalcy in a week or two. (Fingers crossed!)

Trenches

2010-02-14T18:55:00.008+01:00

You may have heard it on the news: the entire US East coast lies idle due to a snow storm described with any list of superlatives you could think of. The reason it is the East coast and not the entire north-eastern part of the US (up to as far inland as Iowa - and since a few days back also as far south as Texas), is simply because anything that happens in the US happens in Washington, New York or California: the world could care less about West Virginia. But that doesn't mean we didn't have a whole heap of snow:

That was home after the first night of snow. This is what the arboretum looked like:

The trail you see pulled through the snow was - at that point - mainly drawn by the intelligent people who had invested in cross-country skis (a must-have down here, so I discovered). As you go further along the trail, though, you'll find many trees of all shapes and sizes fallen onto the track - aiding the foot of snow in making the generally hospitable trail an inaccessible way to get anywhere, regardless of your means of transportation.

Alternative ways of getting places are not easily found, though. Car drivers first have to dig their car out of the snow and even if that works, they then have to hope their road has been plowed - because the West Virginian way of dealing with snow seems to be to close all the schools, tell people to stock up on food and hope everyone stays indoors until it all melts away.

On those roads that do get plowed, pedestrains find themselves in awkward situations. Regardless of whether there was a sidewalk before the snow or not, after a snow plow comes through, the road is separated in two parts: one recently plowed, relatively clean (if still slippery!), car-wide section on which the cars drive, and a second part on which all the snow is heaped. The last time I stood in snow up to my knees, was when I was 12. Needless to say my knees were a bit closer to the ground back then.

So pedestrians (I'm as surprised as you to find out they do exist, but in the freshly deposited snow, I finally found evidence of kindred spirits who in defiance of modern society use a mode of transportation older than humans themselves) have no choice to resort to organically building their own transportation network. On empty lots, along trails that are long snowed under, on the sides of busy roads on top of the yard of deposited snow and ice, they build their trenches in the ongoing war on winter, braving the scorn of a car-mad society that all too happily wishes to forget that parts of the stone age did make it this far.

Country roads take me home...

2010-02-03T00:59:00.004+01:00

Sooner or later I had to use that title, if for no other reason than that it is the first thing most people think of when one mentions West Virginia.

The second thing many people think of - notwithstanding it being filmed in Tennessee and set in Georgia (neither of which borders WV, by the way) - is the movie "Deliverance". I have - a few weeks ago, as it happened around Christmas time - finally watched that movie and while I guess it may be more applicable to swathes of southern West Virginia, it really doesn't strike me as anything representative of Morgantown and the one time I did go wild water rafting (admittedly just across the border in Pennsylvania) I didn't feel the least bit worried about anything Deliverance-like happening to me.

Of course, when debunking Southern stereotypes, one should really bear in mind the closeness of Pennsylvania and - consequently - the Mason-Dixon line (which is supposed to be the official border between North and South). It is exactly 6 miles from my doorstep and so I'm far, very far away from the "deep South".

I've been here for 12 months now (a year and a day to be precise) and I've come to appreciate the frontier-like quality of West Virginia in general and Morgantown in particular. The edge of the midwest (aka Ohio) is less than 2 hours from here, the south has officially just started, the north can be reached on foot and the North-East isn't really that far either. This means you get to meet people from quite a few different regions and as such get a fairly varied view of a substantial part of the country.

I've also grown a liking for the small-town sides of Morgantown. While my first few months were mainly spent overcoming the culture shock that the move from a big city to a small town (which is officially a "city" regardless of my opinion) inflicted, throughout the year I've discovered some nice corners and interesting sides to small-town life. And I've grown some sort of connection to this poorest of states (depending on the metric you use, though I haven't found a metric where Mississippi doesn't come below WV so probably it's more correct to state "second-poorest"), which is partly because it has a beautiful landscape that is being destroyed for the sake of development and economic progress. Partly also because I feel bad for the state - I feel like it must have heaps of potential because of it's beautiful nature and its central location - the only problem seems to be that those in power either don't want to or are uncapable of changing things - in his State of the State address late last month, the governor didn't copy any of Obama's rethoric about investments in high-end communication and transport infrastructure, but went rather the opposite way: he hailed coal as "the future".

There is an adage that goes "People elect the leaders they deserve." I'm starting to suspect this may not apply to the poor and weak. (And while we're on the subject of politics gone wrong: the supreme court has recently ruled that corporations may spend basically as much as they like on political campaigns. Between that and the two useless and counterproductive political parties that hold the strings in this country, a pessimist might claim all hope is lost.)

The reason for this somewhat retrospective post is, of course, my impending departure from this state. While there are of course reasons to look forward to my move to Bonn and Europe, leaving is always a sad thing and so for this last month I'm planning on giving a sort of hit list of the things I like most about Morgantown and West Virginia. I imagine it will be quite different from any of my previous posts, but maybe you'll like this little look at life in a town somewhere in between the Midwest, the South, the North and the Northeast.

Social Taxes

2010-01-24T19:37:00.008+01:00

Given that the U.S.A. gained its independence primarily (or so I am told) on the grounds that it didn't want to pay any more taxes to its colonial power, it is no surprise that tax rates in the US are mostly lower than elsewhere in the Western world. (You could try and dig out some OECD numbers here, but I propose you simply take a look at this graph, hoping that the Wikipedians didn't mess up.)

While entire debates can be had on this topic (and on related politically inflammatory things like health care, public transport etc.), that isn't what I'm planning on today. What I am planning to talk about, is a totally different type of taxation which I would refer to as "social taxes", though it might be more generally described as "charity".

As a way of introducing the subject, have a look at this image:

You can see the trail (which I've written about before), along with a "litter control" sign. These can be found all along the trail, at an average rate of about two per mile and they are effective: the people involved with these organisations (charitable organisations such as the one on the picture above, sports groups, religious groups, scouts, etc.) do make regular rounds with large trash bags, cleaning up the place - saving the West Virginian trails from the fate so many parts of Melbourne's Yarra suffer from. (Don't get me wrong: the Yarra is awesome, beautiful and a great asset to the city, but the empty cans and bottles or the plastic bags that "decorate" the Eucalyptuses in a disturbingly pervasive manner, do take some of its beauty away.)

Another thing I'll mention are the recurring pledge drives ran by the public broadcasting services. While I've been a great fan of public radio, who has spent hours, days, months listening to the likes of the BBC, Radio Sweden, ABC, NPR and, most recently, the Deutsche Welle, I have never paid a single penny for it. While I'm sure Connex would therefore define me as a thief, I never even stopped to think about it - and I don't think anyone else has, either. With NPR this is different. Every once in a while, they run a pledge drive, which implies that for the duration of a week, they will constantly remind you that making radio shows and keeping a station on the air, costs money. And they will remind you (in a nice and friendly way, I'll admit) that if the listeners don't pay up, then we're all doomed. During these selected weeks, the reminders are so prevalent that there are mornings where I find myself wondering if I simply missed the news, or if the radio was too busy asking for money to also find some time to talk about whatever happened beyond the NPR offices.

Public radio and clean paths/nature are just two things that I consider important common goods - things which we can all benefit from and for which we, consequently, should all pay. Down here things are a bit different (I refer back to the Wikimedia graph linked above): taxes are a lot lower than in much of Europe (noticed where Belgium, Sweden and Germany are on that graph?), the U.S. military is dramatically more extensive (seeing as it is fulfilling the partly self-imposed role of policeman of the world) and they spend more on health care than most (if not all) other civilised countries. (I'm just picking out the military and health care because these are two of the three main spending posts, the third one being pensions.) The upshot of this is that there simply isn't much money left for a lot of things that can be funded elsewhere and that you, consequentially, call on people directly to try and sort this out.

At first, I figure it might sound like a good idea. After all, you get to have an immediate impact on where your money goes: do you spend it on the library-support-fund, on the public radio or on the Salvation Army? It also means that you don't have to contribute financially, but could invest time instead - go clean up the trail, for example. It does, however, also mean that essential services come under threat: if there is no one to de-ice the sidewalks, then people are litterally forced to either risk breaking their hips, or use a car. And if some catastrophy does occur one day, I'm sure we could all agree we would rather rely on information from NPR than from either the student-run college radio or Fox News.

Secondly, it means you get freeloaders: I can keep all my spare time to myself and don't spend a penny on any aid or support group or public service and no one will even know. Sure, to some degree you always get freeloaders - as I pointed out before, I never paid a cent to any radio station - but that was because I was a student, who didn't make any money and therefore didn't pay any taxes. But once you do start making money, avoiding taxes would be difficult and illegal, whereas avoiding contributing to charity merely gets you bad karma.

Religion

2010-01-16T18:41:00.005+01:00

I've been meaning to write about this ever since I came down here, but refrained from it since I feared it might do more harm than good. However, there really are some fascinating differences so maybe I should stop ignoring the elephant in the room and just get it over with. Therefore, as a note of warning: whatever follows is nothing but my own, personal view on some rather general and sometimes abstract events and concepts and it is in no way meant as a personal offense to anyone. Not to anyone at all - especially no one I know.

Maybe I should start off with some background for the non-Europeans. The fact is I grew up in a religiously very simple and clear-cut place: everyone was Catholic, but no one went to Mass (except maybe at Christmas and if you're over 60 - old habits die hard). Those that weren't Catholic, were either clearly African immigrants or in the case of Jews they stuck to themselves and were so orthodox that there was, again, no mistaking them for anyone else. Since historically the Churches were placed in the centres of cities and towns, the church square would be used as a market place on Sundays and as a convenient parking lot during the week, though the church itself remained mostly empty.

I was therefore not too surprised when I saw the hugely prominent parking lot next to the church in Star City - given the importance of cars in WV, it was only to be expected. The thing I did not expect was that this lot would be empty at all times except during mass. That is to say: in this town, demographically the youngest town I've ever lived in, more people go to church - much more people go to church - than anywhere else I've lived. And that isn't all. The other part of the equation was something I first realised in Australia.

As I said, in Belgium things are easy: there only really is one church and one religion. Everyone who goes to church, goes to the same place (and still that place is empty). In the New World, this isn't the case by far. Every group of immigrants, be it the English, the Irish, the Italians or the Germans, they all imported their own religion or rather, since these are all Christian (to keep things "simple", I'll focus on Christianity for now) they all imported their own flavour of a religion. And so you have heaps of churches all over the place and everyone goes to his own little church - and yet somehow (I don't know about Australia, but at least in Star City/Morgantown) they manage to get decent numbers.

While I find this interesting from a mere mathematical point of view, religiously I don't understand it, either. Growing up in a homogeneous community, there was never really a point to wonder about whether your religion was the right one and whether it was best to follow the Roman Catholic church or if maybe Martin Luther had a point. Living in a place where the churches of different denominations are built side by side, I would think the question about which religion you adhere to and how sacred and indubitable the words from your holy book are, would certainly be put in perspective.

Having said that, a small word on Jews. Where I grew up, the only Jews I knew about where the ultra-orthodox ones who effectively lived in a ghetto somewhere on the rim of Antwerp. So you can imagine I was pretty surprised when it turned out some of my friends in Melbourne - who by any standards (and especially mine) look really normally Western - were, as a matter of fact, Jewish. The same thing happened here, of course. I knew someone for quite a while, but it's only around Christmas time that I discovered he celebrates Hanukkah instead of Christmas: I haven't found any other way to tell - there simply are no clear differences (for as far as I can see) between Christians and Jews. Or so I thought until (don't ask me how or why, I regret it already) the subject of Israel came up. I have not, so far, had the courage to figure out how prevalent support is in either Australia or the US, but it has been a very long time since I heard someone react with shock, horror and disbelieve (and, just maybe, a tinge of hate) after I confessed to not being a big fan of the state.

Finally, a word or two on tolerance. Last week, a proposal to legalise Gay Marriage was voted down in the New Jersey state assembly. Please do have a look at the Daily Show's clip here. It has it all - the good old orthodox Jews, the conservative nuts, both sides claiming that the Founding Fathers would be on their side of the debate - they even managed to find a conspiratorial anti-Semite. The bottom line, though, is more disturbing and recalls the debate about Sarah Palin's granddaughter and the fact that she wouldn't be aborted, because in both cases the main argument (first against abortion and now against same-sex marriage) comes down to "my God says it's evil, so no one should be allowed to do it". Maybe it's just me - and I hope wholeheartedly that a majority of the university-attending church-goers would be with me on this one - but I cannot understand how in a supposedly secular, 21^st century Western nation, the word of one person's God can be used in a legal argument to prevent another person from doing something.

And the cold remained...

2010-01-07T23:26:00.003+01:00

Please spare a moment to glance at this interesting article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8445831.stm. Especially towards the end, a few good points are made - points which I've had in mind for the past month or so:

"In the town Roros, in central Norway, it has been -40C the last two nights. I have not heard of schools closing and the roads are for the most free [...] Why do the English have this problem every year?[...] I drive my car normally on ice and snow."

Indeed: it's an article pondering the recent cold snap across much of the Northern part of our beloved (?) Globe - and the havoc it has been wrecking on much of society - in the US as in Belgium, the Netherlands and, of course, England.

Ever since the snow started coming down in December, a regular morning feature on the radio has been the reading out of an ever-lengthening list of schools that were "delayed" or "shut". Pardon me for not understanding what a "delayed" school is, but shutting a school because there's a foot (at the very most two) of snow,... I don't get it. Surely in the land of hummers and trucks (remember, this is West Virginia, the Mountain State: your average car is not a VW Beetle), a few inches of snow wouldn't stop you.

What it does stop, of course, are bicycles: needless to say the one good bike path in the county (the one right between my home and my work) turned into an ice-based scale model of the Himalayas late last year - and of course no one has cleaned it up. Now I've ridden on plenty of slippery surfaces and my balance is outstanding - in Sweden I biked a whole winter through and while I lost balance many times, I only hit the ground twice - down here, however, that doesn't work because either the snow is so thick (because noone has ever cleared any of it away) that the drag it produces literally grinds you to a halt, or because the snow has been stamped into an icy surface with much more surface area than the geoid it is imposed upon. (i.e. it's spiky instead of flat.) Keeping your balance while slipping on a flat plane of ice - however slippery - is easy. Keeping your balance on a 30° sideways slope is practically impossible.

So my 15-minute bike ride has now become a 50-minute hike, ploughing through snow and ice and working up quite a sweat however cold the temperatures are (granted, we've hardly reached as low as -13°). On the bright side: these 50 minutes leave me plenty of time to listen to teach-yourself-German podcasts, so if winter persists, I might actually know more than "Hallo" and "Tschüß" when I do move.

In fact, come to think of it - for all the school closures and supposed havoc reported in the news, I can hardly think of any negative side to the weather - the land looks great, it is neither too hot nor too humid, the trail is blissfully deserted,... I guess the only problem is I cannot go for runs anymore, but really I have only been provided with the perfect excuse :-)

Alcohol - statistics

2010-01-01T18:53:00.006+01:00

t turns out to be bl**dy hard to find any statistics on alcohol-related traffic deaths, but at least here's something to go by. Based on this document (and a couple of WHO sources to which I've lost the URL), about 40% of fatalities in motor vehicle crashes in the USA are alcohol-related. (Turns out it's fairly constant whether you consider 2002, 2005 or 2006, so this is a reasonably reliable statistic.) For Europe, where drinking ages are generally much lower (if they exist at all link) but where the limits on blood alcohol content while driving are lower as well(*), I found the following list of statistics on this WHO webpage:

Austria, 2001: 6.5% of fatalities; 1998: 8.5%.
Belgium, 2000: 10.2%; 1998: 8.9%.
Czech Republic, 2002: 10.5%.
Denmark, 2001: 26.6%; 1995: 20.2%.
Finland, 2005: 14.3%; 2004: 15.7%; 2002: 14.6%; 2000: 14.4%.
etc.

I could go through the entire alphabet, but I guess you see my point. (I'll admit there are exceptions to this rule: France 2002: 30 to 40%; Ireland, 2000: at least 40%; Italy, 2000: 30-50%; Spain, 1998: 41%.)

I guess my point is clear by now.

Have a great - and safe! - 2010 everyone. Happy New Year :-)

(*): ps: the link for the European statistics doesn't seem to be working. Let's see if we can remedy that. The data I show comes from this page: http://apps.who.int/globalatlas/default.asp. In the right-hand box "Related Sites", click on the bottom link ("GISAH"). Confusingly, you'll find that the URL doesn't change, but the webpage does. Anyway. Now you click on the third link from the top: Data query to search the contents of the information system, select the category "Harms and Consequences", the topic "Mortality" and sub-topic "Alcohol-related road traffic fatalities" (all the way down the bottom). Make sure to select a decent range of years, so you don't accidentally tick a year that didn't have any information.

Interestingly, last time I tried this, I only got European countries. Now it has all of them - so you can verify the American ~40% and see that Australia had 31% in 1990. (After 1990 the Aussies seem to have subtly tweaked their statistics, but I'll leave that debate for now.) UK was at 15% in 2002.

Alcohol and how to (mis)use it

2010-01-01T18:46:00.002+01:00

As a nice little attention for the holiday season, WVU provided all its employees with a useful little brochure, reminding us the university is totally an alcohol (and drug) free place. It lists the pains and troubles you could find yourself facing when you are found to unlawfully possess, use or (insert any number of verbs right here) a controlled substance in (or near) the workplace and goes on for no less than 20 pages (A5 or whateve the equivalent name is for a folded US letter size paper) listing the fines, detentions and obliged sessions of councelling you might attract when coming anywhere close to any of these things.

Problem is, of course, that neither "unlawfully" nor "controlled substances" are clearly and univocally defined anywhere.

Anyway. The real reason for bringing this up, is that it brought to mind the fascinating and - in my mind - rediculously ambivalent relationship between the state (or, in this particular case, WVU) and alcohol. Let's, for once, start my tirade far away from home, in beautiful Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico.

Santa Fe (depicted here is the main square at nightfall, lit by some great Christmas decorations and poorly photographed by yours truly. Adam (Deller) has many more pictures that worked out much better, but I haven't managed to get them off him yet.) is a nice, seemingly authentic and very touristy town - I would almost call it the Bruges of New Mexico, but since Bruges has been around for thousands of years and Santa Fe barely for hundreds of years,... well, okay, I guess some astronomers might find them equal.

I had come to Santa Fe on a slight detour while travelling to Socorro on a visit to Adam and - more importantly? - the Very Large Array (VLA):

Since Socorro hasn't got anything more to offer than the VLA (and a bunch of scientists), Adam had the brilliant idea to show me the capital as well in a way of - you know - reminding ourselves what civilisation looked like. Truly it was a fantastic idea and I am grateful for it, even if the town didn't like us. Sparing you a rant on all that can go wrong on a two-day visit to an artsy town, I'll stick to the first night when we attempted to go out and catch up over a beer or two.

At the first pub we turned to (and as we later found out, probably the only pub that was still open at this late hour), the bouncer required a $5 entrance per person (fair enough, I guess?!) and demanded to see our ID. Given the fact that I'm 27 and that - ever since I regrew my mustache and goatee - I even look this old, I rarely carry my passport unless I'm about to board a plane. In West Virginia people have been sensible enough to accept my Belgian identity card which, even if it doesn't hold any official power abroad, does identify me and isn't easily forged (it has a chip in it!) In fact, I have successfully and without problem used this ID to both rent a car and cash a several hundred dollar check in WV. However, to get into this pub in Santa Fe; to be allowed to pay $5 to enter so that I could subsequently pay much more to drink beers while listening to music that would probably be so loud that the catching up we intended to do in the first place, would probably become impossible; to do that, my Belgian ID turned out inadequate because - as the bouncer put it - "they had had recent trouble with fake foreign IDs".

I simply didn't know what to say, how to react. There's so much I couldn't grasp, couldn't understand. Do I look like I'm 20? Do I sound like I'm American? Does my ID card (with chip!) look like it might be forged? Do I look like I would imagine I should need to go through extreme forgery attempts in order to be let in to a bar? I was flabbergasted, could not figure out what his problem was. Did not understand why the bouncer of a place would stop such a thorough forgery - if indeed it had been one, which it wasn't. Surely it wasn't his job to distinguish false documents from real documents? Surely he just had to check if the date on whatever card I showed, read less than 1989 and then let me pass? Would they really shoot themselves in the foot by disallowing entrance to two guys in their upper 20s? We ended up drinking tap water over a game of cards in our hotel room.

I'm not sure what my readers (that would be you) are thinking at this point, but the proof of age, irrespective of what you look like, is a very common thing in the US - it becomes a second nature: I show my ID card (though never my passport) without even thinking about it anymore. - But that doesn't mean it isn't hypocritical. My problem is that they're anal about checking your age but that once you turn 21, you're perfectly welcome to do whatever you please - as long as you have your ID or drivers licence (well, and as long as you're not inside university buildings). One of the most frightening things about this, is the combination of this policy with the driving culture that seems to be more common here than elsewhere. What I'm saying is that it seems to not be too uncommon to go out drinking and drive back home. After all, real men can do that, right?

I have been told - though I've forgotten my source - that there are pressure groups intent on making alcohol consumption hard and difficult in the States and that such pressure groups could - and have - send kids into bars with fake IDs, only to get the police involved as soon as the kids manage to get served alcohol, causing the place to be closed down for serving to minors (<21s). While this would explain the reluctance of our bouncer, it does not (in my view) do anything useful. Surely it would be better for everyone if we would embark on a sensible debate about the dangers and problems of alcohol consumption, instead of making 21 some sort of magical barrier past which the sky is the limit?

I guess my point is this: if, instead of threatening us with dismissals, fines and councelling when we turn up to work drunk, if they provided us with a simple, 1-page overview of the damage alcohol does to ones body, mind and brain - and showed the statistics of traffic accidents and deaths that involved alcohol, then maybe we can slowly move towards an understanding and towards a reasonable culture of care and responsibility.

One final example. Sometimes some of the graduate students at WVU go out for drinks - yet the non-drinkers never follow. One day I had the interesting idea of asking a teatotalling student to join us anyway, just for the social aspect of it - and that he could drink orange juice instead, for example. I was met with the same blank stares I gave the bouncer in Santa Fe and a discussion ensued on whether such a thing could be conceivable - if not in real life, then maybe in fantasy fiction. Sure: bars would have some orange juice to make cocktails, but chances were they wouldn't just squander that away on a full glass of orange juice - surely such a strange thing would be unheard of.

In Belgium, ever since the Bob campaign started in 1995, it is implicitly assumed that one person in each group does not drink. Or rather: drinks orange juice, water, coke, whatever non-alcoholic beverage you like. At parties, at pubs, at dancings - anywhere it has become the standard. The "Designated Driver" (aka 'Bob') has become a standard - and he isn't someone who counts his drinks and uses complex arithmetic to justify driving: he's someone who doesn't drink.

Of course, moving from a 21-and-you're-good mentality to a responsible voluntary abstaining for the greater good, isn't easy and takes a lot of campaigning along with some brainwashing. Be that as it may, harshly checking ID cards, trying to get pubs closed by tricking them into serving 20-year-olds and warning your employees about fines and prison sentences, are definitely not going to get us there. (IMHO, of course.)

Starting back up

2009-12-29T15:42:00.002+01:00

Hi all,

I know something relatively close to eternity has passed since I last put something up in here, but with the usual increase of good intentions towards the end of the year (and mostly towards the start of a new year), stay tuned because I'll be doing my best to get things going again on a slightly more regular basis.

There are a couple of contradictory reasons for the recent inactivity. One of these is that I've pretty much settled in Morgantown and don't really discover too many new & noteworthy things to write about anymore. Another part is that I've been travelling throughout November (Australia) and a bit in early December (Socorro, New Mexico). While this might imply something to write about, it also means that I've been busy catching up on work, laundry, grocery-shopping and - mostly - sleep.

Now luckily I've decided to hibernate in Morgantown over Christmas and New Year, so all that catching up is (just about) done now. Also, during my travels I've come to realise that it really is hard to keep up with what everyone is doing and - something which will become much worse over the coming few years - where all my friends are located geographically as well as professionally. So short of Facebook, it's probably a good idea to keep some record of what's happening and where I'll be.

(I very nearly got convinced to finally succumb to the social pressure to joing Facebook, but the fact that the few publically available internet-spots in Sydney airport were practically continuously hogged by people stupidly, uselessly and totally-oblivious-to-anyone-else-anywhere-around-ly browsing through Facebook pictures (you know how I dislike pictures anyway. Just imagine how I dislike them when they stand between me and Gmail!), that fact got me totally turned off again. So bad luck Facebook: your addictive endorphins (or whatever substitute you might use) have not caught me even this time.)

Anyway. I'm sorry for that longish tangent.

For now: a belatedly Merry Christmas (whatever religion you might have) and all the best for 2010!

Family members building the basement

2009-08-25T22:04:00.004+02:00

This blog was supposed to describe my coming to terms with living in the US: the differences, similarities, surprises, eye-openers and frustrations. However, until today, I've been postponing a post about one of the essentials of American culture - and one that confuses me terribly: the Founding Fathers (not my capitalisation).

Of course one would expect some level of idolatry - after all the country that gave use Hollywood is very proud of its independence, unlike countries like Australia and Canada who claim independence while being pervaded of nostalgia for Britain, clinging to an anachronistic monarchy like a toddler to its mother's apron. But idolatry isn't a sufficient description of what's going on here: the fact that you find the founding fathers everywhere (banknotes carry their images, cities, newspapers and universities carry their names) is only part of the issue: the thing that really amazes me is that everyone - without exception - seems to think them infallible and whatever side of the political divide you're on, you'll call on the founding fathers for support.

The unquestioning adoration of these guys seems ultimate. In his political manifesto ("The Audacity of Hope"), Barack Obama writes how he looks up to them and how he studied their (and Lincoln's) writings in a bid to gain insight into politics and into what course the country should take. The one thing Fox News and John Stewart (respectively the default source of news and information for the political right and left) seem to agree upon, is that the founding fathers are untouchable: you don't ridicule them, you don't evaluate them, you don't question anything about them. The independent podcast commentator Dan Carlin whose main selling point is that he is so independent that he upsets both Democrats and Republicans, does exactly the same: whatever the founding fathers wrote, is scripture and untouchable. Even - and now it's really starting to sound like a rosebud-and-moonshine-everyone-is-happy Disney film - even the ever-shocking, inexcusably obnoxious animated sitcom South Park, who drag everyone through the dirt in ways unthinkable only ten years ago, even they do not question the founding fathers. The only episode I've found where they make an appearance, states (Episode 701):

This country was founded by some of the smartest thinkers the world has ever seen.

That particular episode (broadcast on 9 April 2003) discussed the Iraq war and the way in which both pro-war and anti-war groups claim the founding fathers to be on their side. To solve this conundrum, one of the kids travels back to 1776 and hears the founding fathers debate whether their country is to be a warmongering or a peace-loving country. They decide it should be both. At this point, I would think the moral of the story could easily be that the founding fathers were only human after all and that a constitution that was set up over 200 years ago to organise a limited number of colonies focussed on manual labour and trade, that such a constitution and the people behind them, could hardly have an opinion - or any guiding thoughts for that matter - on 9/11, Al Qaeda or going to war in Iraq. Interestingly, that's not what the moral of the episode turned out to be at all: they pointed out that the government had been given the power to go to war whenever it felt the need, while the people had been given the freedom of speech to voice their anger at the government, thereby putting the blame if anything went wrong, on the president instead of on the country. Of course there could be sarcasm in there and we may not have to take this at face value: the episode could easily be interpreted to be an attack on Bush - or on rednecks or on peace-demonstrators - you could really go just about in any direction you like with this, except... it really does not criticise the founding fathers, however easy that would have been.

Seeing all these agreements and realising that the American constitution has guided this country from its humble beginnings (demanding independence because they were taxed without being represented in parliament - inhabitants of DC must see the irony in this) to two world wars and throughout the cold war as one of only two superpowers in the world - while only being amended 27 times since 1776 (12 of which were proposed before the end of the 18^th century!)... that makes me very suspicious. If apparatchiks, presidents, comedians, independents, intelligent people and idiots all agree without a single note of dissent, that really brings the 1984 feeling home to me - surely there must be something really wrong, really dangerously wrong and some horrible creature will eat me if I think of telling the wider world?

Luckily for my peace of mind, I stumbled upon Gore Vidal and the first book ("Burr") of his series on the history of the US of A. I had read the last book of that series ("The Golden Age") years ago and it painted a really positive picture of F.D. Roosevelt, so I had no reason to suspect this book would be all too critical. Yet it was. It painted Washington as in incompetent fool and most of the other founding fathers as insubstantial minions doing his bidding. It doesn't leave any room for doubt when stating that the French won the war of independence, in spite of the founding fathers, not because of them. It goes straight against everything I had always heard and in doing so, it was very much a refreshing read.

Now I guess the truth lies in the middle as it always does, because the founding fathers were human after all. However, to slightly misquote the Simpsons (Episode 144): who cares if the founding fathers weren't what we believe them to be? If it makes people happy and allows them to live in peace, then why not settle for a white lie?

Paris - simply Paris

2009-08-24T23:15:00.008+02:00

While New York kept surprising me in not being quite what I expected, Paris didn't surprise me at all. In fact, from the very first moment onwards, the familiar style of the buildings and avenues almost made me feel a local even though I had only been to Paris once before - for a single day.

If you have trouble picturing the "familiar style" I mention, then have a look at this. It's a paiting from 1898, courtesy of Wikipedia. The charriots have been replaced by cars but apart from that, everything still looks exactly the same - and exactly the same as it looks in every movie you may ever have seen, that played in Paris. (Ratatouille and Moulin Rouge come to mind, but I'm sure there must be heaps I'm forgetting.)

It turns out this recognisable uniformity in architecture is mainly due to a massive remodelling of the city in the mid-to-late 19^th century where large parts of the city were dramatically torn down in order to reshape the city. Pulling off such an authoritarian effort sounds like the sort of extravagance that may have been typical of pre-revolutionary France, but not exactly what I expected hardly 60 years after the revolution. Yet, there is something to be said for it, because it definitely doesn't make Paris ugly.

Partly I guess that is because it would be really quite hard to make Paris look ugly. Wherever you go, whatever direction you turn to, you will stumble upon some monument, park or fascinating building. The number of sights to see and places to go really seem to be without end. (I'll admit that the subjective density of worthwhile sights might be increased by my "slightly-higher-than-average" walking pace, but even so Paris is a nice city to look at.)

Paris is also a big city. As always, I didn't fully appreciate the scale when I checked the maps to find a hostel that was near the conference venue - so between the fact that I managed to book a hotel on the opposite end of the city and the fact that the conference was conveniently organised at locations on opposite sides of the Quartier Latin, I managed to spend a lot of time walking the Parisian streets. (I cannot tell you how I delighted in having proper sidewalks again!)

Other positive things about Paris are the bins that really are everywhere and that prevent junk from littering the streets. Sadly that logic doesn't count for everything, though, since the large number of public toilets (almost though not quite as omnipresent as the bins) do not rid Paris of certain odours which I could have done without. Maybe that has something to do with the tramps (who aren't really all that prevalent but you definitely do see them sleeping on the streets), or with the nightlife which yours truly can of course not comment on. (You do know me better than that, right?)

One major annoyance is the large number of tourists. Being a foreigner myself (and lacking enough french skills to pull off pretending to be a local), I cannot say I mind noticing my barman is Scottish or Singaporese and if the first pub you hit upon turns out to be Irish and has the Ashes on the telly, who would I be to complain? (Especially not once I noticed one end of the pub to be full of Englishmen and the other half full of Aussies. Guess where I was sitting...)

But I can imagine it would start to annoy me to have people speak English to me all the time, to have to deal with unsuspecting, ignorant aliens performing random walks on your streets and sidewalks every day, not being able to take in the beautiful buildings, churches and parks without having a crowd of Nikons obscuring the view. In fact, walking up the stairs to the Sacré Cœur it's hard to notice the Basilica for the throng of visitors who meander about like cattle. In a way I guess it's interesting to realise how annoyed I can get when I find myself doing exactly as the masses - following the tracks that are laid out for me, going to see exactly what they want me to see. (I guess that annoyance and in-built nonconformity is part of what makes me a physicist rather than an accountant.)

But really, the view from the Sacré Cœur - like all the rest of Paris - is worth your while. Just beware and approach it from the back instead of the front. Saves your elbows some work.

Here is the "news"

2009-08-09T15:55:00.003+02:00

I've just watched the only Belgian news podcast that seemed to be up-to-date (latest update on 28 July 2009). Turns out some interesting things have happened last July. For example, Hillary Clinton is still in the race for the White House, after defeating Barack Obama in Ohio:

(I'm not kidding you: see 28/07/2009 in the title? There you go.)

Also, there was an offset between the sound and vision - 7 sec at the start, 100 sec at the end. Interestingly this gave Elio Di Rupo the voice of Yves Leterme. (And now you can all check Wikipedia to figure out who on earth these two are :-P)

If ever you wonder why I don't keep track of Belgian news, you'll find me listening to BBC or NPR...

A small town in Germany

2009-08-09T01:30:00.003+02:00

Bonn really is a small town in Germany - but a beautiful and very European small town. According to wikipedia it has around 300,000 citizens, but reliable sources told me this is mainly because Bonn was merged with a bunch of surrounding villages and towns back in the days when it was West Germany's capital city - in an attempt to make it look bigger than it really is. (Wikipedia seems to confirm this, pointing out that Bonn has doubled in population through a few mergers back in the 1960s.) So Bonn itself is not all too populated - though it's far from being in the wilderness: the trainride to Köln only takes about 10 minutes and needless to say, there is plenty of well-functioning public transport going just about anywhere. As for it being European: most of the city centre is inaccessible to cars - a pedestrian Walhalla, just what I needed. And of course you have good bread and delicious sausages - I could imagine worse things.

But as much as unexpected nostalgia reared its head in making me feel at home after years across oceans and continents, I did manage to get disappointed by what should have been one of the highlights of Germany: its beer selection.

To clarify this point at once: Germany does make many good beers. Both in Australia and the US it shouldn't be too hard to find some fine examples in support of that statement. (I have no clue how available non-Belgian beers are in Belgium, but my guess would be you'd have to try hard to find anything besides Guinness.) Yet, as it turns out, German pubs don't necessarily serve those beers. There's a bit of a selection effect in Belgian pubs as well, since most pubs are linked to a distributor and therefore only serve beers owned by a particular brewer. Even so, you're either likely to get a very wide choice in types of beer anyway, or I've been surprisingly lucky with the few Belgian pubs I've ever tried. Not so in Germany. All the non-Irish pubs I've entered (I know I'm starting to sound like I'm an alcoholic, but you'll have to believe that I'm not. It's simply astronomers on tour, ... I guess they do tend to go out for a couple every few days - what else would you do?) anyway - the non-Irish pubs I've tried all had two, maybe three - and if they're really special, even four types of beer on offer. One lager (I'm still not sure what the actual difference is between lager and pilsener), one wheat beer (weissbier), and then possibly an unfiltered beer or one that is low on alcohol. That's just about it. The pub nextdoor would have the same choice, just a different brand: it looks like this is really all they make here. No ales, stouts, pale ales, abbey beers. Nothing that has any more alcohol than, say, 5%. And this would be "Germany the nation of beer and sausages"? Good heavens.

Okay, I'm sorry - that rant went on for quite a bit longer than it should have, because on the whole it was a great place to hang around and I was sorely disappointed when late on Friday I discovered my Saturday outbound train would leave at 8am, not at noon, necessarily postponing the real sight seeing to March next year.

Finally, it obviously goes without saying that the telescope was great, impressive and beautiful all at the same time - and that I forgot to bring my camera so I don't have any pictures to show you. Again. Sigh. I really should learn that, shouldn't I? Maybe someday I will.

Leiden

2009-08-01T23:23:00.006+02:00

(Still catching up...)

There's little to say about Leiden: it's a small, typically Dutch city, which means there is a lot of water everywhere, it's built up of many old houses that look nice from the outside (I'm sure there are quite a few that look nice on the inside too) and it's overtly bike- and pedestrian-friendly. Call it "small Amsterdam" if you like. (Now that I check Wikipedia, it seem Leiden has more than 100,000 inhabitants - so I guess there must be a quite a few stylish appartment buildings on the outskirts where I couldn't see them.)

Since most of my time in Leiden was spent working at the astronomical institute, however, I really haven't got much to say about the city at all. Except for this: it was here that I first started to feel more positive about the American tipping culture. Let me explain...

One of my former classmates from Göteborg (Roberto) has for the past several years been working for ESA in Noordwijk - and therefore been living in (or close by) Leiden. So every time I get close to the Netherlands, we agree to meet - and generally fail due to overfull agenda's, miscommunication or crashed cars. Now before I go too far on a tangent, this time we actually did meet - in a Belgian restaurant close to the centre of Leiden.

Because Roberto is Mexican - or, to be politically correct, because there was something mad going on all throughout Leiden and I had come on foot while he came by car, I made it to the restaurant about half an hour before Roberto did, so I ordered myself a beer. I'm not sure if it was the condensation on the glass, my tiredness after the walk from the hotel in Oegstgeest, or the fact that I was minding the door more than my drink, but I succeeded (for the first time in my life, I promise) to tip my glass and spill about three-quarters of a drink onto the table and chairs. Now I would have been happy to give these things a swipe before the beer gets sticky and impossible to remove, but there were no napkins and there was not a waiter in sight. Off I went to the kitchen. On the way a waiter passed me with some steaming platters, but clearly I was no more than air to him, even when I waved my hand and asked for his attention. At the kitchen door itself, I was still unable to find any waiters - or, more to the point, to be seen by any - so I uselessly returned to my seat.

After a while a waiter did show up and managed to clean up the mess. He sort of acknowledged my order for a new beer, but it took him so long to get that to me that I honestly started wondering what was happening. (Interestingly, when the bill came, it only contained one of these two beers - which I would bring down to confusion more than anything, but you never know.)

Being a Belgian restaurant, all dishes were paired up with a suggested type and brand of beer; so when Roberto finally arrived and we placed our orders, I ordered my third beer of the evening - the one to go with the dinner. Because the dinner did, of course, take a while to come out, I ended up ordering yet another (4th) beer, just to have something to do before dinner finally arrives. This fourth drink never made it to my table - and when food finally came, it came without adjoining drink, leaving me dry once again.

Long story short: I managed to order two drinks that never came, and from the two that I did get, I only paid for one. Whenever I did want to order something - or when I needed help or a cloth or napkin - there was no one to be found. Of course it was a sunny day and there were many customers, but at least when you order a drink you expect to get it, right? How else would places like these make any money?

In subsequent weeks and subsequent European countries, I would get the same feeling I got in Leiden: I would want to order something - anything - and there simply wouldn't be anyone interested: it turned out to be really hard to get these people to allow me to spend something in their establishments. In the USA, on the other hand, you generally order a single drink and it gets refilled for free (in the case of soda, at least) - in that situation I would imagine they have nothing to lose by not being around when I need a refill - and yet there they are - always right at my table whenever I want something!

I'm still not convinced obligatory tipping is the way to go, but if I compare the service I got at pretty much any place in the US (well, any place I've tried, which is limited so far to a few restaurants, bars and hotels in Morgantown, NYC, Washington DC and Charlottesville VA) to what passed for service at some places in Leiden, Leuven, Bonn and Paris,... I'm starting to see a point.

While writing the above - and through carrying myself back to the days in Leiden, I remember there was one more thing that really struck me in Leiden as well as in Belgium: the weather would be slightly warm - not even necessarily going much beyond 30C and not humid at all - and people would be complaining about it being too hot, while I didn't really understood what they were on about. Maybe people can get used to different weather - after long training in extreme conditions ;-)

Today in my mailbox

2009-07-31T00:23:00.002+02:00

Front side:

It takes more than saying "God Bless America"

If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
- 2 Chronicles 7:14

Back side:

How do you reach the households in your target market?
Try PREFERRED MAIL ADVERTISING etc...

For one, I have no clue what either side has to do with the other - and to continue, if this is targetted advertising then someone really ought to have a look at his algorithm. (I suggest checking the minus-signs...)

New York - the City that Never Sleeps

2009-07-30T01:41:00.005+02:00

When I thought of the Big Apple in the past, I was mainly focused on the Wall Street/World Trade Center type New York where businessmen in pin-stripe suits outnumber tourists and extreme high-rise buildings of glass and steel are the fundamental building blocks so that Spider man has high hideouts to tie his webs to. In the back of my mind I did realise, of course, that there must be some other side to New York because the Cosby Show clearly does not take place in a skyscraper. I found out immediately that the CBD is indeed far from the average New York, that there is much, much more to this city and that it's all great.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of the first things I did in NYC was to walk straight through western Manhattan, carrying a suitcase in the mild rain, after midnight. Clearly this is a unique way of creating a first impression of a city - and a good one at that (if you can handle the late hour and like a light rain) - in the week that followed, I ventured south of Times Square (i.e. into the CBD of Spiderman and the evil bankers) only twice, and down to Times Square only about three times. Partly because the conference schedule was so terribly packed that there was no way one could find any time to see the city, partly because there's plenty to do and see in the other regions that are not shown in the movies.

Since I've mainly seen western Manhattan, let's stick with that for a moment. It is of course a busy part of a big city, but that doesn't stop most streets from being lined by trees - much in the way you see on the Cosby Show, indeed (even though that's Brooklyn and I'm talking about Manhattan). There are sidewalks (as Josh told me there would be in any decent US city) and while there are generally no bike lanes, there are quite a few bikers and they seem to be (seem to be, I haven't actually put this to the test) respected by the car drivers.

I was told that New Yorkers were always in a hurry, but as any relativistic physicist knows, velocity is a relative quantity. From my point of view there was no difference with any other city I've ever been in, I was still by far the fastest pedestrian around. I was also told New Yorkers were uncivil and maybe it's because I didn't interact with enough random people, but I didn't notice anything like that. (In fact, I could imagine random people being uncivil when interrupted on the street - in any city.) True, the one taxi driver I ran into was totally useless, unpolite and apparently in a major hurry, but that may well be a more common truth about cab drivers in general.

Two more things that stand out in a positive way are the subway system (which works incredibly well and all night long at regular intervals) and Central park, which is... Okay, let's have a bit of an introduction here: I am always very impressed if a city or town can manage to maintain (against the pressures of commercial development) some sort of green area or parkland somewhere close to the centre of the city. Most great cities have something like that: Sydney has the botanical gardens - as does Melbourne. London has (amongst others) Hyde Park, Paris has the Bois de Boulogne, Göteborg has Slottsskogen. New York's central park, though, is simply absolutely outstanding. For starters, while New York is either bigger or as big as all of the cities mentioned above, central park lies just as close or even closer to the CBD as in all of the above. Secondly, it isn't just a park - parts of it come closer to being a natural reserve than anything else - I'm not sure how to describe what I've seen from central park, but the fact that I failed every time I tried to walk across to East Manhattan, must tell you something. Also, it's not just beautiful and nearby, it's also huge. According to Wikipedia, Hyde Park has about 253 hectares, Central Park has 341. (The Bois de Boulogne is 2.5 times bigger still, but lies further from the CBD.)

Furthermore, New York has regions with very strongly varying character (some of which I've discovered along with George, so you may find some more details (and pictures!) on his blog - though I haven't found the time to read all of that myself yet): Chinatown, little Italy, Harlem, Westside, Eastside, you name it. Culturally it has a lot going on, too: besides the world renowned Broadway shows, a (seemingly) thriving underground cultural scene (reminiscent of Melbourne when seen through slightly nostalgic eyes) seems to exist. All of that really brings the city down from the sterile individualism of the masses to the close and vibrant personal level and allows you to have a good time on a much more intimate level. (I know that doesn't explain much and may actually not make any sense at all, but it's getting late here so I'm trying to tie an end to this.)

After Morgantown and (definitely) Green Bank, New York was obviously a big and sudden change and maybe that's why I started to feel, after a week, that the ever-busy hubbub started to wear me out. (Though the many late nights discussing pulsar astrophysics and God knows what more over many pints of beer in various bars across Manhattan might have had something to do with that as well.) The next two weeks I would spend in Leiden and Bonn, both much smaller cities on the other side of the Atlantic - but that's another story.

Catch-up time

2009-07-30T01:35:00.004+02:00

And at long last I made it back to Morgantown - with a day's delay because apparently scheduling a 5-hour stopover in NY isn't quite sufficient. I didn't expect to have a 6-hour delay. Anyway. We're back.

Needless to say, a lot has happened in the past month - so much that I didn't even find a spare minute to keep you all informed (that, and the fact that access to internet doesn't come as easily as access to oxygen. Even if it might in some parts of the world, then that's most likely due to a local lack of oxygen - and besides, I certainly haven't been in those places, even if they do exist.)

But I'll make amends and try to rehash the important things in a mostly chronological order, starting with the next post. So stay tuned: with a delay of ~4 weeks, here's what I've been up to.

The Longest Day

2009-06-21T21:31:00.002+02:00

As you all know, the summer solstice (midsummer night) is on 20/21 June. That makes yesterday the longest day.

What you may not have realised, was that yesterday was also the day I travelled from Morgantown to New York. This trip normally takes 9 hours by car or two times 1 hour by plane (change at DC). Sadly, I took the latter option.

Due to technical faults with our plane, which was still stuck somewhere in the wilds of WV, our flight to DC was four to five hours delayed. Then it was cancelled, then it was delayed again and finally it was truly cancelled.

As it turned out, we finally did get flown to DC on the next flight (which they initially claimed to be full) and from there United booked us onto a Delta flight into JFK. Sadly, though, upon arrival in Dulles airport (DC), the Delta people told us their flight was (like any other flight) heavily overbooked and so there was no way in hell that we'd get onto that flight - or any other flight - to NYC.

So back to United. The only thing they did was wave their hands in the air and say there's nothing they can do, all flights are overbooked, what do we expect them to do? (Getting us to NY would be a good start, given that we paid them to do that.)

Along with two other passengers (both Long Islanders), I then decided to rent a car and drive from DC to NY - as soon as we had lunch (which really ended up being dinner). Luckily, by the time we had had lunch, the Delta flight was also heavily delayed - which apparently resulted in some people cancelling (and going by car?) - ergo, we got a spot on the plane after all. (The plane subsequently sat around on the tarmac for an hour and a half because NY had stopped allowing planes to land or something like that, but at least we made it to NYC eventually.)

And remarkably, so did my luggage (though they've lost the baggage strap around my suitcase and they seriously destroyed my fancy Qantas baggage tag.)

Taking the airtrain and subway into the centre of the city was easy enough and I think I arrived there at around 11pm. The plane landed around 10pm which means that simply to get from Morgantown airport to JFK airport (which should reportedly be a 9-hour drive), I spend about 12 hours. Talking about flying as a fast mode of transportation!

Sadly, though, my memory deluded me when trying to track down the hostel, so I spent the next two hours dragging my suitcase through Manhattan (and through a drizzle which is too weak to be rain but persistent enough to make my glasses untransparent). At 1 am I finally arrived at the hostel. I had in the meantime tried to get a taxi to take me there, but the driver had never even heard of "youth hostels". Luckily a random passer by (at 12:30am!) did know the address.

And then of course you get the checking-in trouble. God knows why, but apparently my name had entered the system wrongly, so after they told me that a) I didn't have a booking and b) the hostel was 100% fully booked (which isn't quite what you want to hear at 1:30am after the day I've just described), it took me about half an hour to convince them I did have a booking and for them to get me a bed. At 2:30 I finally fell asleep. (Only to be woken up by the bl**dy Sun at 8 am of course. Which is the second day in a row since last night I was desperately trying to get my laptop to behave correctly again.)

On a positive note, I really, really like New York (or the West end of Manhattan at least, since that's all I've really seen so far), notwithstanding all of the above. More on that later, because now I need to get ready for the conference registration.

Link

2009-06-19T22:02:00.005+02:00

Here's some potentially harmful information about linking in unix:

If you ever feel the need to link to a directory, say:
ln -s someDir Pointer
then when removing the link, do not use tab-complete. That means:
rm -rf Pointer/
will cause a headache: it will not delete "Pointer", but everything beyond "Pointer" - which means "someDir" and everything inside. Instead, do:
rm -rf Pointer
The slash makes a world of difference.

Also, when testing stuff with pointers, never use your home directory. And be forewarned that
ln -s ./ ~/Pointer
is _not_ equal to
ln -s `pwd` ~/Pointer

The linux-users amongst you will have figured out by now what I've been doing all day. (Besides pulling out my hair, that is.) Chances are everyone else has long since stopped reading.

On a positive note, right after I deleted everything in my homedirectory (as a matter of fact I was lucky and it got stuck halfway through - at least I've learned to stop rm when it starts to ask questions), I did finally manage to submit the paper I've been drafting for the past 9 months. So that's a relief.

Finally, I'm back in Morgantown for a day, departing to NYC tomorrow morning (where I'll be attending the Amaldi conference on gravitational waves). As much as you may not expect this, walking the streets of this little university town earlier today, it did feel like home. Slowly but truly I'm warming to this town - give it another half a year and who knows what'll happen ;-)

Quintessential Appalachia

2009-06-11T21:40:00.017+02:00

Or, more precisely, what I think must be a quintessential view of Appalachia: hills, shacks and beautiful white houses that stand firm yet lonely in the wide landscape. (I know this particular picture shows a blue house, but trust me: it's probably the only non-white house for miles around. Not that there are many houses within miles (an average of 3 houses per km² according to Wikipedia), but you know what I mean.

This blog is inspired by the yearly trek of the WVU astro group to their summer hideout at the Green Bank Observatory. Escaping the heat of the plains, this peculiar breed of scientist withdraws to the mountains to abstain from cell phones, microwave ovens and anything wireless. Throughout the few hours drive straight down the heart of the state, the ever decreasing population makes for a clear break from the city we normally inhabit. I would never have thought of calling Morgantown a city, but officially it is and seeing some more of the state, I'm starting to put things into context.

The endpoint of our trip - in the middle of the huge (bigger than Belgium) radio quiet zone - is the Green bank telescope ('the largest fully movable dish in the world' is a 100x110 m dish, which makes it just larger than the 100m diameter Effelsberg paraboloid). Now on the one hand I find it absolutely fascinating that such a large area could be made radio quiet by law (and I'm sure you're all just as postively enthousiastic), but at the same time there is of course the harsh reality that the military doesn't necessarily need to submit to this sort of thing, so you may have a large area without television transmitters or mobile phone coverage, but that doesn't mean you haven't got RFI (radio frequency interference). I guess you can't have it all.

Sitting in the even-more-middle-of-nowhere-than-Morgantown, my silly old prejudiced self assumed I'd find the die-hard hillbilly-redneck communities one generally tries to avoid except when making a certain kind of movie. I'm happy to say I was thoroughly misguided on this front. For starters, I came across this:

a solar-powered "slow-down-school-near" sign in the very middle of the state that survives on mining coal. I'm impressed. Next I found myself sporting a T-shirt that pronounced loud and clear my support for Third World debt relief while walking the thin white line that borders the oncoming traffic from the side of the road. In a redneck backyard of a redneck state that voted Republican even in 2008 - notwithstanding the tens of astronomers who surely must have tipped the balance a bit - and which housed (as I had been told) the headquarters of the KKK, I can only blame oblivion and lack of foresight for such inappropriate clothing. As it happens, though, the easily orchestrated 'accident' didn't arrive - all that happened was that an African-American nodded approvingly from his driver's seat. Of course, it may have had nothing to do with my T-shirt, but even so. (By now I've checked the internet and for as far as I can tell WV doesn't have - and never did have - a KKK headquarters.)

The next day I went to the local shop - the kind of small, darkish shop with the squeeking door you know from your standard Western - carrying my yuppie'ish, city-folk cotton shopping bag (save on plastic - save the environment!) Or so I thought. As it turns out the city isn't nearly as far ahead of the country as I imagined: instead of denigrating looks ("what does that fancy city-boy think he's doing here"), I got an approving nod accompanied with the assurance that "many people bring their own bags these days - just think of all the plastic we're saving; ain't that great".

So in brief, I've been happily surprised about the country: my fears were ungrounded, my prejudices outdated. As a final anecdote I'll mention the walk in the woods that became slightly unpleasant and worrisome when I heard shooting in the distance. Even though I thought hunting season is in autumn, walking in camouflage (did I mention my oblivion and lack of foresight?) while people are shooting doesn't sound like a thing you would like to do - not in WV. Upon arrival at the lodge, though, it turned out there was a shooting range - well away from where I was walking, once again making me look foolish in my worry. (It's only fair to add that the only story I've ever heard of an astronomer being shot at took place in Narrabri (AUS), not in WV. On that occasion, the shooting wasn't an accident but a determined attempt at getting people of private property. I must not be the only oblivious astronomer around.)

The Long and Winding Road

2009-06-02T04:04:00.003+02:00

Dear Joris

I'm glad to inform you that you have been approved the award of the degree of PhD.

And so the road that commenced exactly (well, exactly this Saturday) four years ago, has come to an end. (And I finally get to tick that box "Dr.")

For the die-hard amongst you, the final copy can be found here. For the less hard-core supporters, I've copied the only section you might be interested in, below - the non-scientific part of the acknowledgements, that is.

At Swinburne as in Sydney, work only goes so far in turning “survival” into “life”. Luckily there were many friends along the way, some long gone, others just arrived, who provide some comic relief to give my brain the occasional rest. Thanks therefore to my housemates: Simon, Nadia, Meg, Paul, Elaine, Thomas and Lenneke for introducing me to the best TV series I know and for the discussions and insights in subjects as varied as sub-atomic physics, Australian culture and German cuisine (though mostly sub-atomic physics). Thanks also to my fellow students and office-mates (both in Swinburne and at the ATNF): Xiao Peng, Trevor, Tim, Sarah, Paul, Nick, Natasha, Meredith, Max² , Lina, Lee, Kathryn, Jeremy, Haydon, Emily, Emil, Daniel, Chris, Caroline, Berkeley, Annie, Anneke, Andy, Alyson, Albert, Adrian and Adam for both encouraging and preventing procrastination, for lunch and dinner, for the Age Superquiz, for telling me more than I needed to hear about AFL and rugby. For poker, movies, music. For drinks and laughter. For taking me seriously, but not too seriously. For camping and hikes. For sleep-deprived comedy at 4am in the Parkes control room. And for pointing out the obvious. Apart from housemates and fellow students, the frisbee crowd provided me with an energy release that money cannot buy. Thanks for putting up with my galloping across your field, guys.

Last but not least, thanks to the people I’ve been neglecting most of all: my father, who predicted twenty years ago that I’ll become a particle physicist; my mother, who keeps on defying the Universe in her claim that Australia is a long way from Belgium; and my siblings, Kathleen & Maarten, who are in their own way close while distant. It’s the four of you - and the eighteen years I’ve lived with you in Belgium, that have provided me with the dauntless international vision that brought me to the other end of the world and with the scientific intrigue that made me want to understand the Universe and, above all, gravity.

So yeah, thanks for a couple of great years, people. As much as I'm relieved the writing is behind my back, I'm still sorry those times are past...

Have a drink!

2009-05-29T01:55:00.005+02:00

A few weekends ago, on a Sunday around noon, I decided it would be nice to make pancakes for lunch. And what better way to enjoy waiting for the whiteish-yellow dough to turn yellowish-brown than by enjoying a beer on the side. So I grabbed a random one from the fridge and started lunch.

An hour later, as I was glad-wrapping the final few pancakes for dinner on Monday, I became aware of a slight tipsiness which didn't so much worry me as it confounded me. Maybe the milk had gone bad and was having an effect on my digestion / maybe this was the effect of a few nights of bad sleep? Maybe - no, surely it couldn't be the beer.

From a Belgian perspective, the initial interesting (and disturbing!) fact about beer in WV is that beer with more than 6% alcohol may not be sold. While this law is of course totally preposterous, meaningless and useless, it didn't bother me too much because a) I did not believe that any country other than Belgium can produce a good-tasting beer with high alcohol content and b) We happen to live 6 miles from Pennsylvania and a 45 minute drive from Maryland. (The law was most recently changed so that now it should be allowed, though the shops haven't caught up yet.)

The problem with Pennsylvania is (as I am told by the natives) that you can only buy beer by the case (or slab for you Australians - for everyone else: a 24-unit container), except for the really basic stuff like Budweiser (in which case you can buy 6-packs at bars, I'm told). So in order to get a taste of variety, Pennsylvania wouldn't be the right place to go. Hence, we teamed up with a couple of students and went on a "beer run" to Maryland. Hop across the border, buy an interesting-looking collection and hop back. As a consequence, my fridge has been filled with a quite intruiging (though currently dwindling) variety waiting to be tried ever since.

The random pick I drank while eating pancakes, happened to be a "Stoudts Triple". Now I know what you're thinking: Triple - that spells trouble. But really, the beer didn't taste like alchohol. In fact, it pretends to be a "Belgian Abbey-style Ale" and to my great surprise it smells, looks and tastes damn close to exactly that. Again, I feel a footnote is in place. Once you start paying attention, you'll find beers all over the world pretending to be "Belgian style" this or that. It's an easy trick to get sold: paste a label irrespective of whether you have anything to do with it or not. (On that topic: how many of you knew that the corporate headquarters of IKEA are in the Netherlands?) Anyway. Disappointment after disappointment has taught me to never expect a Belgian style beer to be Belgian style at all. I guess Stoudts finally proved me wrong. After checking the internet (for some reason that defies my logic, alcohol content is often not printed on the bottles or 6-packs), this specific brew was supposed to have 9% alcohol. On a Sunday at lunch with nothing but some pancakes. I guess that would explain some of the tipsiness. Joris - American Beer: 0 - 1.

But that's not where this ended. Oh no. If you thought getting drunk at noon was bad, hang on to your hat, worse is yet to come.

A week and a bit later - a quiet Tuesday evening I think it was - I sit down for my favourite passtime: reading a book with a nice beer as companion. Now since I was the only Belgian on the beer run, I felt morally obliged to buy just about all the Belgian beer that wasn't Leffe (since Leffe you can find anywhere). Consequentially, I happened to have a sampler pack of the (pretty much unheard of for all I know, but then I haven't lived in Belgium for nearly a decade) Petrus brewery - which is indeed, very Belgian.

My random pick that Tuesday evening left me with the "Aged Pale" of Petrus and to say the only positive comment I can devise, it was unlike any beer I've ever tried before. It was not, however, too different from the Slovenian apple vinegar my dad once bought in the vain hope of getting apple juice - the difference being that the Aged Pale tasted less of apple and more of vinegar. I never thought I'd see the day, but here it was: blunt and undeniably in front of me: the ultimate undrinkable (Belgian!) "beer". The struggle that went on in my head was terrifying in that it defied the only things I still believed in: the Belgian supremacy on the front of beer-making. If we cannot even have that, then what good can we do? (Well, I guess there's still chocolate?)

The dark side won. I chucked the vinegar down the sink after only the tiniest sip. And I took a Leinenkugel's 1888 Bock to replace it. Joris - American Beers: 0 - 2.

At this point I bluntly and openly admit defeat: Belgium, Germany and the Czech Republic are not the only nations in the world to make good and varied beers (though the Czech republic doesn't necessarily do that, either). The U.S.A. knows quite a bit, too. I've had some really good wheat beers (which, again, say to be "Belgian style" and in fact they may well rival Hoegaarden, especially since this latter has now been absorbed into the Death Star called "InBev" - that's right: Hoegaarden and Budweiser are owned by the same company. Disgusting, isn't it?) I've tasted "Belgian Abbey-style beer" which actually emulates exactly what it set out to emulate. I'm really, honestly surprised by the variety - the many different brands, the different types available and the quite regularly recurring fact that these things actually taste right! And on top of that, I don't even think I've yet tried any of the beers Josh and Nick told me to look out for.

Out into the wild

2009-05-21T21:03:00.009+02:00

Last week I had two days off and finally made it into the beautiful wilderness of Appalachia:

(Yeah, I only really have two pictures to show for two days of hanging out. But then there really is no way to capture these things in boring old pictures anyway. You'll have to come and check it out yourself :-P)

On Wednesday, Anneke (Praagman - should be known to most of you) came on a flash visit and brought a car, allowing us to make it to the Coopers Rock state forest: a pearl of tranquillity (which I take it is a slightly odd wording in that pearls don't necessarily have much to do with tranquility, but let's leave it at that anyway) not too far from town. After a long and tiring walk through the temperate forest on a warm spring day, we drove back to town to visit ... the arboretum - and have another tiring walk. So yeah, there you have it - visiting me does generally involve a reasonable amount of footwork...

The next day was no less entertaining and also resulted in a healthy tiredness at the end of it: together with most of the astro-students and a couple senior staff, I participated in the inaugural astro white water rafting trip! (The fact that two of the party of nine were actually plasma physicists is a detail we'll be happy to omit.) Since cameras are of course nothing you would want to bring on such a trip, you'll have to believe me when I say I courageously took the hot spot and valiantly guided my raft through the thunderous, perilous rapids of South-Western Pennsylvania. (That's right, we actually went right across the border since that turned out to be the nearest good spot to go.)

And what do you know? We didn't capsize, I didn't fall out (even though the front seat didn't really have any hooks for my feet - or any support at all, for that matter), didn't bash my head against the rocks we glided past and I still do not regret choosing the cheapest health-care plan. All in all it was a nice experience, floating down the river through the forests, seeing the imaginary natives of centuries past sneak through the bushes in hunt for turkeys and black bears. Noticing the settlers arrive at the river - yet another obstacle to overcome. Finding a derailed railway carriage and deducing from the large trees that stand all around it, that it must have lain there for quite some time - perhaps ever since the robbers of the West - the American Ned Kellys - put up a scheme and grabbed whatever was there. Or ever since a tree came down as the train thundered past, though such realistic explanations of course don't rouse my fascination and imagination quite as much.

I must admit, the landscape here never fails to get me dreaming. It must be incredibly easy to write a historical novel about life in the Americas in times past, because the imagery is all right there: the trees, streams, mountains - granted, there's the occasional power line, but apart from that - there's so much room down here! There are so few people on such a massive continent... And so much has happened so recently!

If you think I'm losing it again, consider this: in the BeNeLux, there are on average 371 people per square kilometer. While Australia is a whole lot less dense, Melbourne sure isn't. In West-Virginia, that number is 29 - more than ten times less! On top of that, Flanders fought the French in 1302 - and we still talk about it. My little country back home has of course been the field for many other armies to fight, from Waterloo to WWII. But that's all messy warfare - one ruler comes, throws out the previous one, raids our churches, steals our art and takes whatever taxes he can before the next invader comes knocking. To my mind, Belgian history is the boring constancy that primary school history lessons are composed of.

Not so with North-America. This is the land where Winnetou once roamed the plains. The land where famished Irish built a new life on their up-and-at-them attitude. The place where strong men delivered ad-hoc justice, mounted on their fierce stallions and sporting the guns that defended the weak and harmless. This is the land where a Don Quixote could be brave and valued without needing to be mad. Forgive me for being entirely unrealistic, but it's true that America is the continent of which we read fascinating stories and see exciting movies.

Of course I know that country (which must have been much harsher and probably didn't have any of the romanticised titbits Karl May and Clint Eastwood would have us believe in) has long since disappeared: nobody lives randomly in the wild - except for campers, like everywhere else - and there are no settlers trekking through the wilderness: settlers these days have a 4WD and airplanes. But there's so much unspoiled, free, empty and (in sharp contrast to most of Australia:) livable land around here that I keep on being reminded of those stories of old - the great promised land out West. So as mad as I may be, please don't blame me for continuing to expect finding John Wayne besides a camping fire every time I see a creek or a rotting tree trunk.

Living the good life

2009-05-09T15:58:00.005+02:00

When I first arrived in Australia in 2004, it didn't take 12 hours before I was told of the drought and reminded to keep shower time down. In subsequent years, the concept of a filled bath tub became - slowly but surely - relegated to the realm of science fiction. And it doesn't look like this was just because of the few strange people I fell in with: after nearly four years in the country, I'm just about convinced that the nation - and especially the big cities - are obsessed with saving water.

Yet, water isn't where it ends. As the elections loomed and environmental concern reached the political agenda, televisions were struck with government-funded adds that seemed to have the single purpose of making us feel guilty of using any electricity at all: switch on lights, TVs, microwaves or alarm clocks and black balloons of doom would fill your house: the CO₂ is everywhere and it will kill you. (This purpose was of course secondary to trying to convince the electorate that Howard was good for them. As good as CO₂, if you ask me.)

Such guilt-ridden consumerism (aka the idea that anything beyond sitting in a cave is bad for the Earth and will destroy your kids and grandkids if not yourself), is of course nothing new to me: one doesn't have to live in an extremist-Calvinist community to be made aware of the dreadful things we do to our planet and how this will curse us in the end. As a point of illustration, one of the few things I remember from primary school is how we were told of the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest for the dual benefit of quick gain from tropical wood sales and opening up of cheap pastures to breed McDonalds-cows. I've been ingrained by obsessive-compulsive turning off of lights, closing of dripping taps and taking trains not cars. However, environmental concerns aren't the end of this, either: the government and lobby-groups go through quite some effort to push us into the correct straightjacket: extensive advertising campaigns have left me incapable of considering driving and drinking (however little) on the same night. It's an interesting life, which is guided by reflexes of guilt.

Down here, I haven't detected much of that. In contrast to the Australian balloons of doom, here I've seen car stickers praising the merits of coal ("coal forever!") and the secretary of the interior explains on prime-time television that limiting the consumption of coal is simply not something worth thinking about. Here, people have figured out that it's so much easier to go by car than by any other means, so why wouldn't we? And if you've had a few to drink - hey, as long as you know what you're doing and you've got a big enough 'truck' to feel safe, what could go wrong?

Don't worry about long showers or filling bath tubs - in fact, the shower knob doesn't even allow me to adjust the volume of water, so maybe a full-blown bath may be more economical after all! Also, you shouldn't feel obliged to fill your kitchen with fifteen different trash bags: just put it all in a single one, it isn't really your problem what happens to it, after all - that's why you pay bills for trash collection, right?

Another one: why would you go through the effort of buying groceries, cooking and doing dishes (or, rather, filling the dish washer) every day? Eating out is cheap, yummy and fast. Surely in a time and place where time is money, you'll just pop by Subway or KFC after work? There's no need to panick about refilling your drink during dinner, either - while in Belgium the biggest cost of eating out is often that second Coke you've ordered, in the US (or at least in Morgantown), refills are free.

In fact, to come down to the most nitty-gritty details: my age-old obsession with not choking the kitchen sink is rendered worthless by the mechanical cutter-device installed underneath. Drop anything you like down the sink, if it gets stuck you simply flick the switch and along with the whirring noise, the water level will drop again.

Of course the above is a bit of a caricature: I've seen water wasted in NSW and know plenty of Belgians who wouldn't give a light switch a second thought. On top of that, I've only lived here for 3 months so the few Americans I know and an out-of-context quote from the secretary of the interior may not really paint a convincing picture. But even so, I cannot escape the feeling that the USA isn't only pervaded with a feeling of opportunity and optimism, but also of an attitude to live the good life. And take it or leave it, there's a lot to be said in favour that.

There will be delays...

2009-04-28T23:51:00.011+02:00

A few weeks ago, I put aside my prejudices and worries and decided to spend a glorious day on a bus trip to the "unreachable" mall. I left at 2:00pm and in order to optimise the potential number of busses to catch and minimise the potential waiting time, I first biked to the bus depot in central Morgantown. According to the schedule, I should have a bus every half our there and since I arrived at 2:20pm, there should be one within 10 minutes. As it turned out, I missed one while figuring out the schedules - the 2pm bus had left 25 minutes late.

In itself that wasn't too bad. While the bus stop itself turns out to be the local dope and smoke market (never before have I witnessed two total strangers talk about cocaine addiction within 5 minutes of introducing themselves), the weather was pleasant enough, as was the nearby trail (which I keep coming back to) and the scenery on the other side of the bus station. (The picture above should bring out the early April cherry blossoms, at least that's what I think they are. That lovely spring weather has by now been replaced by heat not unworthy of Melbourne Cup day.)

After 35 minutes at the bus stop, a 25-minute delayed bus did arrive and (after having stopped for an extra 5 minutes) brought us to the mall. While I had been gone from home for an entire hour now, the busride itself only took 15 minutes. Talking about efficiency.

There are three malls in Morgantown (though "around" would be a more accurate preposition). The first mall is immediately south of the city and has died ever since Wall Mart moved out. Now the only reason to go there is because the social security administration has its office there, so you're effectively obliged to go at least once, at the very start of your stay. The second one is right across the river from where I live and the final one is where I was headed now. None of these three malls have sidewalks. None of these three are reachable by bike unless you have no sense of selfpreservation whatsoever. A bus ride to mall 2 (as we just found out) takes 15 minutes, waiting not included. A ride to mall 3 takes at least half an hour - according to the schedules, that is.

Because there are rather few stores inside town, I presume my hopes were artificially inflated for what I would find at the mall. Upon arrival, though, I was quickly put in my place. The fear of losing my way in the seven full, three half and twenty quarter floors of which any Australian shopping mall seems to be built up (in quite a few Australian shopping centres I've seen, the word "floor" doesn't make much sense: you really need a continuous scale in z-direction or an altimeter to keep track of where you are), quickly evaporated when I realised this mall wasn't much larger than the little misfit we have in Kapellen (my town in Belgium). In fact, this mall didn't even have a supermarket and therefore became even less interesting than that one.

I feel like I have to qualify my disappointment, though. The fact is that the third mall (the one across the water from me) does actually contain some interesting stores, though it only has a single bus going there, which translates into an hourly instead of half-hourly service. I got a ride there twice now and it does provide you with good shops for at least some things. The problem is, of course, getting there.

Also, as much as I may seem to complain, I really should bear in mind that Morgantown isn't the metropolis I've lived in for the past ~4 years. According to Wikipedia it has less than 30,000 inhabitants so Melbourne is literally more than a hundred times bigger. The reason why a big city like Melbourne has all its shops in the centre while tiny Morgantown has them all a 15-minute drive outside town, remains a mystery to me, though.

So, after a five-minute stroll through what I expected to be a plethora of assaults on my common sense and - more so - wallet, I'd seen it all and strolled back to the parking lot with an empty feeling and without spending a single cent. It was 3:20pm by now - I had been gone for 80 minutes and had spent a total of 5 minutes in the mall. I figured I could walk back in, maybe eat something, but the 3pm bus (which should normally arrive here by 3:15pm but was delayed by an undetermined amount of time) could arrive any minute and missing that bus would imply an extra wait of at least 30 minutes. I figured the risk of missing the bus was too large and opted to play safe and inspect the parking lot instead.

Here you have a snapshot of the parking lot. It doesn't seem to be so huge, but that is because it encircles the bean-shaped mall and therefore doesn't need a huge radius to have a surface at least twice as large as the shopping area. Smart design in that sense: it allows the fast-food eating, never-walking homo sapiens (who think of a motor cycle rather than a bicycle upon hearing the word "bike") to limit its physical activity to an absolute minimum. (And then they wonder why the dysfunctional health care absorbs a third of US taxes.) Let's move on to somehing more positive and focus on the horizon in the picture above: the softly undulating foothills of the Appalachian mountains, specked with nice white houses that undoubtedly have lovely views over the natural beauty of which this Mountain State has so much. When/if I get to the even more sparsely populated region of Green Bank, you can expect some clearer evidence, because I'm aware this picture may not cut it in itself.

The bus did arrive, eventually. If I remember correctly, it arrived at 4pm and must therefore have been close to 40 to 45 minutes late. I would ask how it's possible to get such a delay on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but given that this post comes almost a month after the event, I don't feel justified in pressing that point. Getting back to the bus stop at 4:20pm, I made it home around 4:40pm, bringing the trip total close to three hours for a 5-minute walk through the mall. Luckily these durations don't scale linearly...

In Australia, the one thing that bothered me most, was the heat. Yet, when you sign up for a couple of years down under, you really should realise it's going to be hot so complaining about it isn't really justified. In America, the single most annoying thing (in my opinion) is the absence of sidewalks and the consequential necessity of a car. This, too, is an implicit part of the deal and it would therefore be unfair if I kept focussing on that point: I knew this was going to be an issue and I've had three months to get used to it, so it really is time for me to get over it and stop whinging - unless I want to end up a pom in America (which, given my accent, I'm not too far off.) I therefore decided this will be the very last post where I'll complain about sidewalks, public transport and necessity of cars. I rest my case, the rant is over.

Before I do so, though, let me humour myself by posting one more picture from my way to the supermarket. It shows one of the few crossings across a fairly busy two-lane road (I've waited quite a while to be able to take this pictures without any cars obstructing the view). You can see the crossing on the left hand side. It leads to ~5 metres of sidewalk which... vanish into nothingness. The sidewalk isn't continued along the major road and on the sidestreet there's not even an even stretch of grass to take refuge on (the left-hand side of the side street - though not necessarily obvious from this picture - is pretty much identical to the right-hand side, which you can just make out.)

With that and apologies for the long delay in getting this post out, I'll leave you all.

Chicken Sandwich

2009-03-25T23:08:00.004+01:00

I just had a chicken sandwich for dinner. That's right: chicken, a sandwich. Nothing more, nothing less.

This somewhat meagre dinner resulted from a combination of factors. First, my knowledge of English isn't quite perfect. It took me at least a year to figure out that "jalapeños" are the small, hot, green peppers. (Please don't get me started on the meaning of the word "peppers"!) Second, I know nearly as much about cooking as I do about pension funds - no need to ask me what the difference is between cooking, baking, frying, steaming, roasting or grilling. (Though I have a hunch about "steaming".) Third, either cooks are really bad in the US, or every single American is an outstanding cook.

The fact is that there is almost no (generally take-away) joint where they won't have you (the customer that is, not the cook) decide on everything about your meal - down to the finest details. Most of you might have experienced this at Subway: what type of bread would you like - what kind of meat would you like - cheese - toasted? - vegetables - sauce - salt? pepper? Drink? Cookie? In Sweden, the only give-away that I didn't know Swedish as well as I should, used to be my blank stare when they asked me if I wanted to take it home or eat it at the joint. At Subway (and now just about anywhere), this single blank stare inflated into a concatenation of blank stares, requests to repeat what they just asked and a total and utter indecision when faced with the choice between Swiss and Ceddar cheese. (I honestly have no clue what the difference is. All I know is that the Swiss cheese most definitely does not come from Switzerland.)

So I learned to say "A bit of everything, thanks" and subsequently, as my vocabulary and culinary knowledge grew: "A bit of everything, except jalapeños and olives, please". Last week, when ordering a hot-dog for lunch, this technique aparently didn't do. The chef (this was actually a real chef-looking guy, believe it or not) looked at me in disbelief. I started wondering how difficult this could be: just how many things could one possibly combine with a hot-dog? After a few moments of consternation, the guy luckily made his mind up and helped me out by doing what any cook in Europe would have done in the first place: following his own recipe.

Back to this evening. Originally I planned to give in to the easy and unhealthy option Burger King provides around the world: Double whopper please. No drink. Pay. Thanks. Get away. No choices, no dilemmas, no lack of information on what combinations arouse suspicion and what combinations are normal. However, Burger King being what it is, I changed plans at the very last moment and picked the unknown, more healthy-looking joint next to it. That in itself wasn't the big mistake. Replying "no" when the lady asked what more I wanted - that was the mistake. I saw her eyes widen and look at me as if I was a straightout weirdo. It may have been my general astronomer/nerd look that did it, or maybe my dishevelled hair, dripping recycled raindrops onto her counter, either way I must have made an impression that correlated with the peculiar order because she didn't ask again.

And so I ended up with a handful of lettuce and a piece of chicken in a bun. I wouldn't say it was a feast to my tastebuds, but at least it must have been more healthy than Burger King.

A walk through Star City

2009-03-16T00:53:00.011+01:00

Giving in to popular demand once again (I'm starting to wonder where this might lead me eventually), I am, as of this week, the (proud?) owner of a digital camera. Now I am really badly trained (and minimally gifted) at taking pictures but you've asked for it (well, some of you have, anyway). I have no illusions as to capturing the West Virginian or Appalachian spirit in a series of 2D representations, but let's see what we can do. As a warm-up, I'll guide you on a walk to the "local" shop. ("Local" being defined as the closest one reachable on foot. This doesn't mean it's nearby.)

This first picture shows our living room and kitchen. You're currently standing with your back to my room and on the far side you can just see the front door. Notice the collection of empty bottles - notwithstanding my housemates being either just 21 or still younger, they've already made their parents proud...

Next we have the outside view of the complex. My room is on the far corner of the second building, top floor. In the background you can just see some hilltops which are quite representative for this region. On the right edge of the image you can see one of the greatest things about Morgantown: the trail. It's this trail which brings me straight to uni - without any encounters with cars or anything like that. In fact, things I did encounter so far include loads of runners (yes, I'll start training soon), even more birds and a single raccoon (if that's what it was, but I'm pretty sure.) No really, it's a pretty trail and I hope to get you some stunnig pictures once spring colours everything nicely green.

Next one... yeah, see what I mean about me taking pictures? I never even noticed that yellow bar running right across everything, I honestly only notice that now. Anyway, I guess you'll have to live with it.

So this picture shows you a couple of things again. Firstly, on the right, a bank. Pretty fancy, though I wonder about their credit rating. On the left is another typical American thing which I - being born and raised in densely crowded Flanders - cannot get my head around. It's a drive-in ATM. Now there are a couple of reasons I cannot figure this one out. Partly it's probably because I haven't got a car myself, but beyond that, there's the simple fact that cash doesn't seem to be of too much relevance in American society since pretty much everything can be payed for electronically. And even if you do use cash occasionally, any supermarket gives you the option to get cash out as you pay your groceries. Besides, there are walk-up ATMs at pretty much every shop anyway. Finally, I don't see why one would put all the money into building this drive-in thing and sacrifice the land - surely you're not gaining quite as much as it costs, or are you?

After half an hour's walk, we have arrived! (As with any of the pictures, click the image to get a larger view.) "Kroger" is the supermarket I'm headed for - the only complete supermarket that I can reach by bike and/or foot. (There's a smaller one in town, but they don't even sell fruit.) Right above Kroger, a green-roofed building pokes out - this is the university's sports centre. Sadly, membership costs way too much to be useful (unless you're student in which case it's free), so I won't go there. Don't get carried away by the "book exchange" - it only deals in second hand books that are on the curriculum lists. Anything else (even if it's on the same subject) doesn't seem to be present. Do notice the advertisement on the left end of the picture, though: "Get Free Incoming Calls". Apparently that's something worth advertising. Initially I though this was about some quite obscure top-level sort of service - like some blackberry carriable internet or whatever. Turns out I was wrong. In the land of the free, you pay for receiving calls. You apparently even pay for receiving sms's. Call me crazy, but I would never have thought of that.

This picture, I'll admit, doesn't really show much of interest. However, it has a huge pole with loudspeakers. This is the town's warning system. Whenever there is a storm, a fire, a cat caught up a tree, it sounds. To be perfectly honest, I don't know why it sounds, I only know that it does so, often. At least once a week and sometimes several times a day, raising the average to probably close to daily. And it's loud. I can easily hear it through the television (windows closed) even though it must be about a kilometer -if not more- away. I personally don't see the point, unless this invention dates back to pre-telephone days, when the fire brigade needed to be called to duty without current technological gadgets. However, this is the 21^st century. I would imagine they would have done away with it by now.

The second thing the picture shows (if you know what you're looking at), is the cleared hiltop across the river, on top of which the actual closest shops lie. They're probably about half as far as Kroger, as the bird flies. However, since I cannot fly, I cannot reach them. Well, not within an hour and without using a bus or a taxi, that is.

We're nearly back home, so let me close off with a quite typical view. Again, the hills in the background - do you notice the swath of treas that are cleared for a power line? Coal - and, consequently, electricity - are the main business of WV. It should therefore not be too surprising that the WV senators and representatives in DC are amongst the foremost people to oppose any anti-coal plans any administration might have. The first time I saw a number plate saying something like "we love coal", I thought I had misread. Sadly, it's a reality...

A final thing to notice, before I leave you and get dinner, is the front yards we're looking at: there are no divides. Of course, in some streets there are divides - keeping dogs and little children inside - but surprisingly few of these divides are at shoulder height or higher: they tend to be at a height that you can see your neighbour and could even have a chat. Totally unlike Belgium, that is. (Dare I say "Europe"? It probably holds for large parts if not all of Australia as well, I think.) To me, that is an interesting and slightly puzzling idea to come from the land that has pioneered individualism and capitalism for more than 60 years now. Clearly there are still plenty of sides to the American psychology that I haven't figured out - yet?

Some random news-picks

2009-03-09T12:28:00.002+01:00

I cannot help myself but provide you with a few links of interest:

First, something about the fascinating American habit of tipping, which I'm still trying to come to terms with.

And next an odd news story from the state of Illinois (that's right: Obama-land) - reinstating Pluto as a planet. (Take that, IAU.)

Television

2009-03-09T12:00:00.004+01:00

Television is a most important aspect of American life - or so I have always been told. Partly I can see how that would be caused by the mindboggling number of channels available - wherever I've lived so far, the default answer to "what's on television tonight" was "nothing interesting, don't even bother". But when there is a seemingly infinite supply of channels to pick from, things do change. (I've zapped through everything from 1 to 54 and gave up there. A random check showed there was still life at 102, but that might have been a duplicate.) Of course it is fundamentally a chicken-and-egg question which came first: the addiction to television or the exorbitant number of channels.

The fact is, everyone has a television. In the house I'm sharing, there's one big television in the living room - and four more, one per bedroom. That makes five televisions for four people which, on the positive side, means there is no need to fight over which channel to pick but on the negative side implies a privacy that kills most random human interaction.

Thinking back about the shared houses I've lived in over the past years, there have been two areas of the house most conducive to socialising: the kitchen and the television. Simply put, if the only television is in a common area, then anyone watching it will be open for a chat - if not during the show itself, then at least during the commercial break. Down here, these dynamics are entirely different - between the unlimited broadband internet and the private possession of a TV-set, people lock themselves in their rooms and only make fleeting appearances outside that cave.

It should therefore not be surprising that the longest event of 'sitting-around-and-chatting' we've had so far, was during a two-hour blackout a few weeks ago. Collecting the few candles we had lying around, we just managed to light the living room enough to all sit around without needing to be in the dark. We didn't quite make it to playing cards just yet, but without internet and television, we had an interesting social experiment all the same...

Public Transport (II)

2009-03-02T14:01:00.006+01:00

I've given it one more try - to catch the bus. This time I attempted to take it in the centre of campus, where there can be no mistake about its route and where it's bound to stop anyway - if it weren't to pick up people, then at least to avoid running into the crowd of students that is always present at this location. In order to make sure I wouldn't miss an early bus, I came ten to fifteen minutes early - allowing me a thorough inspection of the wide variety of buses that do pass through: purple, gold, ... several colours came by, especially those not part of the rainbow; the red bus, however, didn't.

After waiting about 20 minutes past the bus's due time, my main problem with the system became obvious: I'd rather walk for an hour than to risk waiting 30 minutes for a 15 minute ride. Simply put: if buses aren't any more reliable than this (which they cannot really help because, unlike trains and trams, they do get stuck in traffic), then I don't see the point in taking them.

On a positive note, Morgantown has an extraordinary alternative form of transport: the PRT (or Personal Rapid Transit). These are nice little carriages that - in theory - get you to select where you want to go; and then take you there. (While awaiting my next technological advancement, you'll have to do with this for a picture.)

Like just about anything of value in Morgantown, the PRT belongs to the University (notice the WV logo on the carriages - this isn't the state logo but actually the -registered trademark- university logo). A child of its time, the PRT was first proposed in the late 1960s - and during the first year of its term, gained national financing from the Nixon administration. After six years and heaps more money than predicted, it was ready to start operations in 1975.

As if having a Republican-funded mode of public transport in the United States (not to mention WV) isn't surprising enough in its own right, the PRT further exceeds expectations by actually working. While service isn't instantaneous (the software behind the system clearly attempts to optimise something, though I haven't totally figured out what), so far I have always had a car leaving well within 15 minutes - often after no more than 5 minutes. With their own set of tracks and viaducts, these carriages are unaffected by traffic lights or competing traffic and can simply amble along at speeds up to 48 km/h (according to Wikipedia) - which makes them clearly faster than the cars stuck on the crowded roads. What's more, even after functioning in a University town for more than 30 years now, the PRT still looks good: the carriages look like they're newly painted, they have carpeting on the inside (which isn't stuffed with chewing gum and the like but is actually neat) and the windows have not (or hardly) got graffiti scratched in or painted on them. Either the students here are incredibly well-behaved, or the cameras in the stations do an incredibly good job, or the system is maintained superbly. (Probably a combination of the latter two.) Finally, using the PRT is free (for staff and students but I doubt there's anyone in this town who isn't either). The only real downside is that there are only 5 stations and about 13 km of track - so it doesn't get you everywhere.

Having said all that, I doubt I'll be seeing too much more of the PRT in days to come, since I've bought a bike on Saturday - reducing my total travel time to a third of what it used to be. (There's nothing like bicycles for commuting, is there?)

Stimulating the economy

2009-02-24T14:48:00.004+01:00

Last week, President Obama signed the much-debated economic stimulus package into law. There's little I need to write about the specifics of it, because it's pretty likely you're all totally bored with the details you've been bombarded with over the last several months. Nevertheless, let's quickly summarise that the aim of this $787 billion deal is to get the economy going again: to encourage lending, to start and/or keep jobs, to get people to spend. (Notice 787 billion is more than three quarters of a trillion. Scientifically, it is 0.787x10¹² - that's right: ten to the twelfth power)

Anyway, now that we've spent a second in shock, let me declare that (although I'm a big fan of the New Deal and this even Newer Deal) I won't - make that I can't - participate.

There are a couple of reasons for my seemingly blatant lack of interest in the American economy but I plead innocent to all charges: as I hope you'll see, it's not my fault I'm not spending my money.

First of all, there's the West Virginia state's habit of the delayed payroll. I'm not quite sure who it applies to, though it seems to be pretty widespread amongst state-employees (possibly affecting all of them). The principle is as follows: you work two weeks, then you wait two weeks, then you get paid. I'm not quite sure where the idea originated and why on Earth people would put up with it, but hey, it's how it's done, so we roll with it.
It does mean, though, that for no less than 31 days, I had to get by on whatever I took from home - and whatever I could get off my Belgian credit card. The consequence is, of course, that I'm living cheaply. Very cheaply. No economic recovery will result from my migrating, that's for sure.

Next, there's the pension fund. This one is a bit tricky because in itself it doesn't sound bad. 6% of my wage gets placed in a fund which I cannot access until I retire (the good news is the university will double that up, effectively giving me a pension-bonus of 6%). However, I won't retire in the States - or at least, I don't think I will. So instead of staying there for the coming few decades, I'll get the accumulated funds when I leave America next year - together with the last month of (delayed) pay. In other words, the day I finish my job - the day I leave the US and go back to Europe, I'll get just about 20% of the yearly salary I signed up for - don't spend that here, go spend it in Europe.

Thirdly and finally, after living cheaply for a month, there's really no point to getting a car: I've found my way on foot, I can continue like that. Besides, if I'm only here for a relatively short while, there's really no point in getting a car once you've settled down and furnished a room and the like. Not getting a car doesn't stimulate the economy, of course: I don't pay money for a car or fuel or registration or maintentance. But there's another catch to this: without a car, I cannot reach the big shops. I've tried walking to the mall, because it's really not that far: when I walk home in the evening, I can see the lit parkings on the next hilltop. The problem, though, is that there simply isn't a sidewalk to get there - not even half a metre of dirt to separate me from the crazed stream of traffic. There is a bus, but that takes a huge detour and gets me there in an hour - no less; and there's only one bus per hour, so you end up stuck there on the freezing parking lot in the cold, wanting to go home.

The consequence is that the only good bookshop I can easily access is Amazon.com. I wouldn't have a clue where to buy CDs or shoes - or a good rain jacket by the way; luckily I did find a great umbrella. Long story short: I'm not complaining - hell no, I'll be rich by the time I leave here - but I don't get it either. I would think an obvious thing to stimulate the economy would be to make sure people can get to the shops - and to make sure they have the money they've worked for, so they can spend it. I would think it would be a lot easier to get the money where it is (or should be) than to dig astronomical holes in the federal budget. (By the way - the distance to PSR J0437-4715 is just about 5x10¹⁵ km - which is only a factor of fifty larger than the rounded-up stimulus cost in cents. So these truly are astronomical numbers.)

On the bright side, I have managed to find a copy of the New York Times. It wasn't displayed at the entrance next to all the other papers, but was standing on its own on the other side of the aisle - at the end of it, turned around the corner so no one but very attentive shoppers who happen to leave through that particular exit would notice it. Sadly for the American economy, though, I had already subscribed to the British Guardian Weekly by then.

Addiction

2009-02-17T20:15:00.003+01:00

Now that all the official administrative stuff is organised and I have a bank account, home and an emerging daily routine, I thought the dust would settle down and I would settle in. Mostly this turned out to be correct, except for a daily uneasiness that starts to itch around 10am and reaches a climax at 11am when I simply cannot sit still anymore. First I thought it was because it was Monday, then I thought I was just getting annoyed by colleagues sending repetitive e-mails. Finally I realised what was wrong. During my last months - maybe even for close to a year - in Swinburne, sometime between 10 and 11am I would get my daily oxygen-fix by taking a little walk to get the Age - the Melbourne newspaper that is. Needless to say, in Morgantown there is no Age - but somehow the force of habit has persisted.

So I do end up going for a little walk, giving in to the cravings in search of a good-quality newspaper or an equally high-standard cup of coffee. So far, these walks haven't resulted in anything but the good old O₂ fix. The problem is not that there is no (good) coffee on campus - there's plenty of places to go - Starbucks or otherwise. The problem is that there are just way too many students - and much too few of them are in class between 10 and 11am. I honestly start to get the impression that studying in the US comes down to queueing (sorry, lining up) for a cup of coffee. However, I haven't seen many people walk around while sipping their cups (not too surprising since the latte-sipping-liberals are all supposedly in New York and Washington) so maybe it's not the student's fault, maybe it's simply that the coffee shops work too slowly. I'll let you know when I find out.

Another side to my quandary is the fact that I have trouble to find a good newspaper around. So far, I've ran all over town to find a copy of the New York Times (I've tried the Wall Street Journal on the plane - which was probably the last time I'll try that one) and I've only succeeded to locate a few vending machines - none of which are on campus. the few shops that do sell newspapers either have national papers hidden or only sell local papers. Now I'm not saying these local papers are bad - in fact the university-ran "Daily Athenaeum" is pretty good - but I'd actually prefer to know what's going on in the World - not just in Morgantown.

Granted: USA Today you can find just about anywhere. I am, however, in search of a good newspaper.

"Wild" West

2009-02-14T17:08:00.007+01:00

Some time ago, I had the chance to wonder at the wide landscapes of grass-covered hilltops that seem to stretch out past the town and into the great beyond. The sight instilled me with the wonder and excitement of discovery that must have captured the heart and soul of every settler that ever moved West - the great feeling of discovering something new, making a new start - the great feeling of boundless possibilities. Then suddenly, the prairies I beheld were filled with a Native American hunting party, chasing down bisons with bows, arrows and spears, expertly catapulted from the backs of their dust-obscured, galloping mustangs...

Snapping back to reality, I felt de concrete beneath my feet and became aware of the vast tarmac of parking lots bordered by the most humungous stores one ever comes across. The Indians have long gone, as have the buffalos. The thrill of discovery has made room for the ease of a car-driven, laid-back society of concrete. In fact, upon closer inspection of Wikipedia, West Virginia isn't the far West, nor has it ever been. The bison-chasing Americans were never even part of West Virginia - before the Europeans came over, this land was covered in thick native forest, inhabited by turkeys and rattle snakes. The fact that Pocahontas county (where the Green Bank Telescope is) is so nearby, should have given me a hint on what to expect. Anyway. The forest has long gone, farming and coal mining have taken over. That doesn't mean the landscape isn't beautiful anymore - there still are forests and even when they're gone, the hills still roll through the country, towards the horizon. Western civilisation has made its impact - it has tar-covered some of the hills, but it hasn't defeated the beauty of the country. If only I could see more of it without requiring a car.

Bushfires

2009-02-10T14:37:00.004+01:00

And of course it is with sadness that I've been following the news on the recent bushfires in Victoria and other parts of Australia. As of now, 181 people are confirmed dead and the toll is expected to rise above 200 as the catastrophe is being cleaned up.

It's very sad and disheartening to hear that entire communities have litterally been swept away and that the beautiful forests where we went out camping exactly a year ago (17 Feb 2008, I believe), turned into furnaces this year.

And then to say that at least some - if not many - of these fires were caused by ignorant people lighting them.

Preparation

2009-02-10T13:54:00.003+01:00

As much as Fosters and Ten Canoes turned out to be not quite representative of what I would find in Australia, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has a bit more to say about the present-day U.S. of A.

Surprisingly, I'm not referring to the gun-slinging, trigger happy cowboy Western-type culture - what I'm referring to is the banking world. Indeed, in the country that has lead the capitalist part of the World for the best part of a century, not much seems to have changed during that time. Walking in to a bank, you still have the steel-framed tellers (not even necessarily with bullet-proof glass), the massive wooden desks, the low-luminosity, green-capped light bulbs on all the white-chalked pylons as well as on aforementioned desks, the proud American flag in the back of the room, next to a bunker-type passage that probably leads to the vault. I agree that the fluorescent lamps on the ceiling and the computers on the desks were probably put in place long after the days of Butch Cassidy, but probably not too long after that. (I didn't manage to get a glance on the screen, but judging by the speed of the computer, it wouldn't totally surprise me if they were still running some DOS version or worse. Is it possible to connect a newish Dell-screen to a Commodore 64?)

On the outside my bank looks pretty much like any bank in Europe, but there are banks (a bit further out of town), which have a porch like in the good old days, or - even better - a tower with a clock, as you wouldn't expect them outside of (New) Mexico and Hollywood.

As far as functioning, the same thing seems to apply: chips in bank cards are unheard of - though bank cards (and even some form of internet banking) have been invented. This does not remove the importance of checks, though. Maybe this is because I am and always have been a self-confessed ignorant in banking matters, but I honestly thought checks were something of the past - I had never seen one before last week. Nevertheless, my present means of paying rent is to send a check by mail. That's right: I'm not supposed to just transfer the money onto another account - I _send_a_check_by_mail_. (I'd try to claim this is just WV, but my landlady lives in Pennsylvania, so it must be more widespread than this.)

Surprisingly, my pay does get transferred directly into my account - though that seems to be a recent change, because I've received multiple pamphlets explaining why this is a better way of doing things that to get a check in the mail and then cash it at the bank (as they apparently used to do before too long).

Finally, a quote from Wikipedia to keep you all entertained. After listing how countries as varied as Tunesia and Saudi Arabia (and, of course, the entire EU) deal with international banking codes, it says this:

"Hence payments to U.S. bank accounts from outside the U.S. are prone to errors of routing."

Technological progress

2009-02-06T23:43:00.003+01:00

Some have worried about my recent bout of technical innovation - getting a mobile phone and a blog in the same month just isn't what you're used to from me, I know.

But don't worry: things could be worse because apparently, blogging is all dated. According to wired magazine, that is, blogging has long been surpassed by twitter, flickr and facebook - none of which I frequent as yet, as you well know.

So all's still good in technologically backward Joris-land :-)

On that same topic, I had to ask my housemate how to turn the television on, because after a few minutes of trying, I hadn't figured it out yet. That was exactly a day after I spent three minutes looking at the remote in order to figure out how to turn the thing off. Sigh. Luckily my alarm clock only has one button.

Public Transport

2009-02-05T22:46:00.002+01:00

Not having bought a bike yet and starting to lose the Australian heat I had stored deep inside, I decided to break with another tradition and attempt to take a bus instead of trekking half an hour through the snow on a twice daily basis. Initial frustration about the incompleteness of the online timetables (surely these things stop more often than that) and my seeming inability to positively identify a single bus stop anywhere in town, were instantly resolved when it was made clear that the busses don't have stops: they'll stop wherever you wave them down. In fact, for half a dollar more, they'll pick you up at home - how about that?

So that's all good: the only thing I would have to do is walk along the bus's route and wave it down as soon as it catches up on me - instead of freezing to the ground in some wind-infested bus shelter or missing the bus entirely because you happen to be standing in the wrong place. Notwithstanding those good intentions, I haven't managed to find my bus (the red line) in either of the two days that I've tried. Sure, I did see a bus or two, but they were all green and were ever so slightly off the track where I expected them...

Finally, I have done what I should've done at once: I've checked the route of the green line... which doesn't come anywhere near where I saw it. Consequently, I take it the red line is currently being serviced by a bus with a green line along its side.

If only I were colourblind, I wouldn't have walked right pass my bus, two days in a row.

WV week one

2009-02-04T19:19:00.005+01:00

Exactly a week ago, I was somewhere high up above the Atlantic, hoping my plane would make up for enough of the 1.5 hour delay so I wouldn't end up stranded in New York. As it turned out, we got stranded above New York - Long Island to be precise. The fierce winter weather had battered the area badly, so air traffic was in a mess and we were made to fly loops (in heaps of turbulence - my stomach may tell you; but I'll keep things civilised) for another hour-and-a-half. "Luckily", the flight to Pittsburgh was delay just as much and immigration was as easy as a walk in the park. (I guess that's the advantage of not being allowed to land: there are no queues on the ground - everyone's still in the air.) Add in another hour's delay for the luggage which did miss the plane and my ETA in Morgantown quickly turned from Wednesday 6pm into Thursday 1am.

In the seven days since then, I have mainly been exercising my patience and doing my best not to get too upset about just how insular the world still is, 66 years after the founding of the UN (and 90 after the founding of the largely irrelevant League of Nations). Amongst the things which I reckon some internationalism might do a lot of good to, are fun exercises like getting a national identification number (why does that need to take a month? Why do I need three? (luckily I didn't need one in Australia) - and why can't I do _anything_ without one? I do have a passport so they know who I am, right?), figuring out how taxes work (I seem to be exempt in the US, they tell me. Whether that means that I should pay them in Belgium instead, no one knows), opening up a bank account (and figuring out how this bank is different from all the banks you've known before: all banks have largely the same yet different things, but they all name them by different names), figuring out what you must, could and should do and in what order - and getting sent back a lot because you needed to get B done before A, which in turn should be done before C, G, F and J, of which you don't know the desirable order yet. Also, you'll have to do all of this in as little time as possible, but before anyone else does anything, you'll have to wait a long while. The trick seems to either be an expert at international justice, international and national finance and tax policies and international relations or to love walking, not to mind anything and to take _everything_ _everywhere_ _all_the_time_, whether they say you need it or not.

I guess I've spewed enough frustration both in the previous post and paragraph, so I'll leave the whining at that. Now for some happy information. I've got a mobile phone (cell phone?!) and I even figured out how it works. I've got a desk (which is temporary, since it's actually Paulo's desk and he'll be back from Arecibo in April) and I've got a place to live. Since there's nothing quite as enjoyable as a socially functional shared house - and because I imagine it might do me well to have some people guide me into American (and West Virginian) culture, I decided to try and find a shared house - in which I succeeded in no time. So since last Sunday, I've been living in a home inhabited (besides me) by three undergrads from the Pittsburgh region (which is fairly close by). I can hear the surprise, wonder and worries about "undergrads", but so far I'm astonished at both the cleanliness and lack of noise in this place - I've known undergraduate housing where you'd fear for the health of the rats that might live there; these guys (well, two guys and a girl, actually) seem calm, relaxed and pretty clean. There hasn't been too much social interaction yet (well, I've hardly been there myself yet), but I imagine I'll have more to say on this topic sometime soon.

Two great assets of the house are provided by its location: it's in Star City. Now which astronomer wouldn't love to live in a place with that name? Also, it's located right on (well, right next to), the trail - I could throw a rock from my bedroom window and hit a jogger. That trail brings me to another fact that might interest (some of) you: I live about an hour's walk away from uni - that means that the same time it took me to bike into Swinburne, can now be walked. I'd call that progress, especially if I tell you that Morgantown is the best walking city in West Virginia. However, don't get carried away about that: if any of the cities I've lived in before were in the running, I know who would have won easily...

For those who are still thinking about that hour's walk: it's really not that bad: the trail also passes right next to uni, so I could just get a bike and ride for 20 minutes or less - it's really quite close. At present, though, the trail is covered in a dangerously unpredictable combination of snow and ice, so biking isn't really an option - and neither is running, sadly. So for the time being - while the surrounding hills are being covered in the refreshening blanket of Appalachian snow, I walk about 25-30 minutes and catch the PRT.

Transparency

2009-02-03T23:01:00.006+01:00

You know those papers whose titles make you think Hey - that's right up my alley; should be a good thing to read, but after a paragraph you discover your thoughts have wandered to a parallel universe and you actually don't remember what the paper is about.

So you start reading again. And again. Eventually I come to think that surely it cannot be that bad. If only I take it slow, I'll understand. So I start reading again, paying particular attention to every word, one word at a time. Then you figure out that even the first sentence is totally incomprehensible; not because of the language, mind you: whether it were written in English, Flemish or Japanese - it would be just as easy to understand.

After digging through things for a while longer, fear and a faint feeling of sickness and disgust then either make that I ask someone else to translate some things to normal language, or make me decide I've had enough of it - and leave it be.

The reason I'm writing this at present, is because I've just been registered as an employee of West Virginia University (WVU). As part of that, I got myself some homework: a pile of paper (trust me, it's heavy) on "Employee benefits". Because, as the accompanying letter explains it: "The Employee Benefit program at the University is a significant portion of your overall compensation, and we urge you to review it carefully." That's the last thing I understood. I think the documents talk about retirement funds, health care, life and other insurances and quite possibly some more things, but often I don't even understand the meaning of the full title of the documents provided. This, somehow, reminds me of Mozart.

As many of you may know, for all his genius and employment, Mozart died a poor man - beautifully portrayed in the movie Amadeus. (Those who haven't seen that movie, should. I'm far from a Mozart fan, but that movie _is_ good.) The reason Mozart died a poor man, I couldn't ever really grasp, until maybe today: he didn't know how to handle his money. Browsing through the brochures and papers, I get the urge to treat it as a paper: to hell with it - what bad could come of it if I just ignored all this? I'm not retiring - I don't need insurance, I won't get ill and if I did, do you really think I'd take the time to figure out how to get things properly reimbursed?

Now I guess Mozart's problem was a bit different: I'm not about to lose my money in throwing more parties than I can financially bear (you all know me far too well in that respect), but I guess neglecting things like retirement and health cover might come back to bite you when you least need it.

To be fair, I should mention we're not left to our own devices: there'll be a meeting (class?) in a week or so, where all will be explained. All? Let's hope so. Thinking about that meeting, I know one question I'll ask: Could you please explain this to me - like I was a five year old. If they ask what to explain; what exactly it is that I don't understand, I might just reply what we used to reply in our Latin classes of high school: I don't understand any of it.

The How and Why of Joris@Blog

2009-01-26T11:13:00.005+01:00

It has been said about blogging that "Never before have so many people with so little to say, said so much to so few." I did, traditionally, also subscribe to that view and find it therefore necessary to provide a justification and a warning with regard to this blog.

Justification: there are two main reasons why I started writing this blog. First, people told me I should keep them informed about what I do, where I am, how things go. I have been notoriously bad at that but years of patiently reminding me to show some signs of life every now and again have borne fruit at last. Second, reading back trough the scattered earlier attempts at keeping diaries of some sort, have made me realise that sometimes it's actually quite fun to write - about goings on or about nothing at all, or about everything. Maybe that's just me and maybe it's the aweful boredom that months of scientific (read: thesis) writing have brought upon me; time might tell. Fact is: sometimes it's fun to write and it's always interesting (and sometimes nice) to reread notes from times past. So there's the why.

Warning: the above doesn't mean I know exactly what people want to read or know. For all I know, they're just being nice and polite and aren't interested in (m)any details at all. So since I cannot read your minds and because I hope to actually enjoy doing this, I won't give you any guarantees - what you see is what you get. What I do apologise for is if this blog becomes a bit too political at times; I am a slave to both my genes and my past, so please be patient - I'll try to keep boring content to a minimum :-)

Notes from a Tiny Country (that might become smaller yet)

2009-01-21T20:19:00.004+01:00

Exactly a month ago, I left Australia to wither in its heat and went in search of long-lost cold and snowy winters. I'm glad to say I have been successful: it's been a long time since Belgium has seen the cold and snow we've had a few weeks ago. Having my head sufficiently protected from overheating, I even managed to continue writing my thesis - though there is of course no atmosphere to get work done like the one at work itself.

Besides the cold and the happy rediscovering of various family members and dogs, there was a fair amount of reacquainting with the homeland. From a distance of well over 10,000 km one does get some inkling about potential problems affecting the tiny suburban area wedged in between France, Germany and the Netherlands - but somehow I never expect the worst to happen; not to Belgium. After all, it's been a good 175 years now that we may have had our misunderstandings and believe we're all very different and so on, but surely in the end we'll have a beer and some fries and forget about those "troubles" until some later day. Besides, we've got Europe to worry about - and Brussels: what on Earth would we do about Brussels?

Maybe my lack of interest and confidence in the status quo were misplaced this time. Because looking at the political landscape - and talking to some of the people who cultivate that landscape - I'm starting to get the impression Flanders (i.e. the North) is simply put a mess. No one seems to trust anyone else anymore. Of the three political alliances that existed when I left four years ago, none have survived. Instead of one (I'll keep this clean) useless populist party, we now have two. Furthermore, recent polls indicate no less than five political parties would get between 10 and 20 percent of the vote in Flanders. To the best of my knowledge Flemish politics has never been as divided. (For all you statisticians: most likely this isn't just a fluke - there have been a few very similar polls.) So maybe the Flemish are -and will be- the main cause of the current Belgian ungovernability? (We haven't had a decent government since the elections in June 2007.) And maybe I'm not the only one who thinks so. Some (semi-?)official Walloon (i.e. from the South) bodies are already investigating the relative merits of becoming independent or joining France.

In all of this Machiavellian politics, it's nice to see a light rise in the West. As you all know, Obama was inaugurated yesterday. Apparently that doesn't mean the Belgian pubs suddenly change their tradition and turn on the television (a concept that has been tried and tested in the Anglo-Saxon world, but that hasn't quite taken off on Belgian soil just yet), but the continent did take notice. After years of chauvinistic Eurocentric anti-Americanism, we seem to once again place hope in our younger brother across the Atlantic.