Alcohol - statistics

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

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.)

Paris - simply Paris

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.

A small town in Germany

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

(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 ;-)