Today in my mailbox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...