2013-10-31

Drinks for the local trihedron

As promised some plans for the local trihedron ... Still I did not come up with a fancy English/Swedish translation. But first for those who do not know this name so far: A local trihedron (actually I am not even sure if this is the correct English term^^) is a coordinate system with its origin in the observed point. Such a coordinate system is of interest if the point moves for example in another coordinate system which is in spherical coordinates. We learned that in Theoretical Physics I so do not worry to understand everything. (Our teacher was a real black mage which makes it even more difficult. His name was Schwarz by the way which means Black if you translate it. Many funny (physicist) jokes developed from that, you can believe me. :D)
Some day then one of my fellow students opened a facebook group named Zum lokalen Dreibein which kind of means At the local trihedron. Blessed be his creativity! At this day I decided that should I ever open a bar this would be its name.

So much to the name. But as there is already a bad-ass physics name for the bar we need some bad-ass physics drinks. The first three will be called simply x, y and z. You might have guessed that this has something to do with coordinates. This idea came from a friend of mine who demanded that there have to be shots named after the coordinate vectors. (He has a really cool blog by the way: Dantes Blog - check it out! The latest post is about infinities, really great!)
Pictures from my second life. ;) Nice evening behind the bar
yesterday. We had only 87,5 kg of cake left from the meals ...
(Sorry for the unintentional covered advertising.)
So now we have a cartesian set of shots. Next: A set of spherical shots, what else? The names will be disclosed later but physicists might already suspect what they will be.^^ Then there should be some cocktails: The first ones shall be named Gaussians. There will be a One Sigma, a Two Sigma and a Three Sigma. The first one has a 32% chance of having an extra dose of alcohol, the second one still a 5% chance of an extra dose and the last one is for those who want to be sure about what they are drinking. The numbers are obvious I guess. ;)

As you see physicists have some weird ideas from time to time but that is how science is done, right? ;) Some more ideas for the craziest pub ever will be laid open some other day. Creative ideas are always welcome!

2013-10-28

A real viking storm!

Today Sweden got struck by the nice and friendly weather that devastated the rest of the continent already before. Actually the action is going on right now. Two street signs standing besides each other are already so excited by the spectacle that they keep applauding by banging against each other all the time ...

Damage from the vikingstorm in front of the chemistry center -
chemistry trees are not as strong as physics trees. ;)
It started when I was sitting in the new course that started today. To be honest it was a little boring. It started getting interesting when the first cars and trees flew by the windows outside. When the first house followed I decided that I should not take my bike home but that I should fly as well. It worked quite well as my profile is rather ... streamlined as you might remember. ;) (Only my physical profile, do not confuse the physical streamlining with the "societal" streamlining.) On my way I met some Swedes that had the same idea. Flying in the same direction I asked them if this was usual autumn weather but they explained to me that it was not. So maybe this is a mortal version of Ragnarök that occurs every now and then. ;) A real viking storm! And as the Öresund bridge is closed off to traffic as well we are now locked away from the world ... So should we decide that we have to go to Germany today we will do so as real vikings - by sailing! One of my fellow students already proclaimed to be the captain tonight. A pirate's life yoho!

2013-10-24

Lund University pars unio

First exams in Sweden passed, time for a review ...

Of course this is not a Pisa test with boring stuff like grammar and orthography and stuff. ;) (Though this can be very interesting if you really care for it, just saying ...) It is more a short resumee on my studies in Sweden so far. So especially people who think about going abroad to Sweden might find this interesting. (Answer in short: Yes, do it!)

Exam in Processing and Device Technology.
So first some short factual differences to good ol' Germany: The semesters last four month here and at least for us physicists they are usually divided into two halfs. For two months I heard Semiconductor Physics and Processing and Device Technology now, wrote an exam on Tuesday and had an oral examination today. The next two month will be Physics of low dimensional Structures and Analysis on the Nanoscale with exams in December. This is a great separation I think because in this way you can really focus on two subjects and still do four courses in one semester. In Germany it was not particularly fun all the time doing up to four or five courses in parallel over a whole semester. The next semester will start after Christmas, so no break as long as after the German winter semester.

However, the real difference is the contact between students and professors. When you come to Sweden from Germany you do not feel like dealing with professors here ... Everybody uses first names, you can stop by at the professor's offices at any time and you can even call them. On their mobile phone. This is, let's say ... not usual in Germany. (At least calling professors on their mobile phone ...) In Sweden I got the impression (and that is what the professors proclaim as well) that the teaching is more of a mutual nature and that the professors are eager to learn something from their students as well. (Although this is probably patience most of the time. ;) )

This sounds probably great. In many ways it is great. Still there is a negative side to it as well in my opinion. At least it starts at this point. It seems that the first small setback here in Sweden was caused by the supervisors of the lab excercises .Of course I do not want to offend anybody but with only two exceptions the supervisors (phd students all of them) did not leave an impression as confident and as professional as I was used to from phd students before ... This goes in the same direction as the easier contact to the professors: The aura of omniscience that uses to surround the professors I knew so far is not as present here - I suspect this is because of the easier contact. In general the university here is more "comfortable", not as demanding as and one step slower than I was used to. Positive on the one hand, feels like something is missing on the other hand. Summarised, the university experience is less of a fortress of wisdom and a shelter of knowledge impression than you might (or at least I do) expect of a university ... (You totally should study in Lund anyway, this might sound harsher than it is supposed to. ;) )

But at the end of course let's consider the positive aspects: Step I of becoming a Master of Physics (ouw yeah!) - rock the first master exams - mission accomplished!

2013-10-20

Free Gospel!

Gospel choir Rejoice in Lund's stadshallen.

After studying some crazy as bonkers (I was advised to use this phrase by my flatmates) nanophysics yesterday I just did not really want to stay home in the evening. Lucky enough I was not the only one around here so we (two beautiful girls and me ;) ) decided to go to a free gospel choir concert. One of the guys living in our house sings in this choir, hence the idea. And it was an excellent idea because they were really good! Homogeneous and dynamic choire, groovy and playful piano and strong and expressive soloists - what more do you want? Next Saturday Rejoice sings in Malmö together with IDMC from London. I am not sure if I can go there but everybody around here should consider it - it will be amazing!

Related to this concert I dug up a great version of the great song Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen performed by some Scandinavian artists. Make sure to wait for Kurt Nilsen (fourth singer)!

Hallelujah

2013-10-17

The best pub in Lund - Hallands of course!

The best pub in Lund - Hallands!
As announced before now I managed to work in Hallands Pub as well. :) That was yesterday and it was fun again! We started by making lasagna for 80 people (11 liters of bechamel sauce, ouw yeah! :D) which included cutting some 20 big onions ... You will probably only see three men cry more when it is all or nothing in football ... Or expressed in another way (as one of the guys always sobbed in between tear drops the seize of marbles falling to the ground): "It was so beautiful!" Eventually there was no tear fluid left so we cut the rest quite fast ...  The crying area covered half of the kitchen later on so those were some really good onions!
 
That is whar 50 eggs and 4 kg of sugar look like.
After serving this bad-ass power lasagna we then started to make kärleksmums ("lovejummy" or sth. like that^^) for 80 people as well. The ladies caring for their body mass index too much should stop reading now because this involved some 50 eggs (the scaled recipe said 60, but we only had 50 left ...), at least 4 kg of sugar, one liter of cocoa powder (when scaling up amounts the Swedish measurement system of dl instead of g failes miserably ...) and several liters of milk. (Consult the images given for visual documentation.) Summarised: Awesome sugar chocolate cake!!1! (After rescaling the recipe several times because of missing ingredients we just followed the old engineering rule: "Just make it work!" and put everything together that we could find. ;)) My once black shoes and the black working shirt were white afterwards but it felt like being head of the christmas bakery! :)
After the cake was served as well (still steaming of course!) we spent an evening between cleaning, dishing, chilling and of course serving beer and Whiskey! (38 or so different beers and Whiskeys each at Hallands, yeah!) The only disappointment was that the first guy ordering Whiskey ordered Jack Daniel's ... "Whiskey" ... leaving the good Islay's in the shelf ... -.- Whatever, it was a great evening! And - very good thing of course - it starts to be like back in Heidelberg that wherever I go, I meet people I know. :)

Chocolate cake for 80 people.
After cleaning and closing at the end we almost made it to escape with a shopping trolley filled with the remaining beer but we were stopped by the stairway to heaven leading up to the street ... Too bad. ;) We were allowed to take the remaining lasagna home instead so now I have enough lasagna to feed all of my living community for three weeks. ;)

Thanks to the guys for an awesome evening!

2013-10-15

One lecture about WTF please

Yeah that people like to dress up here in Sweden was some of the first things that I learned. During the so called Nollning (beginning the new semester with partying, drinking and dressing up) you could meet Supermen, princesses (usually with beard, a lot of bizeps and hairy legs :D ), crazy animals and a lot of other different species everywhere in the streets. Very normal.

Today some of those party animals seemed to have rosen from their semester coma as it came to the following today:
Mathematicians' Christmas in October - I love Sweden! :D
(On the screen that is a micromotor btw, etched out of silicon - crazy sh*t!)
Without suspecting anything we sat in our last lecture before the exam and listened to our dear professor. Suddenly the door to the lecture hall opened and a bunch of costumed guys marched into the lecture hall singing, lined up in the front of the hall without any comment (professor just sat down and watched the spectacle), sang another five songs and left the room - singing again, no comment or anything. Everybody applauded and our professor continued the lecture. His only comment: "Yeah, the guys from section F have some celebration. I think, there is to be some mathematical calculation that Christmas should be today or something." Well done, mathematicians, why not celebrate Christmas two times a year?

An act of pure disjointedness - I love Sweden. :D

2013-10-14

Contract negotiations

The Wall. (Source: (c) dercartoon.de)
So today I just wanted to play football with my nation and went to date and place stated on the homepage. Only there was nobody there ... So I played with some other guys from another nation instead. At least today the Swedes showed a very different approach to football than we did in the last three years. Due to adverse weather conditions they play indoor football most of the time and that is easy to see in their way of playing: Short playing periods, a lot of small small dribbling, hectic back and forth ... Well as goalkeeper you do not mind and although my style is definitely different I think on my usual defensive field position I managed to fit into the system somehow as well. Good enough to win, at least. :) (Actually it does not make much of a difference if an attacker chooses to dribble or to pass the ball at indoor football if you decide to crush everything that approaches the goal you defend closer than 5 meters anyway - you just do not have to run as much with less passing. Well, not crush of course but you know what I mean ;) )

So afterwards I was asked if I wanted to play in their team ... Now what do I do?

2013-10-13

The Name of the Wind, the fire and the Sword from Hell

Since I came to Sweden I have been told several times already that my name sounded very Swedish - not too bad to begin with in my new adopted country. :) This made me collect some facts about this (sur)name which I combined with a dash of nordic saga.

Some research on the internet suggests that the name Hellenbrand derives from the old name Hildebrand through sound shift. Hildebrand again consists of the Old High German/Old Nordic words hiltia which means "fight" or "combat" (Old High German dictionary, p. 213) and brant/brand which means "fire" or "sword" (Old High German dictionary p. 252).
Some other sources suggested that Hellenbrandt was one of the most common denotations for hell or a common synonym for the Lord of Darkness. So Sauron and Voldemort can pack their stuff, the only lord of darkness am I! :D (That's why I always tell people about the cookies we have on the dark side ...)

But now let us get to the promised nordic saga ... The name Hildebrand is a very old one. It already appears in the Hildebrandslied - Hildebrand's Tale from the beginning of the ninth century and here I tell a short version of this tale:

Hildebrand left his wife and his son to move to the court of Dietmar von Bern to teach Dietmar's son Dietrich the art of fighting. He seamed to have done a good job as later on Dietrich is one of the few survivors and a later king in the bloody Nibelungenlied. (Advice from my father when I wanted to read the Nibelungenlied some ten years ago: Ah you do not need to read it. At the end everybode is dead. - This is actually a quite accurate summary.) Anyway, when Hildebrand returned to his home country with an army (not with bad intentions as far as I remember) after striking dead Kriemhild with Siegfried's sword (her husband - murdered by Hagen of Tronje some time before) at the end of the Nibelungenlied he meets his son Hadubrand with his army. Hildebrand reveals his identity which Hadubrand does not believe thinking it is an artifice of war and so he challenges his father for a duell. Hildebrand cannot refuse due to the prevailing code of honour and so he tragically strikes his son dead. Afterwards he engraves his son's face into his shield where he engraved all the other 80 opponents' faces he has defeated in combat.
The Tale of Hildebrand's Death tells that Hildebrand was defeated by his half-brother Asmundar later on after his sword broke and - lying on his own shield, his head next to his son's engraved face - asked Asmundar to bury him covered in Asmundar's coat.

This is the (short version of the) tale of Hildebrand, my old namesake. I hope I did not mess up some of the nordic sagas, it has been a while since I read them ...

2013-10-12

System of a Tackfest

Two weeks ago I worked at Hallands nation as you might remeber. There is this great system that students just work for free at pubs and clubs just because they want to and just to give others a good time. (Not just at Hallands but at all te nations.) However, they do not work completely for free as (at least at Hallands) there are the so called tackfester ("thank you parties"). One or two weeks after working you can attend one of those. There you get a free meal, half a liter of wine, some snaps and free entry to the club afterwards. And most important you have great company! (Singing is included as well - of course!)

Yesterday I attended my first tackfest and as you might have interpreted from the paragraph before it was great! Met some new people, met some people from before again after some time, in three words: a great evening! (Maybe I should have called the article simply "great" ...)

And as if it was not already clear before I will work at Hallands more often - next time in the pub, I hope! :)

2013-10-06

Hell of a testgame!

Very official press release by Hell of a blog! Sports Ressort:

Yesterday the maybe promising midfield talent Markus Hell has been observed by local football clubs. In the first football match in his new adopted country he played on the positions of a defensive midfielder and right/left/centre back as often observed back in Germany. Although he showed his usual relentless defence work he could not that often show his greatest strength - his widely feared headers. Nevertheless he got some numbers of famous local teams and will be in contact with some of the local professional teams in the course of the next week.

The overall of all players consisted of a great variety of international players and funny enough the clichés brought up often in earlier times were quite applicable to the game. Hard-line and fierce tacticians never slowing down on the one hand and rather playful and ... emotional dribblers on the other hand - I will not reveal who came from which compass direction. ;)

2013-10-04

Typiskt svensk - kanelbullens dagen

Yes, kanelbullens dagen. It is today and indeed it is the day of the kanelbulle - the day of the cinnamon roll. It might not make sense in the first place but today Sweden celebrates the cinnamon roll. :D By eating loads of it and so did I - of course. The kanelbulle is very typical for Sweden and there is probably almost no fika without it. Fika is very Swedish as well, by the way. It is difficult to translate or explain because it is so special.^^ One might translate it with something like "drinking coffee together" but actually it is more. More about socialising, taking a break, relaxing in all the stress going on, ... typiskt svenskt - very good and essential part of Swedish culture which I have learned. :)

In celebration of the day here is picture of kanelbullar I made a few weeks ago. ;)
(Only the right sugar is missing.)


2013-10-02

Swedish music - today: reggae!

Today I finally managed to check out some music a friend of mine told me about: A Swedish reggae band called Kultiration! While reggae is maybe not the typical sound one would expect from Sweden I am already a little flashed by the first song I listened to! :D
There seem to be some traditional Swedish folk elements in the music, as far as I can hear being neither a reggae expert nor a Swedish folk expert and it sounds really great! (Assumption purely based on comparison. ;) ) And at least the guy behind the drums seems to be hell of a musician! (I cannot help checking this with every kind of music. ;) ) My Swedish is not yet good enough to understand the lyrics but I think it is something about a better world ... (Swedes might correct me if I am wrong.) Listen to it yourself!


So it seems that Sweden does not only produce some of the greatest metal bands such as Opeth (full concert as example), Amon Amarth (f*cking awesome Wacken 2012 concert), In Flames (even more f*cking awesome Wacken 2012), ... (insert any none American metal band here - they might well be from Sweden ;) ) and as well some DJs as I have learned recently (as you might know, I do not know anything at all about this kind of exposure to acoustic waves but even I know for example Aviciis Wake me up) but that there are also great reggae bands from this beautiful country! (Sry for the long sentence ;) )

2013-10-01

The Hobbit

The Hobbit ... No, that is not me, I mean The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien. ;) Why The Hobbit? Today I saw the brand-new trailer and I think it is ... quite ... absolutely AWESOME!

I was just wondering: Why does a book get three movies and "the other" book, about six times as long, gets three movies as well? Meaning: How about 18 Lord of the Rings movies? :D

Nah whatever, just enjoy the trailer!


The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug - Official Main Trailer by Warner Bros. Pictures