Physicists on Halloween

What do you do when you plan to go to a Halloween party and you do not have a costume? (Well a costume was optional but it is way funnier to contribute to the overall confusion of appearance. ;) ) The course of events that we followed on the day of the party a few days ago was about this:

• Decide that you need a costume.
• Think hard about it and come up with a lot of crazy ideas all of which are not feasable within two hours of remaining time. ("make a transistor out of three people" (oh those physicists ...), "dress as lecture" (yes, >lecture<), ...)
• Lower your standards. ("Just pin a sheet of paper to your chest and write cloak of invisibility on it.")
• Start singing Thrift Shop in the physics exercise because you run out of ideas but want to keep the good mood.
• Drive around in town confused looking for a cheap last-minute costume. (Did not work, incredibly expensive - everything!)
• Remember some crazy as bonkers black metal bands and their face paint.
• Buy some black and white makeup and find a girl who can apply it. (Thanks, Sarah! :) )
• Hope that it does not start to rain.
• Rock the party! :D

Overall, I think the result was quite awesome given the scarce resources thanks to our makeup specialist. :)

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!

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!

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!

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

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!

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