Coffee from a Reusable Ceramic Mug

A recent study has found that Denmark is the happiest place on Earth. Of course, “happiness” had to be defined in some specific terms such as access to education, standard of living, life expentency, etc. Check out the map at this website and the list of where your country ranks! Germany comes in at 35 with the U.S. at 23….

The past few days have involved a lot of time being spent on playing with new gadgets here. Matthias finally got his laptop on Thursday and has since disappeared into the world of setting up a new computer. He came up for air today long enough to go to Media Markt and Saturn (two big electronic stores) to get some new toys. After years of resisting joining Skype.com, we finally decided to go for the cheap/free international calls. I am still trying to figure out how it works, but I’m sure we’ll get it soon.

For those of you who haven’t tried it, it is pretty cool. We signed up last night and did some test calls from Matthias’s computer. That’s when we decided we needed some new toys. We got a wireless microphone today, as the one on the computer is really not very good for phone calls. Plus, we got a cheap little web cam to make a video along with the audio. All of this will be helpful while I am in D.C. and Matthias is here. Plus, we can do conference calls with family and fun stuff.

Now comes the hard part; we need to set our parents up with Skype. Matthia has been on the phone for about an hour now (see photo) explaining things to his dad. He’s only tried to rip his hair out a few times so far. Next, we will call my parents and I get to talk them through things. I suspect my mom can do it pretty quickly because when she doesn’t hate microsoft for maliciously movng her photos to mysterious places on the PC, she is pretty patient with these things.

It is hot here. I know I can’t complain too much as Mark has to work outside in Phoenix everyday; it is currently well over 100 F every day there at the moment. But, since I am me, I will complain, none the less

Actually, it’s not soo bad (having grown up in Phoenix), but it is tough in Europe as most people don’t have air conditioning. I had to go into the city today to get a few things for dinner, and as I did, I scanned for air conditioned locations to pop in and have a break. I looked for stores with their doors closed, a dead give-away. I hung out in Buecher Postet (the big book store in town) for about 20 minutes ‘looking’ intently at the English language books as that happened to be a spot where one of the air conditioning vents came out. As I was standing there, two workers rushed a woman into the back room who was, apparently, passing out. I am guessing it was a heat relate event. She seemed ok by the time I left. This particular book store is one of only two places I know of in town that offers free water as well. Free water is a rarity over here. Every time I see free water, I MUST try some just for the novelty.

In other news, my living arrangements in D.C. are finally set. I have an apartment in Arlington that is about 1.5 blocks from the NSF building. It isn’t available until about 3 weeks after I get there, so I sent out a few e-mails to people I know with connections there before I started doing some serious searching through Craig’s list. My old pal Dieter checked in with his in laws and his sister-in-law in Bethesda offered to let me stay at her place! For those of you who don’t know Dieter, he was and still is a great mentor to me both professional and personally (plus, he’s a German physicist, and we all know how much I like those). He is a professor of Physics at Temple University who was the director of the honors program when I arrived there. It was his letter of recommendation for a program at Caltech that basically set me on the path that I am on now. His wife, Sammy is an artist and a really fabulous person. I will contact his sister-in-law today to work out the details. In the end, it will help them out because they are going on a 3 week vacation a few days after I arrive, and I can take care of plants and stuff.

It’s not my own, personal, yoga update, but the AVI wesite has been updated. AVI stands for the “American Vinyoga Institute,” and it’ the organization started by Gary Kraftsow. Thye have updated the site so that people can listen to some audio clips of Gary teaching. They also added some great links to pages the bottom of the sight; the pages cover topics like Yoga and backpain, Yoga postures, Yoga breathing techniques, etc.

Since I think Gary and Mirka’s approach to yoga practice makes a lot of sence for me, I thought I’d share. As most of you know, I could go on about this subject for hours, but I’ll spare you

If you are a fan of the German national football team and a fan of Xavier Naidoo (of which I am both), you’ll enjoy this video. If not, it’s a chance for you to experience some German rap music.

Matthias and I went out the the Sternwarte (observatory) from the local astronomy group last night. It was about a 30 minute drive into the country, and the sky was pretty dark once the sun finally went down (after 10:00 PM).

They had a nice little set up. After we were there for a few minutes, we saw a Iridium flare, which I had never seen before! It was very exciting. These flares are basically reflections off of the solar panels on satellites. I actuallu may have seen two. I am pretty sure the second one was the flare that was predicted on a website that can tell you where they are, but no one else was looking at the time I saw it. I am pretty sure it was also a flare. It was moving a lot slower than a shooting star.

We looked at a bunch of objects. We could see Jupiter when the sun had just set and the sky was still quite bright, but as the sun faded, the little Galilean moons started to appear. We also looked at a few other cool objects like M13, M92, and M57 (the ring nebula). M13 and M92 were two globular clusters that I studied in my Ph.D. research. They are both almost as old as the Universe, and they hang out in the Halo of the Milky Way Galaxy (that’s the one we live in).

In other news, it’s hot here. Actually, as a result, I was totaly dehydrated after hanging out at the observatory without a bottle of water to drink. I felt hung over this morning. It’s not so much the heat as the inability to escape the heat in a freezing cold air conditioned building. It feels fabulous when I need to drive the car somewhere and turn on the AC! I think tomorrow afternoon will require a trip to the local pool. I hope the rest of you are staying cool during the hot summer.

Here is a little update on what I have been discovering with my little digestive experiments. The last time I mentioned it, I was coming to terms with the fact that bread and pasta both seem to be really difficult for me to digest. I have been doing some research on differnt approaches to eating, and most of them say that people like me don’t digest wheat well. At least it was nice to see some indoependant confirmations of my own observations. So far, I looked into two differnt appraoches to food (plus some random things here and there).

• Macrobiotics: You can find tons of books on the subject. I only began by invesitgating one and doing a lot of reading online. Basically, it is a hugely complex system that is based upon models from East-Asian (mostly Japanese) diet, philosophy and lifestyle. I lpicked up some useful stuff, but it reminded me of the Ayruveda system (traditional Indian medicine) in that it is too comples to get much out of it without dedicating an incredible amount of time to it. I suspect it is really useful if you have an expert to consult, but as I don’t I can only go with some of it’s general suggestions. Plus, I am highly skeptical of some of the more outreageous claims, such as “a macrobiotic lifestyle can prevent and sometimes cure” dieseases like AIDS. Howerer, it’s not worth throwing out the baby with the bath water, so I am keeping my macrobiotic book as a reference.
• Eat Right for Your Type: I am just learning about this system, which offers a book by the same name. It was a very popular book in the U.S., and it’s based on the idea that people of different blood types have different reactions to different types of food. After having recieved a long lecture from Dorota on the meaning of blood type while hiking through Yosemite, I was able to understand a lot of basic principals on the main website. What also inpressed me is that it pointed out that certain types of food, for example wheat, can cause reactions in people with my blood types, and people with my blood type are suseptible to joint issues, possibly caused by an autoimmune response to certain foods. This system is, at least partially, based in western medicine in that regular doctors have been known to approach arthritis as an autoimmune reponse (from what I read). The advantage of this sytem is that it is a bit more black and white than macrobiotics which throws words like ‘Yin’ and ‘Yang’ around a lot. As I am not really sure what is meant by these terms when applied to food, me or anything, really, I tend to like the approach of saying “If you are blood type T, you should avoid foods like X, Y and Z.”
• Random people: If you want to see a group of people who are VERY picky about food, go to my yoga training. It’s not that they are so picky, but they have discovered what works for them through self-experimentation or sometimes through life changing reations/events. Once one find relief, one is not eager to return to the lifestyle habits that bring s suffering. Actually, some conversations during my training got me thinking more deeply about food and how it affects me. I have also come across personal blogs or websites from people who have suffered alot do to reactions to food, and they are looking to share their story and learn what others have gone through. I am learning a lot from all of these people. I am lucky not to have severe digestive problems, but I figure the more I learn now, the less likely it will be that I will suffer from these problems later - given my family’s digestive issues, the chances are not slim. If I do start to suffer, at least I may know what to do about it.

That being said, I have discovered spelt (”Farro” in Italian and “DInkel” in German)! It is a grain made famous by the Romans, and it doesn’t seem to bother people who have a wheat sensitivity. It is not too difficult to find in Germany in whole, flake and ground form. You can get bread mixes and pasta made out of it.

I made two big tests this week. I made a bread out of spelt flour and we had spelt pasta. First, both the bread and the pasta tasted like bread and pasta! (sometimes these subsitutions never taste like the original). I ate bread and didn’t get my usual syptoms that follow bread and pasta.

Since first starting on this little investigation, I have observed that when I eat bread (particularly white bread), I had a slight shortness of bread about 30 minutes later. It just causes me to yawn more often than normal for an hour of so. I also just don’t digest the bread for a really long time. If I eat is at night, I still feel full the next morning, and my stomach feels uncomfortable and tired. I have also tied sleeplessness to bread and pasta.

Last night was the big test. Matthias made an awesome seafood (spelt) pasta, and we ate a lot! I slept great, and this morning, my stomach felt so relaxed!! I was smiling in bed, which is good because I was in such a crappy mood yesterday…another effect I have noticed is tied to what I eat; I get angry….maybe the french fries and beer wasn’t the best dietary choice - ya, think??

I’ll start posting spelt recipes as soon as I have them

Remember seeing a video of an electric shock being applied to the leg muscles of a dead frog in high school biology? Well, here is a demo on a living organism (using an electro-acupunture gadget)…..

Sorry for the delay in writing. I thought the videos and images were cool though.

We have been having some fun in the past few days. Matthias has been battling with his computer (he considers that fun). He has been trying to get a C (programming language) compiler and library running on his laptop so he can play around with some coding. Apparently all of the information about setting up C is for Linux users. Since Matthias is using windows, he has been getting really frustrated that he couldn’t get any help on the subject. After harassing Adrian, Cliff and me (mostly me) for a few days, he finally found some on-line support for exactly what he needs. As I was sleeping in this morning, he jumped in bed announcing his success. Then after breakfast, he demonstrated how his computer can now calculate Bessel functions…. you can imagine how excited I was about it.

In other fun news. We went to the Brueckenfest (bridge festival) in Regensburg this weekend. There is a festival nearly every weekend during the summer, and this one is, apparently, to celebrate the bridges. Any excuse to party. The streets down by the river are packed with people. Matthias and I had dinner in town on Friday and then went to the festival since the weather has finally cooled off.

We found a group of amateur astronomers with some telescopes set up. One guy was talking with Matthias and telling him about galaxies, and Matthias said, “that’s the kind of stuff my wife studied.” The guy was so excited, and he told Matthias “Wow, you really scored!” A minute later I found myself surrounded by amateur astronomers quizzing me on what I had studied and where I had worked. They were really enthusiastic. I always loved the astronomy hobbyists in the US as well. It was fun to try to explain my work in German!

They invited us to join them at their private observatory in the Bayrische Wald some time. We will go to the Volkssternwarte (public observatory) in town on Friday to see them. The observatory is over 100 years old, so I am excited to see it. I am kind of kicking myself for not getting in touch with them sooner. I could have given a few public lectures or something.

Yesterday, Sarah, Cliff and we went to Weltenburg to check out the big Weltenburger Klosterbrauerei (Cloister brewery at Weltenburg) on the Danube - you gotta go to the website. They have been brewing beer for over 1000 years, so we figured that we better try it!!

The area around the cloister was beautiful - Click on the image of the Cloister to get to the other photos. There were rolling fields on ones side, and some small cliffs on the other side of the river. There were lots of reminders of Jesus, just in case your mind wandered to impure thoughts. There were 2, count ‘em 2, stations of the cross paths leading to the top of the hill behind the Cloister. What a great sanctuary. There were even several places that revealed old roman walls popping out of the ground. It was great. We walked on the walls of an ancient watch tower.

After taking in the nature, Jesus and the Romans we squeezed ourselves into some of the few empty seats in the packed beer garden, and had some lunch. The bee was, in fact, awesome. It was really dark so we all thought it would be bitter, but it actually wasn’t. It was smooth and had the after taste of a pretzel (no kidding).

As Cliff pointed out in his blog, we were all clever enough to head out for the day without the thought of having money in our pockets. We asked the waitress if we can pay with credit card, but she said no. However, she said, they can mail us the bill! Only in Germany!

We topped the afternoon off with a session of rock skipping on the river. Actually, I napped on the rocks while the others threw stones. Matthias’s arm is still sore, but I have to say, he sure can skip a stone. In my post beer & french fry haze, I did catch a glimpse of his skipping. He could get it to skip half way across the river.

Here’s a little natural Hallucinogen from a cool science blog. Just play the video and follow this instructions. Aren’t science blogs a great waste of time?