Coffee from a Reusable Ceramic Mug

Cliff sent out an invite yesterday afternoon. See, a little while ago, they attempted baking a layered cake with strawberry icing, and well, it didn’t go well. Sarah, being the trooper she is didn’t give up, and successfully pulled off an American style chocolate cake. Said cake was so good, in fact, that they requested that we come over last night to help them eat it else they will have no choice but to eat it all! Matthias and I, being the good friends we are, were happy to help.

I call it ‘American Style’ cake because the Germans do cake differently than we do in the U.S. There’s nothing wrong with German cake, but it’s just different in density, texture, taste, etc. I have stopped ordering chocolate cake here when I get a craving for it because it never satisfies my craving, so I was really looking forward to trying Sarah’s. I get a lot of chocolate cake cravings when I am less than two week away from moving to D.C., for example….

I figured if they could offer dessert, we could at least offer dinner. So, we decided to make our sushi rolls and spring rolls. We haven’t made them in a while, and they almost always taste good. Granted, it takes a good 1.5 hours to prepare, but it’s always worth it. Matthias came home from work and started on the sushi while I prepared the spring roll ingredients. Matthias has a sort of Zen thing happening with the sushi rolling. He begins by screwing up the first roll and cursing. Then he rolls about 3 more rolls with sudden outbursts of obscenities (eating the screwed up parts of the rolls as he goes and complaining how bad they taste). Then he finds his grove. He gets quiet after that and we can start to have a normal, non-obscenity laced conversation. I have a less Zen-like method for spring rolls where I just roll them hoping that they will break so I can eat them. Fortunately or unfortunately, I have apparently figured out how to wrap them without them falling apart so I was still hungry when we got to Cliff and Sarah’s. Matthias was already full but in a good mood - that’s the Zen part, maybe it’s the obscenities.

They loved the sushi and spring rolls too (actually with enough soy, wasabi and peanut sauce, anything tastes fabulous — The Sake helped too). Then Sarah brought out the cake, and it really was an American chocolate cake! It was all spongy and rich!! I ate so much on top of the many pieces of sushi and spring rolls, but I have NO REGRETS! My stomach had a few regrets, but sometimes, she just has to suffer - it’s chocolate cake for god’s sake! Yum!

As a bonus for the night, I finally got to see the episode of Jeopardy when Sarah was a contestant! I was so nervous to see her up there competing, which is kind of dumb because it happened two years ago and I know the out come. She was one of the many to play against Ken what’s-his-name who won a bazillion games in a row. Sarah’s game was his 39th win or something. Sarah explained that Jeopardy is all about working the timing with the buzzer, and Ken was pretty damn good. All of the players usually hit their buzzers for every questions, but the one with the best timing gets the first buzz. I am so impressed Sarah was on Jeopardy. I never could have answered all of those questions!

So this is my first blog entry. So far it is 68 for Tammy and 0 for me - that’ll change from now on. It’s gonna be one on my side (probably for a very long time though). We came here to help my dad set up skype on his computer, and so far it outsmarted us. The mic works perfectly fine when using the windows audiorecorder. With skype it is stubburn, and refused to give satisfactory results. However, we managed to trick it, by starting the audiorecorder just a second before placing a skype call - then it works. Strange! We have one more day to go - so I haven’t given up yet. Updating the hardware drivers was no success either, because they don’t have updated versions for the specific implemented onboard soundcard we have. So far for my first blog.

Some of you might remember the story of Jill Carroll who is an American journalist for the Christian Science Monitor. She was working free-lance in Iraq when she was kidnapped and held for three months by Iraqi Insurgence. She was forced to make statements praising her captures and denouncing the U.S. while in captivity, and quite a few people condemned her upon her release (which is always annoying). After some recovery time, she has begun to report her story in a very clear series of articles chronicalling her time in captivity. I started reading it last night and watching some of the video interviews with her. I was very moved by her exprerience. She is releasing the story in several part on the CSM website. She released part 4 today, and I am off to read it now.

First of all, a BIG thanks to Cliff and Sarah for recommending the Stadt Wien Hotel in Austria. We had three great days going to, coming from and staying there! It is in a little town called Zell am See that is, as the name indicates, on a lake. It is surrounded by the Alps. They have a sauna, pool and massage (which we took advantage of, twice in two days). There are a lot of kids running around, but it is a family place, so it’s what you would expect.

The service was excellent. Upon checking in, they asked if we had any food preferences. I haven’t encountered such awareness that different food preferences actually exist in Europe, so I was impressed. This question actually led to the quote of the trip. When the woman asked about food preferences, Matthias answered, “Sie ist Vegetarierin, aber sie versucht damit aufzuhoeren.” Which means, “She is vegetarian, but she’s trying to quit.” I though that was brilliant, and it explains my most recent endeavor into digestive inquiry.

The arrival day was spent in the spa area and in round 1 of the massage. We walked around a bit just to get a feeling for where we were. On the second day, we planned a big hike to the top of the mountain, but we awoke to a massage hangover (Chinese medicine rocks!) and a rainy day. We didn’t have the gear to do a long hike in the rain so we opted for a drive to a nearby Eishoehle (die grosste der Erde!) called “Eisriesenwelt”, which is a huge ice cave. However, we weren’t the first clever tourists to come up with this rainy day alternative. We were told it would be 1.5 hours to wait for the tram that took you to the entrance of the ice cave. We decided we’d rather walk around in the rain a bit rather than stand in line in the rain. It was great to hike a bit even if one of us whined about being wet and refused to hold the other ones hand because she was wet!! We ended the second day with a scenic drive through a mountain pass and then back to the hotel for massage number 2.

Today, we decided to check out the Grossglockner Hochalpenstrasse, which is a road to a view of the highest peak in the Austrian Alps. It was a fabulous drive to get to the lookout point to the peak and the glacier below it! We went down to the glacier and couldn’t resist taking a drink of the water running off - I’m sure it was full of bacteria, etc, but it tasted great!

On the way back, I got some serious practice on driving a manual transmission! It wasn’t fair for Matthias to drive the entire scenic trip, so I did the return. Mostly it was great. Then, we decided that we should check out a lookout point we missed on the way there. This lookout point was up an incredibly narrow and STEEP road. After about ten feet, I realized that I needed to downshift to first gear. Fortunately, for me and the line of traffic behind me, Matthias realized that this meant the car would roll back. It took me a minute to realize that the reason the car wasn’t going backward as I let off the break was because of Matthias had the emergency break - actually, he told me he had it and then told me to start going again. He let of the break as I got power and we kept going! As we went up the hill in a line of slow traffic (never leaving first gear), we had to stop 3 times, and every time, Matthias grabbed the break, and we started off together again. Once we got to the top, I realized that my entire body was contracted for most of the journey.

Though it was scary, it is a fabulous analogy for partnership. I knew he had my hand break every time I needed to slow down or downshift, and I needed him to calmly help me through it. See, most of the trip, I had to convince myself to insist on driving back because I know he loves to look at the scenery too. During my terrifying short drive to the lookout, he never asked me to get out of the car and change places - he didn’t encourage my fears to stop me (that and it was actually impossible to get out and change positions because of the insanity of the road). I didn’t want to let me fear to stop me from taking care of him like he took care of me on that hill.

There are some more photos on our Flicker site. If you notice a pink hue to some of the photos, that’s because my camera is slowly breaking. The CCD was completely wacked at about 2,500 meters elevation. I thought it finally died, but I may be able to squeeze a bit more time out of it before I am forced to replace it.

my amazing mom is turning 29 today!! In celebration, Matthias and I are heading to a spa/hotel in the Austrian Alps to relax and get a couple of massages (we’ll do it for you, mom). I hope your day is just as awesome mom!!

This week, Science Magazine published a survey of people in countries, mostly Western, about their thoughts on science. They had some interesting results, so if you get a chance, buy the magazine this week.

They found, for example, that people in the U.S. were more literate on genetics than nine European countries. And, when people were asked about a description of the evolution of lants, 78% of American adults agreed with how plants came to be. However, 62% of the people in the same study believed that humans were created as whole persons without any volution. The big result is the tha out of 34 countries examined on their acceptance of evolution, the U.S. ranked 33!! (just beating out Turkey). Impressive. Germany ranks up there at number 10. The graphic on the left is a plot of the results when people in 34 countries were asked something like, “Do you believe humans developed through the process of Evolution?” Blue means ‘no’, red means ‘yes’ and grey is ‘not sure’

The current theme of politicians or those with strong financial interests attacking science in the U.S. is troubling in many respects. The system of scientific inquiry is, by design, unbiased. Of course bias slips into individual investigators, but the process of science is designed to filter out these biases. It doesn’t always work, but it is the best system we have for determining truth. If we look at recent history, we can see a few cases of governments turning on scientist just before things get nasty. The Nazis, the Russians, etc. all turned on, and even murder intellectuals and scientists as a means of controlling the minds of the people - if a government can silence those who seek truth, none will be able to see the true bias and deceit of those running the government. American scientists are getting a bit pissed off, but mostly they are just talking to each other about it.

This is why I think science outreach is so important. Scientists aren’t attacking a belief system or a way of life. They are just trying to understand the mechanisms that govern our Universe, and their PR skills are sorely lacking. However, some who feel that their religious beliefs are in contradiction to the results of scientific theories are creating dichotomies between science and religion (they are also better at PR so their ideas get heard). If scientists can start teaching kids what the scientific process is, at a young age, then these kids will have the analytical skills to decide for themselves. Science is not a belief system; it is just a process. Unfortunately, as I remember, science is taught to kids a process of memorizing ‘fact’ that scientists ‘discovered’ - making it seems a lot more like a religion than it really is. I think this is why science seems to boring for kids. Who wants to just memorize a bunch of stuff? Science only gets interesting when what you are studying is not in the text books, and it is up to you to figure out the whole story.

It only seems to be the more extreme branches of religions that have a problem with science - it is ,ironically, mostly Evangelical Christians (ie. many of the ‘conservative’ policy makers in the U.S.) and extreme Muslims that have problems…….that’s interesting! In fact, the Catholic church, after oppressing many scientists themselves a few hundreds years ago, has been in the forefront of science on the evolving Universe. It was a priest, after all, who convinced Einstein that his equations did, in fact, predict an expanding Universe. The Jews basically believe that if God created the Universe than what ever it is doing is God’s will; it was Einstein who said that to understand the Universe is to understand the mind of God. Where is the dichotomy there?

If anyone is interested in reading a technical paper on the two dwarf galaxies in the Local Group. you can check out my new preprint of a paper that should be going out in and astronomy journal later this year.

Matthias and I rediscovered a Gutschein (gift certificate) for an air balloon ride that expired on September 9th! It was a wedding gift from his coworkers. AS we are both afraid of going in an air balloon, we have put it off. I am going to try to reserve a trip for the second of September. I figure that will be a good distraction for us. We’ll be too terrified of the ride to be nervous about me moving!

I thought this analysis was so cool, that I just had to share. Sean Carroll, a physicist from the University of Chicago, writes for a blog called “Cosmic Variance.” I will just quote part of his most recent post Called “Lessons on Monopoly” (the board game).

“….But the interesting things, not having played Monopoly for years, are the moral and political implications that follow from the game. We think of Monopoly as the quintessential embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism: a competition within the unfettered free market, starting from a level playing field and allowing nature to take its course. Which is all true. But what the game really illustrates are the shortcomings of capitalism, as effectively as one could imagine; if I didn’t know better, I would think that Karl Marx himself had designed the game. Consider:

• The game perfectly demonstrates the instability of the free market (which it should, if someone is going to “win”). That is, the rich get richer, as they can leverage their wealth to increase their earnings. Makes for a better board game than a society.
• Talent does not win in the end. Sure, there is some judgment involved in when to make certain trades with other players, but the biggest single factor in winning or losing is a literal roll of the dice! How bleakly fatalistic can you get?
• The playing field is initially level, but only in a completely artificial way. It’s perfectly clear that, if the game worked like the real world in which some people were born into wealth and others were not, the aforementioned benefits of being rich would absolutely dominate. Not much room for social mobility. A devastatingly effective argument for preserving the estate tax!
• Most telling of all: your income does not come from working, it comes from collecting rents. Later in the game, when a few players have started to build houses, you quickly discover that you lose money during your own moves, and only make money during the other players’ moves.
• It follows that, later in the game, the best square to land on is Go To Jail! From the comfort of Jail, you don’t have to worry about paying rents to anyone else, but you are free to accumulate wealth from your own properties. It’s really just a vacation resort for white-collar criminals.
• The only mildly redistributive action that occurs in the game is the rare-but-devastating “building repairs” card that comes up occasionally in Chance and Community Chest, and which does impact the rich disproportionately. But, significantly, the money doesn’t go to other players, but to the Bank (which is the real source of evil in the whole game).
• On the other hand, the game does make you hate the Income Tax. So there’s some mixed messages there.”

For those of you who don’t get around to reading the comments on the blog, mom just informed me that she took the nerd-test, and got a pitiful 9 percent. Which means, of course, my mom is totally cool. I suspect that the small bits of non-nerdiness in me come from her.

On a completely different subject, I just thought I’d voice my annoyance at spam. Not only have I started receiving Japanese spam this week (which yahoo and Outlook both filter for me), but the comments on the blog are starting to get spammed too! How does that even work? I have gotten a couple of responses from people I don’t know, and I am still curious how they found us, but I was happy to let them be part of the Tammy and Matthias thing. The spammers just feel like an invasion. I consulted my blog-guru, Cliff, yesterday, and he showed me how to activate a spam guard plugin through word press. Let’s hope that blocks the stupid spammers.

And, yet again, a completely unrelated note - (this would be the ‘Sangha’ part of the title). I started doing my teacher training with AVI way back in Jan. 2005 in Austin. I was blessed to have found a great group of people to learn and practice with. Even though I have postponed my training this year, we are still in touch thanks to the great technology that is Yahoo-groups. The word ‘Sangha’ is a Sanskrit word which means the group of people who help link you to your spiritual practice. In addition to my fabulous friends and family, I have found that the group of people in the AVI training have also been a big part of my Sangha. So, because the group is rather larger, they are spread all over the U.S. (I am one of 2 who don’t live in the country). I sent out notice to the AVI group about my move to D.C., and one of the ladies lives in Bethesda (Suzie), and another recommended a teacher I could practice with in MD as well. Suzie aptly pointed out that D.C. is great but a little on the ‘uptight side.’ It will be nice to hang with Suzie once in a while and ramble on about life. I love that little pieces of my Sangha are spread, literally, all over the world. If I ever lose myself, I won’t have to turn far to find someone who can help me return.