Coffee from a Reusable Ceramic Mug

I went to H & R block earlier this week and got a shocking estimate for this years taxes. For a number of reasons, we may be getting socked this year, primarily it’s because I may have to pay self-employment tax. Apparently, my knowledge is the ‘product’ that I sell in my ‘personal business’ - I think that’s crap, personally, because I get paid a salary and can’t possibly make any more given my position. If I had the potential to grow the business, I can see why I would be taxed accordingly, but my fellowship is basically a professional development program. So the tax lady is checking out some history on my position and may be able to save us. Luckily, the people who pay me sent out some legal documents referring to different precedence on the matter. In the end, I can’t complain either way - in reality, my taxes should probably be higher.

In a seemingly unrelated piece of news, I found this article on Quizlaw - a blog written by one of my biggest fans Seth (you know you are). I think there is a correlation between my high taxes and the stuff Dustin (Seth’s partner in crime, so to speak) wrote; here are some interesting numbers he pulled out of a recent Guardian piece on The True Cost of War written by Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. (the second one is probably the one most of us can relate to the easiest)

• $16bn The amount the US spends on the monthly running costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - on top of regular defense spending
• $138 The amount paid by every US household every month towards the current operating costs of the war.
• $19.3bn The amount Halliburton has received in single-source contracts for work in Iraq.
• $25bn The annual cost to the US of the rising price of oil, itself a consequence of the war.
• $5bn Cost of 10 days’ fighting in Iraq.
• $1 trillion The interest America will have paid by 2017 on the money borrowed to finance the war. The same amount of money would have fixed America’s social security problem for 50 years!
• 3% The average drop in income of 13 African countries - a direct result of the rise in oil prices. This drop has more than offset the recent increase in foreign aid to Africa.

Dude, I almost wish my taxes were a bit higher looking at the $1 trillion to be paid back in INTEREST for the money borrowed! As my dad says, the only difference between the Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats tax and spend and Republicans borrow and spend. I think if most people realized who we borrow from, they would be a bit shocked. I know that a large chunk of our foreign debt is to China, and it is growing. I’d rather give my own money to my country than have it be borrowed from another source - I’m voting democrat.

We finally made it to France, though just briefly.

Matthias and I went to visit Sandra (his sister) and Julien (her boyfriend) just on this side of the French border near Karlruhe. I posted all of the photo here. We drove up on Saturday and left on Sunday afternoon. It was nice to catch up with them and see their place. They took use to Karlsruhe, which has some great shopping - real American sized malls! There’s a beautiful park around the castle in the middle of the old town, which was nice over the warm weekend.

On Sunday, Julien headed out for a soccer game, and Sandra took Matthias and me to Wissenbourg just on the other side of the border. Matthias has been to France a few times, but I have never been, so I was excited. The town was cute. It had little canals running through it, and it reminded me of Holland a bit. We found a little restaurant down an alley, and got to experience rude French service (which is remarkably like rude German service). We asked our waitress for a menu, and she said that there is no menu, and we only can chose one of the flamkuchen (like a French pizza). After we ordered, the other groups of people who sat down around the same time all got menus from the other waitress who was, apparently in a better mood than ours. No matter, the food and atmosphere were nice.

It was also a beautiful day. I didn’t even need a jacket. It’s so strange in the middle of February! I expect it to be more like Oshkosh Wisconsin where one of my coworkers lives. He just sent some great photos he took at the local “Polar Plunge Festival.” Looks cold. I expect that to be what my German winter is like, but I won’t complain about the sunny and 60 degree weather.

There is a nice program being run out of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory to map night sky brightness around the world. I just got the following information on the program from the lead scientist, Connie Walker. Participate if you can! I’d love to see a bunch of data points from Regensburg.

Can You See the Stars?
Join thousands of other students, families and citizen-scientists hunting for stars during February 25 through March 8, 2008. Take part in this international event called GLOBE at Night to observe the nighttime sky and learn more about light pollution around the world. GLOBE at Night is an easy observation and reporting activity that takes approximately 15-30 minutes to complete. Citizen-scientists record the brightness of the night sky by matching its appearance toward the constellation Orion with 1 of 7 stellar maps of different limiting magnitude. They then submit measurements on-line at www.globe.gov/globeatnight/. Resulting maps of all observations are created and placed back on-line by the GLOBE at Night staff within the few weeks that follow. The five easy star-hunting steps, for which more information is provided on-line, are:

• 1) Find your latitude and longitude.
• 2) Find Orion by going outside an hour after sunset (about 7-10pm local time)
• 3) Match your nighttime sky to one of our magnitude charts.
• 4) Report your observation on our website. (Observations can be made February 25 through March 8; you may report through March 15).
• 5) Compare your observation to thousands around the world.

In addition to the unaided-eye observations of Orion, the GLOBE at Night campaign offers Sky Quality Meters (SQM) users the opportunity to measure directly the integrated sky brightness. SQM measurements by citizen-scientists can also be reported on the GLOBE at Night website to contribute to a global map of light pollution around the world.
Helpful and user-friendly ancillary materials such as a teacher packet and science standards, a family packet, and student games and information are provided on-line at www.globe.gov/globeatnight/.
You can also subscribe to our mailing list to receive updates and results of this campaign. Visit www.globe.gov/globeatnight/ and click on “subscribe” at the bottom of the webpage.

During the inaugural event in 2006 over 18,000 people from 96 countries submitted 4600 observations, including data from every U.S. state. In 2007, the number of observations almost doubled! Help us exceed 10,000 observations in 2008! GLOBE at Night is a collaboration between the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (www.noao.edu), The GLOBE Program (www.globe.gov), The International Dark-Sky Association (www.darksky.org), Centro de Apoyo a la Didactica de la Astronomia (www.ctio.noao.edu/AURA/CADIAS/), and Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc (www.esri.com/k-12). GLOBE schools all over the world as well as science and nature centers and astronomy clubs (i.e., programs with networks maintained by the Astronomical Society of the Pacifiic) are local leaders in GLOBE at Night efforts with citizen scientists.

This article in the New York Times was really interesting because it reported on a recent study that young women (teenagers mostly) are contributing significantly to some of the latest internet trends. They are teaching themselves programing, developing sites, and sometimes making some money at it. Boys of the same age are not keeping up with the action. Unfortunately, the tone of the article changes about half way through concluding that girls really just like to talk and express themselves, and so they have websites so they can talk more - they aren’t really doing anything cool and creative on purpose or anything.

Somehow that fact that the young women were redefining technology was lost about halfway through. It was a bit depressing to see how what started out as something praising the technologically savvy, creative young women with a lot of potential basically blamed it all on gender stereotypes! How annoying. Why is technology and innovation somehow assumed to be fundamentally unfeminine, and if there is femininity involved, then it cannot really be considered technical?? Women were, literally, the first computers (they did complex calculations on paper for the male scientists), and they made up a significant chunk of workers in the computer industry until it became lucrative, then suddenly, women ‘weren’t very technically oriented’ (it must be all of the talking and self expression), and they just weren’t getting hired anymore. The perception also discouraged more ad more young girls from considering such a career.

I think this stuff annoys me the most because so often there are many subtle message telling me that I am not very good at being a ‘girl’. I like science, I am overly analytical at times, I don’t like to cook (luckily Mathias does), I like technical stuff, I have messy handwriting, etc. My mom tells me that I hated wearing dresses as a little girl and I refused to let anyone try to put my hair in pony tails - I wonder if I was just rebelling against these subtle messages. The little tom boy with unbrushed hair and torn jeans refused to go down without a fight! I guess I haven’t changed much.

I found this OpEd piece in the Washington Post today. I love reading their Sunday OpEd pieces in general - that’s when the good ones usually come out. It discusses, as the title implies, the dumbing of Americans as a cultural trend. It points out that the trend is not exactly new, but we have reached a new level because whatever we don’t know (like world geography or foreign languages, for example), we deem as unimportant in the first place. As an aside, I am not claiming to be much smarter than a lot of my fellow country-men, but I do try to learn about stuff outside of my little world. I fully admit to wasting far too much time reading Perez Hilton and letting my brain melt, for example!

Anyway, the author gives a great example of how this has changed the face of American politics. FDR came up with the idea of ‘fireside chats’ to explain to the nation the details of the war - can you imagine our current president leading a discussion on the details of Afghanistan and Iraq every week? If he did, how low do you think those ratings would be - say they put it on against 24! I bet a lot more people would tune into watch fake US officials beating the hell out of people (like only Jack Bower can) than listen to one rationally (boringly!) clarify the horrible details of real problems.

Anyway, it’s an article worth reading.

Matthias has never been one to give flowers as a gesture of his feelings. In fact, in the 6.5 years we’ve been together, he gave me flowers once - and I knew I had really earned them that time.

However, I think he feels a certain pressure around days like February 14th, and granted, I like to point out that he never gives me flowers (except that once). When he came home last night, this is how the conversation went:

Me: “Hi” (and went to give him a kiss)

Matthias: “I didn’t get you flowers because I didn’t want the women in China to die!”

Me: “Well, that’s a really good reason not to get me flowers!”

He had, apparently, contemplated the idea of buying flowers, but after reading an article about the flower industry and the roses for V-day, he decided he couldn’t contribute to the suffering of good Chinese women! Can’t you see why I think he’s so great?!?! Luckily, that article thwarted any notion he had of buying me flowers! I think I am happy about that - at least now he has a reason for not buying me flowers.

Instead, he made me pizza and we watched a VERY romantic movie, “Shrek.” The pizza was great (though it had the typical wheat effect of making me full until mid-morning but sometimes one needs some homemade pizza!). We topped off dinner with something called a “Baumckochen” (tree cake), which Sarah pointed out to me earlier in the day. It looks like a stack of chocolate donuts, and it almost as good. I have been craving donuts lately, so nothing is quite as good, but the tree cake was a good substitute!

All in all, it was a great Valentines Day!

Last night, I dreamed that I met the new pope. Her name was Suzanne, and she had some problem with her legs that caused her to walk awkwardly and need assistance at times. I escorted her to the bathroom during the gather (which was really an astronomy conference). As we walked out, I said that it was great that I could actually help escort her to the restroom because that was never possible with earlier popes because they were all men. She asked why I think it was possible for her to become pope now, and I said that it is a good year for women. Many women in power are only now getting the opportunity to serve in the roles they deserve and have worked so hard to attain.

As we came back to the conference, the pope and I ran into an amazing astronomer I know named Meg. I introduced the two of them, and Meg leaned over and told me that one of her old collaborators who will be working with me is a big fan of Gary (my yoga teacher). I told her I’d be happy to share what I have learned with him.

The dream kind of faded after that. When I told Matthias about the dream, he said “Your crazy feminist ideas even come in your dreams!” I don’t think a pope named Suzanne is such a crazy idea.

Matthias and I went for a nice hike today just south of Munich (I uploaded photos here). Apparently, every other German was on their way to and from the Alps as well because there were cars everywhere. Luckily, we weren’t heading to ski slopes, so once we found the base of Breitenstein, it was pretty empty.

The cause for the frenzy is probably related to the fact that it was a really warm and sunny Saturday in February. As usual, I hate walking up hill. That would be why almost all of the pictures of me are taken from above; I am a bit slow. However, I LOVE the view from the top, so the terrible walk up is worth it. We didn’t get going early enough to make it all the way to the top, but we made it to a cute chapel about an hour up the hill. We got to hike through snow as well. The air was so fresh and cool! We really needed to get out and hike.

I decided today that either the Germans take much better care of their hiking shoes than I do or they all hike a lot less than me! Their shoes were all really clean. They also have lots of gadgets like ice clips for the front of the shoes and the fancy Nordic walking sticks. Matthias and I were like the low class hikers on the mountain with our dirty shoes and using only our feet to get us up and down the mountain. We also ate our own sandwiches on the side of the trail - which were awesome! (tunasfish sandwiches with green apples and mayonnaise). I like slumming it in the Alps! What a great Saturday.

After reading an article in the Washington Post today, I learned that I am a member of the 51st state! At least according to the Democratic Party. Apparently, the party has organized and expatriate ’state’ with 22 delegate representing the interest of Americans living abroad. After a bit of searching, I found information for Democrats abroad and tracked down how I could vote in the primary today!

I didn’t get my primary information organized for Arizona in time, and so I was kind of bummed that I wouldn’t be able to vote. I was so excited that I would get a chance. I called Sarah (my partner in little German adventures) and she was into going as well. We took the train down to Munich (about 75 minutes), walked a few blocks and hung out at a little ‘party’ they had organized at the building. By party, I mean me, Sarah, a few German students and four Americans. We were a bit early. Once voting started, a group of expats showed up, and we got to vote. It was a fun atmosphere. People were wearing little American hats, there was an NBC news camera, etc. We got some good old American candy bars for our trouble and headed back to catch the train home. All in all, it took us about five hours to get down there, vote and get back. How can anyone say I am not patriotic? Of course, I think Sarah and I canceled out each other’s votes, but at least we did our part!