Coffee from a Reusable Ceramic Mug

We just learned this morning that Matthias and I now weigh the same! That’s a new milestone for us.

I came across Deutschland fuer Dummies” today, and I must say that it is an awesome resource! It has info on everything from emergency telephone numbers to getting a ‘dog drivers license’ (I had no idea) to educating your kids to be bilingual. Just thought I’d share for anyone who hasn’t stumbled upon it. It hasn’t been updated for a while, but the info was pretty darn useful. I suspect Matthias would learn a lot from it was well - he is a terrible resource for how to do things in Germany!

just wanted to test if it’s possible to blog from my iPhone. It’s possible.

It has been a really busy week so far! There is a conference down in Garching, and I have been driving down every day. It covers the science that I used to study (and keep finding myself unwilling to let go of). Basically, I have been playing catch up on what has been happening in the field more recently. It seems to have exploded as a bunch of nice instruments came online in the past few years. There is a ton of data being collected (mostly by the Europeans).

Anyway, I have been getting up early and driving down, and I get back pretty late (for me). It takes about 1.5 hours door to door. I know this because my bladder has almost exactly a 1.5 hour capacity these days. After about an hour and fifteen minutes, the baby does a little dance just to makes sure that I have noticed that it’s time for a pit stop. Thanks to my ever growing abdomen, I have had no problem securing an aisle seat everyday (I get up once every session - 1.5 hours after it starts).

There is so much cool stuff going on in the field of stellar populations and dwarf galaxies. I am really impressed with a lot of the work. I think some of the work is really weak and can be improved by someone who does the kind of analysis that I did for my PhD - no bias, of course.

There are several people there from my “academic family.” These are the people related by the academic mentors. I was adopted by a great adviser names Andy, and Andy shares a PhD adviser with a guy named Chris (my academic uncle). Chris and Andy have several ‘off-spring’, and we all know each other as a result. Seeing them is a little like a reunion of cousins. We have had lunch this week and got the chance to catch up on whose doing what and working where. The search for a ‘real job’ alludes all of us so far. We are all in temporary positions at the moment and for the near future.

Anyway, I have been having a great time! I had someone explain why most of my dissertation was invalid today - I actually agreed with her. I had a lot of problems with the part we were talking about, but she put it in terms of fundamental physics that made a much better argument than my gut feeling.

I had forgotten that there is such a large percentage of women in my field. After working with the astronomy community in general in the past few years, I just see so many men on a daily basis that I forget that there are different demographics depending on subfields. Something about the area of stellar populations and galaxy formation seems to attract a lot of women. My boss (who is also there this week) hypothesized that the larger percentage of women has to do with the fact that some women got into this field in the early 20th century (many of them were ‘computers’ for the ‘real’ astronomers), and then mentored a few women and those women mentored a few more. I noticed that, at least in the U.S. and northern European community, there are quite a number of successful older women as well as a larger contingent of students and postdocs. The Italians also have a lot of women, but they all seem to disappear after about age 45 - the only gray-beards from Italy were men. I have heard that their system is really hierarchical, and I suspect that plays a role in the strong filtering.

OK, time for bed. One more day tomorrow, and they I will be totally wiped out. It’s fun to pretend to be an astronomer again….

Surprise, it’s a boy!! No, it’s really just Andrea’s son Benjamin and some handsome baseball player from the US team. A bunch of expats (all connected through Christina of course) met up to watch the US collegiate team play Germany. Andrea made sure to get the autographs from as many of the boys on the U.S. team as she could just in case any of them become famous - she is pretty clever. Matthias, Cliff, Sarah and I arrived at the time the game was supposed to start figuring that it would be as empty as it was when we went for the European championship. Boy were we wrong!

It was packed! There were no seats open, and we eventually settled a patch of grass near outfield. It wasn’t all Americans either. There was a big German crowd cheering on their team as well, and a bunch of German kids were throwing balls back and forth next to the field. Who knew baseball was so popular here. It was nice weather and good company, so it was a lot of fun. I think the stadium had a lot more people than expected because it took me about 15 minutes just to get some fries! There were a bunch of Americans there with me standing in a french fry holding pattern. There was plenty of beer and hamburgers though.

I can’t say I paid too much attention to the game, which is normal when I go watch baseball, but the U.S. kicked butt. I’m sure it would have been the opposite had they been playing soccer. I think the score was like 9 to 2 or something. It wasn’t even close.

Christina posted a bunch of nice photos on her Flickr site. We took only a couple of photos, and they didn’t come out well. Actually, Matthias took the photos, and I just chatted with people. He’s good that way.

I came across this on a blog I check into once in a while. It shows a few intelligence tests for octopi, and it is pretty awesome. If my Spanish were better, I could get more out of it, but the crazy background music combined with the movements of the animal are eerily soothing.

A report came out today indicating that Americans live shorter lives than citizens of almost every other developed country. If you are poor in the U.S. you are screwed even more - if you are rich and Asian or white, you may do pretty well as far as life expectancy. Among other things, they noted:

• Of the world’s richest nations, the US has the most children (15%) living in poverty
• Among the OECD group of 30 developed nations, the US has the most people in prison - as a percentage and in absolute numbers
• 25% of 15-year-old students performed at or below the lowest level in an international maths test - worse than Canada, France, Germany and Japan
• Japanese live four years longer than Americans on average
• If the US infant mortality rate were equal to first-ranked Sweden, more than 20,000 babies would survive beyond their first year of life

Ironically, if you have cancer in the US, you have the highest rat of survival compared to people in some other developed countries……(but, again, that is if you are white and not poor)

We went to my 32 week doctors appointment this morning. As Matthias pointed out last night, I am looking more like Homer Simpson these days. Put me in a pair of blue pants and a white t-shirt, and we have the same profile.

Anyway, this is a photo of the ritual of fetal monitoring I go through every appointment these days. Sitting for 45 minutes holding the monitor in place because the blob doesn’t like to lie in positions that make monitoring simple. I have to hold it and chase her a bit as she flops around. I get a nice audio confirmation of every kick too. She is alive and well though, so I can’t complain. The doctor says that she looks content.

So, Matthias has had quite a good time lately. On Friday, he got the new iphone, which he has been talking about for the last year! (actually longer, if you consider how he talked about the original iphone).

He only got it because of pure luck yesterday when it came on the market. He went to three stores, and all of them were sold out, and could only offer a wait list. He went to the Donau Einkaufzentrum to the big T-Mobil store there, and it was a madhouse. He asked if they had one, and there was one 8GB one left (Matthias wanted a 16GB one), so he offered to go on the wait list. The thing is, the people at the store couldn’t find the list! There was one 16GB i-phone left, and the lady said “Let me call the guy who this is reserved for and see if he still wants it.” She called, and the guy already had one. After unsuccessfully finding the wait list, she asked her boss if she could just sell it to Matthias! So, he got it by pure luck! Things have been kind of difficult lately (it seems like every step forward requires such a larger investment of time and energy), and it was nice to see something just fall into his lap. I told him that maybe Clair is bringing a balance to the Universe for him these days and things will get easier – maybe she has some good Karma already. Let’s hope it spills over into our next apartment search!

Anyway, Matthias has been playing with it almost non-stop since then. It is actually quite hard to have a conversation with him as a result. He is so overstimulated that he can’t focus for more than 5 seconds on anything not related to the phone.

Last night was the one time he took a bit of a break from his phone to watch boxing and enjoy his new chair. Note the beer, the iphone, and the bathrobe (after a nice long bath) - he was having a god time. He didn’t actually put the iphone down to watch the game, but he did pay attention to the game a few times.

This morning, he did his yoga DVD (from his iphone), and now he is in the kitchen enjoying a big American style breakfast (Bisquik pancakes, bacon and eggs), so I think this has turned out to be one of his best weekends in a while - it takes so little for us sometimes. We just ran out of Bisquik though. I wish they sold that stuff over here. Importing it is such a pain, but we love the pancakes.