BESSY

Ok, as most people know, I have been working recently at the synchrotron as the time gets closer to Christmas. And this has necessitated my acopting a nocturnal schedule for most of it. The reason for the nocturnal schedule is that we do not get time on such a large experimental facility very often (you usually have to apply for time, and get maybe 2 weeks in duration, once or twice per year), and so when we do have time, there is an incentive to use all the minutes. The equipment doesn't know what time it is, so it doesn't matter if it's during the night or weekend or whatever. Perhaps a little background....

I bet you never thought reading this blog would be educational, eh? A synchrotron in general is one of those big particle accelerator rings that you sometimes hear about in the news.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/synchrotron

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been prevalent in the popular news during the past year or so, and it is a synchrotron of a little different flavor than the one I'm using. The one I'm using is called BESSY in acronym form.

http://www.bessy.de/

This stands for Die Berliner Elektronen-Speicherring Gesellschaft für Synchrotronstrahlung. Doesn't really matter, it just goes by BESSY. I feel like they may have taken a few liberties with the acronym, but this appears to be a pretty common practice. There's another facility affiliated with my department here that goes by the acronym SMART. One time I saw the word expansion of what that acronym stands for, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how they got those letters out of it. They'd have to ignore words and invent silent ones etc. to get it to work out, it seemed. I think they must have just started out with the acronym they wanted, and then tried to come up with words spelled out something similar. And they didn't even have to do a good job, because no one bothers to go back and check on these things. They just always call it by the short name SMART. Then, they can say hilarious things such as "we are the SMART guys" and "so-and-so used to be a SMART guy, before he moved to a different department" etc. The people who work on this project seem to have quite a lot of endurance for finding the humor in this. Mine ran out after perhaps the first 1/2 time I heard it, but maybe it's just me. Perhaps no one else cares about this. And I appear to have digressed a bit...

In any case, so we use this BESSY thing in order to get out light. Like we have in the lab. Except super-intense and tunable to (most) any energy. For this extra advantage, the BESSY II facility (there used to be a BESSY I before) was built here a few years ago at a cost of about 100 million Euros (maybe $130 million depending upon the current exchange rate). As a scientist, I am supposed not to be cynical about this. We are doing very important work here that is yielding great benefits for the future of humankind. Depends upon the day that you ask me....

So, this is what necessitated my working the night shift for a while. A typical shift might run from 7 pm to 9 am for me. It takes about an hour for me to get out where the facility is on the train, so this makes for a pretty long day/night. And not particularly fun, to tell the truth. No time for Christmas shopping or anything else, so it's good that I finished that stuff early. What is amazing though is how quickly my body was able to adjust to the time difference The first 24-36 hours were quite difficult, but afterwards, it seemed just about normal. Somewhat similar to my normal work, but during the night. Of course, I found the smoothness of this transition a little disconcerting as well. The fact that I could live the inverse life of a normal human without anyone really noticing reminded me of the difficulties I've had getting to know Germans so far. I haven't really had many positive interactions with Germans that immediately come to mind. I've never been to a German person's apartment (unless you count the friend I visited in Dresden). And most German people don't seem particularly interested in talking with me. This also makes language development all the more difficult as I've described before. I guess that's something to work on in the New Year. I've heard that Germans have gooey, chocolatey centers, if I stick with it long enough to penetrate the outer shell. We shall see. In any case, I seem to have digressed again. Ok, on to some pictures so I can end this blog post, before I get off topic again.

Here is a photo of the outside of BESSY. It is about the size and shape of a professional basketball arena.

The following two pictures look one way, and then the other from the balcony inside so you can see some of the complicated business that goes on around the ring.

In general, people bring in their own equipment and then set it up like a little campsite on the periphery of the ring to tap into the stuff I described above. This makes for a bit of a challenge to bring all of the pieces and get it set up correctly, so that everything works. You aren't in your laboratory, so there are always problems with pieces not reaching far enough or not aligning the way you thought etc. The following picture is of the equipment we brought and set up. Then, afterwards, we had to quickly disassemble and transport it back to the institute in pieces. A little bit of the bottom part of the equipment does permanently stay there, but most of it goes.

Then, one last thing. I saw this little emergency exit around the outside of the ring and it gave me the giggles. As you can see, the architect of this building decided to make a ring of windows along the floor. This would be a convenient location if we had eyes on the tops of our feet. On more than one occasion, I had to get down on the floor to see how the weather was outside, and determine if I needed an umbrella, for instance. Then, I'm guessing that the fire marshall (or German equivalent) inspected the building after construction and decided that it needed an additional exit. Instead of interruping the window, or making a door with a widowed bottom, they went with this. Doesn't seem like it would be very easy for someone with a disability to use. But the image of people lining up in an orderly fashion to walk the plank on this thing in the event of an emergency seems quite ridiculous to me.

The Gnome Visits Berlin

(see description in the post below)
Sorry there are a couple of typos in this. The slideshow software interface isn't very user-friendly, but hopefully, I can fix the obvious ones coming up soon.

To Do in Berlin

First of all, a recent piece of news is that my last journal article from my PhD was just accepted for publication. This finally completes the last hanging chad from my PhD and is a welcome relief. Now that that stuff is behind me, I can concentrate on other things.

My sister and brother-in-law came up with a list of things I should do while I am in Berlin, and slowly over time, I have been making progress on them. I was also given a small gnome to carry around with me and keep me company on these excursions. As yet, the gnome is unnamed (I hadn't thought of this oversight until this moment). Suggestions? Perhaps Gnomey McGnomerton for now. In any case, I have (basically) finished the list as of recently and here is the pictoral evidence. Thanks again, Anna and Casey!

By the way, the slideshow is above, as you've probably already seen. I tried to make it go below, but after wrestling with the blog a bit, I decided it wasn't that important. Enjoy.

KC in the DL

Ok, I've had a bit of an unprecedented rash of posts lately, so be sure to look below and make sure you've caught my most recent ones. Here is a short one. I've run into a couple of Kansas City (MO) references in Berlin and thought I'd put them up here. This is exciting for me anyway, so please just humor me for a minute.


The first one was a completely random poster advertisement near one of the train stations. And here it is.



I saw it and took a picture because I was excited to see the KC reference. It looks like a fashion show. Or maybe an art exhibition. So, I looked it up later on the internet. And, the website was pretty mysterious. And maybe a little creepy. There are some strange pictures of a tattooed man wearing snuggie-like baby clothes, it appears. Feel free to check it out (but please don't blame me for the strangeness that lies behind).

http://www.peggynoland.com/shop.html

And little to no information on who Peggy Noland is. Very strange. Whatever, something new.

Anyway, the next second reference to KC came from when I was walking down the street. I walked past this old man, and looked up...and saw...a Kansas City Royals baseball cap. Be still my heart :). So, I went up to him and started frantically talking to him in German to ask him about his hat and where he got it and if he knew of the Royals and if he was a fan etc. He appeared visibly disturbed by the encounter and I managed to catch that he had no idea who the Royals were or anything about baseball as he ran away. I was working my way up to asking to take a picture with him, but this appeared out of the question at this point. So, I was only able to snap this photo of him as he fled the scene. Trust me, that blue cap says KC on the front.

30...

So, I recently turned 30. This happened to be on the same day as the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, so it was a pretty big deal in Berlin. I tried to go and participate the festivities, but it was quite ridiculously crowded and I couldn't get really anywhere close. Plus it was rainy. To illustrate, here is a photo of the festivities from the newspaper.

And here is a photo of the real experience, from our point of view.

Patience ran out quickly under such conditions. We ended up deciding to just leave and go to a tamer area with an unseasonably-early Christmas market instead.

30 doesn't seem like it should be that big of a deal. I only turned one year older than 29. And really I was only one day older than the previous day. But, one apparent difference is the round number. I've read some about this before, and Americans, in particular, tend to emphasize round numbers, even a little more than other cultures. 100 yards rushing for a running back in a football game seems much better than 99, for instance, and 30 seems a lot older than 29.

Also, another difference is in the way we categorize ages. I received a survey from the Mizzou alumni association, the day after my birthday. Here was the first page.

For reference, my cursor hovers over what I wanted to put, and the checkmark designates the answer I had to honestly put. And, um...can I also say...30-45!?!??!?! Ridiculous. I am in an age group with 45-year-olds as of one week ago. That is different. This is all I have to say about this for now... :)

Soccer

I managed to go to my first German soccer game a few weeks ago. It was pretty fun (even though of course I made them lose by being there). I think I've decided to become a Berlin Union fan while I'm here. This is their second-division team in Berlin (which is in the East; the first division team is in the West and they are horrible). Anyway, this seems to be shaping up to be my most underwhelming post ever, but I think this video turned out pretty well. I almost captured the scoring of a goal, but not quite. Turn up the volume to catch all the sounds, and enjoy.

Church

Going to church in Germany can be added to the list of things that were routine for me in the U.S., but are more challenging here. First of all, the number of churches here isn't huge. This is partly due to Berlin's location in the former East Germany. When someone from East Germany is asked to what church they belong, they will say, "I'm East German." It is interesting that Germany has governmentalized tax support for the Protestant and Catholic churches in the country. When you fill out your residence registration (which is required anytime you move in Germany, even just down the street), you can check a "Catholic" or "Protestant" box. I've learned that it is by this method that the government collects special taxes that it distributes to these two churches. Where is the separation of church and state, you might ask? I don't know... There are only the two boxes, so if you are a part of a third church then the government doesn't have an option for you. You can opt not to check either box however.

Anyway, so in looking for a Catholic church to go to, I kept running into churches that seemed like Catholic churches, but they would turn out to be Protestant. This kept happening over and over. There was some indefinable property of these churches that made them seem Catholic to me. But then I would turn out to be wrong. It was really starting to bug me. Then, I was reading about the history of one of these churches, and it said that it had been a Catholic church for a couple of centuries, before the Protestant Reformation. Then, it was a Protestant church afterwards. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh... This was one of my, "Aha, stuff in Europe is quite old...." moments.

Well, I have gone to a few different churches here to check things out. The common denominator is that I have little idea what is going on in any of them. Of course I understand some words. But, they speak quite fast, of course, and there is a bit of specialized church vocabulary. And the echo-ish effect in these large cathedral type churches isn't helping. At one of the places I've gone the most often, they have a big, beautiful organ which they play during mass. Then afterwards, the organist goes crazy and plays a virtuoso organ solo for a few minutes, which I always look forward to. Here is a taste below. Turn up the volume and enjoy. I videoed it stealthily from my lap so that no one was aware. Like a ninja.

Also, here is a picture of some of the treats they have at the Protestant churches. Here you can see some Martin Luther Bonbons. They also had cookies. For the kiddies.