Blogger of the month! :)

Die Murmeltierjahre im Land des Frühschoppens has been chosen Blog of the Month for March 2009 by Expat blog, the expatriate community.

You can read the interview here. Thanks Olivier, Julien and Benjamin! :)

Swing up!

Schadenfreude

Campeones... Campeones... Oé!, oé!, oé!

Yes, Spain won the Euro2008 yesterday. I am no football fan, but I like justice and (I heard that) Spain played very well during the whole thing, and that she deserved to win. Good so.

I would like to remark three facts that I observed:

(i) two very different concepts are usually mixed up outside Spain: Olé is a salute that the public does on a bullfight when the torero makes a beautiful figure. The howl to cheer for your team is NOT Olé!, olé!, olé!, but Oé!, oé!, oé!, without "l".

(ii) it is interesting how a success of the national team is automatically transferred to all nationals of the winning country. Even though I did absolutely nothing, I have been ten times complimented on the Spanish triumph. Winners are popular.

(iii) even more interestingly, Austrians seem to be really happy with the result of the match yesterday. But I guess it's not only because of a special sympathy they have for Spain, but also, on the negative, because of who did Spain beat. I guess a certain Schadenfreude (today's favourite word) was behind the horn concert yesterday... ;)

About gravity and time perception

Thanks to the internet, we can meet much more people today than we could if it would not exist. Meet them, take a brief look at their lives or follow their thoughts with interest. Anyway, for those who always felt a little geeky, those who wouldn't play football at school, those who rather kept quiet when the teacher asked something, for all of us, the internet makes us aware of our comforting averageness, after taking a look out there...

I've always liked to make up theories about why things are the way they are. Most of them are nothing but pure crap, but some of them, the oldest ones, achieved to me a status, maybe not of irrefutable truths, but at least theses for which a counter-example is yet to be found.

One of my favourites is the subjective perception of time, and how Newton mechanics comes in hand to explain it. Some time ago, it was remarked how spring and summer go away too fast. If we imagine the year as a circle, divided more or less uniformly in 12 sectors, corresponding to the 12 months, if we assume December and January at the top, we put it upright and we imagine time going by as a little ball rolling on it under gravity's action, it is then easy to understand why spring goes away so fast (the ball falls almost free from April on), why does summer, too (with all the drive from spring, September is already there before we can realise it), why is it so hard to pass from October to January (going uphill!), and why we start feeling more perked up from March on (gravity starts to pull us down).



Other time intervals can be explained with this approach as well: working hours (uphill from 8:00 to 12:00, downhill from 13:00 to 17:00, although sometimes the whole thing turns upside down, I don't really know why...) or the week (Saturday and Sunday at the bottom, Wednesday on top).

And I wonder, if we were on the Moon, where gravity is weaker, would we feel less difference between spring and autumn? Or, if we stayed on Earth, is the ball's movement affected by tides?

Heppy Birsday (*)

One year ago I started my Murmeltierjahre adventure. After 65 posts, I must say that blogging has changed my life. Maybe not in a profound, crucial way, but still, very often I discover myself thinking "public", thinking about an audience, thinking how could I explain this or that, what picture shall transmit best my feelings or my points.

Blogging in English has always been a real challenge to my skills. As I already told, I did not want to lose my English skills, and having so few chance to practise, Die Murmeltierjahre has been a really cool way to think in English. I always try to write English first and then translate (or rewrite) in Spanish.

I would like to thank you, yes, you that are reading these words, because without you blogging would make no sense and would be no fun. Thanks for being there and welcome to this second Murmeltierjahre season, now with a more personal layout, which I hope you'll like!



(*) German speakers use to have a lot of trouble with this TH sound (as in birTHday). It's funny to hear them sing "heppy birSday to you, heppy birSday to you, ..." ;)

Looking at the pointing finger

"It is said that when someone points to something only dummies look at the pointing finger. But sometimes, to look at the pointing finger allows us seeing the unexpected or simply discovering the ordinary under new points of view.

Toni Palau (Tarragona, 1975) started to look at the pointing finger some years ago in Austria. Through a camera lens."



Today Mateo, from DIVINOTINTO, the one and only Spanish bodega in Salzburg, published my photo exhibition online. You may visit it here, and also my flickr album here. And, beginning on March 25th, you may visit it on site, along with good wine and conversation.

I hope you like it! :)

Yey!

Do you know what do all those little green lights mean?

Yessss! Our Internet works again! YEY!!!

It stopped working on November 4th. The healing process has been really tough and we've already been to almost all cafeterias with wireless LAN in Salzburg. But today it works again!

I am so happy! :)

Technical difficulties...

Due to some obscure technical difficulties, I do not have Internet access at home for a week now :( It was a really funny surprise that we found as we came back from Barcelona last week. I am trying to take a look every now and then from Internet cafés, but I can't write really much. I am there, though.

As soon as my dear friends Tele2 and Telekom Austria solve their multiple misunderstandings and differences, find their peace of soul and put our line together again, you'll hear from me!

Des samma mia...

What has a dance metal band like Rammstein to do with traditional Bavarian oom-pah music? I was shown this video a couple of days ago, one of the best dubbing works I've ever seen. Even the audience sing-along goes with the song!



I like it also because the song is sung in Bavarian dialect, which is quite close to Austrian dialect. I love the Austrian dialect, especially since I am able to understand it a little bit. Austrian German (and Bavarian German, too) has a much sweeter melody than Standard German, as well as a great number of own words.

I have a challenge for all those who can speak or are learning German. The first (non-native) who transcribes the singer's dialogue with the audience wins a box of Mozart balls. Good luck! :)

Amazing web powers

I have always been amazed by how rapidly an exponential growth can surpass our common sense intuitions. Let's imagine that a certain bacterium is able to reproduce once per hour, and that we start with a single bacterium in a laboratory flask. Say after one day, we observe that the bacteria fill up half of the flask. Our common sense would say that it will last another day for the bacteria to fill up the flask. But indeed we would have to wait only one hour. Or, most amazingly, how you just need to fold a piece of paper over itself 50 times to get to the Moon.

One of the properties of a network structure is the beautiful way in which it takes advantage of this fact. Each time we add a new node to a network, the absolute number of connections grows exponentially. If we take that as a measure of the value of a network, we may say that this value grows exponentially as we add nodes to it. If the value of my own connection depends on the value of the network, I just need to connect to it and wait for others to do the same. If I would have the only telephone in the world, it would be pretty much useless. But how useful is a telephone nowadays? The networked connection makes the huge difference here.



The internet might be the biggest human-made interconnected network in our world. As I started writing this blog, I wondered how would I get any reader because, how would anyone be able to find it in the first place? But it happened. At first I looked at those little red points on the world map trying to guess who was behind, and how did they learn about Die Murmeltierjahre. Then I started posting comments here and there, and then someone came over, and others followed, and someone liked me and put me on their link list, and so it began. The exponential growth started to unfold in its wonderful way.

Most important here is the human factor. Because it is people who sit behind the screens, it is you people who bring the whole system into life. When you read blogs, you get the opportunity to peek through little windows that very generous people decide to open into their lives.

I have been lucky enough to meet a couple of "buddy" bloggers, and it is kind of an experience. Because you've already read so much about those persons' lives that you know them already. Through the words they wrote, you've got a feeling about them. And when you get to meet them in person, you might still feel like you're meeting a stranger, because you didn't know the colour of her eyes or because you are surprised by the sound of his voice, but the way this person makes you feel is exactly the same feeling you get as you read. If you enjoy reading someone, you will enjoy a conversation as well. It is amazing to realize how much of ourselves we put in our blogs. And how much our blogs say about us.



I like the Net. Because it continues to allow me to meet, virtually or in person, with some extraordinary people, who make me laugh, who make me think, who let me see through their eyes even those things that are already so usual I wouldn't notice them anymore.

I like the Net because I feel as if it were a living organism. I like the Net because it puts the amazing power of exponential growth in our hands.

Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)

I am a mathematician, I think I already mentioned that. As such, I enjoy the occasional mathematical joke, although I know that's definitely not what you want to use when it comes to boost up your social life. One of my all-time favourites is "What's a polar bear? It's a Cartesian bear after a coordinate change." :)

However, I recently discovered The Klein Four Group, one of the first a cappella groups of the world of higher mathematics. Five graduate students of the Northwestern University in Evanston/Chicago, IL, sing about life with implicit references to mathematical topics. They may be seen as a bunch of nerds who know how to sing, and they probably are, but I think they sing great!

I don't really like embedded YouTube videos in blogs, but I will make an exception for them today. Let me introduce you The Klein Four Group with their hit Finite Simple Group (of Order Two) (here the lyrics)



The name of the group itself is a pun to this. I hope I didn't scare half of my readers away! Please don't panic, I won't be posting mathematical jokes any more... :)