the world has turned and left me here

the wcf

The World Cup Final is over, with the disappointing result that the Brazilians are once again the world champions. And Germany played so well (except for those two little goals of Ronaldo's) that you really can't feel ashamed of them. For the most part they controlled the ball. Their style is not Brazil's--the Germans favor a slowly developing attack, strategy, the artillery shelling of Kahn's kicks from the backfield establishing forward positions. You can see the Panzers rolling in. Brazil, on the other hand, has a completely different approach that relies on explosive attacks which one doesn't see coming, and raw speed.

Training a soccer team for the World Cup must be a bit like programming a Robocode robot. Robocode comes with many standard robots like Crazy, Ramfire, Walls, etc., each of which have their own specialized strategies. When I started writing Robocode robots I quickly discovered how to beat Crazy, Ramfire, and Walls, but couldn't beat all of them all the time with the same robot. The Robocode sample robots are essentially a test suite (like de Jong's test suite is for optimization algorithms), and if you can beat them all with the same robot then you may have a world champion on your hands. It's the same with soccer teams. Germany handled many different strategies well, including the overly aggressive strategy of the U.S., but hadn't quite figured out how to defuse the Brazilian bomb every time.

Anyway, after the game we saw this on the ground in the English gardens, and I think it pretty much sums up the post-game feeling.

the mother network

Guess I've been having too much fun recently to write it all down--but that's the way it should be, eh?

Last night I decided to tag along with Mark. He was meeting an old friend at a pub whom he hadn't seen in 5 years. The guy's name was Jan and he was a biophysicist who spoke astonishing English, a lot of fun to listen to. He just finished at Urbana-Champaign and will be doing his Phd at Stanford next. Mark was under the impression that Jan was still in economics, but in fact Jan chose between physics and economics a while back--it was just that all of Mark's information, including the news that Jan was doing consulting work in Munich for the summer, came from his mother, who heard from someone else's mother, and so on...who heard from Jan's mother. The joke was that this "mother network" was faster than any 10 megabit network in existence, perhaps achieved through some special quantum entanglement of their mother brains, but that the information was often inaccurate since the process of observing it introduced randomness, a la Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. But we also talked about the differences between America and Germany (naturally), on which Jan was strangely reluctant to generalize (for a physicist that is), except to say that perhaps Americans tended to more extremes--"there's a wider Gaussian," as he put it. And it was also funny to hear him talk about what's currently "in" in physics. Apparently high-energy particle physics is "out," and the way he said it was exactly the way you would say last summer's fashions are "so last year," or something.

Despite having a bit too much to drink and having to get up with the working world this morning, I felt energetic. There was a pseudo-deadline at work today so I stayed extra late working with my project partner, and after that we went to have a beer together. When I finally got back to the Siemen's parking lot it was 11:30 pm and the bike shed was locked up. No problem, I thought, shrugging off my backpack and climbing over the chain link fence, I'll just hoist the old infertilizer over the top and be on my way. This proved more difficult than I thought, as straddling the top of the fence in the dark and lifting the bike over from one side was a balancing act that I wasn't quite up to at the time. I was just about to give up and throw the hunk of metal over by hand when the gate quietly swung open--it had been open the whole time, even when I was straddling it and reaching down for the bike. Sometimes the solution is the obvious one.

And this weekend is going to be a Weekend, a weekend with a capital "W" that is. Tomorrow Mark, his visiting friends, Norman, and I are going to shop around in Munich by day and party in Kunstpark Ost by night. Then Sunday, Sunday with a capital "S" that is, is the World Cup Final match between Germany and Brazil. We're going to watch it on a bigscreen in the streets of Munich with all the other frenzied German fans. (At this point I expect that a "frenzied German fan" will be a normal German with a silly hat or something, but with an otherwise stolid demeanor.)

categories

To quote MC Hawking, "Damn I'm smooth." Check out the new category icons I've added to make it easier still to filter out stuff you really don't want to read:

	Here you'll find my (quasi-regular) Journal Entries
	Random Musings for when I really go off on a tangent
	Image Collages when it's mostly pictures
	Blog Announcements for things like this

stu, the graffiti artist

construction site graffiti

the best haircut ever

It is Tuesday night and I'm itching. Itching to scratch my stomach, that is, because my sunburn is just getting to that stage. And I have this giant welt on my arm where some insect must have bit me last night (last night? or the night before?). I just remember waking up with a start and seeing furry writhing legs right in front of my line of view and shooting up into the air, from supine to upright in 0.3 seconds, lunging for the light switch. But it was gone. These Europeans have almost everything we do (except for Dave Matthews and air conditioning and screen doors). Yes, I would like some whine with my cheese, thank you very much.

This morning it was time to go get the mane trimmed. I now understand why Mark's hair got so obscenely long last summer in Germany--he didn't want to risk it with a German barber probably. But I did something trendy. I went to this hair salon that screamed expensive, and it was, about three times as much as I've ever paid for a haircut, but it was the best haircut I've ever had. First a girl gave me a shampoo and an amazing neck massage, so amazing that I forgot my shoulders were burnt to a crisp, and didn't complain one bit. Then another girl in bright red pants and hair dyed bright red to match cut it, and it was like watching an artist go to work. A third girl who was supposed to be minding the desk watched on, trying to catch my eye in the mirror and smiling when she did. Maybe--I like to think anyway--she was a little intrigued by yours truly, an energetic American of the variety you don't see every day in suburban Munich. After paying and thanking the red-haired artist especially, I left, and realized that everyone I had interacted with had been a cute German girl of about my age. Like I say, it was the best haircut ever. :)

Well, Germany is in the World Cup Finals. We shall see with whom--either Turkey or Brazil. If the former, there are going to be some serious street riots no matter what the outcome. My department was also holding a going away party for a coworker at the same time, so there was stuff to eat and, you guessed it, beer. I took this opportunity to have an Augustiner Helles Bier while programming. In spite of it I was probably the most productive person there, as almost everyone was standing around talking and laughing. Sigh. Programming and having a beer. This is one of those things that will simply never happen back at the ranch.

unidentified weird sound

Ever since I arrived here I have been hearing weird sounds at night. Not weird sounds so much as a single weird, recurring sound. I have hesitated to say anything about it to anyone, including my roommates, but tonight I got the nerve up to track it down.

So I am walking down the street at midnight. My shirt is off, as I got sunburned pretty badly today, and in one hand I have my PDA. The noise seems to emanate from behind a hedge that is too tall to see over. I raise my PDA on high and begin recording this thing while lightning flashes mutely in the distance. I am a little scared that as I'm about to round one of these hedge corners a ferocious-looking man in a bear suit will pop around it silently and then disappear again and I will pass out, like in Mulholland Drive.

But I get the recording. Listen to it yourself, listen very closely because the recording is much much quieter than this thing is in real life. It keeps me awake at night sometimes it's so loud.

I can only make wild guesses as to what it is. Is it a monkey of some kind? A parrot? A weird German owl? At one point its screechings were so plaintive that I would have sworn that some demon-child was being tortured nightly in my neighbor's back yard.

What do you make of it?

blog update

Rebuilding the entire blog made for a pretty boring weekend, I'd have to say, but hopefully I won't have to do this again (still don't know why I was suddenly unable to post anything). Lost all comments so go back and post them again if you like.

the happiness vector

I remember something my Organizational Behavior book (die! die!) once said in its sweeping but apologetic cultural generalizations about how different cultures have different time-orientations. On the one hand we have the Japanese, it said, who look largely to the past and are guided by history and ancestry. On the other hand, we have the Americans, who work their tails off for a distant golden retirement, ever delaying gratification in the way that only a Protestant society can.

Now I wish to propose the following idea: our individual (I do not wish to make cultural generalizations here) orientation towards time can be expressed as a vector, ie it has both direction and magnitude. When projected onto the time axis, the positive direction is the future, the negative the past. The magnitude represents how strongly one is influenced by considerations of time.

I am striving for a perfectly vertical vector, the "happiness vector." I am trying to live in The Now.

But this will change. As we age, our time orientation vector rotates, slowly but surely, from a positive projection on the time axis to a negative projection on the time axis. Always in the direction of experience, experience expected or experience remembered, whichever outweighs the other in our minds.

residual things to prove

We were coming back from Pep today by car, and all kinds of honking and hooting was going on. The Turks apparently won in their World Cup Match. We probably passed about ten cars with red Turkish flags waving out the windows, which just made the Germans shake their heads. When the Germans won in a nailbiter against the Americans 1-0 on Friday, only twice did they show any signs of elation: once after the goal, and once after the game. As the crowd streamed out the doors they were already in the process of becoming their usual, reserved selves once again.

Today I went to practice frisbee in the little park with the giant hill in the center. Behind the hill there was a small gang of German high schoolers all squeezed onto the same bench, enjoying a stealthy smoke and riding around their motorcycles (motorpeds? they were small, not Harley's, ok) occasionally. I just set up on the longest open stretch of grass and started getting into the routine of throw, walk, throw, walk. At one point my throw landed close enough to their bench for a blonde German girl, dressed in pink and very pretty, to use this as an opportunity to find out why I was playing alone. I gave her the standard "I'm from America, my German is bad" thing. She made a pathetic little girl throw in my direction, to which I managed "And you throw a little badly too" in German. Their was laughter.

I went back to playing. Another guy showed up in his Frosted Mini-Wheat motorcycle. Perhaps because I was perceived as a bit of a threat after the friendly attention I got from pink girl, someone made a noise as I was about to throw the next one. I kind of shook my head and smiled at this--it hadn't affected the throw at all, in fact it was one of my best of the evening--but the seed had been planted in my mind. From the moment of my arrival I had been a little at unease around this gang of kids; it brought back memories from those terrible Junior High days. I went through all the stages of paranioa, began to play out scenes in which I kicked the sh*t out of these cocky German warm-shower-takers in my mind. The adrenaline was running pretty high, and I was prepared to take action at any moment. Most guys my age would have been past that stage, mature, beyond throwing punches I suppose, but there were so many fights that I didn't get into but should have, so many omitted punches, so many stand-up-for-yourself situations that I just backed down from diplomatically, that I have residual things to prove I guess. Too little testosterone too late is the way the story went.

the big joke

Now I'm definitely having sleep problems. My little room is on the second story and is not air-conditioned. I lay in bed late into the night, a thin film of sweat over my body, the air getting thicker and thicker and my skin beginning to crawl with imagined insects. Last night I only managed 4 hours of sleep, the second time this has happened this week. But I don't feel tired so maybe I have nothing to worry about.

Things are no better at work. The other guys in my room have taken to going in early, because there's no air-conditioner in there and it becomes like hell itself in the afternoon. Gets difficult to think, and everyone's temperature begins to rise. There are many outbursts of frustration. You would think that a media office with a panoramic 3d screen and 20 pairs of 3d glasses that cost 500 Euros a piece could afford a simple air circulation system. The main office of the department just across the hall, where most people work, is well air-conditioned, so there's a puzzling discrepancy here.

I looked at my face this morning after shaving and saw a bunch of red blotches around my jawline, not pimples exactly but close enough. What with all this continual sweating I had a teenager's nightmare vision of my face slowly rotting. Jungle rot setting in, only on my face. It felt like I needed to take a hundred showers to get clean of this horrible feeling. As a kid, the constant affliction of pimples which began way too early in the third grade made me think of the following thing, which I remembered again today: I wished I could take a picture of my face every day, first thing when I woke up, in the same exact position so as to allow for a giant flipbook of my face over the course of my life. It would be weirdly fascinating at the end of it all to review my life in a few seconds, baby-face becoming kid-face becoming angular teenager face becoming bearded middle-aged face becoming wrinkled old man face. Somewhere in the early middle of this flipbook the pimples would be going off like firecrackers, and then they would gradually die out. I think at the time I thought this up I very much needed to convince myself of the transitory nature of pimples.

Today, again, we went to the Isar after work. But it was a totally different experience. For one, it was in the center of Munich. And the water was way too fast to comfortably swim in. It took Mark and Norman and I quite a while to get organized, so by the time we got out there, the sun had disappeared and the hot crappy day had been replaced by a grey crappy one.

There was some confusion in navigating Munich (big surprise here). Spirits seemed somewhat low, even with Norman around. We laid out our blankets and got to talking about girls, which led to some cynical remarks from me about another great exchange that takes place between the sexes. Norman wasn't taking any of this seriously even though Mark and I were. He told me that we were too young to think seriously about things. Maybe this is true, but I can't just give up on the world and consider it all one big joke as some people seem to. Pressing on, we eventually got to talking about religion and the ultra-serious, at which point Norman dropped the bomb and showed us why life had forced him to regard it as a sort of joke.

Out of respect for the guy I won't recount it, but suffice it to say that some awful (this does not begin to describe) things happened to him very recently, of which I had no idea, and now knowing them still cannot fathom. He was suddenly bitter about a lot of things. I can only hope that laying them out in the open did him some good.

Recovering the conversation, I told them about the five Platonic solids and how my introduction to them recently had been the closest thing to a religious experience I've had in years. I was completely amazed and mystified by the fact that there should only be 5. Why 5? Why not some other number, 7, 10, 11, an infinite number? I recall telling my professor about this and asking him these questions, and saying "Who decided this?" "What do you mean who decided this," he said, "it comes out of The Math. It's been proven." He didn't understand what I meant at first--a little archetypal, don't you think? "No, I mean in a metaphysical sense," I said. "Oh." And he laughed at this and the misunderstanding that had just taken place. "I don't know," he said, smiling.

Isar beer

Today after work we went swimming in the Isar. I would have included pictures, but, well, let's just say it would have seemed a bit weird to all the partially/completely naked people running around.

The water was clean and fast. On the far side the current really picked up, making it difficult to keep from getting dragged downstream. On the near side, however, the water was not so fast, and it was here that we discovered four bottles of beer on the bottom, no doubt left to get cold and then forgotten. They were unlabeled except for the caps which indicated that they were Munich beer of some kind. To me they were Isar beer. We joked about this being the origin of all German beer--"it simply shows up already bottled at the bottom of our rivers." I went and got one, pulled it off the bottom and made my way back to shore. Just like a commercial. It was good, and cold.

This made me a little rowdy on the way home. And I've got to hand it to Mark, his ultra-fast driving really makes one feel alive. At one point I was standing up in the back of his convertible yelling "If you like potatoes, say ho!" (in German of course) to the peace-loving citizens of some little berg. At 40 mph.

But hey, why not? You only live once. And besides, the message has got to be heard by all.