Something blue

Crane's bill.

Beauty

Teeth

18-19 Ma year old shark teeth when the area close to my home in Germany was coverd by an ocean. These are the biggest ones we have found over the years - sometimes you're not that lucky.

Wanted

Field Work!

Instead: writing, writing, writing ... deleting, deleting, deleting

Can I have my life back?

Time for reflection

Rachelle Van Zanten - My Country (Official Video) from Taylor F. on Vimeo.


This video shows which fantastic places on Earth humanity is about to destroy in search for the last drop of oil (or gas in this case) and the last bit of coal.

Circus frog

And those nasty people made it jump through the hose which is supposed to connect the water tank and the drill (and which they carried up the mountain together with the drill, the equipment, the petrol canister, and the 30l water tank - luckily without the water - just to find out on top that the drill head was too worn off to be used for hard rocks):

Language confusion

At the moment, I use German mostly when talking to my mother on the phone or on days when I stop by the office and have a chat with the office mate. Work is in English so I use it every day particularly now since I have to write papers . That sometimes results in writing English shopping lists for example ... I fear that some of the geological terms I could not even express in German anymore but that's probably not much of a problem since I do not plan my future in Germany. At the same time of course I am staying in Norway which results in having things such as a Norwegian bank account and sometimes having to fill out some Norwegian forms. Unfortunately, I don't really know many Norwegians I could practise with but at least I can read Norwegian books and I would not want to read a translation of Norwegian authors such as Jo Nesbø anymore.
Sometimes when you book a ticket or make a payment you have these drop-down menus where you have to choose the nationality or country and if I am not careful I am looking at the completely wrong end of the alphabet.
If you are French you would look for France (French), Frankreich (German), France (English) Frankrike (Norwegian and probably similar in Danish and Swedish), Francia (Spanish and Italian) ... I do not intend to list all languages but you get the picture - you look for F. France is a nice simple example of course, there are some countries where you have to look for two letters but being German it turns out like that:
Allemagne (French - ok I don't use this too much)
Deutschland (German)
Germany (English)
Tyskland (Norwegian)
The Spanish and Italians keep at least the A and G with Alemania and Germania but why on earth is German in Italian tedesco?
The other day I was looking for Germany in a Norwegian drop-down menu ... I nearly gave up until I realised ... wrong language :D

And that's ...

... what we think about you not having anything nice for us:

What you've got?

How disappointing - nothing to eat!

(Poor things - do they really need two of these clips in the ears?)
Found this while looking at field work pictures for my last paper.

Things the world doesn't need

Royals!

Nordkapp

Just thought I'd post a few more pictures. Driving from Alta to the Nordkapp in April which resulted in a Nordkapp free of people - only acceptable way ;)

Nordic Ski World Championship 2011

For those who are not much into winter sports: Oslo was the location of the nordic ski world championships this year and we had cross-country, nordic combined and ski-jumping competitions for the past two weeks. Initally I was debating about going since I was right at the source and the new ski jump was built especially for this event but I didn't want to go alone so didn't buy a ticket early on. Retrospective that was a good thing because I spent the first week of the WC in bed with a feverish cold and I couldn't have stood outside for hours. In addition, we had the worst fog for about a week, so people must have had difficulties even seeing the athletes. Yet, when I heard that a few people from Uni were going and I felt a little better , I bought a ticket for the large hill ski jumping team competition on the second last day of the WC.

The whole week we were completely covered in dense fog and we were quite worried about the weather but we couldn't have gotten a better day.

Here, a side view of the ski jump. Although they were running express trains to the WC area, some people have had problems to reach the competitions in time so we started out really early and caught the very first train up there which wasn't bad at all. At almost every corner you get free food/drink/stuff from companies advertising their products.

That picture was taken a few hours before the competition. By the start of the competition the "stadium" was completely full.

The only downside of the good weather was the wind causing problems to the jumpers. Yet the competition started quite promising for the German team ...

Severin Freund just below the OSLO writing if you don't see him ;)
Unfortunately the competition was terminated after the first round (apparently due to the constantly changing wind conditions but it came quite unexpected even to the coaches etc.). It was quite unfortunate for the German team, since their last jumper, Michael Uhrmann, had bad luck with the wind and they missed 3rd place by 0.7 points or a mere 39 cm. And that was his very last jump since he plans to end his career this year.
For us it was quite disappointing to see only one round and the very abrupt ending was actually the only downside of an overall very nice experience. Although I am not really a fan of people in masses, it didn't feel as overwhelming as I feared - you still had space around you and people didn't seem to be as much in a rush as they usually are.

Before the snow melts ...

... a few pictures of all the snow we had this winter :) Best Norwegian winter I have had.

The entrance to my flat.


My street.

On the way to the T-bane station.

Disgrace

I am not really closely following German politics lately but THIS man is a disgrace to every honest PhD student going through all the trouble and pain to write their thesis.
Finding all these excuses and playing it down as citing mistakes is one thing but being allowed to keep his post as defensive minister and even still being supported by most Germans is just too much - please Germans wake up! Whenever he opens his mouth he's lying. Show that Germany is still the country of Goethe and Schiller where degrees are not faked.

Nasty copy machine

Since I am usually teaching Friday morning and we are now dealing with really complicated diagrams, I thought it would be the best idea to use overhead projector films on which I could draw. So I went to the copy machine which has two trays with paper and just put the film into the first tray since the machine only tells you the tray it uses after it has copied ... And of course I got the copy on a normal sheet of paper because the copy machine took the paper from the second tray. Therfore I put the film into the second tray ... and the copy machine decided to take the paper from the first tray so I had another copy on a normal sheet of paper.
So I put films into both trays and almost expected that the machine would refuse to copy because it may not like film BUT it actually copied on film ... YEAH!

Where would I be ...

... without facebook. I really would have forgotten this important date without facebook reminding me. And no, I don't really like facebook that much and I usually only log in when I get a message, that's when I saw this important information: "Today is your birthday"

30

There is the new decade. It will only be celebrated after I have managed to hand in the PhD thesis - so I may end up celbrating two birthdays at once (hopefully not!). Since I have been in Germany for a few days and my actual birthday will be a normal work day, my mother insisted to have at least a few candles and a cake. It was a little earlier than the real birthday but I am not superstitious anyway. She also gave me loads of provisions - sweets, cookies, tea so that my big backpack was completely filled with good things to make the last phase of the PhD easier.
Thanks Mom, you are the best!

Snø

Finally we had some more fresh snow and skiing is now fun again because there is a small trail with lights which is mostly used by hikers, runners and people walking their dog. I really like that trail but after a while the snow is so trampled down that skiing is not that much fun on it anymore.
A really great thing here in Norway is the "lysloipe" - illuminated ski tracks so that you can go skiing even after work in the dark. The only thing I do not like so much about the main lysloipe is the amount of people - it sometimes feels like on a highway and many people also take their dogs who then just run into your path while in great speed downhill. Since I prefer to make my own tracks and less people, this small lysloipe is perfect for me - almost no people and you can ski at your preferred speed.
Here a few pictures but since it was dark and I had been doing some exercise it was rather hard to keep the camera steady which resulted in the pictures either being blurred or too dark when I changed the exposure. But they are enough to get at least an impression.

Scientists ?

Sorry this is in German and very hard to explain.

Zwei Geowissenschaftler unterhalten sich über Skype. Dabei geht es darum, die richtigen Zahlen in ein Programm einzugeben, um das gewünschte Ergebnis zu erhalten. Hierbei ist A der Fragende und J der angebliche Experte (zumindest wird J immer gefragt). Weiterhin sollte man noch wissen - A kommt aus Franken, spricht aber kein richtiges Fränkisch und J kommt aus Schwaben, kann aber auch nur ein paar Wörter Schwäbisch.

A: dees is doof
J: ja musst halt auch einfach das richtige eingeben :P
A: na freilich
J: und ned son lällabäbl
J: du musst erst 2 angeben für den denominator
A: hehe genau
A: hab ich
A: bin dran
A: jetzt der demoninator
J: und dann die beiden nummern
A: also 1 1
J: wat?
J: erst 2
A: ne falsch
A: 1
A: einfach
A: ne 2
A: oh mann

Goodbye

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;

William Shakespeare (Hamlet, 3/1)

Saying goodbye forever is never easy. Especially when the person has been a constant part of your life the past 30 years. Yet, the last few years were rather difficult and to live much longer than the (almost) 90 years would have brought more suffering with each day.
Rest in peace you will be in my memories.



It's the best one I could find on youtube ... would prefer it without the pictures but the music is what counts!

Word add on for writing articles ;)

50%...

... of the students showed up for my first lecture (or rather exercises) today. Since it is the very first time I am lecturing, I assume that this is not connected to my person ;).
Funnily enough we had only one Norwegian in the room - the other nationalities being Latvian, Czech, Polish and German (me). The rest of the Norwegian students probably thought that they wouldn't need any practise ...
I talked loads and felt like completely dried out in the end despite the liter of tea but I really liked it despite the early hour and the nicest part is to see them getting the hang of the topic :)

Vegetarian

Yes, I am a vegetarian for about 18 years and yes that means that I made the decision to not eat meat and fish when I was about 12. My mother accepted it right away and more or less ate vegetarian meals with me at home - of course she was a little worried that I may miss some important nutrients but we had all kinds of books listing vegetables which are good for vegetarians and my mother just cooked more of those. My grandmother didn't really want to accept it but I strictly only ate the side dishes and the salad (no, I don't want the sauce where the duck was baked in...). Going to a restaurant at that time was somewhat harder since traditional German cuisine is mostly with meat or fish. Luckily it was just about the time when more and more people started to become more conscious about what they ate, so most restaurants offered at least two choices of vegetarian meals. During school times, I even got a vegetarian kebab - which is baked feta cheese instead of the meat (that was really good actually). I think that Germany is now a very vegetarian friendly country - most restaurants have a vegetarian section on the menu and you have such a big choice of cheese and other dairy products that you can choose the cheese without the rennet and the yoghurt without the gelatin (seriously what does gelatin do in yoghurt?).
So it was a little bit like going to the middle ages when coming to Norway. There are a few vegetarian restaurants and at most international places (Indian, Italian, Chinese ..) it is usually quite easy to find vegetarian choices. However, when people go out for a meal, they don't ask the ONLY vegetarian (of ~50 people) where she would prefer to eat and I don't blame them (since I am not fanatic about vegetarianism - it is my choice). So I ended up at places where they had not a single dish without any dead animal (not even the salads or soups). Of course then I try to negotiate with the waiters if they could make me something without the meat and they are quite friendly and co-operative but at times you end up with only half cooked vegetables or a strange sauce, etc.... Oh and a real vegetarian doesn't eat fish - that is something which people here have problems to understand - probably because there are many people who say that they are vegetarians but eat fish. Of course that is fine with me but they could say that they are a pescetarian or a semi-vegetarian ... then a real vegetarian wouldn't constantly get served fish. Well I have learned and now will not forget to mention this fact.
The choices in the supermarkets are also not really that great - cheese is usually quite tasteless and so you just go for the one with the most taste (whatever rennet it has). A majority of yoghurts still have gelatin so I stay away from those, there are usually only two producers of milk (both of course not ecological), the only thing you really get is free-range biological eggs. And if you don't go to the really big supermarkets or the Turkish shops (which are quite far away for me so I would need at least half a day only to go shopping there), then the choice of vegetables and fruits is also quite limited.
I am sorry for the somewhat long essay but it still seems to be a certain issue at least here in Norway. Of course you may ask why I am still eating vegetarian if it is so hard here, so here are my reasons:

1. I don't like meat and fish and actually never did eat much as a child. I put this as the very first reason to show that for me it is not a hardship to not eat meat out of principles which, of course, I also have.

2. Ethics. This is mostly about factory farming (mass animal farming) and the treatmeant of animals like transport and slaughtering techniques. Of course something is about the ethics of killing because I also wouldn't eat game out of principal (not because of reason 1).

3. Environmental issues. This is about what people feed to animals in factory farming so that they get fat and what medicaments and hormones they inject. Logically, this also effects animal products and that's why I buy eggs and milk and cheese from organic farming if I have the choice. I could go as far as not buying milk and cheese but I think that would be going too far at the moment. Something like the recent dioxine scandal in Germany will not affect you if you buy organic products.

4. Diseases. Only a minor point but since there have been a few scandals about old meat being repacked and sold, there is a chance you can get some parasites or other nasty stuff ...


Oh yes and I do eat gummy bears - without gelatin of course (imported from Germany, as usual)
During school times we went to visit a factory which produces gelatin. It stank horribly but what really shocked me was the fact that they took leather pieces coming from a shoe factory which already had been coloured. So first they put in chemicals to remove the colour which surely wasn't that harmless either and then they produced the gelatin out of it ... yummy!

Mission travel bug completed!

This time I was successful reaching the destination AND finding the cache. It was a hiking trip in the snow - according to the GPS ~5.2 km in a nice round trip. Since a few people have used the path, hiking was fairly easy except for a few rare areas where I sank in. And the big advantage: no people on the trails at all - they are all skiing on the illuminated track. Since it was getting dark I even saw two moose which is the very first time I've ever seen them close to Oslo. Due to the lack of light and them moving away from me very fast and a missing zoom lens I couldn't take a picture to proove I've seen them :(
Yet I can show some other moose pictures from Alaska:

Running ...

... looking...

... picking up junior...

... and into the woods.

All taken from the car in the middle of the day (on a road with no cars though). We didn't understand why she was running parallel to the road but after the small one turned up to our surprise it was clear where she was running to.

Full moon

Some experiments with tripod and zoom lens. Not as perfect as I wanted them but not too bad ;)

Geocaching

Actually I have been infected by him a while ago. Several times, we went out geocaching together and it was great fun to look for the hidden boxes :). Yet, I hadn't quite made up my mind if I wanted to buy a GPS or not. Things changed when my quite old mobile phone gave up to work and I needed a new one so I decided to get one with GPS receiver. The GPS itself was actually quite accurate once it worked but it always needed some time until it started to work and the biggest disadvantage was the battery - it was only good for about half a day and of course a phone doesn't use normal batteries, you could easily take with you. So, finally I got a real GPS and am really happy with it.
Between Christmas and New Year, I picked up a travel bug which had Norway as one of it's preferred destinations so I took it with me and am now trying to set it out.
The first time I went skiing on the illuminated track since it was already dark and unfortunately couldn't find the cache although I must have been close to it.
The second time I tried to ski in the backcountry on a hiking trail and didn't come very far - snowshoes would have been better because the top of the snow cover was frozen and the ground rather uneven - oh well at least I didn't meet any people and that was the main goal :)



Looks like fluffy nice snow but it is more like cement ;)






That's the so called Swedish wall - normally out of rocks.



The sky looked very nice unfortunately I didn't really get a good spot completely without trees.



And a blurred moon ... looked much better of course

Tea

Well, I really love tea! In the mornings, I prefer black tea but I also like green tea and all kinds of herbal teas. The only condition for the black tea especially: it has to be REAL tea - not those small cheap tea bags with an almost indefinable powder which hardly tastes like anything - no loose tea where you actually still can see the leaves. To have some variety in the mornings, I usually have quite some assortment of flavoured black tea (vanilla, earl grey, amaretto, cherry, cranberry, caramel ....) so that I can choose a different one each day and will not get tired of one type.
Unfortunately, Norway is not really a "tea" country (although I start to wonder if it is good for any type of food at all) so among the few teas you get in the normal supermarked, you usually have the choice between 5 different bag teas. In the very good supermarkets, you get one loose tea but usually only one brand which is not that good. I recently was in a medium sized German supermarked and the tea section is now ~ 10-15 m long, 2 m high all densely packed with all kinds of tea (herabal, ecological, loose, bags).
Alternatively of course, you can go to a tea shop and they have a very good choice and very friendly people working there (like in almost every tea shop) but as most good things here in Norway they are REALLY expensive.
So, everytime I come back from Germany, I import loads of tea. Some of it I buy in the German supermarked and some I order at a quite good German online shop (they probably would deliver to Norway as well but then you never know if they put additional tax on it or if they keep the tea at the customs - a lot has happened here).
Of course it's not only the tea I have to take with me, so I usually have to go home with at least a half empty bag to fill it up once I return and still I have to do without many things which I really like but I have to make choices and one of them is the tea ;)

High Hopes

Beyond the horizon of the place we lived when we were young
In a world of magnets and miracles
Our thoughts strayed constantly and without boundary
The ringing of the division bell had begun
Along the long road and on down to the causeway
Do they still LIVE there by the cut
There was a ragged band that followed in our footsteps
Running before time took our dreams away
Leaving the myriad small creatures trying to tie us to the ground
To a life consumed by slow decay

The grass was greener
The light was brighter
With friends surrounded
The nights of wonder ...

Tongue out!

White Christmas

Since I haven't posted too many pictures lately and since a white Christmas is not that common anymore, here proof of snow on the 25th of December 2010 ;)

Re-re-re-revised revision

Found this while cleaning up my e-mail account:

Sample Cover Letter for Journal Manuscript Resubmissions by Roy F.
Baumeister

Dear Sir, Madame, or Other:
Enclosed is our latest version of Ms # 85-02-22-RRRRR, that is, the
re-re-re-revised revision of our paper. Choke on it. We have again
rewritten the entire manuscript from start to finish. We even changed
the goddamn running head! Hopefully we have suffered enough by now to satisfy even you and your bloodthirsty reviewers.

I shall skip the usual point-by-point description of every single change
we made in response to the critiques. After all, it is fairly clear that
your reviewers are less interested in details of scientific procedure
than in working out their personality problems and sexual frustrations
by seeking some kind of demented glee in the sadistic and arbitrary
exercise of tyrannical power over helpless authors like ourselves who
happen to fall into their clutches. We do understand that, in view of
the misanthropic psychopaths you have on your editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they weren't reviewing manuscripts they'd probably be out mugging old ladies or clubbing baby seals to death. Still, from this batch of reviewers, C was clearly the most hostile, and we request that you not ask him or her to review this revision. Indeed, we have mailed letter bombs to four or five people we suspected of being reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back to them the review process could be unduly delayed.

Some of the reviewers' comments we couldn't do anything about. For example, if (as review C suggested) several of my recent ancestors were indeed drawn from other species, it is too late to change that. Other suggestions were implemented, however, and the paper has improved and benefited. Thus, you suggested that we shorten the manuscript by 5 pages, and we were able to accomplish this very effectively by altering the margins and printing the paper in a different font with a smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way.

One perplexing problem was dealing with suggestions #13-28 by Reviewer B. As you may recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews before doing your decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works that he/she felt we should cite in this paper. These were on a variety of different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that we could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish-American War from a high school literary magazine. The only common thread was that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone whom Reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited. To handle this, we have modified the Introduction and added, after the review of relevant literature, a subsection entitled "Review of Irrelevant Literature" that discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more asinine suggestions in the other reviews.

We hope that you will be pleased with this revision and will finally recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency. You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout this process and to express our appreciation of your scholarly insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you;
please send us the next manuscript that any of these reviewers submits to your journal.

Assuming you accept this paper, we would also like to add a footnote
acknowledging your help with this manuscript and to point out that we
liked the paper much better the way we originally wrote it but you held
the editorial shotgun to our heads and forced us to chop, reshuffle,
restate, hedge, expand, shorten, and in general convert a meaty paper
into stir-fried vegetables. We couldn't, or wouldn't, have done it
without your input.

Sincerely,
...

Happy New Year!

Yes, I'm a little late but I would also like to take the opportunity to wish everybody a successful and especially healthy year 2011. Actually I had similar thoughts like the ones expressed in the quote below.

"New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that coome with thte coming of drakness on other nights." ~Hamilton Wright Mabie

For some reason, humans need this repetitive celebration at a random time once set by some of our ancestors (of course not completely random since our planet travels around the sun in approximately that time). But we could as well celebrate the new year in the middle of summer or in March or any other month. Or we could celebrate the beginning of every single day. Then we could also wish each other a happy new day, we could have new day's resolutions which may be more realistic than the plans we have at the beginning of a year and which we will have forgotten by the end of January. Maybe we could live in the moment instead of the past or the future and every day could be special. Maybe we would succeed to seize the day instead of following the monotonous daily routine while forgetting which day of the week and which week of the month we have.
So I wish you 365 happy new days, that most days may be successful and special to you and a lot of strength and support for the demanding, unhappy, tough days we all have to survive as well.
Or expressing it in the words of Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65 BC - 8 BC) commonly known as Horace:
Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
"Pluck the day, putting as little trust as possible in the future"
which have become even more famous due to being quoted in the " Dead Poet's Society" (an extraordinary and excellent film in my opinion).