Koeln is Really Really Gay

I managed to make it to Koeln (Cologne) a second time this summer, and it was really, really strange. Unbeknown to me, I'd arrived right during the Koeln Gay Pride weekend festival. My first clue was all the guys holding hands, but as the day wore on, the abundance of seatless leather pants and street-corner lesbian porn peddlers somehow made it obvious.


Some gay cheerleaders.


The gay pride parade, lead by Santa Clause and Mr. Slave. I never thought of Santa as a gay icon, but think of him as a hairy old man who delivers packages down your chimney and he fits right in.


After a while, I got tired of all the gayness in the streets so I visited the Lindt Chocolate Museum. This place is fantastic! There's an indoor rain forest, a complete bean-to-truffle chocolate manufacturing line, and a chocolate fountain. You get free samples from the fountain and the entire museum smells fantastic.


The Koelner Dom! This massive structure is the definitive Gothic cathedral. Dark, huge, and a little foreboding, it's truly amazing. Personally, I prefer the smaller and more colorful Aachener Dom.



These strange "mystery bananas" were everywhere. I saw a few in Aachen also.

JET: The Jülich Tokamak Fusion Reactor

Check this out! Last week my friend Ivo managed to hook me up with a tour of the Tokamak fusion reactor at Jülich. Technically, you aren't supposed to take pictures anywhere in the research center, and this is particularly true of the reactors, but I took as many as I could before security shut me down and made me promise not to post certain photos on the net. If you want to see more, check out the official photos here and the really awesome videos here.


Mission control! The hallowed control consoles for all fusion experiments. Jülich's engineers and physicists can monitor all aspects of the reactor from here. A typical experiment lasts between five and seven seconds (the longest on record is 12 seconds) and an experiment can be run every five minutes or so.


That pipe-looking thinggy is a coax cable, just like you plug into the back of your TV. Only bigger. Much bigger.


This was the last thing I was allowed to photograph. At times like these, green is my favorite color. "Bunker-Verlassen" can be translated as "abandon the bunker!".

These next two photos are from the TEXTOR website, but they look almost exactly like the photos I was told not to post.


The inside of the reactor as seen through an observation port. In here, hydrogen plasma is heated to 50 million degrees and held in a 60,000 volt toroidal magnetic field. The plasma is invisible, since the hydrogen atoms have been striped of their electrons, but the "cool" plasma near the walls will emit an eerie pink glow. (No pink here, since the reactor was inactive.)


The power cables for the reactor. Research Center Jülich as a three-million Euro annual power budget. Ivo asked if the physicists were required to notify the power company before turning on the reactor. Our guide just laughed and said, "Oh, they know when we turn it on."


After the fusion reactor, we tried to get a look at one of the old fission reactors. Research center Jülich was origionally named "Kernforschungsanlage Jülich" (Nuclear Research Institute Jülich) and sported two fission reactors, but one is now decommissioned and the second is in the decommission process. Security around these reactors was extremely high. That white dome was the only thing I could photograph, and I was immediately told to put my camera away. There's a double-layer fence, guard towers, and security cameras all over the place. We couldn't get inside, on account of not having signed documents from the police. Wow.


Today it's a radio tower, but it was originally built to measure the strength and extent of nuclear fallout in case of a reactor meltdown.

Some interesting facts, comparing nuclear fission to nuclear fusion:

• When a fusion reactor fails, the plasma's energy is dissipated onto the reactor walls, they heat to about 400 degrees C or so, and nothing too exciting happens.
  
• When a fission reactor fails, you get Chernobyl.
• Nuclear fusion produces very little radioactive waste, and this waste is dangerous for only 50 years.
  
• The United States Department of Energy states that in Ohio alone, nuclear fission has produced "31 million pounds of uranium product", "2.5 billion pounds of waste", "2.75 million cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris", all of which will be harmful for thousands of years.
  
• Three baseball-sized garden rocks and three liters of water contain enough fusion-fuel to power a household for an entire year.
• Every fusion reactor to-date has consumed far more energy that it ever produced, but the ITER reactor will be the first to actually produce power. (It won't be a power plant, just a proof of concept.)
• The first fusion power reactors should go online sometime between 2050 and 2070. Mr. Fusion!
  

So! There's your physics lesson for today.

Tagebau Hambach and VI-HPS Inauguration

Wednesday I attended the inauguration of the Virtual Institute for High Productivity Supercomputing, a new academic effort at Jülich. Most of the day was scheduled for lectures, which weren't too bad. I met Douglas Post, the Chief Scientist for the United States Department of Defense, and also a few researchers from Tennessee, Oregon, and Dresden. You could tell who Douglas Post worked for. His keynote address bristled with phrases like "smart bomb" and "F-16 turbine" and "gulf coast oil rig" and "terrorist threat".

But the really exciting stuff was after the lectures when we went on an "excursion" to the largest open coal mine in Europe: Tagebau Hambach. Our guide was exactly what you'd hope to find in a coal mine. (Not Dick Cheney; that's what you wish to find in a coal mine.) Our guide was a short, densely-built, muscular German with thick wiry red hair and beard who looked like his favorite past time was banging rocks together. He was clearly very familiar with mining and the English tour was excellent.


Some of Germany's finest minds encased in green plastic. The lady in red is wearing high-heels, poor fool. I valiantly caught her in my arms as she fell from our all-terrain bus.


Photos can't properly describe the sheer size of Tagebau Hambach. It was first opened in 1978 and will continue to produce coal for another forty-or-so years. The coal layer is 70 meters deep, the deepest deposit in Europe. Mining the entire strip will require relocating three towns and an enormous forest. Sad as that is, the environmental directors take their job very seriously. Every square kilometer of destroyed forest is duplicated as exactly as possible on the far side of the mine. Seeds and saplings from the original plants are used, and even ant hills and wasp nests are transported. A few days before, I went running in the relocated forest and was completely unaware that it was "artificial." It's probably not as good as the original, but it's better than many mining companies have done in past. Actually, the company is not required to rebuild the destroyed forest. They're doing it just because they like trees.


Looks like Mordor to me.


This is the "bucket wheel" of one of the six 245 meter tall excavators. That wheel is about the size of a small house and can be moved with millimeter precision. The main structure is tracked via GPS and local computer equipment and can be moved by centimeters. Four operators take two-hour shifts controlling the massive wheel.


After Tagebau Hambach, we went to Burg Obbendorf for a three-course buffet dinner (I was inordinately pleased that I could identify by taste two out of three wines served). A little rain storm came in just before dinner, leaving this gorgeous rainbow.

God has blessed me so much this summer. It's just amazing.

Chocolate! Charlemagne! Fireworks! Giant Spiders!

I've been pretty busy the last two weeks, but last weekend I managed a day-trip to Aachen with four other PhD students, Binh, Ivo, Kyle, and Anna.


Our first stop was the Lindt chocolate factory! This place is amazing! We weren't allowed inside the actual factory (might frighten the oompa-loompas), but there's a great outlet store where you can buy TONS of chocolate for pennies. Kyle walked out with about 3KG (6.61lbs) of lovely Swiss chocolate for less than $20.

Next we took a nice walking tour of Aachen. Aachen is famous for it's sulfur springs and there are natural fountains all over the city. (The sulfur spring tasted like warm, runny eggs.)


It's not a lamp-post, but this reminds me of Lucy Pevensie.


This coach house was a bookshop in the 18th century, but the bookseller couldn't read or write! He didn't stay in business long and died a barrel-maker.


The Aachen Cathedral, and the only square in Aachen that actually has four sides! Every other open area is a triangle. This is because when the Romans laid the streets of Aachen they oriented them along their major highway, which runs south-west to north-east. However, cathedrals are all built facing north-south, so when Charlemagne rebuilt the roads to correspond with the cathedral, all the squares were bisected.

The cathedral is amazing! It's one of the first twelve sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List and was the coronation church for the German kings for about 600 years. The central part is the oldest: an octagonal tower with a 16-angled dome built by Charlemagne in 786. He's buried there today. The glass choir hall on the left was added when the central chapel couldn't hold all the pilgrims, and the tower on the right-side was added some time after that.


I just loved this garden on the roof. Downtown Aachen is packed with these beautiful European houses.

There was a huge festival that night back in Jülich in the Brückenkopf park, an old Napoleonic fort just over the Rur river.


These hot air balloons drifted past my apartment window while I was getting ready for the party.


Elvis lives! And he has a German accent! And can't dance for peanuts! I laughed so hard I almost fell over. Just when I didn't think they could top that, the band started playing "Sweet home Alabama". It is a physical impossibility for a German to say "Alabama". He is guaranteed to say "Ala-bauma".


There was an AMAZING fireworks show, the best I've ever seen. The fireworks were synchronized to music from Hook and Pirates of the Caribbean (the first movie, the only good one), and you were allowed to get very close to the launchers.


After the fireworks, an Indian tribe did a dance. I had to come all the way to Germany to see native Americans?!?


This guy was waiting for me back in my apartment. That's a 1-Euro coin, about the size of an American quarter-dollar. Can somebody tell me what it is?

Filthy Language

This may be a little off-color, so if either of my moms are reading this, I apologize. ;)

I've been making a list of normal, harmless, every-day German words which are so phonically similar to offensive English words that an American could possibly confuse the two. Here are the English spellings of some of my favorites. Click the word to get it in German.

Douche
Dick
Guilt
Fart
Cunts
Hell
Gross

I was on the receiving end of "douche" and "dick" before I knew German. Ute came to visit Saskia at Virginia Tech, and on seeing how skinny I was, said "Oh! You are not very dick". Back at my apartment, I was surprised when she said "Please. Do you have a douche?"

It goes both ways though. The German for "hot" is "heiß" (the ß is a double "s", a bit like a snake's hiss). In English you can say "I am hot" when the temperature is high, but if you say "Ich bin heiß" to a German, you are saying you are horny. Also, the German for "humid" or "muggy" is "schwül" (notice the umlaut!), but the German for "homosexual" is "schwul". Hilarity ensues.

Once, one of my classmates once tried to say "It is hot and muggy" and accidentally said "I am horny and gay". Good times.

Under no circumstances should you tell a German to "flick it".

Birthday Party, Chuck Close, Pirates 3, Migraine

Last weekend was a mixed bag. It started off great with a birthday party for Paul, the father of Saskia's "host family" in the Neatherlands. Paul and his partner Suzi are very dynamic, very intelligent people who live in a beautiful old farm house they've been rebuilding for the past few years. Susi is a brain surgeon and Paul owns his own software company. They have an excellent appreciation for music and art, and their house is full of beautiful things and two charming children. The party was awesome! Saskia destroyed me in Fussball and billiards, but I had a great time.

The next day, Saskia and I visited a much-hyped art exhibit in Aachen featuring portraits by Chuck Close. I thought the portraits were fascinating, but the exhibit had been over-hyped. We cooked fresh pasta for dinner. Yummy!

That night we went to the Dutch theater to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3. (Unlike the Germans, the Dutch show movies in English). Unfortunately, this movie really sucks. There were so many explosions I felt like I'd been in a two-hour car wreck, and so many ludicrous plot developments I completely gave up trying to understand who was on who's side or what they were fighting for. And since when are salty old pirates called "the brethren" and give patriotic speeches and sing soulful songs of unity?!?! Even Johnny Depp couldn't save this one. The only bonus was pretty-boy Orlando Bloom getting his heart cut out.

One reason for my strong dislike of this movie may be that it contributed to the first serious migraine headache I've had in over two years. It had been so long since my last one that I was beginning to wonder if I had exaggerated how painful they are. Unfortunately, I had the record exactly right. If you've never had one, try imagining rubbing shards of glass in your eyeballs while the US Navy tests jet engines inside your skull and an irritatingly cheerful gnome sings high-pitched ditties while he cuts your toe-webbing with paper. It's hell. My feet were freezing, my head was frying, and I vomited if I tried to stand up. I dreamed someone was chainsawing my ear, woke up, and found that a fly had been circling my head. If you think I'm exaggerating, then try this: I once ran three miles with a torn kneecap ligament before I realized what was up. If I say it hurts, believe me, it hurts.

Saskia, angelic as ever, drove me back to Juelich and made sure I got to my apartment OK. A hefty overdose of Ibuprofen later, I passed out for six hours and was weak as water till this morning. 24 hours later, I still feel worse than after most day-flus. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be back on my feet!

More about Forschungszentrum Jülich

Prof. Dr. Felix Wolf, my host professor here in Jülich, gave me a little history lesson over lunch today. I had supposed that the research center had a military background because of its remote location and nearby military buildings, but not so. The center was founded in the 1950s as a nuclear research center, focusing on nuclear power. It's in the middle of nowhere for several reasons:

1. The area around Jülich is a major coal-producing region, so there is easy access to an abundance of electrical power.
2. This was the most thoroughly-destroyed part of Germany after WWII (95% completely leveled!), so the research center was seen as a way to revitalize the area.
3. When everything for miles around has been bombed to oblivion, land is cheap.
   
4. People who question the basic laws of physics should work in the middle of nowhere.

Nuclear weapons were never researched here because the Allies would have been annoyed. They're not researched now because the German people would be annoyed. In fact, nuclear power research is shutting down because of political pressure.

Basically anything that needs a lot of electricity tries to be nearby. The military is nearby also because of the cheap power. The world-wide German AM radio stations are broadcast just outside Jülich (the antenna is a spider-web sorta thing about the size of three football fields that hangs between six tall towers. I can't get a good photo because the cables are so thin.)