As an added bonus, here's a video of the fireworks in Marburg (yes, the soundtrack is Star Wars as played by the university orchestra), courtesy of Tour de Flener. 

Disclaimer:  it was more of a walk, but that title didn't sound nearly as catchy.  My attempt to run 100km in 24 hours is rapidly approaching - as of today, I only have 13 days until it begins.  More information can be found here).  Although I've been running at least three times a week, only going 4-5 km at a time isn't really the best practice in the world for trying to run/walk 100km in one stretch.  To see if we even had a chance, Erica and I did a test walk this Saturday.  Our goal was the small town of Nierstein, one of the many wine villages along the Rhine, which had the advantage of being only 18km south of Mainz.  With high spirits, we loaded up the backpack with water and sandwiches and headed down the nice trail, keeping the Rhine in sight for most of the way. 

To be honest, after about 1 hour, walking gets pretty boring.  We were the only walkers out that day - we almost got run over by bikes, but that's another story - and while the weather was perfect, it was also just a bit warm.  Ten kilometers later we happened upon some shade, and to our luck this shade was right under a cherry tree.  Needless to say, we stopped there for a bit, filled up our now-empty sandwich bags with delicious (made more so by the fact that they were free!) cherries and kept on going.  After a total of 4 hours we had made it to just outside of Neirstein, and as it wasn't the prettiest of towns we decided to turn around there and head back.  After another hour we decided that our test was completed - 5 hours is a loooooong time to walk, especially as we were unaccustomed to the long-distance thing.     

Now for the stats: in 4' 58.92" we made it 16.01 miles (26.68 km), so assuming that we can keep up this pace, we *should* be able to complete the walk in 24 hours or less, even with some time saved for breaks.  In addition, I plan to run at least some of it, so I would say that my chances of finishing the race are at least decent.  That having been said, I still need sponsors!  Remember, all of the money that I raise will go to help orphans and children in Guatemala (you don't hate children, do you?) and that every little bit helps.  Only want to give $0.01 per kilometer that I complete?  I'll still take it.  It's for a good cause, and now that I've shown that I should be able to do it I just need your support.  To let me know if you're interested, please use the contact form or email me here.  Thanks in advance, and Think of the Children!

I officially registered for the "Run of the Crazed" today (see one of my posts from a while ago for more info on that), but there's a small catch:  the sponsoring organization would very much like us to find sponsors.  All proceeds will (at least theoretically) go to the project PROCEEDI in Guatemala, which gives financial support to children of poor families so that they can attend school, have shoes, not starve, and all of these wonderful things that people everywhere tend to like.  And since I think it's safe to assume that none of you hate poor children (or do you...), I will have to ask that you consider sponsoring me.

What then, does this mean?  Anything you want.  If you want to give me $0.01 per kilometer that I run, that's fine.  If you want to further complicate matters by imposing conditions, like giving me $0.01 per kilometer if I can complete at least 50km, that's fine too.  You can even bribe with offers of a whole dollar (slow down, cowboys!) if and only if I complete the whole thing.  Really, any offer will be accepted, no matter how ridiculously low or the insanity of the attached conditions.  Remember, all of the money is going to a good cause and I will see none of it.  You don't hate children, do you?  Do you?

As further incentive, I'll keep this post updated with any and all sponsorship offers that I receive, including name, location, and amount (which can of course be anonymized should you so choose).  If that's not enough, then you'll have my thanks and the thanks of the children.  (Think of the children!). 

To make an offer, please send me an email at this address.  If that doesn't work, you can also use the Contact Page.  Thanks in advance for your support!

One of my goals when I received my Fulbright was to use the year abroad to learn another language.  At first I went for the more exotic languages that Marburg had excellent faculty in, such as Chinese, Arabic, and Russian (very hard to find in the US), but after realizing that a year spent learning these languages would not allow me to come close to even a basic conversational level, I started to look at slightly easier, albeit more practical languages, such as Spanish, French, or Italian.  I was foiled again at this juncture, as none of these courses fit into my work schedule well (why is Monday evening the preferred time to teach a language here?).  Keeping my goal in mind, I scanned through the course catalog and found that my options were Modern Irish - Advanced Intermediate (nope!), Middle High German (dead language), and Dutch. 

I had liked my trip to the Netherlands for a conference earlier this year quite a bit, and while there I realized that I could read Dutch fairly well (embarassingly, at first I thought that it was just very poorly spelled German), but as soon as I heard someone speak it I realized that Dutchman can make what I will describe as unnatural sounds.  I am not alone in this viewpoint - a Dutch radio commentator is semi-famous there for saying that "Dutch is not a language, it's a disease of the throat."

Today marks the end of my first week learning Dutch, and my first impressions are that it is a very weird mixture between English and German - since it is a Low Germanic language (not inferior, just that their country is closer to sea level than "High German", which came from Austria/the Alps).  Pronunciation is at times very close to English and/or German, other times the opposite of how it is spelled.  Thankfully, the spelling, grammar, and word order of all three languages are at least similar, as the following example shows.  Equivalent words (or word groups, if English uses a helping verb) are shown in the same color. 

          What is your name?      English
          Wat is je naam?            Dutch
          Was ist deine Name?     German

However, Dutch is still much more a Germanic language than English, so sentence construction and word order is often closer to German than English, as the following example shows.

          How are you called?     English
          Hoe heet je?                Dutch
          Wie heißt du?               German

While it might be too early to make any bold sweeping claims, I feel confident that I'll be able to learn a fair amount of Dutch in one semester (all of Dutch grammar fits into a nice 80 page book that I found) and I'm enjoying the class a lot so far - the professor is very good and clearly loves her subject.  The weirdest thing is learning a foreign language in a foreign language, but even that seems to be going well so far.  And to counteract the obvious "But when will you ever use this?" charge, there is a chance (however remote) that I will do research next summer in Namibia, where Afrikaans (mutually intelligible with Dutch) is widely spoken.  So there.

While waiting for a centrifugation to finish, I stumbled across the Mechanical Turk feature from Amazon.  In short, it allows to complete tasks - ranging from picture identification to market research - for a (very) small payment (usually between $0.01 and $0.50).  Some of the tasks pay more - but they usually involve writing 3-4 500 page articles on a specific subject (i.e., auto insurance) that someone was clearly assigned as part of their real job and they are trying to "outsource."  It's also fairly common to see tasks where you supply 50 email addresses to a spam bot for the great reward of... $0.05.  So all in all, it's a pretty odd look at one aspect of the web-based economy - a sort of officially sanctioned black labor market.  Amazon clearly benefits the most here - they charge a processing fee to the posters of tasks, and pay your reward in the form of gift certificates.  This method allows to still charge full price for money you earned from people who also paid amazon - a win-win situation for them where I might end up with enough cash to buy a paperback at the end of the year (or decade). 

One cool aspect is that none of these tasks are able to be automated - a real, live person has to sit down and do them.  While easy, each one serves as a kind of "Mini-Turing Test" and it would be great to see if some computer scientist out there could use this system as a way to test out any AI or advanced program of that sort (all the while increasing their funding!).  Another cool use of the system would be for psychological surveys - you'd reach a huge audience, and with the ability to reject sub-standard or clearly inappropriate responses without having to pay them a dime it would probably save money too.  Instead of $5.00 per person, they could do $0.50 and still attract an audience - all the while increasing the sample size so that results might actually be relevant (undergraduate psych majors, this is clearly directed at you). 

Speaking of work, it continues to go smoothly - I'm learning how to extract nucleic acids from soil and preparing for the METHECO conference in Heteren, NL at the end of the month.  This new soil extraction will tie in nicely to the conference, which will focus on the metagenomics of methanotrophs in different soil environements (fancy way to say get DNA from soil, use it to see what lives where).

This story has been covered elsewhere, including the German version of Newsweek, Der Spiegel, and lots of blogs, so I'm not the first to catch it, but it's still funny.  Three times a year the Max-Planck Society publishes a magazine that summarizes research from all the different MPI's so that the general public gets a good impression of what we do, and so that we can learn what all the other institutes are doing.  The theme of the third German-language issue (and upcoming fourth English-language edition) of this year's magazine was China, so they decided to put "an old Chinese poem" on the cover, taking the image (with that name) from an online database.  Not wanting to offend anyone, they gave it to a senior German sinologist for proofreading, and he gave it the ok.  However, about a week after the magazine appeared, the MPG released a statement which included the wording "... it has now emerged that the text contains deeper levels of meaning, which are not immediately accessible to a non-native speaker"

So what then, does the cover in question say?  A rough translation, provided by language log, follows:

"With high salaries, we have cordially invited for an extended series of matinées

KK and Jiamei as directors, who will personally lead jade-like girls in the spring of youth,

Beauties from the north who have a distinguished air of elegance and allure,

Young housewives having figures that will turn you on;

Their enchanting and coquettish performance will begin within the next few days."

It's pretty arguable that this meaning was easily accessible to a non-non native speaker, as the image is not an "ancient Chinese poem" but rather a brothel ad from Macau which dates to... you guessed it, present day or turn of the century at the oldest.  You'd think that with all of the international researchers at the Max-Planck Institutes (there are 4 Chinese or Taiwanese researchers in my department alone) they could get this right.  A new cover was released, but I managed to get a copy of the old one. 

And it's probable that this whole incident was just cosmic revenge for this other translation wonder. 

So I had a lot of free time at work today, due to a nice 4 hour incubation step (isn't science fun?) and decided to see what the world around me was doing with the news and such.  I came across some things that will give you a huge boost to your self-esteem and also make you wonder how these people have managed to live that long.  First, this lady is apparently surprised that bargain-hunting for what is in the first place a dangerous and unnecessary medical procedure might in fact not be a good idea. 

And we all know that kids are annoying, but throwing your six-year old nephew into a river because you think he is a witch goes a tad far.  Apparently the famous drinking abilities (or problems, you decide) of our English-speaking relatives who actually managed to get a whole continent to themselves have spread to parliament.  And finally, do not be surprised when valuable recordings get stolen due to neglect - especially in Jamaica, where crime is not exactly what one would call a rare occurence.