Aloha Norden

NASA funding

2012-01-27T11:13:00.000-08:00

I heard a discussion on the radio a few days ago about NASA's budget and how it would need to be trimmed and focused on fewer prioritized missions in a tough economy...

To put this into perspective, NASA receives $19 billion annually; this is less than 1% of the US budget. (link) The defense department receives $689 billion; 20% of the US budget. (link)

The international space station cost to NASA is less than $30 billion (excluding the space shuttle, $55 billion was spent on space shuttle missions to the ISS), so lets say a total of $85 billion. (link)

The second Iraq war cost at least $750 billion in direct costs to the US and may be as high a $1 trillion. (link) (Obviously this is ignoring the costs of human life, etc.)

Each state in the United States has benefited from NASA spending. In 1971 a 33% discounted rate of return was estimated for NASA investment/stimulus in the US economy. More recent reports easily show that NASA spending stimulates the economy and creates jobs. (link) (This ignores the less tangible benefits arising from the US being a leader in science and technology development.)

Now is not the time to decrease funding to NASA. If anything it should be increased dramatically, and it doesn't take a lot of creativity to see where that money might come from without raising taxes. Unarguably, NASA helps the US, both in direct economic terms and in many other ways.

We, as Americans, were world leaders in space, but we have lost our vision and drive to apathy and cynicism. We build monuments on the US mall in Washington, D.C. to wars. Where are the monuments to some of the greatest positive accomplishments the US has done, like the Apollo program and moon landing?

NASA should be doing what only governments can do. 40-50 years ago this was simply orbiting the earth, the moon landing and building a space station. Now, private companies routinely send up satellites, and are on the verge of replacing the space shuttle heavy lifting and docking with the international space station. Soon private companies, and other countries such as China, Russia and the EU will land on the moon. We need to broaden our focus and be more ambitious in our vision. NASA should be conducting manned exploration of the solar system (we need a moon base, Lagrange base, a martian space station, and a Ceres base, in that order, one of the biggest problems is radiation shielding so lets solve that problem) with more powerful non-chemical propulsion technologies, like the Orion project and VASIMR, that can accomplish manned missions to other planets in months rather than years. And we should be beginning serious unmanned exploration of interstellar space, like the Daedalus and Longshot projects, to pave the way for others to follow.

This expansion would build up a solar system wide infrastructure (and economy), so further exploration becomes easier. There are many possible benefits for earth as well. For example, we could start mining Helium-3 to solve the earth's coming energy crisis.

We can do amazing things if we just decide to do them. Let's get started!

Hawaiian elephant spider

2012-01-24T05:27:00.000-08:00

A closeup of a rare elephant spider crawling on the front steps of our house!

Actually this is a pink-spotted hawkmoth (Agrius cingulata). The hawkmoth family (Sphingidae) includes some fascinating species such as the bee hummingbirds (and here) and the death-head moth from Dracula (I want to make a note about new media based on older media in a later post). Also, look at this Oleander Hawkmoth.

V was returning from the grocery store after dark so we left the porch light "burning" for her. Then M noticed this large moth flying near the light. When trying to identify it I got quite excited at one point and thought it might be the endangered Blackburn's Sphinx Moth, but it is a pink spotted hawkmoth instead. They are found in Central and South America and are long distance migrants. They occasionally show up in West Africa and Europe and are naturally found in Hawaii and the Galapagos.

Here it is parked next to a house gecko hanging around by the light, to give an idea of size.

Reading

2012-01-22T03:44:00.000-08:00

M reading a library book on a Saturday afternoon.

We do not have a TV set in the house, which is a situation I am quite happy with. I feel that TV watching is addictive and unhealthy, especially for children.

confetti shooter

2012-01-21T19:22:00.000-08:00

Red-crested Cardinal

2012-01-21T19:01:00.000-08:00

A red-crested cardinal (Paroaria coronata), tanager family (Thraupidae), outside our local library. I took a picture of it as the kids went inside to check out some new books. They are from South America and, like most birds at low elevation, are introduced to Hawai'i. Too bad, you can almost imagine them as red-white-and-blue "United States Cardinals."

1,000 Words

2012-01-21T18:19:00.000-08:00

A picture is worth...

Java Sparrow

2012-01-21T08:02:00.000-08:00

I took a picture of another bird that is quite common in parks around Honolulu.

This is a Java sparrow (Padda oryzivora) in the Estrildid (waxbill finch) family, like zebra finches. Their specific epithet, oryzivora, means "rice eater" and they are often seen in groups picking up grass seeds. They are from Indonesia where they are threatened in the wild. They are illegal to possess in California and importing to the US is banned. However, they seem to be doing fine in the wild here in Oahu.

Here is another one just outside our local library.

Pirates!

2012-01-21T07:26:00.000-08:00

I've been critical of using the term "piracy" to refer to copyright violations--illegal copying of music and movies online. This has been in the news a lot lately so I thought I would bring it up here. To me this seemed like a term invented by the industry to shape the subjective view of copyright infringement in the public, by playing the dramatic "piracy" clips over and over on DVDs etc until the public picked it up and started using it. (If you repeat something enough, people start to believe it.) Right or wrong, in these clips they compare physically stealing objects (purses, etc., which can not be replaced unlimitedly) to watching movies online (which can be made in unlimited copies). And they seemed to be successful, now in the news reporters say "piracy" to simply refer to electronic copyright violations.

Relabeling terms to shape public perceptions is a common practice. Like pushing the term "insurgent" and "liberation" in the last US invasion of Iraq, and "patriot" to refer to giving up freedoms after 9/11 (does anyone remember doublethink from 1984?).

I know full well that languages are not static and that they evolve. Words are defined by how they are used; I would like to think this spontaneously occurs from individual use up; however part of this change includes planned shifts encouraged by governments and industry (like the ones mentioned above), and use that is discouraged by governments and industry (such as trademark genericization or EU restriction of common food names). Which is distasteful when compared to the context of e.g. newspeak. Piracy, until a few years ago, was a specific crime of robbery that occurred at sea. I made jokes about the shift in meaning like; "the Indian and Iranian navies should do more about the copyright infringement off the coast of Somalia." If electronic online copyright infringement is now piracy has piracy become physical maritime copyright infringement?

However, I stand corrected in at least one respect. This is not new.

Here is a 1904 advertisement (link) stating "A copyright will protect you from pirates." According to this sourced wikipedia article on copyright infringement the use of the term piracy to indicate violation of exclusive rights goes back several centuries. Originally it referred to financial gain of the violators, but this has recently been broadened by industry to include violations without financial gain and this use of the term "piracy" has been used at every opportunity to make it more popular in public usage.

If you ever wanted to be a pirate as a child, chances are, you already are one...

HEKI

2012-01-17T05:28:00.000-08:00

These bumper stickers are very common here in Oahu. At first I thought it was some kind of brand name like a "heki" line of clothes. However, a second look at the capitalization, HE>i, made me realize it is probably a religious statement; "HE is greater than i." A search online showed that both were right. It appears to be a clothes line and Christian, and the company is based here on the north shore of Oahu. Like the Darwin fish, I can already imagine satirical alternatives popping up, SHE>i, HEGO>id, I>u, etc.

Zebra Dove

2012-01-16T10:24:00.000-08:00

Zebra doves (Geopelia striata) were introduced to Hawai'i in 1922. They are in the, what else--Dove family (Columbidae), and are native to SE Asia. Now, like the Myna, they are very common on Oahu, particularly in urban areas. The zebra doves are very calm and approachable birds. In town at times it almost seems like you will trip over them underfoot.

I remember thinking when I was a kid that a lot of "types" of living things came in "greater" and "lesser" pairs: pigeons and doves, grasshoppers and crickets, beans and peas, frogs and toads, whales and dolphins. Of course this quickly breaks down upon closer inspection, but it did seem like a natural way to classify living organisms at the time.

Update: According to Denny's "Birds of Hawai'i," p. 12, the zebra dove was introduced from Australia. The Australian "peaceful" dove is actually classified as a separate species, Geopelia placida. Are the doves here in Hawai'i G. striata or G. placida?

Sword Fighting

2012-01-15T19:35:00.000-08:00

The kids were sparring with some nerf swords out in the yard.

Chinese Rose Beetles

2012-01-15T13:01:00.000-08:00

The first flower on the 'oohai was promptly eaten overnight after blooming. Nothing was left but the calyx (green sepals) at the base the next morning. Some tiny ants were crawling around but I doubted they were responsible. Above in the middle of the image is a picture of the second flower just before opening. As I mentioned earlier the bloom is white but they open to a red flower.

Here is the flower and a close up.

Again, the next morning this one was gone, removed down to the calyx.

The yellow flowers on the nanea are also gone. This (below) was taken before nightfall and in the morning nothing is there.

I have noticed the ends of the shoots missing on the nanea, at the time I chalked it up to the pigeons and doves that have been in the backyard. They dug out papaya seeds I tried to plant and ate them and I have seen them nipping at some other plants, but now I am not so sure. There are several places where the leaves on the 'oohai have obviously been eaten.

Also, on our hibiscus plants, the flowers are left alone but several of the leaves have holes chewed through them.

I have noticed beetles crawling out of the leaf litter underneath these plants when I water them. And on at least one occasion a waiting brown anole grabbed one for a snack.

I suspect the beetles are the culprits. I managed to get a mug shot of one.

I did some searching and they appear to be chinese rose beetles (Adoretus sinicus), and sure enough they are nocturnal and feed on plant leaves. Originally from East Asia they are now common in Hawaii and have existed here for over 100 years. (Here are some links; Garden Guy Hawaii and ExtEnto Knowledge Master). According to their taxonomy they are in the scarab beetle family (Scarabaeidae). I couldn't find much about other beetles within the genus, but the subfamily, monkey beetles (Rutelinae), often use flowers for food. People in the Eastern US are likely to be familiar with their invasive scarab beetle cousins, Japanese beetles (Popillia japonica), which also strip the leaves of certain types of plants.

It appears that one option is to pick the beetles off of the plants around 1/2 and hour after sundown. Since they are nocturnal they probably wouldn't work well for anoles, but maybe they can be fed to M's house geckos.

Update: I went out to hand water some of the plants and took a plastic container with me to collect the beetles in. They climb up out of the leaf litter under the plants when doused with water. I didn't get any from under the 'oohai or nanea but quickly collected ~25 from under the pumpkin plants.(?) There is no obvious sign of them feeding on the pumpkins, but they are close to the nanea and 'oohai. I will keep collecting them for a while by hand while watering and see if it has an impact.

Uh-Oh and German dozens

2012-01-15T11:45:00.000-08:00

When we got home from the grocery store yesterday, V was putting away groceries and getting ready to fix supper. She turned her back for a second and F exploited the opportunity to explore a new corner of the house. By the way, she is a very fast crawler now when she wants to be. I heard a shriek from V and came running. F learned an important new property about eggs when they are dropped.

This reminds me of something I think I forgot to post about in Germany. In the US we are used to buying eggs in a carton of a dozen (or at least multiples of 6 like the carton of 18 above). When we bought cartons of eggs in Germany something looked off about them, then you realize there are only 10 eggs in the carton, not a dozen. After a while we jokingly referred to 10 as a "German dozen."

Myna

2012-01-14T20:08:00.000-08:00

Common Myna (Acridotheres tristis) birds, in the starling family (Sturnidae), are very common in urban areas here on Oahu. I snapped this photo in front of our local grocery store. They were introduced from India in 1865 when Hawai'i was a unified kingdom. In India mynas appear in classical Indian literature. Some mynas can talk as in this video.

'Oohai

2012-01-12T19:43:00.000-08:00

I also planted an 'Oohai (Sesbania tomentosa) in the back yard. The 'Oohai is endemic to Hawai'i and is federally endangered; there are only 2,000 - 3,000 in the wild. Today when I got home I noticed the plant had bloomed! They have grey-green leaves and before the flowers open they are white, but after opening they are bright red.

In this closeup you can see a white bud to the left behind the red bloom on the right. If they form seed pods I will try to collect and germinate the seeds. Like the Nanea in the last post these are also Fabaceae (bean family) plants. However, I have no idea if they are edible or not. Another plant in the same genus, the rattlebox (Sesbania drummondii) found from Texas to Florida, is poisonous to livestock; however, danchi flowers (Sesbania bispinosa) are eaten as a vegetable in Thai and Vietnamese cooking.

Nanea

2012-01-09T18:53:00.000-08:00

Part of the back yard, including a steep bank, is in dire need of erosion control. One of the first things I did after moving in to our current house is plant some different plants in the back yard to see which ones grew well. One of these is the nanea plant (Vigna marina); a spreading legume (Fabaceae, bean family) vine that fixes nitrogen in the soil and helps other plants grow. Nanea is in the same genus as black eyed peas (Vigna unguiculata) and the mung bean (Vigna radiata). It is native to Hawai'i and is also found on tropical islands around the world. According to "Tropical Legumes: Resources for the Future," p. 37, the tubers are roasted and eaten in northern Queensland, Australia. It is usually found near the beach and is very tolerant of dry sunny conditions. It is also the only plant that seems to be doing well on the dry bank. It is actually growing and spreading since I planted it.

It is putting out two longer vines that are growing up behind the fence, which is hard to see in the picture above. Today I noticed that it had started flowering. Below is a picture of the yellow flower. This can be a sign of stress in plants but I am hopeful.

Scribble-bot

2012-01-08T14:06:00.000-08:00

Things never turn out as planned. I picked up a small $1 vibrating motor (the kind that makes cell phones vibrate) and a paper thin silicon wafer solar cell. I was going to hook them up according to something like the bristle bot over on the "get your mess on" blog, but so that the creature vibrated and moved in sunlight. (The first robot I made, when I was in 5th grade, was with an electric motor, a solar cell I ordered out of a magazine, a cardboard base, double sharpened pencils (for axles), glue, tape, rubber bands and plastic wheels; it ran in light and stopped in shadows; like a cockroach.) However, this time ~30 years later, the silicon promptly shattered when I tried to solder wires to the + and - sides of it. I picked the largest remaining piece and tried to heat it as little as possible to solder but it shattered again. So, for now, that's all for the solar component. I still had the vibrating motor, so I hooked it up to a 1.5 V AA battery, and rubber banded them together. It vibrated and slid around on the table top. I needed something to add to it. I thought about the toothbrushes we had ... but then remembered something about a drawbot (on Teacher Tom's blog that referenced "get your mess on", and at "Filth Wizardry" that commented there). So I used more rubber bands to make a little pencil tripod...

Above you can just see the vibration motor under the AA battery which is banded to the pencil tripod.

Another view.

T pointing out the rabbit ear configuration.

I cut out a rectangle of cardboard and taped a sheet of paper to the back. The cardboard is to keep the vibrodrawbot from going off the edge of the sheet. It ran for a while a scribbled out a design.

At the end we had a masterpiece, already framed to hang up on the wall! T was unimpressed, he said "so basically you made a robot that can't do anything but scribbles; even [F] can do that."

Undeterred I am thinking of future modifications. An on/off switch, pens in different colors, ...

First Words!

2012-01-07T06:49:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, on Old Christmas (Jan. 6), F said something!

F is 9 months old now and has been making all kinds of noises, most of them seem to be random. However, yesterday she was playing with a paper towel roll that was standing up on its end; she knocked it over and made a noise. I didn't recognize it as a word so it didn't register right away, but it was fresh in my "sound memory." A few minutes later she was playing with the pots and pans in a cabinet in the kitchen. One fell out on the floor and she made the same sound again, "uh-oh." Only then did I make the connection and realize she had said something that was appropriate to the context. V was at a job training/interview session all day (so I was home in charge of the kids, but men taking over household work is also a tradition on Old Christmas in Ireland) and I texted her right away to tell her what had happened.

VOG

2012-01-05T10:53:00.000-08:00

We had a lot of vog on the third, which I am told is common this time of year. It sounds like the name of a character in a bad science fiction film. However, vog is a combination of "volcanic" and "fog." (Like smog is a combination of "smoke" and "fog.") It is possibly the shortest portmanteau word (combination words like liger). It is formed from sulfur oxides, from volcanic gases released on the big island, reacting in the air. It creates an acidic aerosol but we didn't notice any problems breathing it. In the picture above part of a hillside is in the foreground. At the lower edge you can see the shore. Normally the ocean horizon is visible midway up in the distance but it is completely obscured here.

Here is a view with less vog for comparison above and an even clearer day below.

T's acting skills

2012-01-05T10:27:00.000-08:00

V, F and I ran to the store and when we returned T met us at the door with a big bruise on his forehead! Apparently there had been an accident with his new punching bag...

Actually, he put the bruise there with red, yellow, black, green and blue markers while we were away!

Brushless Motor

2012-01-03T20:28:00.000-08:00

I redesigned the motor we made earlier. I figured the brushes were creating a lot of friction and keeping its top speed down. I wound four new coils onto spent wire spools, 1,000 wraps each of 32 AWG enamel wire, and mounted the new coils around the bottle with the magnets taped to it.

The magnets are mounted 90 degrees apart (or as close as I could get them to 90 degrees using the pattern printed on the bottle). If the electromagnets were small enough I could put them 22.5 degrees apart within a 90 segment and pulse them in a row.

However, they wont fit this close together, but I can place them around the full 360 degrees in multiples of 22.5 degrees +/- 180 or 90 degrees--in other words 67.5 degrees--and if I get the right placing it will work the same way (with, in this case, lots of tweaking and taping).

(Originally I tried to do this with three coils in multiples of 30 degrees, which in theory should work, but it was too sensitive to the placement.) In this second case the magnets are pulsed in the opposite direction from the way the rotor turns. I hooked up a controller and wrote a short program to drive the motor. The LEDs on the breadbord indicate which coil is powered and to what degree. It worked better to move adjacent coils up and down in voltage in a triangle wave pattern to trade off the rotor.

Here is a code snippet to give an idea.

All I had at the time were some PNP transistors to hook it up so everything is "drawkcab". A "HIGH" signal means "LOW" voltage, etc. I need to clean up the code by putting the pins in an array and having a single loop. I am also thinking of using a smoother sine wave function to trade the rotor between coils and increase the voltage to the coils (currently it is running on 5 volts off the controller board, but the control of the rotor is very loose). One surprising side effect, as the power is adjusted along the triangular wave the board can not do a true analog transition, but approximates this by varying the pulse of an on/off signal very rapidly, this causes the magnets on the bottle to vibrate and produce sound. The motor "sings" as it turns. Also, contrary to my original goal, I can not get to high speeds with this setup, but I can turn the motor as slow as I like, pause for as long as necessary, and easily reverse direction, kind of like a step motor, which gives me some ideas for applicaiton if I can build a more rigid structure, run it with more power, and gear down for a mechanical advantage without too much friction.

T's Birthday

2012-01-02T08:55:00.000-08:00

T is 13 years old now!

V took him to a Godzilla film festival where he got to see a classic Godzilla film he hadn't seen yet.

After that they went to a Kung Fu school for a free lesson.

Meanwhile I had the girls at home. We played with M's perfume kit and wrapped presents for T. Also, M made a gift house for T in minecraft.

Here M is making up memory cards (out of aluminum foil and coffee filter paper) with different smells to help train your sense of smell. They are arranged on a grid and you pair matching smells together (like the concentration game but without flipping cards over, just from smell memory).

After T got home he opened his presents which included a robot kit, some Lego sets and a reflex punching bag. Then T and M played minecraft for a while. Later they had strawberry shortcake for a birthday cake. Here are pictures of T playing with the bag.

He is being goofy for the camera in the last picture.

New Year's Dinner in Hawai'i

2012-01-01T21:14:00.000-08:00

In our family it is traditional to have pork (preferably hog jowls, but we haven't found that in stores in years), greens (preferably collard) and black-eyed peas for New Year's Dinner for luck in the new year. The greens represent making money and the peas coins. We couldn't find some of the ingredients so we made a twist on the recipe this year. V cooked pork laulau. It has pieces of pork, wrapped in taro leaves (for the greens), in turn this is wrapped in Ti leaves for cooking. Below you can see the laulau placed on foil with holes in it for steaming from the pot of water below. Also, we could not find any black-eyed peas so we used black beans as a substitute, which can be seen cooking in the pot at the rear.

The ti plant (ki in Hawaiian) was spread across the Pacific and brought to Hawai'i by the Polynesians. It is used for lots of items in traditional Hawaiian culture and planted next to a house today for good luck. The people that rented our house before us, that I met briefly, were Native Hawaiian and left a ti plant for us in a pot. I planted it in front of the house below.

AM radio check

2012-01-01T16:43:00.000-08:00

I was up last night from all the fireworks and commotion. I read that AM radio travels further at night by skywave so I checked what kind of reception I could get with the radio in our van, and also as a future check for our homemade radio reception. Here is a list of the radio stations in Hawai'i. And here is a site that will give the coordinates of the radio towers. I was able to tune some kind of signal from all the AM stations on the islands except for one, KHLO in Hilo on the big island. Many of the stations in Maui and on the big island were not intelligible. However, I was able to tune in one station from Maui that was clear, and two stations from Kaua'i that were clear. Here is a map (click for a larger image).

Icons in black are stations I picked up with the foxhole radio (during the day). Blue are stations with clear reception from the van radio at night. Red are stations with unintelligible reception on the van radio.

One station was unusual because it only had a three letter call sign, KGU. I looked it up and KGU is Hawai'i's first and oldest radio station. It went on the air in 1922. It was used as a homing beacon by Fred Noonan (of Amelia Earhart fame, he was the navigator on their around the world flight when she disappeared) in survey flights of the Pacific in 1935 and by the Japanese in 1941 to lead them to Pearl Harbor at the beginning of WWII for the US.

As an interesting aside, the first attempt to fly to Hawai'i was made by John Rodgers in 1925. The plane landed in the sea and he had his crew make sails from the wings. He sailed for 9 days and made it to Kaua'i.

One surprise was a signal at 1700 kHz. It was borderline intelligible. The signal would get stronger then fade into static then come back. At one point I clearly heard "ESPN Radio." The nearest station broadcasting at 1700 kHz is in Mexico at the Tijuana border, XEPE-AM, and sure enough it broadcasts ESPN sports radio. I also read that AM stations at higher frequencies are more likely to have long distance propagation. It is 2,600 miles away. This is equivalent to picking up the same station in Tijuana from Quebec City, Canada.

View Larger Map

In fact here is a post about picking the station up from Ottawa, Ontario.

Joule Thief

2012-01-01T15:33:00.000-08:00

The kids and I are doing some more battery experiments (briefly mentioned in an earlier post). We have been using copper pennies, aluminum foil, felt, wire and diluted vinegar in old film canisters. We can generate a few volts but so far have not had any luck powering anything off of them. To try to convert the output to a higher voltage I made a joule thief pictured below. The name is a play on Jewel Thief and Joule as a unit of energy. It "steals" extra energy from the battery.

It has two wires wrapped around an iron (ferrite) ring (although a bar would also work) and two ends are connected to a transistor (one via a resistor). It sets up an oscillation which boosts the voltage to a higher level for part of the time. The key to understand it is that as the current flows from the transistor to the coil, a magnetic field increases in the iron, which causes a current to flow in the second coil, which gives positive feedback to the flow of current from the transistor. So the flow of electricity builds in the circuit. However, voltage is only produced in the second coil when there is a change in the magnetic field. So when the current begins to max out the secondary voltage drops, which again due to positive feedback lead to a very rapid decline of current in the system and, because the magnetic field is changing again, a sharp spike of voltage is the opposite direction from the second coil (from the collapse in voltage in the first coil). This quick pulse of voltage is higher than what is in the original battery and can light the LED. The circuit is trading continuous lower voltage for brief moments of higher voltage. (This is similar to the mechanical action of a Shishi odoshi, a Japanese garden fountain that slowly builds in potential then snaps back to the beginning state making a loud "deer scaring" noise.)

In the picture above it is powering the LED to the upper right from a 1.5 V battery. Normally 1.5 V is not enough to light up an LED (without the voltage oscillation), the LED to the lower left is connected directly to the battery for comparison and is not lit up.

So this simple joule thief works; however, four of our homemade copper-aluminum batteries are not enough to light the LED even with the oscillating voltage boost. Back to the drawing board. (I suspect the zinc in some of the pennies is causing a problem. Perhaps I will experiment with some other metal combinations.)

Happy New Year

2012-01-01T04:08:00.000-08:00

V, T and M got dressed up and went to the radio show today (I bought them tickets as a Christmas present). They went to "A Prairie Home Companion" with Garrison Keillor which is broadcasting this week from Honolulu. I also got them valet parking at the theater so they wouldn't have to find a parking space somewhere else and walk.

Meanwhile F and I did several activities like hanging up laundry (she enjoys holding onto a clothes pin and touching it to the clothes I am hanging up while holding her) and playing with her new play tent and crawl tube.

We also have a jump on growing pumpkins for next year. We saved the seeds in the fridge from carving pumpkins back in October and planted them in temporary pots (T and M each planted seeds from their pumpkin) in early December (the first time I have planted pumpkins in December!). They quickly sprouted and we transplanted them to bare patches in the yard that need some ground cover. Here is what some of the plants looked like on New Years Eve!

There were also a lot of fire works set off tonight. Just after midnight on a whim I grabbed my camera and snapped some pictures. This is handheld in low light with suboptimal exposure settings, but some have nice effects.

Foxhole Radio Modifications

2011-12-30T12:33:00.000-08:00

I played around with the foxhole radio we made earlier to try to increase the signal. In a traditional foxhole radio a single diode is used, which cuts off half of the AC from the signal and converts it to a useable audio wave. This is a half wave rectifier, which does not make use of all the power potentially available in the signal.

I used four LEDs hooked together in a diode bridge to make a full wave rectifier where current flowing in both directions in the signal are converted to an audio wave.

Here is the actual setup.

And a closeup of the LED diode bridge.

Before with the single diode I was able to tune in stations from 10 to 15 miles away. I was able to find the same stations again, so it is not worse, and I also found three more stations, the tower of one of these is just over 20 miles away! Below is a map of the station locations I tuned in using this setup (click for a larger image).

So there seems to be some improvement. I searched for mention of this online and in forums I read that using a full wave rectifier in an unamplified radio wouldn't help because of the voltage loss from the signal going through two diodes instead of just one (these types of radios work with very low power so any loss is bad). However, my results suggest is does help. For much beyond 20 miles I am going to run out of island. I need to bring in signals from over 50 miles away to reach the next island, Moloka'i. Perhaps next I will try to increase the size of the antenna.

Christmas

2011-12-26T07:14:00.000-08:00

We had our first Christmas in Hawai'i; it was also F's first Christmas anywhere!

The night before M made some snickerdoodle cookies, and each of the older kids read a short Christmas book to the family (M read Merry Christmas, Merry Crow and T read Who's That Knocking on Christmas Eve?), which has become something of a family tradition.

Sprinkling cinnamon on top of the cookies before baking.

The kids had a lot of fun opening all of their presents. Thanks to everyone for the presents!

Christmas Loot

F didn't understand what was going on at first, but she quickly learned. She got a lot of blocks, stuffed animals and soft toys. She was playing with the older kids, they would stack up the blocks then she would excitedly knock them down. She also got a large new toybox to store them in. She is starting to figure out how to drop the blocks in the box.

T got lots of legos and construction sets, and books (he is an avid reader). He quickly set up his new magnetic dart board and was enticing us to contest with him.

M got some craft sets and a kindle! We registered the kindle and set it to charge up. Then she broke out a ceramic painting set and started to paint her own bowls.

I surprised V with tickets in her stocking for her and the older kids to go to a live radio show that will be broadcasting from Honolulu on Christmas eve. (I will stay home with F; children under six are not allowed to the show.)

M made a gift for me within the minecraft game we have been playing. It is a house filled with gold and diamond blocks, which are valuable in the game. She was very thoughtful and left a special pick inside the house to use to mine them. She made the outside of the house in a present pattern using blue and yellow dyed wool. She also put a sign next to the door saying it was to me and from her.

A gift house in Minecraft

It was a warm day, a high of 83 F, and the weather was perfect so we decided to have a picnic. We ran to the store to pick up bread and meat for sandwiches. I let F hold on to the steering wheel for a minute just before we left and pretend to drive. She let out two sharp high pitched squeaks as a laugh in her excitement.

We drove up to the north shore and had the beach to ourselves. We played on the beach, ate sandwiches, and played on the beach some more before heading back. Then we all relaxed around the house and later V fixed one of my favorites, chicken and dumplings for supper.

Looking for sea creatures in the rock pools.

The beach to ourselves. The people in the distance are T and M.

F in her pink wetsuit playing in the sand.

Drive to Waianae

2011-12-24T20:36:00.000-08:00

It is still Christmas Eve here. We took a drive this afternoon up the west side of Oahu to Waianae. We haven't been up that way yet so we did some exploring for a bit. We stopped at a place that had lava formations at the beach. It is riddeled with holes that the surf moves through.

There are crabs that hang onto the rocks as the waves beat down over them; they remain in exactly the same place between waves.

Here is the view back towards Honolulu from Makakilo. In the foreground is a lot of construction for new houses. In the distance Perl City is to the left and the towers of Honolulu are in the distance to the right. Diamond head is the peak on the horizon that sticks out in the ocean on the right.

In a completely unrelated point. We planted some hibiscus plants in the back yard. The one M picked out had two nice blooms on it today.

Waiting for Christmas

2011-12-24T17:51:00.000-08:00

Hawai'i is close to the international date line and on the "wrong" side of it. It is now Christmas over most of the world but we will be one of the last places for it to arrive. Along with our neighbors to the north the Aleutian Islands and French Polynesia to the south we are at UTC-10:00. Our closer neighbors to the south, Kiribati, moved to the other side of the date line in 1995 and have been celebrating Christmas all day now. The only ones behind us are one hour later in UTC-11:00, they are American Samoa and Niue.

While we are waiting, below is a short video clip T pointed out to me. (Don't worry, everyone is OK.)

Our 2011 Christmas Tree

2011-12-24T14:10:00.000-08:00

Here is a picture of our Christmas tree with presents. If you look closely you can see our ornaments. We have a Christmas pickle, a surfing Santa, a red shiny ball and a snowman M made yesterday out of plastic and cardboard. Below the tree is our Christmas light setup. I added a potentiometer (variable resistor) to adjust the rate the lights blink by turning the dial, also there are now 10 LEDs. It is powered by a 9 volt battery hidden behind the tree.

Winter weather and random catching up

2011-12-24T02:02:00.000-08:00

I can't believe it is almost Christmas; we noted the solstice passing two days ago. The weather here has cooled slightly and is a bit more windy and rainy compared to a few months ago. We are living on the dry, leeward, side of Oahu. There are actually nopales (Opuntia cactus) growing here and there wild. The grass in our yard was dry and brown but with the increase in rain lately it has started turning green and growing. I took today off of work and T and I did some yard work to cut the grass and weeds. Then I put both T and M to work to collect bits of trash out of the yard. (We live in a densely populated area and small pieces of plastic can blow around and accumulate.) Each day I have been watering some plants we have planted and I was worried about how dry it has been, but this increase in rain and cloudiness has helped a lot.

We have adjusted a lot to the temperatures here. When I say the weather has cooled this means it gets down to about 70 F before sunrise, perhaps in the high 60s. We were laughing at ourselves when V said she was cold in the morning and I checked to see what the temperature was. A year ago this would have been unbelievably warm.

We use a clothesline in the back yard to dry our laundry. Now that it is raining intermittently this would seem to be a problem, but if we don't get the clothes off in time the rain quickly clears up and they dry right out again. A couple of times we have had heavy downpours, but so far the rain here has never lasted long.

We drove around last night to look at the lights and decorations people have put up. V and the kids went out again tonight to have another look. There were several barges from the west coast that came in a month ago carrying Christmas trees. They were selling like hotcakes at some of the stores around here. We put up a small Charlie Brown tree for fun. Next year I would like to decorate a small palm tree with lights.

I programmed our microcontroller to blink a series of different colored LEDs in various patterns as a Christmas decoration. I tried to teach the kids how to count in binary numbers while doing it, but they seemed more interested in the "Knight Rider" pattern as the light sweeps back and fourth. Here is a picture of the lights with the system hanging up from a hook on the wall and running off a 9 volt battery.

Here is part of the source code that flashes the lights in a binary integer series.

There is a potential bug, the interior for loop should start with "count=(LEDnumber-1);" to make it more general.

In other news, V earned her first paycheck in years! (She could not work legally in Germany because she was not an EU citizen.) It was just a one time thing, but every bit helps. She got paid to ... sleep! She was a guinea pig in the control group for a medical sleep study. I took care of the kids over night (we had a party!) and she got to go, get a good nights sleep while hooked up to monitors, and get paid for it! I need to find a job like that. It is too bad she can't do that more often, but V is job hunting for more permanent work.

And here is a random picture:

If you look closely you can see one of our neighbors dogs relaxing on a back porch.

And here is a picture of F from this morning. We are out on our back porch. It is tricky to hold her and take a picture at the same time.

Above is a picture of M in another project. We are trying to make our own batteries. We picked up some used film canisters from a local pharmacy for the containers and made the battery out of aluminum foil, pennies, felt, wire and diluted vinegar. After hooking eight of them together in series we only managed three volts. This one is still a work in progress.

This is a giant centipede (Scolopendra subspinipes) that is native to Hawai'i and can give a nasty bite. It was on the sidewalk in front of our house one morning.

As a final thing to mention on this update, the kids have had a lot of fun playing a computer game called minecraft lately. You can play it as a single player, but I set up a server so they could play together in the same game world (my setting up the server seemed to impress them much more than showing them how to make a motor, radio or speaker out of household parts). One one hand the game is simple, but on the other it can be very creative. You mine blocks that have different properties and you can combine them to make new tools, etc. You can also arrange things to build complex machines. I was playing with them and we made an automatic harvester and a powered rail line you could ride on in the game.

New Tires and a Petition

2011-12-22T14:17:00.000-08:00

In recent news. We had to get new tires for our van. The back ones were very worn and I had to keep pumping one up. It got worse so that I was pumping air in every few days, so we went to costco and got them replaced a couple days ago.

Also, there was a petition I was asked to sign and I refused. It was to oppose the proposed repeal of a tax exemption. I asked who was exempt and was told it was people over 65. I asked, so retired people aren't paying for public schools, and was told yes. I told her I'm not signing it. Why should the richest people not help support public education for our children? She didn't seem upset at all. I think she was being paid to collect signatures.

It frustrates me how little people value education. The most important things for the future of this country is education. Everything else, jobs, economy, security, healthcare, energy, ... stems from a strong education, if you take a long term view. Cutting education to focus on these other areas is a short term fix that hurts us in the long run.

Lego Occupy Wall Street Gift Set

2011-12-22T11:01:00.001-08:00

I thought this was funny. It is better viewed at the Slate site (may have a commercial first).

Microcontroller

2011-12-17T16:00:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of posts in a row here but what we did is actually spread out over several weeks. It's just that I finally have some time to catch up with communicating a bit.

In another project, I picked up a microcontroller and a breadboard and have been playing with programming it with the kids. Above T is cutting and stripping some hookup wire to put together a simple circuit with an input, pushing a button, and an output, blinking an LED; the breadboard is in his lap.

Above is the completed setup.

We wrote a program to upload to the microcontroller so that once the button is pushed the LED blinks our family name in Morse code. Below is a screenshot of the IDE and the first part of the program that is uploaded to the controller.

Lizard Production Gearing Up

2011-12-17T15:10:00.000-08:00

Earlier I mentioned the anoles and geckos M had caught and placed into aquariums.

Well now they have started laying eggs and tiny anoles have hatched.

Also, V has set up a cricket raising facility to produce a steady supply of food for the lizards.

Fox-Hole Radio

2011-12-17T12:57:00.000-08:00

We built a foxhole radio as another weekend project a few weekends ago.

First we strung an antenna (22 AWG) out the window to a tree in the backyard.

Then I set up a ground wire using an outlet and a child safety plug to cover it (and a lecture to the kids about the danger of doing this wrong and exactly what I was doing and why).

(DISCLAIMER - Do not do this at home if you are reading this. There are safer ways to set up a ground. Stick a piece of metal into the dirt outside in the yard and connect the wire to that.)

Then we made some coils of wire over cardboard tubes and sandpapered off the enamel coating to tune the frequencies, and hooked up a diode on the other side of the circuit (in parallel between the antenna and ground). The diode only allows current to flow in one direction, which removes half of the wave from the AM signal and allows the signal to be played in a speaker as sound waves. The sound output for the speaker is between the diode and ground in the circuit. The circuit has a resonant frequency that is adjusted by the length of the connected coil to filter different stations based on frequency. We experimented with several different diodes and coils.

In the picture you can see a zener diode and a green LED (light emitting diode) both of which worked fine when hooked up in the circuit. The trick is making your own diode. I tried a few treatments of razor blade surfaces to a graphite pencil point in the circuit. One blade I rusted in salt water and air for a few days. Another was heated with a candle, which put on a layer of black carbon on one side. Another I heated directly on an electric stove eye until it oxidized to a deep blue color. The third one worked the best and is shown hooked up (with thumb tacks and cork board, no soldering here). The pencil is held up and connected to the rest of the circuit by a bent safety pin. The contact point of the graphite to the oxidized metal surface can be adjusted until a good diode contact point is found where the electricity only moves across in one direction. We also tried a few different tunable coils with different lengths and wire sizes. The one that worked the best was an intermediate size shown here (30 AWG). The circuit is connected at different points along the coil to tune different radio stations. It was very touchy a slight movement to the contact and the station was gone. It worked better to add a capacitor to the antenna input side.

Above is the capacitor. The antenna is connected to a square of aluminum foil placed in a book. This is separated by a single page from another square of foil that goes into the circuit. The radio can be fine tuned by placing different weights on the book, which changes the distance between the foil sheets.

Here is the setup connected to our amplifier and plastic plate speaker. We also plugged it into the microphone input on a laptop to monitor and record the signal with audacity. Using an empty frequency, we were able to detect our home built motor running on another table by recording, noise removal and amplification. The brush contacts in the motor acted as weak spark gap transmitter. We were also able to get several local AM stations tuned in. I identified three of them by the call signs and looked up their antenna locations online; they were 10 to 15 miles away.

The Fermi Paradox and Flightless Birds

2011-11-26T08:58:00.001-08:00

I've been thinking about the Fermi Paradox lately while driving on my daily commute. There are an estimated 3 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. The search for extrasolar planets have found that many stars have orbiting planets. The Drake equation that Carl Sagan often quoted suggests that there are many planets with life on them in our galaxy. The Fermi paradox asks, if there are so many aliens in the galaxy why haven't we seen them already? When I was a kid I had a similar argument about time travel; time travel will not be possible, even with future technology, because no travelers are coming back to the present for us to observe. (Of course this can be a self fulfilling prophecy if an entire culture adopts this philosophy.)

The recent results from the Kepler planet hunter have been exciting. Kepler is finding a lot of planets, over a thousand now, including ones close to earth's size and planets orbiting in the "habital zone" around their star where temperatures are expected to be similar to Earth's (allowing liquid water). From these results it has been estimated that there are half a million habital zone planets in the galaxy. It has been argued that the idea of a habital zone is too narrow and that life could exist outside of this range, like perhaps on Jupiter's moon Europa. However, taking this number at face value we can work backwards and estimate the distance to the nearest "hz" planet.

The radius of the milky way is about 50,000 light years (ly) and it is about 1,000 ly thick. Treating the milky way as a simple cylinder gives a volume (pi r^2 h) of 7.85 x 10^12 ly^3. Dividing this space by the number of hz planets gives a volume of 15,700,000 ly^3 per planet. If we imagine this volume as a sphere (4/3 pi r^3) around earth and solve for the radius (r = cuberoot[(3 * 15,700,000 ly^3)/(4 *pi)]) we get a distance of 155 light years. So, simplistically, at face value, we expect the average distance between habital zone planets to be about 155 light years, and the nearest hz planet to Earth to be about 155 ly away.

Earlier this month NASA announced that Kepler confirmed the first earth sized habital zone planet, Kepler-22b. Kepler-22b is 600 ly away, but there should be many other hz planets closer by. The expected number of hz planets goes up quickly after 155 ly, because the volume of a sphere increases dramatically with small increases in the radius and the area of space around Earth quickly contains more possible hz planets. I plotted the relationship below.

What is the probability the planet will have life? Using Earth as an example (our only example), life seemed to appear on Earth as soon as conditions allowed it. Almost immediately as the Earth cooled and liquid water formed. This suggests that if the conditions are right, life is very likely (but this assumption has also been challenged). However, what form will that life be in? For 3/4 of the time since life existed on earth it was only present as single cells. Expecting life that arose independently in space to be similar to life on Earth is likely too narrow a concept. But again taking our only example at face value suggests most (perhaps 3/4) of life on other planets to only be the equivalent of single cell life on Earth. How far away should we expect the first planet with the equivalent of multi-cellular life to be? Multiplying the per planet volume by 4 to account for 1/4 of the hz planets having multi-cell equivalent life and solving for the sphere radius gives (r = cuberoot[(3 * 4*15,700,000 ly^3)/(4 *pi)] = 246 ly). So we expect the nearest multi-cell equivalent containing planet to be 246 ly away.

Is it possible to ever be able to travel those kinds of distances? Project Daedalus and Project Longshot were attempts to conceptually design unmanned interstellar crafts using existing or near existing technology to flyby Bernard's star 6 ly away after a 50 year trip and to orbit Alpha Centauri 4.4 ly away after a 100 year trip. So interstellar travel on the order of ~5 light years to our nearest neighbor stars is being seriously contemplated. Ramping this up to trips of 150 to 250 ly seems impossible but orbiting the earth and traveling to the moon seemed impossible until we did it. Conversely, after 1,000 years of interstellar travel it might be possible for an alien to make it from the nearest planet to earth. However, again by using our only example, the leap from multicellular life to space exploration took a very long time to occur here on earth and is probably very rare elsewhere.

Sputnik, the first human made object to orbit the earth, was only 54 years ago in 1957. When compared to 4 billion years of life on earth this is a tiny fraction of time, 1/80 millionth. Half a million hz planets in the galaxy multiplied by a one in 80 million chance of developing space exploration technology gives 0.00625 or approximately half a percent chance of space capable life per galaxy. To expect an average of one occurrence of space exploring life per galaxy predicts space travel would exist for (1 = 500,000 * x / 4,000,000,000) an average of 8,000 years per planet. 16,000 years to have 2 per galaxy, ... 1 million years to have 125 per galaxy. If on average alien species that are exploring space have been doing so for a million years, and we expect 125 such civilizations in our galaxy, the nearest one is expected to be 4,500 light years away (on this scale consider the galaxy as a flat disc, pi * r^2, r=50,000 ly gives a galaxy area of 7.8 x 10^9 ly^2, dividing by 125 gives an area of 6.2x10^7 area per civilization, converting this back into a radius gives 4,500 ly). Is it possible for a space faring civilization to survive for 1 million years? If so, using approximate Project Daedalus speeds (years of travel ~=10 x ly distance), they would have to travel for approximately 50,000 years to arrive here, or 5% of the age of the alien civilization. How much of space could be explored at those distances within those time frames? Perhaps this is the answer to Fermi's paradox. Life may be common in the universe but we are likely the only ones exploring space in this galaxy. There may be other civilizations exploring space in other galaxies but they are impossibly far away. Even if there are other civilizations exploring space in this galaxy, it would be easy to miss each other because of the immense distances and time scales involved.

Using the time travel technology analogy. Since other civilizations haven't already visited us, it is not possible to develop faster than light space travel (although this may also be a self fulfilling prophecy). This leads to a future vision of humans (or human machines) spread over vast distances in the stars where it is possible to slowly communicate interstellarly and travel to the nearest star in a lifetime, but it is not possible to travel between hz planet star colonies in a single lifetime. Perhaps this diffuse human existence would enhance our probability of survival, if humans were less physically interconnected what happens in one area would take a very long time to affect, or not affect at all, another region of space.

Why should life naturally evolve the capability to explore space? Earth-like life that developed on a planet would be adapted to the planetary conditions and not to space, so what kind of selection would exist for life to evolve to space conditions? Space is tremendously dangerous for earth-like organisms. (Although, a similar argument can be made for sea based life to not evolve to terrestrial life.) As a parallel, it has been suggested that birds species who arrive on isolated pacific islands may evolve flightlessness not only because there are no predators to escape from, but also because of the danger of flying and being blown out to sea. There may be natural selection on habital zone planets not to explore space, and to stay on the planet, the individual organisms that explore space are likely to die. Because humans have cultural inheritance via communication as well as biological inheritance we are able to evolve technology that is not based on individual behavior or genetic capabilities and to get around this biological evolution limitation. Perhaps we would expect other space explores to do the same.

What kind of life might we expect to naturally evolve to space travel? In its simplest sense, life is the ability to reproduce with the chance of new mutations. This can be the biological evolution we are used to, or we can imagine a complex machine that could build copies of itself, or the electronic evolution that can occur with replicating computer programs like a mutating computer virus. Perhaps our idea of life is overly narrow. Might life exist as complex electrical signals transmitting between metallic meteorites? If so what reason is there for this type of life to evolve to try to communicate (or just send out powerful signals) to unkown species in deep space? This could be the asteroid belt equivalent of single cells that we wouldn't notice unless we looked for it. As Dyson suggested, we could possibly build self replicating machines in space, but is there a reason they would evolve to travel interstellarly unless we initially programmed them to do this? These are referred to as Von Neumann Probes and it has been argued by Carl Sagan that any intelligent life would not build them...

If the distance between habital zone planets is too large to cross in a few lifetimes, perhaps in the future we could build machines that could build humans (and other earth life) after traveling to the planet (as is hinted at in A. C. Clark's novel Rendezvous with Rama). Who could then establish a civilization to build new interstellar machines--a long slow spread to the stars. Perhaps we might expect alien civilizations to also do this?

M's B-day

2011-11-20T18:27:00.001-08:00

M's had her 10th birthday. The first of the kids birthdays in Hawai'i. One of her presents was a bow and arrow set that she has wanted for a long time. I promised to take her to practice shooting it and today I fulfilled my promise. We went to an archery range and she got to try it out.

A more powerful motor

2011-11-20T11:26:00.001-08:00

We made another motor from four 3/4" x 1/4" NdFeB magnets taped to a used water bottle. Between the magnets are strips of aluminum foil to make contact between the brushes. The brushes are held onto the cardboard box frame by clothes pins. Also, an axle running through holes in the bottle was made from a coat hanger wire. At the base is an angled electromagnet (enamel coated 32 AWG wire wound onto a glued together paper spool and mounted onto a cut plastic cup). The setup is timed so that as a magnet just passes the coil the circuit is connected and the magnets push apart, then the circuit is broken as the bottle rotates and the next magnet comes into place.

It can run on only six volts but it is more fun to hook up twelve volts in series to run it faster (top picture). After running for a while the aluminum foil was almost completely worn through so we replaced them with stripped wires, which worked a lot better.

And we needed one further modification. Only using the magnet to push the bottle around means it is turned off most of the time. I added a second set of brushes to make contact at a different point and hooked it up to reverse the flow of electricity through the coil. The results in a pull of the next magnet toward the coil, then it switches off briefly as the magnet swings by, then kicks back on with a push of the magnet away.

The pull-push configuration spins the bottle much much faster than before. It will run on a minimum of 3 volts. With 9 volts it will self start (not requiring a push to start spinning). We hooked up all the batteries we could find in series and got it up to 33 volts, at which point it seemed like the motor was about to fly apart. It was getting dark at this point and with the lights off we could see lots of little sparks flashing between the brushes and contacts as it spun.

The wiring was trickier for a pull-push setup. At least two batteries are needed because the current is set up to flow in both directions, so if one battery were used for everything it would short circuit.

A more powerful speaker

2011-11-13T11:01:00.000-08:00

The signal coming into our speaker was too weak to make a strong sound. We picked up a 3W signal amplifier kit from Radio Shack (Velleman K8066). T got to practice soldering hookup wire to alligator clips to get started. We (mostly I) soldered the kit together with a 9V battery for a power source. We mounted it on a small cardboard box and added an on/off switch "to make it more official" as M said. It works! The audio is as strong or stronger that the speakers on my laptop. It does very well with higher pitch "violin" range. I played Vivaldi, Four Seasons, Winter on it and T accused me of tricking him and actually playing it off the computer speaker, it was so clear and strong. It does poorly with lower human voice range (I tried Kennedy's speech at Rice University and his May 25, 1961 speech before congress but they were unintelligible), which probably helps explain why it was such a bad microphone for our voices. One interesting thing, when I played recordings made from using it as a microphone, back onto it as a speaker it shook like crazy. This demonstrates inducing mechanical resonance from the natural way the setup tends to vibrate. One last tweak I would like to add is a switch for flipping between unamplified microphone mode and amplified speaker mode.

Pygmy Puff

2011-11-11T11:22:00.000-08:00

M took us shopping for some sewing supplies and made a pink Pygmy Puff. It is something from the Harry Potter books.

11/11/11

2011-11-11T11:17:00.001-08:00

I am told that today there is 11 hours and 11 minutes of daylight in Hawai'i. It is also the date.

In other news. There has been a lot of security and traffic restrictions with this weeks APEC meeting.

M's Reptile Facility

2011-11-07T20:33:00.000-08:00

One thing about Hawai'i, there are lots of lizards darting around. M caught several Brown Anoles and House Geckos and is now raising them in cages. She feeds and waters them and has them sorted by age. She is also making up plans to sell them as pets at the local farmer's market. If you look closely you can see some of them in the cages.

Also under the cages our new vacuum cleaner is parked recharging. It is a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. They were for sale at the local Costco and were the same price as equivalent manual push vacuum cleaners.

Mars Curiosity Rover

2011-11-05T14:36:00.000-07:00

Later this or next month NASA is planning to launch a one ton rover to land in Gale Crater, Mars next August. How do you softly land a one ton robot on a rocky desert planet? NASA put up a video and it is fun to watch all the steps that have to work in the landing. I hope nothing goes wrong.

Speaker success

2011-11-05T13:13:00.000-07:00

I mentioned earlier that we tried to make a speaker for a weekend project (and also as a part of the kids education). It didn't work at all and I figured we needed more power. We were using ceramic magnets, so I ordered some more powerful neodymium magnets to play with. We also used more wraps (250) with thinner (32 gauge) wire to get a more powerful electromagnet coil to push and pull the magnet. These were glued to two plastic plates and one plate is supported over the other by springs. When it is hooked up to a battery you can see the top plate being pushed or pulled by the magnetic field interactions. We stripped a 1/8" audio cable and hooked it to our speaker then plugged it into the computer and played a song. It worked! Sort of. The sound was very faint, but if you listened closely you could hear the audio coming from the top plate. If you touch the plate you can clearly feel the vibrations.

We also plugged it into the microphone port and tried recording. It makes a very bad microphone but it does work to an extent. You have to lean close and speak loudly. There is a lot of hissing and so on but you can recognize a voice in the background. Here is a picture of the raw recording using Audacity.

Below I've amplified the signal and labeled places where T said "testing one two three."

Happy Halloween

2011-11-02T15:04:00.000-07:00

The kids all dressed up for Halloween. Then F crawled toward me to see what the camera was all about.

We carved pumpkins and the kids went out and brought back a huge amount of candy.

Simple Motor

2011-10-15T13:14:00.001-07:00

I have been trying to start doing projects with the kids each weekend. Last weekend we tried to make a simple speaker from scratch, no success on that one so far. So this weekend I went for something easier and we made a simple motor out of wire, paperclips, magnets, tape, an AA bettery and two alligator clips. All taped to a plastic plate base. Above is a picture of it unhooked (I used small ceramic magnets to hold the wires to the battery). The coil is about 35 wraps of 26 AWG enamel coated wire. The connections to the clips have the enamel scraped off one side, so each revolution the electromagnet turns on and off repelling it from the magnets below and it spins. Below is a picture in action.

T made a motor like this from a kit a few years ago, but this one is completely from common off the shelf parts.

Palestine

2011-10-05T21:21:00.000-07:00

Why shouldn't Palestine be able to participate internationally at the UN (i.e. receive UN recognition). Israel is a UN member. Palestinians are not Israeli citizens. Palestine is a separate nation. Palestinians and Israelis are both human beings. Is there any reasonable argument that Palestinians should not have any self determination. Is there any reasonable argument that Palestinians should not have the same level of recognition as everyone else?

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

The family is here!

2011-10-03T18:36:00.001-07:00

I have moved yet again, to a rental house. Also, V, T, M and the baby F arrived and I picked them up from the airport. We also just got internet access hooked up at home yesterday.

Brown Anole

2011-09-17T12:13:00.001-07:00

There are brown anoles (Anolis sagrei) all around the house I am temporarily subleting. They bob their heads up and down and sometimes puff out their throat to display.

Americans Elect

2011-09-15T22:44:00.000-07:00

This might be interesting. The organization, Americans Elect (here and here), is already on the ballet in several states and is trying to add as many as possible. Their goal is to have a 2012 presidential candidate directly elected by an internet community. They are not without controversy, but it would be a refreshing alternative to standard party systems. Perhaps the major parties will adopt some of these ideas in the future? -To give people the feeling that they have more of an individual voice in the process.

rainbow swimming crab

2011-09-15T19:56:00.000-07:00

The carapace from a rainbow swimming crab (Charybdis erythrodactyla). Collected near Dillingham airfield, Oahu. When it was fresh on the beach, before drying out, the blue spots were very bright and contrasted.

My 9/11 story

2011-09-10T11:17:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago we were living in upstate New York. V was pregnant with M and T was in daycare. We had one car. We were running late that morning and were low on gas. We had public radio playing in the car and often listed to NPR on the radio in the mornings. I wanted to stop and get gas on the way to town but V was going to be late for work so we went straight to drop her off first. My mind was busy thinking about things I needed to do for work. I went to drop T off at daycare after dropping V off. When I pulled back out on the road from daycare the car lost power in the turn. I knew I was in trouble and turned off the radio to think quickly about what direction the nearest gas station was in. That was just after 8:30 in the morning. I drove for about a quarter mile and then the car died completely; I coasted it off to the side of the road and parked it. Then I was on foot to the gas station. I had several miles to walk by farmland.

At one point some blue jays flew over the road making their soft "tulu" call, which is very different from the harsh "jay!" call they usually make. When many people hear it they often don't recognize it as a jay call. I noticed how clear and blue the sky was. Also, one thing you see when walking along the side of the road is how many animal remains there are from getting hit by cars, which I also reflected on. It is something you hardly notice when driving. (You may wonder how I can remember these details; the chain of events was so unusual that day I wrote down every thing I could remember of what happened soon after; however, even if I hadn't I don't think I would forget.) After a couple miles the gas station was coming into sight. Before getting there I saw someone else cross the road ahead and go into the station. I went in, found a gas can, and went to the cash register to buy it. The man I saw before was standing off to the side holding a paper, but not really reading it. The attendant said that I can't bring gas into the store. (He apparently didn't see me take it off the shelf.) I told him it was empty; I ran out of gas and needed to buy it to fill it up to take back to the car. The man with the paper said if I buy the paper for him he would give me a ride back to my car. Then he handed the cashier a bill for both the paper and the can; the cashier rang it up before I had agreed to anything. He then asked me for the money for the gas can. I didn't like this but I had spent a long time walking and didn't want to turn down a chance to ride back and not carry the can full of gas, so I went along with it. I didn't have exact change so he came out a dime ahead, but it was worth getting a ride back to the car. (However, in the back of my mind I was thinking that I saw him cross the road and had not yet seen him with a car... ) I filled up the canister, paid for that, then followed the guy across the road to a driveway between a house and a storage garage. Both buildings looked very neglected and were falling apart. The guy was acting odd and making strange little comments so I was thinking he is a little bit nuts. He said that this is not really his house, that he normally lives in a much bigger house in Canada. Then he asks me what direction it is to town. This is very strange, even if he didn't really live here, how can you come out here and not know which direction you came from? I declined to go inside with with him and said I would wait there; I stood in full view of the road and gas station. He goes in and comes out with a box full of keys and talks to me while rummaging through it. He said that "she" is not really his wife that she is just staying there (I never saw any woman and don't know who he is referring to). Then apparently he finds the key he is looking for while telling me he runs a business that makes him millions of dollars and that he is just spending some time here. He takes the box back inside. I am debating just walking off because this guy is obviously nuts, but I am also curious as to how this might unfold and I am thinking that I might get a good story out of this. He starts to come out then stops and turns and talks through the dark doorway, he sounds surprised and disappears again. Then comes back and tells me not to worry about getting to work on time that he just saw the news on TV. This didn't really mean anything to me at the moment. We get into his car and start out. Before we pull out he asks me which way it is to town again. Then while driving on the road he is going very, very slow. He is also swerving into the other lane, as if he can't really see the road. Cars are lining up behind us and occasionally passing while yelling out the window at him. All this time he is talking to me about his son, he loaned him $800,000 to start a business, but he made sure he paid it back "every nickle." Then he tells me again not to worry about work, that a plane had flown into the buildings in New York and into the Pentagon and that they were on fire. Then asks me what I do, and asks if I know "how to reverse engineer vitamins." Before I can answer he asks if I know what reverse engineering is. I say yes, and he says that we should work together and that we can make $200,000. "Anyone would be interested in that." It goes on and on. I am thinking that this guy is crazy, and that he is the worst con-artist ever. I am also trying to remember what he is saying so I can repeat it later to tell people. Then he gives me a card out of this pocket and said I should contact him to come work for him. The card looks very used and I wonder where he got it from. Then he said he shouldn't have "swallowed" that dime when paying for the paper and that we should stick together. Finally we make it back to the car. As I pour the gas into the tank he stands there both criticizing me for holding the can wrong or pouring it in wrong and telling me that we should help each other out. He tries to get me to promise to contact him from the card. I just thank him for the ride and then he asks me which direction it is back to his house. I point him in the right direction and he gets in his car and watches me until I start up and pull off. I give him a wave as I go and he starts driving in the right direction.

I haven't had breakfast yet and am a bit exhausted from the walking and mentally from dealing with the paper guy. He was non-stop fast talking and asking weird questions. I decide I am already late and it won't hurt to take a break and get something to eat. I buy a paper and get some breakfast. The story I read in the paper is about a suicide bomber in Israel that is an Israeli Arab citizen. I then go on to work and tell TB when I get in that "I have had quite the morning." She asks if I have heard the news. I ask what news and then she says almost the same words the paper guy had said. That planes had flown into a buildings in New York and into the Pentagon. This was a very disorienting, unnerving point. I had discounted that information from the paper guy as crazy along with everything else he said. But now the people I worked with were saying the same thing. I felt like everyone was going crazy. I had to take a look around and ask myself what was going on. I got onto the computer and tried to pull up CNN, but the page wouldn't load. I tried another news site but even after several minutes it wouldn't come up either. This was unusual. Then our boss came in and said that the world trade buildings had collapsed, he had went back home for a while and saw it on TV.

It was clear that I was not going to get much work done that day, so I took care of the necessary things that had to get done and then walked down to a store nearby where I remembered that they had a news channel playing on a big screen TV inside. A lot of people were there and the store had made room and put down rows of chairs in front of the TV. That's when I finally saw the footage. I sat down and watched for while until it started repeating and then headed back to work. Then V called me and asked if I had seen what was going on. I remember saying that this must be Al Qaida. The world trade center had been attacked before in 1993 (which apparently everyone had forgotten about) and Osama bin Laden's network attacked the USS Cole in 2000, so it made sense. Especially at that time I kept up with a lot of details in international news. Later I was talking with other people at work about bin Laden and Al-Qaida, it seemed that no one had ever heard of them.

We didn't have working TV reception at home. I remember getting home that night and turning on the radio to hear Bush's announcement that no distinction will be made between terrorist organizations and the countries that harbor them.

In the weeks and months that followed, one of our coworkers was also involved in emergency response and was called to assist at the disaster site in NYC. Our boss was very unhappy about this because he also had a job to do there in the upstate. I volunteered to do his job until he was finished in the city.

I remember how slack security was at airports before 9/11. I saw people go around security and get on planes. I told airport personnel and they just "handled" me and didn't seem concerned. You also used to be able to walk with people to boarding, after checking in, which means anyone could get onto the planes if you traded places. And so on. That is one thing that really changed after 9/11.

The threat from terrorists was always there, Al-Qaida had been attacking the US for years before 9/11; it's just that most Americans didn't seem to notice or didn't connect the dots. The idea of using planes as weapons had also been around (e.g. Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor in 1994). What changed was peoples perception of the threats.

Another thing changed at home for us. I had a US flag flying in front of our house for years before 9/11. The only house in our neighborhood. Then after 9/11 everyone put one up. We however soon after took ours down, out of disgust and protest at the passing of the "patriot" act and other developments from politicians. (Don't get me wrong; I was all for going after Al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan; Iraq was a different story.) We, as a country, played right into bin Laden's hands. How many freedoms and moral standards should we give up to fight terrorism? Not a one.

Hawaiian Garden Spider

2011-09-10T11:06:00.000-07:00

My new species discovery is a garden spider from the Pacific, Argiope appensa. Apparently they are common on islands in the Pacific but were not found on Hawai'i until introduced. Now they are referred to here as the Hawaiian Garden Spider.

funnel cloud!

2011-09-08T09:32:00.001-07:00

I was driving home yesterday and couldn't believe what I was seeing. It looked like a tornado was off in the distance. I checked the time and it was 5:15pm. I pulled over and called V on the phone because I felt like I had to tell somebody. It grew and from where I was I couldn't see the tip of the "tornado" so I wasn't sure if it touched the ground or not. I went on and lost sight behind a hill, then when I came out 10 minutes later it was gone. There were dark dramatic clouds and it started raining. I went on home but the internet connection was down and just came back up this morning. Here is a link to a report and here is another one.

Slipper Lobster

2011-09-05T20:57:00.001-07:00

I found a carapace (part of the exoskeleton) of a sculptured slipper lobster (Parribacus antarcticus) on the beach. It is mottled purple and white. The live animals are funny looking, they are essentially oval in shape, viewed from above, without long legs or claws sticking out.

Black and White Cone (Conus ebraeus)

2011-09-04T04:46:00.000-07:00

After leaving my camera turned off for a week there was enough charge in the battery to snap a few more pictures.

Here are shell fragments from another cone snail, the Black and White Cone (Conus ebraeus) collected along the beaches near Dillingham airfield. This is also known as the Hebrew cone; occasionally the markings can resemble Hebrew letters. I think a good modern name would be the Tire Tread Cone.

I'm not sure if the three smaller fragments at the bottom are C. ebraeus. [Update, these lower three might be the Vermiculated Cone (Conus chaldeus).]

Dead batteries, Rainbows

2011-08-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

I would send more pictures from Hawai'i but my camera's batteries are now all dead, and I didn't pack my recharger with me...

However, I do want to mention the rainbows. When I first arrived and picked up a rental car at the airport, there was a huge double rainbow in the sky. Since then it seems I have seen a rainbow every few days. Rainbows seem to be very common here and perhaps explains why a rainbow is on the HI license plates. By the way, I have only seen one license plate so far that is not Hawaiian; it was from Alaska!

I have a bank account and a van now and am looking for a house to rent so the rest of the family can join me (I was in a hotel for a few days but now I am in a temporary sublet), but I am also starting a new job, so things are busy once again.

Grape Morula Shells

2011-08-15T21:15:00.000-07:00

Here are shell fragments from the Grape Morula (Morula uva) collected along the beaches near Dillingham airfield. Tiny broken pieces are very common and were one of the first shell fragments to really catch my eye because of the black & white contrast. I suspect (correct me if I am wrong) the brown and white ones are just more worn down.

Penniform Cone Shells

2011-08-14T14:46:00.000-07:00

I found some penniform cone (Conus pennaceus) shell fragments scattered along the beach on the north shore of Oahu. The cone snails have poisonous darts and some species have even killed humans, but that is rare. This species is even more interesting because it has a pattern on its shell that is very similar to rule 30 cellular automaton. The pattern reminds me of a snow capped mountain range.

East - West, West - East

2011-08-09T22:45:00.000-07:00

There are a million things I should talk about to catch up on all the news in Germany and returning to the US and so on... in time.

However, I'll just mention one thing about Hawai'i at the moment. I keep getting turned around with road directions. I'm used to thinking of West as toward California, and East as towards China. I know this seems stupid but when I see an Exit that says H1 East for example I imagine that I am heading toward the side of the island in the "China" direction in my mental map, but it is the opposite. I still need to get used to being on the other side of the earth.

In Hawai'i

2011-08-02T08:05:00.001-07:00

I am in Hawai'i now. It's a long story...

December Update

2010-12-31T05:54:00.000-08:00

It has been a busy month!

I traveled for nine days earlier in the month. I left in the dark on a 5:45am train with snow falling and wind blowing thick drifts to head for the airport in Hamburg. The local train in Hamburg did not go all the way to the airport that morning so it stopped and I had to walk through the snow to a bus stop a few blocks away to connect to the airport. The snow was thick on the ground, in the road and in the air and of course is was still dark. The sunlight started coming when I got to the airport which they were plowing to keep the runway clear. I caught an early flight to a connection in Paris and spent several hours in a layover there. There was snow on the ground in France also, which seems strange to me as I always picture it as warm. The flight was delayed an additional hour (which is not bad as air travel usually goes), and we were back in the air as it started getting dark again. We flew directly over Palma, Mallorca Island in the Mediterranean, then flew over Algeria. I could see the lights from cities near the coast but as we went over the Sahara I also saw clusters of lights out in the desert that seemed to shimmer. I sat next to a woman on the plane that worked with UNESCO to try to preserve a mosque in Djenne (the largest mud/brick structure in the world). Finally close to midnight we landed at the airport near Bamako, the capital of Mali. I showed them my visa for Mali (which was down to the last minute to get in Germany being a non-EU citizen ... paperwork). There were people playing scams at the luggage pickup ("I saw your friend waiting for you outside." What is your name?" "I will go tell them." If you say your name they will say yes, it is them... and you end up being pressured to take a taxi with their "friend" ... all stuff I am used to traveling in Africa before. It is easier to not get started in conversations with these guys and they move on to the next one.) Outside there was a swarm of crowded people trying to get your attention and you have to be very careful about pickpockets. I got through them. Got in a taxi to the hotel. Then we're off to downtown Bamako. The night guard at the hotel lets me in through the gate, but before I leave I get the taxi drivers phone number for a trip back to the airport at the end of the journey. Then I get to my room with a mosquito net covered bed after midnight, wash up, and try to sleep. It is warm! and I traveled here with a coat and heavy clothes on, the winter coat I had to carry folded under my arm from the airport. I can't sleep of course so I wash my clothes in the sink and hang them to dry on a clothes line on the balcony. I listen to cars and motorcycles go by and people walking and taking at night.

The next day my contact is not there but does appear later in the day (she missed a flight and was delayed getting back to Bamako). We make a plan for the week and I am off in a taxi again to get money changed, and to pick up a sim card for the new phone. Back at the hotel I try out the sim card. It connects but for a long time I am not able to contact V, so I call my brother in the US and ask him to tell V I made it and everything is fine. Almost as soon as I do that I try one last time and get through to V and talk to her and the kids on the phone. We made arrangements to ride with a missionary family in their truck to Mopti-Sevare, leaving 7am (the father/husband can't go because he needs to see a dentist the next day so I get his space in the truck). I get some street food, on the corner you can get bread and spicy meat kebabs with some greens together in a sandwich. Walk around for a bit to take the place in. Repack for the trip tomorrow. Go get some supper at a nearby restaurant (capitan fish, from the Niger, and rice). After dark back at the hotel a small gecko sneaks into the room and I manage to get a picture of it on the ceiling. There are geckos everywhere, once you start looking for them, darting up walls and behind objects.

The next morning I have my bag ready and at the truck before sunrise. We tie everything in the bed in the back. Then four adults and two small girls, the missionaries daughters, get into the extended cab and we are off. We drive northeast all morning, with a short stop for gas, dodging herds of goats, sheep and cattle that are crossing the road and passing donkey carts. We stop at the house of a friend of the missionary family for lunch. When we go in you have to be careful to take your shoes off at the door. We sit around a big bowl filled with rice and with cooked chicken and sauce on top. You eat with your hand out of the bowl. You have to be careful to only eat with your right hand. Touching the bowl with your left hand is insulting. You also eat out of your sector of the bowl, an imaginary pie slice that corresponds to your position. There is an imaginary circle in the center that is shared by all and has most of the meat piled up. You can take food out of this section and add it to your own, but don't take food out of another section. It is insulting to turn anything down and you are expected to eat as much as possible. Here travelers have a "sacred" quality and people are eager to provide for travelers because "they are close to God." It is the opposite of the idea in the US of apologizing to the host for "putting them out." Towards the end of the meal they bring in a huge pile of sliced watermelons for dessert and several older men come in to greet us. You also have to be careful to only shake hands with your right hand and your left hand can be placed to your right elbow (optional, but makes sure you don't touch anyone with your left hand) while shaking hands.

After lunch is finished we move on, it is very hot (which is a welcome change from N. Europe). We put scarves in the windows on the sunward side to provide some shade. We stop at one point to check the radiator. It has a slow leak but has plenty of fluid. One person almost open the cap and I stop them because the engine is hot, and show them the overflow container on the side to check. One funny thing is the air intake hose is long gone and has been replaced locally by a sewn leather tube. I wish I had a picture of it. The landscape is flat and getting drier the father we go. There are baobab trees and termite mounds scattered around. I walk up to one large termite mound that has a tree growing out of it and a bees nest, for collecting honey, is placed in the tree.

I send messages to V a few times with my phone but the gaps between connections are growing. We stop near Djenne and buy some snacks (I get some oranges, peanuts, and small muffins). Then I get a message from V that someone has used our bank card to buy airplane tickets a few days before (before I even left for the trip) in Frankfurt so the card has been suspended. The bank won't talk to her because the account is in my name and insists on talking to me or having a signed form faxed to them, which is impossible. V explains to them I am traveling in Africa and can not be in constant contact but will return next week to take care of everything... Anyway, we have to keep moving, it is getting late and it is dangerous to travel on the roads after dark. We get to Mopti just as the sun is setting. First we stop at the missionaries house and have supper with them and meet the rest of the family. Then there is a shared house my contact has nearby, we walk over and I am given a room. It is sort of a small compound with a locked gate and wall around the place. A small side house and a larger main house. A well and outhouse. The main house has a central room and individual rooms branch off of that with curtains hanging over the doors. There are steps that lead up to a flat roof that I thought of sleeping on because it was much cooler, but I was too tired to set up my tent. There are several Dogon living there and I greet them and have tea with them. We are sitting outside under a mango tree that has green mangos hanging off of it. The tea is fixed in a small silver pot on top of a raised container with coals in it. It is green tea and is brewed very strong, you drink it out of a tiny glass. It is brewed three times from the same leaves and they talk to each other while we wait for it to brew. They are very friendly and one person invites me to the place by saying "You left from your fathers house and came to your fathers house." Later I bring out an orange to eat and they ask if they should get someone to peel it for me, I say no it is fine, this is the way we eat it in the US/Germany, which they seem mildly surprised about. I offer them slices of the orange. They ask many questions about where my parents are living, how many kids I have, how old they are, ... which is an indirect way to ask my age. Age is very important here because it dictates a lot of interactions, such as who can be asked to do things for others. After a while I excuse myself and get some sleep.

The next day we met up with a missionary from Denmark that was visiting and all headed over to Mopti (we are actually staying in the next town, Sevare). It is a bit far to walk so we use local transportation. There is a pickup truck a few blocks away with a driver yelling to people he is going to Mopti. We get in the back and sit on wooden boards that are placed around the sides, and the back of the truck is covered by arched poles that have sticks and small pieces of boards fastened over the top. We are crammed in tight, when the sides fill up some people sat on sacks in the middle, one person across from me is holding some chickens by their legs. We fit eleven people in the back of the small truck. Finally, the driver is satisfied that no one else can possibly fit and, collects money from us and we start toward Mopti. The sides were open so a breeze came through and honestly, having a cool breeze made it more comfortable, despite being crowded, than riding in the closed bus, another option for getting to Mopti. Half way the truck slows down and pulls off to the side. The left front tire has worked its way loose, so they take out a tire iron and start tightening up the lug nuts. Then we roll forward a few feet and they tighten it up some more, all the while other trucks, buses and motorcycles are flying by. Then we get going again and pull into the bus station area in Mopti. We take a taxi through a maze of streets and end up in front of a butcher shop with a bunch of guys hanging around and chunks of meat hanging up and knives laying around. We wind our way past and behind the shop and into the house of a friend of my contact. They invite us inside (remember to take your shoes off at the front door), lay a mat and blanket on the floor for us to sit on, then bring us a large cup (/ small bowl) of water followed by a huge bowel of rice and sauce with cooked fish on top for us to eat out of for lunch. I make a mistake with the water; in Kenya and Ethiopia we often washed our hands with water that was kept outside restaurants in pitchers or brought to us before eating. I thought this might be the same so I washed my hands in the water (including the forbidden left hand) then my contact told me it was for us to drink out of. They were all easy about it however and just laughed and got a fresh bowl of water. While we eat everyone talks to each other in a mix of Fulani and French, when we finish they bring in some peanuts for us to snack on. And the host brings out some jewelry and clothes he sells in the market in town for us to look at. I take the opportunity to get some gifts to take back to my family. Afterward we walk around Mopti a bit. There are a lot of stalls selling things along the banks of the Niger where boats come in to dock. It is very crowded and people are selling all kinds of things, but one thing that catches my eye is slabs of salt that are being cut and sold. The salt is traded from the Timbuktu region to the north. I ask if I can take a picture but am told no. Then back to Sevare in a covered truck, and I make a stop in the local postoffice to pick up some stamps for postcards. Back at the house we get some dinner from town, a huge bowl of rice with meat and sauce on top, I wait for the other people to start eating and no one eats for a while, then my contact tells me that they are waiting for me to start since I am the oldest one present, which completely surprised me. So I sheepishly take the first handful then everyone starts eating. That night I pack minimally for going out to the village over the next few days and plan to leave behind as much as possible at this house (winter coat, gifts, changes of clothes, ...).

The next morning we are off again toward the village I came to visit. One of the people staying at our shared house went off to school early that morning. Before we left he was already back saying the teachers were on strike that day. We walked down to the bus area to get a ride to another small town first, and meet up with some people from the village there (they travel there on market days to sell things from the village). On our way to the bus stop we see a commotion up ahead. A huge crowd is coming and people are getting out of the road. We step off in front of a shop and watch, the crowd is yelling and marching by and I am told it is people that work at the school. They are on strike and protesting. We go on to the bus/van and pay for our spot. We pack into the back again, this time it is much hotter because it is closed on three sides (except for the back entrance). One guy that works for the driver and tied packages to the top of the bus is hanging onto the back. Part way one of the bags comes off the top, we stop and he runs back to get it, brings it back, there is some arguing and inspecting from the owner, and then he ties it back on top. We meet up with contacts from the village and walk around the market for a while. I take the opportunity to ask how to greet people and to thank people in the villages language. There is also lots of dried fish for sale, clothes, fruit and so on. We stop and get lunch, then make some tea, then load up into an old truck the village uses to travel to market, with bags and sheep tied on top, and head out to the village. We stop along the way at several smaller villages and people get on and off with their bags. Finally, just before nightfall we get to the village. It is built of mud bricks up on a cliff on the edge of the valley. There is no electricity and no cell phone reception. I am greeted and welcomed by lots of people. We walk up part of the cliff to get into town, by then it is dark. I set up my tent on a flat area between two houses (to keep mosquitoes away while I'm sleeping). Then the chief comes to visit and we all eat supper together. He seems very nice and via translation tells me I am welcome to the village. I respond by saying thank you in his language, which is a big surprise and big hit as forigners never are able to say anything in their language. We talk for a while then turn in.

The next morning just before sunrise a man brings us a rooster, held upside down by the legs, as a gift and says that he wants to be our friend. In the morning the women walk down to a pool of water in the valley below and fill up huge gourds full of water to carry on their heads back up to the houses in the village. Many of them do this with babies tied to their back and many are also wearing bright color prints. There is a long (by our standards) greeting exchange as they meet each other for the first time each day. In the houses the water is stored in a clay bowl that is covered and water is dipped out to use during the day. Many of the men head out to their fields in the valley carrying tools or working with animals. There are a lot of goat like sheep. There are two wheeled donkey carts for carrying heavy loads around. Everywhere I go the people are very friendly. Fodder for the sheep and goats is kept on the roof of open structures that also provides shade and the younger men sit on mats in the shade and talk and brew tea. I hang out with them for a while. In the middle of the day it is very hot and everyone sort of takes it easy. There are groups of kids running around and they find me fascinating and watch everything I do. If I walk toward them however some of the younger ones are terrified and run away. I search for three small rocks of the right size, and their curiosity grows, then I turn to them and start juggling the rocks, and they chat quickly with each other about it. Then I put the rocks down and later I see them picking them up and trying to juggle them. In the afternoon we walk to the next village and visit there, walking is the only way to get to it, there is no road and the trail is rocky and twists in some points so even a motorcycle would be slowed down. There was a little kid that saw us as we came around a corner and was terrified, I never saw such a small child run so fast. We greet some people in this village that my contact knows and everyone seems to be very nice and friendly. Before we leave to return a man says some kind of blessing for us. On the way back a woman gives us some huge ripe mangoes that she has just collected as a gift. When we return it is getting dark again, we have the rooster for supper over a bed of rice and talk with the chief some more.

The next morning I have to pack to get ready to start the journey back. We have some coffee and I eat a mango (by the way the day before I had the best guava fruit I have ever tasted). I brought some small gifts, one is a hand cranked flashlight that I give directly to the man that gave us the rooster. The rest I give to the chief for him to distribute. Another guy gives me a bag of small hard candy as a gift.

To get back I ride on the back of a motorcycle down the trail and past several other villages until we get to the road. There I wait in the shade on a mat with several other people next to the road. They are curious about me but we can not communicate very well because of language barriers. So I draw in the sand to explain where I am from. I draw an outline of Mali with points for Bamako, Mopti and a point for our present position. Then around that I draw an outline of Africa. Then Europe with France and Germany. I put a point for Paris. This all seems to be understood very well, since Mali was a French colony there is a lot of familiarity with France and Paris. Then I put a dot for Hamburg in Germany and explain with "Allemand." Then I point to myself and connect the dots. Of course they think I am from Germany so I draw the US "Amerique" and connect a line from Hamburg to the US. Then I talk/draw about some other countries I have visited, how cold or hot they are, and so on. While doing this trucks pass by or stop and people get on or off. At the rest stop they are also selling gas with is in glass bottles in a wooden rack by the road. Eventually I meet up with my contact and the chief and we all get in the back of a truck and ride to Mopti. There we go out for dinner with the chief and make arrangements for me to travel back to Bamako.

Early the next morning, before 6, I have my bags packed and am waiting for a motorcycle ride to the bus stop with a guy that is also going to Bamako. The guy oversleeps, I call him at 6:30 and he comes rushing, picks me up and we ride across town to the bus stop. There bags are tied on the top, including a motorcycle toed on top of the bus, and we get in and soon are on the road. There is a cardboard box full of chickens that get loose at some point and provides some entertainment as they are caught and put back in. The bus stops briefly in several towns for people to get on and off. Then we stop for lunch and I buy some sheep stew for me and my travel companion at a roadside diner. Then get a bag of peanuts from a kid selling them next to the road and we load up and are off again. This time there are two men that are arguing about the situation in the Ivory Coast (the former president refuses to step down after the election and there is a standoff, also between two militaries support and could erupt into civil war). The argument ebbs and flows with other people on the bus interjecting comments from time to time. My travel companion seems agitated but doesn't say anything until a certain point then starts yelling and goes on for a long time. Other people on the bus seem to agree with him and make comments, then he seems to get the whole bus going against this one other guy and is making one comment after another that the rest of the bus shouts their agreement with. Then the conversation is over and the original man is quiet and looks out the window. In the late afternoon we suddenly pass another bus that is turned on its side in the road and the bags that were tied on top are spilled all over the side of the bank. The bus stops and everyone gets off to go look at the accident. Then everyone gets back on the bus and we start moving again. After about 20 minutes a truck with sirens goes by heading for the accident. Closer into Bamako there are large fires burning on the hillsides in the distance to clear land for agriculture. Then finally as it is getting dark we wind our way into Bamako and get to the bus stop. Then I get my bags and a taxi and we split up on the way into town. I am staying at the original hotel and he is staying with a friend of his.

The next morning I run some errands and travel around Bamako a bit. I take several taxis between points but I have plenty of time and walk back across the bridge over the Niger on foot. I get some street food and repack everything and then call the taxi of the man that brought me from the airport. He picks me up to take me back to the airport. I check in, get through security and passport checks then as it gets dark I am waiting for the overnight plane back to Paris then a connection on to Hamburg.

It is cold when I get back with snow on the ground...

Also, in Decemebr we had Christmas, which M had a lot of fun decorating for, and T's 12th birthday. He decided to wear his pajamas the entire day and had a lot of fun with silly string, opening presents and a cake.

(I will add pictures next)

Playing with the phones camera

2010-12-03T19:45:00.000-08:00

It snows some more Thursday night and here are some pictures from walking around Friday morning.

Just outside of town.

Cold swimming hole!

Park bench.

Cars getting buried.

Here comes the sun.

Town on the lake.

You can sit outside at the bakery.

Market day.

Still Snowing

2010-12-02T07:35:00.000-08:00

It has stayed cold and continued to snow on and off (and is snowing at the moment out of the window). We drove by Eutin this morning and some sizable drifts had formed on the side of the road. Winter is a month early!

V and the kids gave me my Christmas present early this year. I am traveling in Africa next week and they bought me a quad-band phone that should work with sim cards there. This is my first cell phone and I have no idea how to use it. (I made it all these years without a cell phone/mobile/das handy.)

A photo from my new phone (bakery in Bad Malente).

Also, I don't think I have mentioned this on the blog yet. V is expecting in March, a baby girl!

Winterwetter

2010-12-01T00:45:00.000-08:00

It has snowed even more until yesterday and then the sky cleared off last night. This morning everything was frozen and it was -5 C. The roads were not safely drivable in our opinion (the roads are full of frozen slush with ice underneath) so the kids are getting a day off--I have no idea if the schools are actually closed or not. V and I walked to town to get breakfast at the bakery and the wind was driving snow dust off of roofs and blowing around on the ground. Everything is white. It is supposed to snow some more tomorrow and the longer forecast is below freezing the rest of the week. This is a very early start to winter for N. Germany and everyone is talking about how unusual it is. For one of my newer coworkers, this is the first snow he has ever seen and I think he is starting to get concerned--we had some fun teasing him that this is nothing, wait until it really starts snowing and gets cold...

Also, the kids got their long awaited advent calendars today (Dec. 1st)! They are a big deal here in Germany.

A White, Black Friday

2010-11-26T05:17:00.000-08:00

It started snowing last night and hasn't stopped yet!

Thanksgiving

2010-11-22T23:30:00.000-08:00

I completely missed Thanksgiving (although the real Thanksgiving is not until Dec. 5th this year so there is still time)--I guess I am getting used to being in Germany. Dec 5th is also a German holiday (shoes get put outside the door and filled with candy in the morning) that M is looking forward to.

We are still waiting to hear back from the new school so they can meet with our kids and see about a transfer.

Big news! V is pregnant and due in ~March! The kids are very excited and debating how they will raise the new baby. The obvious question that comes up is citizenship, as far as we understand it at this point, since I do not have a permanent work visa, the baby will not get dual citizenship at birth. However, this seems to be a moot point anyway as Germany does not allow dual citizenship in general, and she will loose German citizenship as an adult if she decided to keep US citizenship (I suspect this is all related to the idea that people should visit Germany to work but not to live).

The weather has turned dark, and cool and rainy now. The sun has come out a few times over the last few weeks but in general it has been very shy. In a way I like this kind of weather, but it would also be nice to get a break for a few days. One of the people at work brought in a crate of fresh smoked herring the other day. He catches them out on the Baltic, soaks them for a day in salt water, then smokes them and we ate them right away. I am used to smoked fish being hard and dried out but when it is fresh it is very good. From the smell of smoked fish, people appeared out of nowhere and started chatting and soon the whole table was surrounded by people eating the fish (I suspect we all also have a vitamin deficiency from the lack of sunlight and this makes the fish more appetizing as well).

PS - There is some snow falling now mixed in with the rain. The first of the season!

PPS - OK, two people from the US said it is on the 25th (today) this year; just goes to show how out of touch I am. And, St. Nicholas Day is actually on the 6th here in Germany.

Schools, again...

2010-10-17T02:56:00.000-07:00

Once again there is a problem with the school situation. I mentioned that there was a takeover of control of the school council last school year. All the current teachers were fired and there are all new teachers this year. We didn't want to move the kids again, but it looks like this is not going to work out. We met with the teachers before school a month ago to ask what was going on. It seems the the school has been split into two groups, older students that are receiving regular classroom instruction and younger students that are doing some projects but are largely unsupervised during most of the school day. Our kids are not being taught (which echos the situation we had in the public schools before). We pointed out to the teachers that our son is in the age group that is receiving classroom instructions and they said that he was not included for nonsense reasons (he didn't request it and thus was not selected in the placement decision). I asked if we had any choices about our kids education (as apparently the other parents have) and we were told no. I also asked again for a username and password for the school website so we can communicate and stay on top of events and the volunteer schedule. All of the other (German) parents are able to access the website but we have been excluded and continue to be excluded and kept in the dark. So, we are looking for another school to transfer the kids to. There is another private school that we just learned about. It is farther away, but has regular classroom structure available for all of the kids, and many of the kids from this school transfered there during the takeover, so our kids will know other kids there. We have contacted the school and have a meeting with them in a few weeks, but if there is a transfer it might not be until the end of the year until it can happen.

Name change

2010-10-17T02:52:00.000-07:00

I've fallen behind again in blog entries. A lot has happened and I will try to catch up again. Also, I've changed the title so that it is less specific and more general to northern Germany. Because of our commuting and the kids school location and so on, we really live in a region in Schleswig-Holstein, so I have renamed the blog "Norden."

In Oslo

2010-09-01T08:18:00.000-07:00

Once again I am back outside of the EU. I just arrived in Oslo, Norway this afternoon and will be here a couple days on business. After checking in to the hotel I walked down to the harbor to have a look around. The central city seems very busy/crowded compared to a lot of cities in Germany. People were fishing in the harbor. Also, on the flight up here we passed directly over the Skagen peninsula. I got a good look at it from the air. The countryside around Oslo is already hilly in contrast to N. Germany, but I am not near the big mountains yet.

V has her driver's license!!!

2010-08-17T08:05:00.000-07:00

At last! After many months of paperwork and waiting, V's test was scheduled by the driving authority for this afternoon in a nearby town (after phone calls to see what the hold up was--they were waiting for her driving school to contact them, but we don't have a driving school...). I dropped her off and waited for the results. She did great and we were both a bit shocked she passed on the first try (reminder, some of the answers to the questions are very strange to non-Germans). After the test they handed her a stamped piece of paper, she asked to clarify to make sure she passed and half the class responded "yes." I took her straight to the Kreishaus and after some waiting she was handed her new license after handing over her US one. Then I had some fun making her drive me around the county for a while. It is the first time she has driven in Germany. This is in the nick of time too. School starts back up on Monday and finally I don't have to commute the kids back and forth all day!

In Reykjavik

2010-07-19T02:16:00.000-07:00

...

In Helsinki

2010-07-17T23:14:00.000-07:00

Actually T and I are in Vantaa, Finland, a town just outside of Helsinki where the airport is located. We are on our way to meet uncle D in Reykjavik, Iceland for a much needed vacation. It is bright and sunny here in Finland. We spent the night at a hotel because we had a 24 hour layover. There is an entertainment center nearby "Flamingo" that we walked to last night, got supper and walked around. It has an indoor pool, bowling alley (that we walked over and looked into with a glass panel floor/ceiling), spa, movie theater, restaurants and attached hotel. We ate in one of the restaurants that overlooked the pool, and people on the other side of a glass wall were in the pool area ordering from the same restaurant. T wanted to see the new Shrek movie but it was only available in Finnish so we did some window shopping instead.

Back from Vienna

2010-07-05T04:34:00.001-07:00

I was in Vienna, Austria since last Wednesday on a business trip. I just got back at almost midnight last night. It was very warm there (and very warm here in N. Germany) all last week. Vienna is a nice city. Most of the time I was busy and due to fly back Sunday morning, but I ended up just missing my flight in a string of bad luck (despite leaving early in the morning in plenty of time). My new flight was scheduled for late on Sunday and the whole time I regretted not having time to see more of Vienna so I turned the situation around and went back to the city for the day, walked around some parks, ate lunch at a sidewalk restaurant, and visited the Belvedere palace/museum. The most famous painting at the art museum is probably "The Kiss" by Gustav Klimt.

The night before I could tell again that Germany had won a soccer match. At one point people were running around wearing German flags and flying them from cars etc. (This was in Austria!!!)

Germany vs. England

2010-06-28T20:16:00.000-07:00

Just a brief note about the game over the weekend. It seemed to be a big deal. You could tell each time Germany scored a goal without a radio or tv on. People would cheer off into the distance over the town. We figured it would be a good time to get groceries and sure enough, hardly anyone was driving and the store was a ghost town. I did see one woman that ran into the store from apartments across the street talking on a cell phone, then minutes later came running back out talking in the phone. A little while later we could tell Germany won because everyone except for us was yelling, fireworks were set off and cars were driving around beeping and playing music loudly. They all seemed to have a good time with the game.

World Cup

2010-06-18T01:53:00.001-07:00

There is a once every four years international sports competition going on right now that is not the Olympics. We hardly know it exists in the US but the rest of the world prepares for and follows it closely. It is the soccer World Cup (which Germans often translate into English as "foot ball.") I was in East Africa during the last World Cup and it was playing on radios, people were talking about it, and at night they gathered into restaurants/bars or whatever public structure had a TV playing to watch the games. Normally there is almost a cultural phobia about appearing nationalistic in Germany. As a general rule Germans do not fly the German flag and here opt for the regional Scheswig-Holstein flag instead. But that has all changed with the World Cup. Now cars are driving around sporting the two "patriot" German flags sticking up from each window. German flags and stickers are hanging up in random places, windows, balconies, car doors, rear windows. All kinds of German flag colored toys and wrappers are at the grocery store. At work there is a pool going following the games. Last weekend there were spontaneous car horns and yells from the town as a goal was scored by the German team. Apparently, Germany is doing well this year.

I am learning something about how it is structured. There are four groups of four teams. The US is with England (why not UK? or EU as a whole?, each US state doesn't get its own team), Slovenia, and Algeria. From each of these four groups one team will go on to a tournament for the final world cup game. Last time it was won by Italy.

The US is also doing OK. We tied England 1-1 this time around, down from beating them 1-0 the last time we played England in the the world cup (link).

---
Update, it is eight groups of four teams and two from each go on to the playoffs...I guess. I am still confused.

2 cents

2010-06-03T09:57:00.001-07:00

Here is my suggestion for the Gulf oil leak (everyone is making one, and yes, it is in the news here as well). What about a freeze lock? It would need a sleeve around the pipe before the break. Pump the sleeve with liquid nitrogen surrounding the pipe, the oil in the pipe cools down and starts to become solid, once it solidifies completely, then the end of the pipe can be cut and refitted. In a pipe the fluid moves fastest in the center and slower near the edges and at almost no speed at all microscopically near the edge because of viscosity. Immobilizing a small layer near the edge effectively shrinks the inside diameter, slowing everything down a bit more and so on. Liquid nitrogen is cheap and they have underwater robots...? Of course it would need to be over a long enough section to hold back the pressure behind it, but if they could just slow it down enough ...

Busy and behind schedule

2010-06-03T05:38:00.001-07:00

I haven't posted in almost a month. Sorry about that. I have been very very busy and have fallen behind with a lot of things. I'll briefly go over some highlights of the last month.

The next weekend after coming back from Denmark I went back with T for a day trip just over the border at Flensburg. We parked, walked over a bridge that straddled the border and were then in Denmark and could fish. We cast for a few hours but didn't catch anything, so we packed up and headed back. Still it was nice to get out.

Now that I have both my US and EU driving licenses, V has started the process of getting her German license. The person I saw was away on vacation when we went to the office and the alternative threw the book at her (driving lessons, eye exam, first aid class, driving test, ...). The woman was very condescending and asked if V had ever driven before (miming steering a wheel while asking). V has been driving for over 20 years! In Hamburg they have a direct exchange with US driving licenses (no extra testing or anything) that V checked into but you have to be employed in Hamburg. There is also another angle, if you are working for a US company in S-H you can automatically get a drivers license, so if V were self employed, ... ? At any rate something has to be done soon because if you do not convert your license within three years of moving to Germany you have to start from the very beginning as if you have never had one before. V got the eye exam done and is planning to take a two day first aid class in Kiel next week to get those parts done.

The weather has warmed and "sunnied" up dramatically. I've taken the kids on a few mini-outings in the area the last few weekends. One of these is a tree that is a local tourist attraction (more about that later), a maze in a field out of stones, and a tower on a hill where there are nice views. Also last week we drove around Ploen to look at the Rapeseed fields which are bright yellow and at their peak. Mid-May is the best time to visit northern Germany.

And, last of all, I found out that kids under 12 can fish in Germany if they are with someone that has a German fishing license (and has a permit for that particular pond/stream, ...). So T went fishing with A and I tagged along. T caught a pike (finally we caught a fish!!!)! We brought it home and he was very proud of it. V fixed big pike steak fillets out of it.

Denmark Fishing Trip

2010-05-08T02:23:00.000-07:00

Last weekend we drove up to the Denmark island of Fyn to go fishing. It is complicated and practically impossible for us to get a fishing license here in Germany because we are residents (tourists can get one however), but in Denmark you just have to buy a fishing license and kids under 18 can fish without one. We stayed in a little cottage on a vacation campground. We didn't catch anything (except that Molly snagged some seaweed that put up quite a fight in the current and seemed just like a fish at first), but it was nice to be able to fish openly and legally. We tried fishing for needlefish (which Europeans call garfish, but they are completely different from gars in America), sea trout (ocean going brown trout which can get very large), and fished some in the harbor with a flouder rig baited with herring. We were a bit too early for the needlefish. The saying around here is that when the rapeseed field bloom, the needlefish are biting, and we were just before that but couldn't go this weekend because of my job. Also, the kids got to watch a movie in English! (Movies are usually dubbed in German in Germany but are in their original language in Denmark.) And, a big highlight for me, because we were outside of Germany, V was able to drive the car for the first time and I got to ride in the passenger seat for a change!

School Volunteering

2010-05-03T22:04:00.000-07:00

The school is operating with a skeleton crew now (with the headmaster barred from entering the school). The week before last there were only two teachers Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. On those days V volunteered by staying at the school during the day with the kids and helped out where she could. I did some extra driving after school to help shuttle some kids around between activities. (I tried practicing German with them, and having them practice some English while driving, which in general resulting in a lot of giggling.) This last week some other parents came forward and volunteered. The remaining teachers have a lot of pressure on them and I really appreciate how hard they are working to keep things going. The kids split into two groups, one group worked with horses for a few days while the other group made a film at the school. Most of the film was funny and light hearted but it did contain some "angst" sections with one of the teachers "fighting evil" and with WWII bombing references, which my son told me was because the kids were worried about what would happen with the school change.

Also, V saw/heard about some advertisements to hire new teachers that the occupation adults put out. Apparently they do not have anyone in place to take over teaching, and from what the headmaster said it can be difficult to find people to hire. So this transition may continue for a long time.

Iceland Volcano

2010-04-17T23:31:00.000-07:00

The giant cloud of ash moving over Europe from the eruption in Iceland has made news headlines from all the flight cancellations, but as far as we can tell that is all. The sky looks normal here and the sunsets are not any redder than normal. There is a lack of contrails in the sky like the days after 9/11 in the US. If there is any ash that has fallen, it is yellow, on my car windshield, and looks suspiciously like the pollen that fell last spring.

Update, there was some disruption at work from the volcano. Several people were traveling and were trapped when their flights were canceled. One person spent an extra week in Spain and someone else took ground transportation back from Italy. Now however, things are back to normal.

Mars by 2035 or bust

2010-04-16T10:23:00.000-07:00

I was very disappointed by the cancellation of a US return to the moon. No one has been to the moon in my lifetime and I am approaching 40! Today Obama announced a budget increase for NASA with a plan for a manned mission to an asteroid, followed by orbiting mars and returning, then a manned mission to land on mars in 25 years! I hope very much this plan works and I will be able to see humans land on another planet in my lifetime.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8623691.stm

Paris

2010-04-09T23:28:00.000-07:00

It is April and we are in Europe so where else would I take my eight year old daughter on a trip. We went to Paris this week, left early on Monday and came back on Thursday. I planned ahead and actually bought the tickets and booked the hotel last year, then back in February I reserved boat and Eiffel tower tickets. M was very excited about the trip, was constantly looking forward to it and looked up all kinds of things about Paris that we could see while there. She had her bag packed days ahead of when we were leaving and kept reminding me of when we needed to go. I had never been to France before so it was new for me as well. Also, M was studying some French words with V, oui, non, bonjour, merci, ... to help prepare. So on Monday morning we walked to the train station, took the train to the airport in Hamburg, then flew to Charles de Gaulle airport outside of Paris (which I had transited through once before), found the train stop in the airport, got tickets to Paris (they had instructions in English for buying tickets from the machines) found the platform and train and hopped on. To get into the platform area they had turn styles that you fed the ticket into and grabbed again like the metro system in DC. Paris is a big city, we traveled into it for quite a while. We made two transfers onto different lines, following the metro map, and then emerged almost in front of our hotel with the Eiffel tower in view just across the river.

In many ways Paris "felt" more like a city in the US compared to Germany (people jaywalked, there were more minorities around, cars went over pedestrian crossings between pedestrians, streets were messier). It was almost like being in Washington DC with the tourist sights and museums along the National Mall and Potomac (here Champs-Elysees and Seine) with large marble buildings around.

After seeing the Seine and the way the walkways, steps and roads were arranged around it I recognized scenes in movies I had seen that were along it (and thus in Paris) but I had not realized before how characteristic it was. M also said, it was just like in Ratatouille.

We checked in and dropped our stuff of at the hotel and then a little later went for supper at a French restaurant with a view of the Eiffel tower. Then it was getting dark and walking back we saw them light up the tower like a Christmas tree, with blinking lights and search lights on top.

The next morning (Tuesday) all the museums were closed so we walked up to the Arc de Triomphe, then got a croissant breakfast at a cafe, and headed to the Eiffel tower. I had tickets to go up in the tower at noon. (Also, a friend of M's in the US sent her a cutout drawing of herself to take pictures of in Europe and send back. It's part of a school project [see the Flat Stanley Project]. M is planning to surprise her with pictures of Paris.)

... will add more ...

School/Spring Updates

2010-04-02T22:10:00.000-07:00

Several things have happened over the last couple weeks and as usual I have been swamped, so I will go over some updates on the highlights.

First of all the weather, right on cue, on the first day of spring it was warm(er) and sunny, the day before large cracks in the ice on the lake started to appear, on the equinox the cracks widened considerably throughout the day, every few hours they seemed to have doubled. M was excited about all the non-frozen water on the lake. By the end of the day the ice was drifting with only the edges of the lake still immobile and 99% of the snow was melted. Today the ice and snow seem like a distant memory. This far north it is like a switch is flipped, spring comes so suddenly. Now the sun is up for a long time, fields are turning green, and crocuses and Schneeglockchen (little snow bells) are up everywhere. The Winterlinger are already fading. (And I learned the German word for pansy flowers from a neighbor that was planting them earlier this week, Stiefmuetterchen, literally "little step mother") The trees are still sticks however.

OK, now about the school. We went to the emergency parents meeting. Actually the headmaster, who has barely spoke to us much at all before, suggested that we attend and pointed it out to V. In true form (for us) we went to the school, waited, and no one was there. Then V made some calls and found out the meeting was in a different town completely, so we drove there as quickly as we could but of course we were late. It was at one of the parents house and the adults were crowded around a dining room table while the kids all played together in apparent chaos. We learned along the way that this was a subset of parents that wanted to keep the current teachers (and our families made up half the kids in the school), it was a "by invitation only" meeting and were meeting to see what to do. Apparently, people had joined the school "club" that did not even have kids in the school and were now trying to shut it down. Out of respect for their privacy, because what is said here could get back to the people involved, I will not go into many details about what they discussed. However, I suspect they were suspicious of us at first (being Americans and all the stereotypes that entails, individualistic unilateral corporate military authority ...) and asked if we wanted to say anything. I told them that what was important to us was our kids, and having this school available was one of the main reasons we were able to stay and live and work in Germany; we had a horrible experience with the public school before, and that the headmaster and teachers have done a wonderful job helping our kids adjust to living here and couldn't be thanked enough for their work, and that we were very concerned about what our options would be now that they are trying to take over the school and convert it to more like a German public school. The group really brightened up when I said this and they saw that we were on their side.

A relevant observation that many Germans themselves agree with me on, one central point I see in German culture is an insistence on "the one right way" to do things, and anything else is wrong by default and has to be corrected. Also, in the US we are taught while growing up not to turn other people in for breaking minor rules, i.e. not to tattle-tale or snitch to the teacher, police or whoever is in authority. In Germany it is quite the reverse, people are encouraged to point out rule breaking from an early age and to "correct" others. Rather than being embarrassed they are proud to do this, even as adults and other adults encourage this behavior. It seems childish to us, but many things seem childish across cultures--because one part of cultural differences are the very things that children do spontaneously and adults are trained not to do (the other part is the things we are trained to do additionally that do not come spontaneously). To be fair, while to Americans it seems like Germans worship authority, to Germans it seems like Americans behave childishly in their distrust of authority. Also, Americans are more likely to trust the actions of private corporations but distrust the government while it is the opposite with Germans (trust the government, distrust private organizations).

So, to get back to the school, there is a compulsion from other people in the community to fix the school, because it is wrong, private and does not teach things like the public German schools do, even if their own kids do not attend. Identifying and removing dissidents is a part of any culture, but in this respect it is especially strong here and we are up against a central issue in German culture. Anyway, we are now part of the "resistance" parents. Some of them are very upset, after all they created this school for their children and went through the long struggle of getting it officially recognized and all the financial and legal battles over the last five years, only to have it taken away from them now. Several of them also had babies that they wanted to eventually attend (the headmaster has a one month old just born, before he was fired). At least one of them said they wished they could leave the country to raise their kids, actually one parent did move to Ireland a few weeks before (and these are German parents, not foreigners like us).

Aside from the obvious negative aspects and our concern over what will happen with our kids and school, there was a bright side. While driving home I felt good about something and realized, this is the first time we have really been a part of a group in the local community. For the first time it wasn't just us alone against the world, we were part of a group that shared our concerns that is against the system.

So the next day we took our kids to drop them off at the school. There was a huge work truck double parked in the drop off area and sure enough, "the gardener" was sitting in the truck, smoking a cigarette, and watching the school ominously. The "occupation" had arrived. I took our "resistance" kids into the school, later when picking them up the gardener was standing outside the building watching the place. Sometimes it almost feels like I am in a movie.

The mid-week V flew back to the US for a week and I had the kids on my own. Easter break is coming up and the last night of school there is an overnight sleepover at the school that the kids are looking forward to. The kids are still sad the teachers are all leaving but we are just trying to keep everything going as is until something becomes resolved. Things are going OK. One afternoon I have a nice chat with the headmaster and we worry about what will happen to the kids that attend the school. He points out a pile of cardboard boxes that was dumped on one of the walkways around the school rather than being cleaned up (the parents have rotating responsibility to clean the school) and said it was symptomatic of the problems occurring. Over the weekend I take the kids to a park and they play for a long time and do really well. It feels good to get outside for so long and let them run around. Then on Monday I go to drop them off at the school and something is wrong. There are hardly any cars there and some strange people are standing around staring at us as we walk in. Most of all, "goatee," who appeared to be a ringleader of the opposition during the school meeting where the teachers were fired (and does not have kids that attend), was standing in the road talking to the headmaster. I went in and talked to F. It turns out the opposition took some kind of additional action, and rather than the headmaster and current teachers finishing out this school year until replacements can be hired, the headmaster is now barred from entering the school, school is closed for the rest of the week, and the overnight before Easter is canceled. They are sending the kids back home with their parents. I am stuck in a bad situation because I have a job and the kids on my own until V gets back. Legally the kids can not go to work with me and we have an absolutely required, once yearly safety briefing the next day. Plus we have a neighbor that can create problems and it is not legal for the kids to be home alone... F said not to worry about it, he would volunteer and watch the kids at the school unofficially for me and a couple other parents. It is too bad that he is being fired.

V returned from the US on Wednesday and we drove to the Hamburg airport to pick her up (no more spending all day on the trains to get back and forth to the airport!). She brought back some food that we can't get here: black beans, collard greens, black-eyed peas, okra (which unfortunately was canned, you can't transport fresh vegetables), canned sweet corn!!! I stared at the labels on the cans for a while. It looked really strange to see everything, down to the tiny writing on the ingredients, written in English (and Spanish in some cases). I have been here for over two years, with only a few days back in the US at a meeting over a year ago, and now not seeing German on labels looks very strange to me.

OK, so now Easter break has started. It is not clear what will happen when school is supposed to start back up, or if it will be closed for some time. Anyway, T and I have a trip together later in the summer (part of my promise last fall to do more traveling with the kids while we lived here), but first I have a trip with M this break, we leave on Monday, she is very excited, and I will write more about that next.

Insurrection!

2010-03-16T09:08:00.000-07:00

On Monday the kids had their turn at the school drama. Many of the kids were very upset that the teachers are leaving. These teachers really are wonderful people that are great with kids. As far as I can tell it started with a kid that wrote some slogans on the bathroom wall with a marker protesting the vote. M copied one of them down and xeroxed the paper, then put a copy in each of the kids mailboxes by the front door. While T made some protest signs and taped them up on the walls and one on a stick as a sign to carry around. Other kids also made signs and wrote on the walls and overall they had a big protest at the school. The teachers allowed them to protest in various ways and said the kids were working out their frustration. When I went to pick them up M had a stick and was looking for tape for her sign to carry around. I think it is great (you can't get an education like this at a public school). The parents are having an emergency meeting Tuesday night and we are told that a parent needs to be present at the school each day until the end of the year (not sure why, perhaps to keep the kids from trashing the school).

School meeting

2010-03-15T22:07:00.000-07:00

On Friday I asked B if the kids could stay at their place Saturday afternoon while we went to the meeting and he said it was no problem (they have kids the same age to play with). We dropped the kids off and drove up to the school. In the note we got we understood that the meeting was supposed to start at 3pm but when we got there it was already underway (I later found that it started at 2pm) so we had to walk in while they were discussing something and all eyes were on us as we found a place to sit down and then people asked us to sit in several different places. We finally ended up sitting next to F who helped translate for us. We filled out some paperwork for joining the group (it is legally organized as some kind of "club") and handed in the paperwork, then they announced that we were joining and held a vote to see if we could join. We passed so that meant that we could then vote. The first part of the meeting after we arrived discussed that they had just achieved some kind of status with the government and could start receiving money from the province now, and there was an audit of their finances. The next point was to vote to release the council from legal responsibility for their decisions for a year and that all members would share responsibility, at which the headmaster objected and it did not pass. They took a break and then we got on to the big issue. Six of the parents had written a letter to the province government that their kids were not learning enough in school and there was a point on the agenda to vote on that the headmaster was not doing his job correctly and a call to look for a replacement. Then there were separate points for each of the teachers. The teachers said that they agreed with the headmasters philosophy and if the first vote passed they would quit with him because they did not want to work in a school that the parents of the children were against. Then the long drawn out part of the discussion began. Essentially it was a public humiliation of the headmaster and teachers. There was a call for parents to say what they didn't like and a few volunteered, one said that he worked in a garden and if he built something and it didn't work he took it apart and rebuilt it (this would seem like a reference to the school staff but he was referring to the children) then another guy said he ran a business building/repairing ships and a team either worked well and built things quickly or were slow and need to be fired. Then a couple of parents talked about how their kids handwriting was not good enough (what is this obsession in Europe with handwriting?), and they have been worried about it for years. My opinion on this is kids are not machines to be taken apart and rebuilt, nor to be taught as quickly as possible, and it is our job as parents to also teach our kids, especially if we are concerned about something (and especially since in Germany the kids are only at school for half a school day compared to many other western countries). I have worked hard at home teaching my kids after I get home from work, why can't these other parents also do this. Furthermore, I really like the self directed teaching style the school has. Most of what I really learned I learned on my own, not at public school. If we force kids to learn a list of subjects on a given schedule then they will learn to be told what to do and not think for themselves. If we encourage pursuit of their own interests, they will learn to learn on their own. Of course their is a balance between extremes, but the public schools (in Germany and the US), in my opinion, are not anywhere near this balance. Also, as parents we all have different skills, backgrounds and training, why can't we volunteer teaching the kids at the school to help out the teachers and give more topics to be available. Anyway, they went on and on about this and then a lengthy session devoted to changing the wording in the resolution so that it was stated and restated in front of everyone how bad a job the teachers were doing (which is also a political trick done in the US media, something is repeated many times until the majority of people believe it), then there was a call for each of the parents in turn to say what they didn't like about the teachers, which fortunately did not pass. (There are plenty of German public schools around, if they want their kids trained in that manner why not send them to the public school instead of destroying this one by making it more like the public schools and removing the option for everyone. This school was a/the major factor in us being able to stay and live and work in Germany.) Finally we got to the vote, which was called to be by secret ballot then there was a big drama as they wrote the results out on a presentation board then covered them to be unveiled officially the next minute. Both V and I voted but we were in the minority and the resolution passed 38 to 14, with some abstainers. At that point the headmaster and teachers left the meeting (there was no point in their staying) and V and I walked out with them.

The kids were very sad when we told them the outcome. Two of them have been wonderful with T helping him adjust to living here, after the first year with the public school and M is very fond of one of the teachers. They will stay to work until the end of the year but then all new teachers and a headmaster will have to be hired for the next school year.

More school developments

2010-03-14T07:52:00.000-07:00

We had a parent-teacher meeting last Thursday. I was a bit apprehensive after our experience with the public school before, but it went really well. They told us how the kids were doing at school, and areas that they needed to work on. We told them areas we were working on at home (for example I have been spending a few hours each week with each of the kids to work on math, and V has been working on reading and writing). They told us their concerns (for example, T made an embarrassing WWII reference during a fight he had with another kid) and we told them ours. I mentioned that is was very frustrating to not have communication about special activities and days the school was closed and asked if there could be an email list to announce these kinds of things. One of the teachers left and came back with a list of special holidays that are not in the official regional schedule and said they would discuss setting up a notification system. I felt like the meeting was very productive. However, the bad news came at the very end. They told us that on Saturday (two days later) there was going to be a vote from the parents about how the school should be run and it was possible that they might vote to hire new teachers. Two of the teachers get along very well with T and M is fond of one of them. After our tumultuous first year with the school system, and despite our continuing frustrations, I was very concerned to hear this. The last thing I wanted to do at this point is upset the system we have worked out for our kids with a brand new one. Furthermore, they said that some of the parents wanted the school to be set up more like a standard German school--the very thing we were trying to get away from. I asked if we could come and vote at the meeting to keep the current teachers and he said it was possible and that he would send a letter home with the kids the next day to give us more information.

melting... ?

2010-03-06T00:49:00.000-08:00

The day after the last post, we got the kids ready, drove to school, and guess what, no one was there. The schools weren't canceled due to the weather, and it was not a regional holiday in the official list of school holidays. No, the school has its own set of additional holidays that we have not been told about. We asked the next day when we went to the school again to see if it might be open and guess what, it was. So now we have a list of these additional holidays the school decided on but didn't communicate to us, and I can't help feeling it is only a matter of time until the next surprise ("what, you didn't know we had a required school trip on Saturday..."). (This is only really a problem for us, the other parents are part of a community and talk to each other all the time so they know what is going on without even trying; it doesn't occur to them to tell us and that we wouldn't know something that is so obvious to them.)

The weather, the days have really gotten longer and it feels very nice to have sunlight around again. It warmed up a lot this last week and melted 90% of the snow away. In some places the sidewalks became long trenches of ice full of melted water and people were walking in the road while some others were out chipping away at the ice to let the water drain out of the walkways. I'm sure the animals are relieved, there are places along the drive to school where the bark has been newly stripped off of the trees (from before the snowmelt). The spring flowers (yellow Winterlinger) were blooming under the snow and revealed as it melted around them. It even rained a couple times (premelted snow was falling), which is something we haven't seen in a while. The skate-sail people have packed up and left because the ice on the lake is too thin now from the melting (V saw them packing and the license plates on their vehicles were from places like Estonia and Russia). Last weekend we drove up to the beach to see the snow and ice next to the ocean, which is still an odd sight to me that I am not used to. There were roundish blocks of greenish ice that I think is frozen seawater. The snow was blown into large ridges right up the the edge of the water in some places. In one place there was a huge, deep pile of mussel shells the gulls were picking over. I told the kids we were looking for amber because no one has been looking for a while with everything covered in snow and ice, so we walked along the narrow edge of sand looking through the shells, driftwood and seaweed. In some places the sand was washed over snow so if you stepped on what looked like a normal sandy beach your foot would sink into the snow underneath. It looked odd to scrape away brown sand and see bright white snow underneath. The fjord in Kiel was frozen over and I drove as far as the island of Fehmarn where the Baltic was frozen for a ways extending out into the sea. People were out on skis with parasails pulling them along in some of the large fields.

But, the last couple of days it has been snowing off and on again.

Still snowing...

2010-02-14T01:58:00.000-08:00

After the last post "melting" the weather changed its mind and turned back around again. The lake didn't quite melt and is now frozen solid again. People were walking around on it yesterday and the sail-skaters were out. It has snowed every day for many days (it is snowing lightly now) and now everything is bright white again with an overcast sky. On the way back from dropping the kids off at school there is a point where I drive up a hill with two fields on either side. At the beginning of the hill the horizon (black tree outlines in the distance) is blocked and the gray-white fields blend into the gray-white overcast sky. It looks as if the road extends into a whiteboard of nothingness and it is an odd feeling to drive into it.

We didn't even attempt to drive to school earlier in the week but on Thursday we didn't get the call in the phone-tree that school was canceled and the roads looked passable, at least here in town so we headed toward school. The roads got worse and about half way I decided it was too dangerous and turned around and came back. Later at work I found out schools were canceled anyway from coworkers. This is a frustrating thing that keeps happening with the school, there is a lack of communication, we asked to be informed and to be on the list to be called when school is canceled but for some reason we keep getting skipped over. Next case in point, on Friday M was under the weather but I took T to school. At the school other parents were carrying in trays of baked snacks, the kids were dressed up, ... something was going on. It turns out that there was a costume party at the school for Karnival (kind of like Mardi Gras in the US). All of the other parents "just knew" there was a party and yet again, despite our asking to be informed, no one bothered to tell us. This kind of thing also extends to work. A couple weeks ago there was some excitement from the secretary asking for my tax card (Lohnsteuerkarte), I told her I had already given it to the office when I got it in the mail almost two years ago, 2008. She said no she needed the one for this year, 2010. Is there a different one now? Finally she told me that a new one comes each year to some address (I'm still not clear if it is work or home) and it needs to be turned in to her office. So I went to the Rathaus (courthouse) and got a "replacement" one for 5 euros. It is a mystery to me how last years 2009 tax card got turned in unless is was sent to where I work and just skipped over me. At any rate, time and time again I have asked at work if there is anything I need to do that I wouldn't know about as an American, and even now, two years later, I am finding out things each day that I should have done or are important to know and people are very surprised that I didn't know about them despite admitting that they never told me about it. I hear about similar things happening to foreigners living in the US. Somehow, things that people grew up knowing, or have known for years, don't come to mind when foreigners ask about what they need to do; and we are surprised. Once again, the stereotype that Europeans are more aware of the dynamics of people coming from different cultures than Americans doesn't seem to hold up in my experience. I still find myself explaining to Germans that we don't do things the same way in the US and that's why I don't know about it.

Sorry to be negative about this, but it is a reoccurring theme that just won't go away. In addition to the Lohnsteuerkarte I just found out the rules about a "Sozialversicherungsausweis" card that apparently for the last two years I was supposed to have with me at all times in case the authorities checked--and again surprise from the Germans that I wasn't born knowing this. This will keep happening with each new foreigner working here if someone doesn't do something about it, and no one will do anything but me, so I am putting together a guide of things people should know but that no one will tell them when they come to live and work here.

To change to a brighter note, the snow has made the animals much easier to see. Near the school there are deer and boar tracks everywhere. Last week, on the way back from school a huge herd of deer was right next to the road with a pheasant looking for food on the very edge of the road where the snow was pushed back, I turned around and went by them again slowly so the kids could get a good look. A white deer was standing right in the front (they are bad luck, "pech," to kill according to the local hunters).

Also a side note before I forget, the hunters have a specialized hunting vocabulary that is mixed with Plattdeutsche, deer are something like Rotwild (red-wild) and boar are Schwarzwild (black-wild).

Melting

2010-02-05T05:56:00.000-08:00

It is finally warming up and the sun is out. The temperature on the digital thermometer in our car this morning didn't have a negative sign on it (and didn't appear to be broken). School is back from weather cancellations (it is the first time in decades that school has been canceled for the weather according to the locals). I've been driving the kids to school again in the mornings and have a fun time getting the car over the ice into and out of the parking space (lots of wheels spinning and rocking the car, reverse-1st-reverse-1st... to get out). The roads a pretty clear now and the snow is compacting into hard, dirty, ice everywhere else; it really reminds me of upstate New York this time of year. Pools of water are appearing out on the lake. The coots will be happy for the lake ice to melt. When it froze completely over there was no way for them to dive to escape the hawks. They huddled together in a bunch out on the ice and hawks were taking turns dive bombing them. At one point a week ago in desperation they left the lake completely and went over the snow into town in a group and hung out in front of the grocery store, where people were going in and out, to escape the hawks (normally coots are very shy of people). There are a lot of dead coots and feathers in the parking lot between the lake and the grocery store now from the hawks. V and M took some bread to the ducks a few times over the last week. They were desperate and climbing all over each other to get to the food.

Two years!

2010-02-01T15:29:00.000-08:00

Today it has been two years that I have been living and working in Germany.

Ice fishing

2010-01-28T21:43:00.000-08:00

A lake near town had ice thick enough to drive a car on, so some guys took some axes and fishing rods and tried out ice fishing Wednesday afternoon. Only a few perch were caught.

German school refugees

2010-01-28T21:18:00.000-08:00

Here is an article V pointed out to me about a German family that wanted to homeschool and had to get political asylum in the US to do it.

http://www.hslda.org/hs/international/Germany/201001260.asp

Some quotes from the article:
"rather than being concerned about the welfare of the children, the government was trying to stamp out parallel societies" -- I see this kind of sentiment a lot here in mainstream Germany. This also applies to unpopular religious organizations (not Catholic or Lutheran but "cults" like Jehovah's Witnesses who, in contrast, are not allowed to talk about their religion at work). Germany seems to want to force people to believe the same thing, and not have any dissenters, and is perusing this on the religious and education ends.

“This is simply about the German state trying to coerce ideological uniformity in a way that is frighteningly reminiscent of past history. Homeschooling is a growing social movement all over the world, and the Germans want to stamp it out based on a fabricated notion that homeschoolers are a ‘parallel society.’" -- ...

Also, there is the discriminatory side of this against non-Germans (not in this linked article). Turkish children suffer from lower expectations and marginalization, and we have heard first hand that teachers have "their own" kids to teach (German) and don't have time to teach "our" children (not German) even though they are in the same classroom.

Also, someone I know from Poland has privately told me that the only reason they will have to leave Germany in the next few years is because their children are getting close to school age and they don't want them in the German schools.

There are lots of things I like about living in Germany, but ignoring the problems won't help them go away. The public school system has been our biggest problem in living here and the " coerc[ion of] ideological uniformity" is frankly scary.