A Swede in America

Florida

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 02:55:04 GMT

So i'm on conference on Sanibel Island in Florida. I have seen pelicans and dolphins so far... plus some physics talks. The hotel is at the beach and you can actually see the ocean from lecture hall which is a bit distracting.

MSU talk

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 03:36:11 GMT

I drove up to East Lansing this morning and gave a talk at MSU. I think it went well. At least there where no booing and rotten tomatoes... There was a pretty good discussion. I'm staying here until tomorrow to have some more discussions.

update

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 03:36:28 GMT

Sorry for not posting lately. I guess I just did not feel like it.
I have been in a applying for jobs kind of mode. I have two job interviews in Germany coming up at the end of the month. I will also go to Dresden to see my old institute when I'm in Germany. I will basically spend a week traveling around my old home country.
I'm going to East Lansing tomorrow to have some discussions with a couple of experimentalist and give a seminar at Michigan Sate University.

The front fell off

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 04:00:54 GMT

http://view.break.com/352629 - Watch more free videos

La Linea

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 19:49:51 GMT

One good thing about youtube is that you can find all your childhood favorites. I always loved this one. The guy is so bad tempered and i always wondered if he is actually speaking real italian or just some made up language...

Well wikipedia answered that question...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Linea_(TV_series)

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 03:51:46 GMT

New Hampshire must have best motto of any state. 'Live free or die.' I wish I had cool sounding motto like that.
I still have some logical issues with it. The 'or' I guess can be an inclusive or an exclusive 'or'. If it's exclusive we will either live free or die but not both. Since we are all going to die I guess it would mean that there is no way to live free. The alternative is that it is an inclusive 'or'. Since death is still certain all it really say is 'Live free or not'.
I guess the lesson we should all learn from this is that you should not apply your university education in logic to state mottos.

back again

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 03:22:34 GMT

I haven't posted very regular lately but here a update. I went to two conferences in Connecticut and New Hampshire. I met some old friends (not that old really) and some new ones. I gave a talk listen to some more and played some football. It was all pretty nice. Before I went home I stayed two nights in New York. It's always nice to come to big city. I went to some museums, I watched people play football in the street (I'm not kidding) and I ate some weird ethiopian food.

After that I went to Indianapolis to watch F1 race with some friends. It was hot! And laud! Formula 1 cars where impressively fast. Here is some photos.

F1 Indinapolos

Apart from that I went scuba diving this weekend. We went out on Lake Michigan and dived at some wrecks. A old tug boat from 1890 and a slightly newer barge. The skipper on the boat we where on had some trouble locating one of the wrecks we where originally supposed to dive on but apart from that it was some nice dives.

Time go watch the Colbert Report TV.

Diving & compilers

Thu, 17 May 2007 04:25:37 GMT

I did my first dive of the year today. It wasn't a great dive only ok. There where several small problems. The most important one was that I had to little lead and there for I tended to float to surface as soon as we got to shallow water. So I wanted to go to a bit deeper water but my dive buddy thought it was too cool down there... I guess I have to get some more lead for the next dive. I guess it was just a typical 'first dive of the season' kind of dive. At least we saw some striped bass.
I did some benchmarking of compilers today at work. It turned out that the code I was testing ran faster with the intel compiler without optimisation than with the portland group compiler with optimisation...

Snow and Go-cart

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:22:17 GMT

Yesterday I went batting practicing and go-carting with my physics softball team. It was great fun. They had these batting cages where you could practice hitting balls throuwn by . There where cages for both softball and baseball at different speeds. (Different speeds of the ball that is.) The 85 miles/hour looked really scary. I spend most of my time in the softball cage. Afterward we drove their go-cards for (short) while. One should really wait 15 minutes after driving a go-cart before you get into your own car to drive home...
Winter came back today. Yesterday was warm and sunny. I could sit outside yesterday evening at 10 in a t-shirt. Today its snowing most of the day. Weird american weather!

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 01:14:47 GMT

I found this really funny!

Softball

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:40:58 GMT

So I joined the the physics department softball team. Which unforgivably is called The Eigenvalues. I suggested that we should all have the same number on our shirts and call our self The Degenerate Eigenvalues. I thought that was very funny but some how I was in a minority. Anyway we had our first training session on Thursday. Surprisingly it went ok. I was able to hit the ball. I could not catch the ball and I don't know the rules but I guess that will come later. First game is on Tuesday. We have more players than we can use so I wont get tom play all the games. I'll keep you posted on our results....

Prince Philip

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 20:44:33 GMT

It's always fun to read news about prince Philip. And this time it's not even his fault!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/19/wphilip19.xml

Buns

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 04:38:14 GMT

I wasted half the day searching for a bug in in a code just to eventually find out it was nothing really wrong it was just a unnecessary complicated statement that had bad numerical properties. To pick me up I went home and made some swedish Fat Tuesday buns and ate one in hot milk. It's called a 'hot wall' in swedish of some strange reason.

Skiing and a gas geyser

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 04:37:27 GMT

Yesterday we had a gas geyser on campus. Someone cracked a gas pipeline when digging for a water pipe. You could actually see the gas streaming out of the ground 10 meters up into the air. I guess what you saw was the condensation of water vapor in the air when the gas expanded and got colder. Anyway it was very impressive. They had to evacuate 6 buildings including mine because of the strong gas smell. you could even smell the gas while you where out doors. So we spend the afternoon in the pub.
Saturday I went cross country skiing a one of the golf courses at the university. It was great fun. I have not done it in 6 years (you did not get many opportunities for that in England) but it was not to difficult to get going. I got very tired afterward and I was completely dead in the evening.
There are coming 20cm of snow over night... Should be fun to drive to work tomorrow!

More ice

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 23:21:47 GMT

Just testing to post photos. This is ice hanging off my building.

Ice 2007

Very cold

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 04:48:44 GMT

We have had really cold weather the last couple of days. -20 and below at night and 10-15 below zero as a high in the day. Some days we had a bit of a snow and wind as well. -15 and wind is really horrible.
Now my car seem to have developed a cold. It sounds weird and there are strange warning lights. I tried to look at the engine to see if anything was wrong but unfortunately I could not open it since the bonnet was frozen.... I wish I had garage.

Ice ans snow

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 05:24:23 GMT

So we got m ore snow. And these huge icesicles (is that how you spell it? or is it even the right word?) hanging from my building. They are 3 meters long!

Snow

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 05:04:11 GMT

So we finally go some proper snow now. Maybe 20 cm. I has been snowing more or less nonstop since yesterday afternoon. If it stays all week I'll go cross-country skiing next weekend!
I love driving when it's this much snow. A lot of sliding around. Maybe not safe, but fun. I try to limit the sliding to empty streets and parking lots.
I went to cinema and saw Babel today. It was quit good. In the end all the people from the rich countries where ok but all the people from poor country get their life destroyed... It is not very fair but I guess that it's a realistic picture. I also went to the pool and did some exercise.

New word - Rondellhund

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 17:22:01 GMT

I was home in Sweden over Christmas and New Year and I did not see the sun for 2 weeks... That's not to unusual in southern sweden this time of year. Anyway I learned a new swedish word: rondellhund. It means roundabout dog. Since I was last in sweden (last summer) sweden has been griped by a roundabout dog epidemic. A rondellhund is a small painted wood dog some people place in the in roundabouts. In the last half year every roundabout in sweden has got one and there are many roundabouts in sweden.
Yes, this is as strange to me as it is to you!
The hole thing started with someone placing one painted wood dog in one roundabout. They probably had a good reason to do it. Then suddenly everybody got this strong urge to do the same... People are strange. Humans lived for a couple of hundred thousands of years and the last 50 with roundabouts and not once has people had this urge to place small wooden dog in strange places. Now we can't live without them.

Lund on wikimapia

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 22:55:51 GMT

I looked up my home town on wikimapia. This is the little text that came with the satellite photo.

'University town in southern sweden. Large cathedral. Always bad weather.'

It's a very good summary.

21C

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 04:36:40 GMT

When I woke up this morning my flat was freezing cold. Luckily it now looks like my landlord has fixed it today. 21C once again. Yippii! Work is a bit slow right now since I got stuck with something that looked simple from the start but keeps coming up with problems. Or the same problem in new forms. Well friday is flying home day. And Saturday is spending 6 hours on Heathrow waiting for my flight to Copenhagen. Happy days....

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 05:16:48 GMT

I thought I should post something before I go to bed. This hole week I got into the bad habit of not going to bed on time and then struggling to get up on time. Writing this does not help I guess. I have got back to writing job applications this week. That's is something I'm pretty tired of. For the last three or four years I have been writing job applications more or less constantly (not all the time but on and off) which is very depressing. At least I have avoided being unemployed so far. At least at the moment I'm applying in fun places like the North American west coast. I haven't got much Christmas feeling yet but I'll think I wait with that until i get back to sweden on the evening of the 23rd.
There is a Swede at the international space station right now. It reminds me that I have to keep my eyes open if there are any physics lectureship coming up at the university of Mars. I always wanted to move to Mars....

Happy Thanksgiving!

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 03:59:47 GMT

I just celebrated my first thanksgiving. At lot of food some football and nice people. Mostly physicist but still fun...

Film + visit

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 04:59:17 GMT

I went to see 'Stranger then fiction' with some of our phd students yesterday. I was actually really funny. One of the more intelligent comedies I have seen in a while. It's about a man who tries to find the author who narrating his life and is about to kill him. It's actually better then it sounds.
An old friend from Sweden where here to visit me this weekend. I took him to a football game on saturday. I think he enjoyed it. At least as an anthropological study in weird american habits. On sunday we went to chicago which was slightly more normal day.

New tires & job rejection

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 04:13:08 GMT

I finally got around to get a new set of tires for my car this week. The old ones very worn and I was getting worried that the winter was going be a bit slippery with them... Trying chose which tires you should have is really impossible when you actually don't know anything about the different tires. So in the I chose the ones with the pretties pattern...
I also got rejected from a job I would really liked to have had. That sucks. I guess it's time to come up with a new plan for the future or something.
We have a thunderstorm here right now... in November. This is a weird place.