About
This is a blog that I have set up in order to stay in touch with my English-speaking friends, as I find it hard to keep e-mail contacts up, let alone call people regularly.
I am a German physicist with a PhD degree, 41 years old, living in Sydney Australia since 2002, previously in Orange County, Southern California USA, for 1½ years.
The thing I know the most about is obviously physics, especially optics; but I am also a keen cyclist (the German way, with dynamo lights, mudguards and chainguard) and have built quite a few wheels in my life. I commute to work and ride a total of about 25 km on a bicycle everyday. Moving closer to work would make my life easier and more time-efficient, but I like the very walkable suburb where I live, and detest the car culture and infrastructure on the North Shore, where my work is.
I own no car because that would be akin to operating a personal power plant, and the very easiest way to minimise your carbon footprint is not to do that. But I do have an old 750cc motorcycle which I’m not driving at the moment because there is a problem with the gear box.
I am quite familiar with the concept of Peak Oil and the consequences; besides energy flows, I am also very interested in what follows from them: economy. I read a few “contrarian” web sites and try to find the right path between corporate disinformation and wild conspiracy theories. This is a highly complex and hard to understand theme complex, to which I, being pretty smart but of course not nearly smart enough, feel naturally attracted – this is an endless intellectual challenge, and an exercise in humility, because I have made more wrong than correct predictions.
Since I believe (from observation) that it’s not necessarily hard work that makes you rich in capitalism, I also put some of my energy into understanding speculation in futures and stocks – but at the moment it appears best to own precious metals, and one also needs to have a life besides all the planning on how to get rich quickly – more so as I got married in 2007.
Besides physics, I love music. I think that jazz is where the most of the best musicians go, but I am a metalhead, and while there is pathetic and barbaric stuff out there, it is also a very fertile field, there are quite a few people with a musical education in that sector as well, and tremendously interesting things are going on in Metal in recent years, which I’m only starting to re-discover. My favourite instrument is the guitar, but since I have my electric guitar here and the amp is still in Germany, I have not played much since I’ve been here. I don’t indulge in a lot of luxuries, but I have a very decent and unique stereo and even vinyl records. Music is very important in my life, and is one of two art forms I understand, the other one being literature. I also appreciate the beauty of math sometimes, and I enjoy colours; and some people say I have a good feeling for composition when they see my photos.
I got a fair bit of language talent from my mother – I still like German best but I am very comfortable writing in English, and I am pretty good at spelling, so if you see bad spelling here, it’s most likely a typo – or I’ve overlooked to make a correction after dictating my post. I find it hard to dictate efficiently, because the program doesn’t understand me well when I speak as slowly as I think – I wasn’t aware it was that bad.