Journey Notes

Just did another backup and update – WordPress Version 2.7 “Coltrane” has just come out. This looks like quite a step, and quite a change. We’ll see if it actually saves time – which is, and will be, my biggest concern. But at least, apparently this is the last non-automatic update. We shall see.

As I advance through the years, and see and learn, I don’t often get enthusiastic about politicians any more. Disturbingly, witty cynicism is not open to me anymore either, as I’m already far enough along to see that all we’ll ever need of that is neatly packaged once and for all in Oscar Wilde’s work.

Still, Barack Obama has done it, and wowed me. How many men (or women, for that matter), having got this far, have enough good sense to know when they don’t know? How many politicians will seriously listen to scientists?

I have been following, with some interest, the progress of Obama’s Cabinet assembly.  I had thought, from various hearsay statements, that Obama didn’t understand the energy issues – and perhaps that is true, but he seems willing to acknowledge there may be more to it than what he knows. That sort of attitude is rare in politics, religion, and a lot of other endeavours where having a view is mistaken for having a clue.

And thus, the (over?)promising President-elect has tentatively appointed  a certain scientist (I read it here first – Achtung Deutsch!) decorated by peers with nothing less than a Nobel Prize in Physics, to head the Department of Energy. Meet Steven Chu:

The photos are from the 2005 Congress of the Australian Institute of Physics, where Professor Chu had a plenary talk in the morning and used the opportunity to tell us a few really important things. Nothing that I didn’t know, mind you, but it’s not like anyone’s ever going to listen to me.

I am not sure Obama is going to like what Chu is about to tell him (at least I’m confident he’ll grasp it), and I’m sure the creation of green industries and efforts towards higher energy efficiency will be met with fierce resistance from those who have made America what it is today.

But hey, voters have said “let’s do things differently here”/”screw the Neocons”/”better have a Democratic President if I end up on welfare”, elected a black man with a name of Middle Eastern appearance (congratulations! This is still possible only in America, even if a perfectly timed serial bank implosion probably helps) – and it looks like Obama is not about to let them down immediately. This first recession of many, as we adapt to fossil fuels running out, has shaken loose so many things that perhaps there is a chance to move a few mountains.

Good luck to Professor Chu. I have heard him speak – he is a very thoughtful and mild-mannered man, who sometimes gives his well-thought-out answers after 20 seconds of silence. You would think his failure in Washington is guaranteed – but see above about cynicism. I know that being a physicist isn’t enough, but perhaps America, of all places, can demonstrate that green is good, and for business too.

From 29th November to 5th December I was at the 18th congress of the Australian Institute of Physics in Adelaide, and this was the first time I got to see the city after Thomas, Claudia and myself had only driven through in late 2002, on the way to the airport, and then I had to get on a plane back to Sydney. This time, I had planned this as something like an early summer escape (seeing as it can’t seem to stop raining for long in Sydney), but I had also prepared an article for the conference proceedings and a talk for the program – along the lines of this.

Turns out it was a pretty busy conference – 8:30 in the morning till 7:30 in the evening almost every day! This is the sort of conference that gets your head spinning after four or five days. I’m still not complaining, because the poster sessions were a lot of fun (and they took place on three out of the five days, and came with food and drink), the plenary talks in the mornings were mostly interesting, and it was relatively easy to switch between the seven parallel sessions, because everything was in one building.  To take advantage of this, though, you had to use the elevator rather than the stairs, which is still a little unlike me.

The only thing that didn’t work out very well was the computer support for the presentations – does anybody actually like Office 2007? Does anybody know how to use it?  Certainly, my Powerpoint presentation (made with OpenOffice 3 and Powerpoint 97, mostly at home) didn’t run very well on the test computer that was set up at the speakers’ preparation centre. So I fixed the movies, and the animations (took the entire lunch break) – then it’s Wednesday, the time for my talk arrives, and what do I find in the lecture theatre?  Office 2003 and Windows 2000.  Almost needless to say, the movie did not run on the first attempt, but at least everything else worked okay. After the talk it occurred to me that when the lecture theatre has two screens, one should use the mouse, not a laser pointer, to point.

On Thursday, I had to chair a session, which was a challenge, because initially I wasn’t too familiar with the subjects of the presentations.  I had tried to read up a bit on the techniques and work of the group that provided four out of the five talks in “my” session, so that at least I would be able to ask a question or two to jumpstart a discussion after talks – but that turned out to be quite unnecessary as the discussions started themselves rather nicely; in fact I had to cut some of them short. As a reward for my extra preparation work though, I now know a little better what a frequency comb is, and I find that quite useful and exciting.  It’s inconceivable that this would have been discovered without someone puttering for hours and hours in the lab, because this is really quite an improbable instrument! Unfortunately, a Nobel Prize has already been given for that.  And in the frequency-comb labs, these inner sancta of 15-significant-digit accuracy, it’s still common practice to start the pulse laser by tapping a mirror with a screwdriver!

But enough of the talk already! I wanted to show you some pictures from my wanderings in the sparse spare time I had, and let’s do that in a separate album. The parks, campus and river parts that I saw of Adelaide, are rather pretty – but six years ago we also saw some bleak suburbs. There are statues everywhere, and war memorials, and churches. The city has a good, pleasant vibe to it – but then the grass is always greener (or yellower, in the case of Adelaide) on the other side of your flight.

After I tried for a while to embed a movie on the German blog, and in the process came across the new user interface for WordPress, which includes buttons to insert movies without much HTML coding, I decided to update the WordPress installation for this blog. It was running on 2.2 and it is now 2.6.5. Now I have my movie and music insert buttons , and a number of short codes, but unfortunately right now I can’t think of a movie, or image, or audio, to insert. Anyway, the upgrade went well, and I am also dictating again.

The following paragraph showed up after the database upgrade as an old draft, and was from the original date of setting up this blog in 2007. For what it’s worth, here it is again; it doesn’t look like I can upgrade the German blog to insert movies more easily, because that one is controlled by the provider, and I don’t think I have any influence on what version of WordPress is running there.

Just FYI, the other blog is reisenotizen.janburke.de, which I have set up from the 1&1 (large German ISP; used to be an inside tip, now quite mainstream I think) webspace administration menu. That is all automatic but you have a lot less control over the look and function of your blog page. Still, this is what got me started. I have now installed an SQL data base on journey-notes.janburke.de; I don’t even know what that is, but WordPress needs that to run. Apparently there are quite a few scripts in the installation that help file and organise the blog entries.
I am also curious to see whether the subjects will be different in the German and the English blog; I would expect that the German stuff is more of a “my friends and me” nature, whereas I might post some stuff of more general interest here.

Today, I received my high-end noise cancelling digital microphone and have just trained it a little, or to be precise, the software with the new microphone as an input device.  The signal-to-noise ratio, at least according to the set up screen, is about twice as good as with the cheap microphone I had used before.  This should make dictating in English easier and faster, and less frustrating.  If this isn’t a breeze now, I’ll probably just give it up and keep typing.

I should probably look at the clock to see how much time it takes me to dictate text in this window.  So far, it seems to be going well.  But I shouldn’t spend too much time dictating tonight, because I still have the conference talk for next week to prepare.  I finished with the slides, but you never know how it’s going to go before you actually speak to your slides and rehearse.  So, until soon.

Here is a mail I’d sent to Financial Sense before the G20 economic emergency summit in Washington DC – they never published it, so I’m now publishing it myself. Isn’t the Internet great.

On Wednesday this week, the German “Spiegel” magazine had five Nobel Prize winning economists give their ideas for a “new world order” of finance and economy, before the G-20 summit in Washington over the weekend. Robert E. Lucas went on the record with this: “The regulatory problem that needs to be solved is roughly this: The public needs a conveniently provided medium of exchange that is free of default risk or ‘bank runs’.”

My jaw dropped – no, he isn’t going to say that, is he!? Not the G-word, he’s a Nobel Prize decorated economist after all! But what are you supposed to think when someone says “medium of exchange that is free of default risk”? I know of only one that’s worked so far – but let’s hear the Professor out: “The best way to achieve this would be to have a competitive banking system with government-insured deposits.”

My jaw dropped again. If governments did not allow currency to be created out of nothing, which of course makes it worth nothing, they would not have to guarantee the deposits with more nothing! It’s that simple – all the world can now see quite easily where government-guaranteed nothing-money has led us, and I feel like the Professor is asking “whom do you believe, me or your own eyes?” But then I have not studied economics and do not therefore understand why governments are free of default risk, as the Professor implies.

The underlying point that this brought home to me is just how important it is to governments to maintain control of the currency – important enough to seize control of the banking system, and parts of the producing economy – basically to cordon off the big cesspools of nothing-money to be found, and swallow their entire foul contents – just to keep control. And why, to protect the people? Possible. But perhaps this is just plain self-preservation instinct. Without government controlling the currency – no government.

It takes years to get big fundamental science projects approved and funded, and even more years of uphill battles for any significant art funding – and rarely are we talking even one billion dollars here. But that is unproductive money anyway, as good as throwing it out the window, right?

And when an investment bank comes unstuck because of, shall we say, imprudent leverage and complexity of its “products”, suddenly hundreds of billions are found for stuffing the hollow shell to keep it standing, probably with growing awareness that all the “assets” bought are only going to return the “ass”, if that. And if the billions are not found, they’re created out of nothing, all at once. That is not throwing money out the window – that is throwing money down a black hole.

And yet, even this price is not too high for our governments to pay, and the perception of what is “unproductive” is quite different here. I think our leaders feel it in their bones that the licence to print currency is the only thing of true importance to keep them in power – let the control of the currency and the “system” slip away and people will take matters into their own hands, including a medium of exchange of their choice.

The power to print is the key to the kingdom – therefore if someone says a G-word at the summit, it will be “guarantees”, and if someone says an S-word, it will be “safeguards” – so we’ll do the same thing as always, only much harder, and stuff all the hollow shells with $$$ and €€€ – if you have done something for so long so successfully, it’s hard to give it up just because it doesn’t make sense anymore.

Another thing that has me worried about the “direction setting” is that no one – no one! – questions growth. Perhaps it’s just my lack of economic training, but we are now very near the maximum of liquid (transport) fuel availability. Nothing equals fossil fuels in safety, convenience and energy density, and nothing will replace them in a hurry. Economic activity means energy consumption – and once we have squeezed the waste out of our systems, we’ll have a hard time keeping “negative growth” away.

Over the past 100 years the pyramiding-debt model has worked fine thanks to free fossil energy and resulting effortless economic growth. This is bound to end very shortly and the transition has already begun – this time the energy crisis gave the financial crisis a tow, and was then overtaken by it, but only just. Growth is then supposedly re-started by pent-up demand – only next time there may still be no supply to meet it. The challenge is unprecedented in human history – to develop a workable model for a rapidly shrinking economy, where borrowing against the future may be impossible. Now would be a good time to think about this too – Nobel Prizes are waiting.

The Thanksgiving weekend is here, and we have three American guests, who will have a Thanksgiving party at our house. These are: Christine, Alfredo (Ariana’s boyfriend who arrived here from Puerto Rico on Thursday); and Rob, Alfredo’s best mate, who is married to Rebecca, a friend of Ariana’s. (Rebecca is also of the owner of the flower shop that provided the lovely bouquets for our wedding. And Ariana and Alfredo met for the first time at Rebecca’s wedding. Small world.) Christine got a turkey this morning, and the girls and Alfredo went shopping for groceries, while I cleaned up the house. And just on time, the landlord showed up to inspect — the roof! This was because from Monday until Thursday we had a roofer here, who hopefully fixed the roof for us, so we have no more water running down the walls when it is raining hard. We won’t know until it rains hard the next time. Shouldn’t take long though, because we have a La Niña climate situation in this part of the world, which makes it relatively wet in the Western Pacific region. The drought in the country still hasn’t broken, but we’ve had plenty of rain in Sydney itself. Summer is definitely here, and I’m now wearing a singlet all day, and no socks in my sandals, yippee!

By the by, the landlord likes a lot what Christine has done regarding furniture, and the general beautiful set-up of the place — he though the place looked better than when they lived here, and even asked if he could invite his wife in, who was waiting outside in the car — of course he could — and she liked it too. Oh, and come to think of it, so do I 🙂

The Thanksgiving stuffing will be a feast tomorrow — and maybe, just maybe, we will have something else to celebrate also, because today is election day. The latest polls indicate that John Howard will be booted out in no uncertain terms — but it’s not over till it’s over. Christine and I are going to the neighbours this evening, where they will be holding an election party — I do hope there is something to celebrate. John Howard has lied to us for long enough, and it’s about time we had someone new lie to us. Well, that does sound a little cynical doesn’t it!? Can’t help myself though, if elections could change the system, they would be illegal. More tomorrow — maybe.

Here we go again, I’ve trained my word recognition program in the meantime, and it’s going really well already! I suppose other than telling you how I’m going with the word recognition program, perhaps you want to know a few things about my life!

Well then, it’s been a hot day here in Sydney, and I have bitten the bullet today to applying for the position of the research group leader, which is almost vacant, now that Roger is considering to retire. I’m not looking forward to the paperwork, but to have a bit of a say in what happens scientifically is a big carrot indeed. But all that is assuming I will get the position, which is by no means certain. and even if I do get it, it’s likely that because of the paperwork that someone else has to do in the meantime, it will be a while before I know.

Also, we have a federal election coming up on Saturday, and the chances are decent this time that John Howard will actually be booted out! (Not that I’m too hopeful for a real change in this country though — I’ve seen it all in Germany in 1998 when Helmut Kohl call was voted out after 16 years in power, and some people actually thought things would now change. Needless to say, they set themselves up for disappointment.) However, John Howard is tough as a cockroach — I still like cockroaches better — and therefore, I will believe he’s gone only when I see it. Our neighbours have invited us for a post-election party on Saturday night– it would be a relief to get out of the 1950s at long last!

I am trying something new. I got myself the Word Dragon speech recognition software, and I intend to use it to blog in a time-saving and efficient way, and if it’s a lot of fun, I’ll hopefully use it more than I did the keyboard. My dad complained the other day that I hadn’t posted in more than two months. Now I hope that with the play factor, the novelty factor, and me always having something to say, the blogging will get a little better, and more frequent too.

A very interesting question is also whether I can run the English and the German version of Word Dragon on the very same computer. I intend to get myself a German version and dictate a few blogs in German also (that way I don’t have to fake an Australian accent).

Till next time.

In case anyone needs to be reminded: this is the first anniversary of September 11th on the same weekday. It made me think of that morning back in 2001, in California: my daily wake-up signal used be the 7:01 flight out of John Wayne airport. That day, no plane. On the driveway, I met my neighbour Brenda, mother of three small kids, and said good morning with a smile – but her long face told me that she was having a really bad day. This is my most vivid memory of that day.

Now for my American readers, we did not have a TV, and I would not have watched the morning news anyway. Brenda must have wondered why I was still smiling – she probably didn’t imagine I was unaware then. I still think sometimes I should have gone and explained – but this is unfortunately not something I would do without encouragement.

Things kept getting eerier as I arrived at the office at 8:30 and there were still hardly any cars on the parking lot. Once in the office, of course I learnt what had happened; and one of the secretaries said “this means we’re probably at war”. I couldn’t help but ask “but with whom?” “Oh, that they will find out.”

And then everybody sat in the quiet office and tried somehow to do their work – I was preparing for a conference trip to the Fringe 2001 in Bremen, which suddenly felt very frivolous and as out of context as everything else. I remember thinking “I wonder if they’ll let me out – or back in” – but eventually of course, there were no flights to get to Germany anyway. To this day I have never watched the video footage of the fateful flights, because I realised I would probably not be able to think clearly anymore if I did.

In the evening my housemate wasn’t home, but there was a message on the phone from his mother in Wisconsin, urging him to get out of town quickly. I wrote to my parents and told him all was reasonably well where I was. A few days later, the 7-11 store got protection from the county sheriffs because the clerks were Sikhs and wore turbans.

It feels so far away now – but what was as clear to me then as to everybody else, was that the world had changed, and probably not for the better. In retrospect, this looks like the real beginning of the Bush era – and how we have got used to the “Clash of Civilisations” in the meantime! It is still amazing to me that the US has started two wars after 9/11, and we do hear of foiled terror plots sometimes – but from the UK, Australia, and Germany, not from the US.

But I had wanted to describe that morning – it felt very different on this sunny spring morning in Sydney; and the world is different now, but we have all adapted. Time heals all wounds? I don’t know; perhaps you just can’t see them anymore under all the new debris.