Jumping to incorrect conclusions pt.1

Not that there are likely more parts to follow...

There's a study entitled "Depression among Adults Employed Full-Time, by Occupational Category" over here. Very nice to see that 'Life, physical and social science' is near rock-bottom when it comes having been depressed between 2004 and 2006. The only happier bunch of people are those working in "Engineering, Architecture and surveyors". The last table shows that both males and females are happiest in 'Life, physical and social science'. Hold on, they score lower in the overall score table. Now let's jump in a completely scientifically incorrect manner: For these lines of work, it doesn't matter what you do, as long as there aren't too many women around to make you depressed. If you take the numbers of the two mentioned categories, you can work out that the ration men:women is. For the sciences it's 1.3:1 and for the Architects etc it's 6.8:1. Fewer women, lower overall depression rate. But why not the other way round? Are the men depressing the women and driving up the female depression rate, compensating the fact that there are less of them? No, there are no men in "Personal care and Service" and still women have a depression rate higher than the depression rate of males in any occupational category...
And that's how to draw completely wrong conclusions (on my part) based on what might be valid data (haven't looked into it that well).

Cars, fuel & the environment

Rant alert!

So, as usual: we're all doomed. If it isn't that comet that's heading for earth and is expected to pass within lunar orbit in 2036 that finishes us off, it'll be our own doing in the form pollution beyond repair. Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't be watching the environment - I'm just not convinced that what's being done makes sense. The following are all thoughts on comments made in the media, or recent popularised developments.

First off: The cars, but more importantly, the trucks themselves. Recently there was news coverage of a trucking convention - a show where the latest developments in trucks were showcased. It featured a hydrogen truck, and a hybrid truck. Both of them weren't too popular (yet) and a critic mentioned that it was all show anyway - nothing ever changes and trucks were the most polluting vehicles on the road, using 1 litre of fuel to travel 3 km (1:3). This is, of course, a bad argument as to why they are so polluting. Say a truck carries 25 tonnes of freight, and a car can carry half a tonne (crude estimates). If you have a very fuel-economical car it might do 1:25 (optimism ain't dead yet). To carry 25 tonnes, you need 50 cars, which would be equivalent to a single vehicle doing 1:0.5. In other words: a truck is more efficient than a car.
Hybrid cars and especially hydrogen vehicles, combined with new plans by Dutch ministers, do solve overcrowding problems in the Netherlands. A large percentage of cyclists has no clue about traffic safety, and many use headphones on the bike. Combine this with very silent tires (the ones that NL wants to make compulsory) on silently running electrical cars...

In the above rant fuel already features a prominent role. But there's more. Hydrogen is all nice and dandy, but it is only used as an energy store (as any fuel is merely a store). The question is: where do you get the energy from to create hydrogen? If you're burning fossil fuel to get this energy, you're just geographically shifting the pollution. So aside from the fact that hydrogen is hard to come by at present - it also requires a large investment in durable energy.
One source would of course be solar energy (according to pop-sci channels the earth takes up 8 times more energy then we need on earth - although I wonder how much we need to keep the earth warm). One way of harnessing this power is by - well let nature do it for you. Grow plants, harvest plants, convert energy stored in sugars within the plants. In most cases this is done by converting sugars to ethanol, which burns well and can be used to power vehicles. Brazil started a huge biofuel project in the 70's, and it's still running. They use sugar cane. The US uses corn, and went from no usage to moderate usage overnight. The corn price tripled overnight, meaning that in countries like mexico the poor could no longer afford their food and the meat prices doubled on their own market. Also, the way that it's being grown and refined, may actually cause more pollution and may cost more energy than it's yielding. This is certainly the case for palm oil, a lot of which comes from Indonesia. The problem here is that the land on which the palms are being grown are being cleared by burning down the natural forests of the country. As far as carbon emissions go, this is worse than traffic.

As a final, not so directly related note: Discovery Channel is opting for the 'most of us will be dead soon anyway'-approach. Their future cars programme is advertised with a short that acts as if it's selling a car to you. You being number 48095 or something 5 digit like. Seeing as they indicate a globalised economy (the car is 2 million credits) you'd expect that ID numbers would also be global. In other words - they don't expect more than 100000 registered people by then. I guess that'll turn out to be the most interesting future vision the programme will have on offer.

The most confusing one yet...

It's inevitable that occasionally you'll run into the 'my belief is the only true belief because...' argumentation. The one I really don't get is (specific religion removed, as it applies to all):

'The [insert name of holy scripture] wasn't written in one day, and has been printed millions of time [so it must be true]'.

I think I'm finally getting a dose of religion: the one true religion is (in this light) the one which has the highest number of copies of scriptures by which it advertises itself and teaches its followers. The results are in: Time to go to your local IKEA shop to worship - it's catalogue is not made in a day and is the single publication that has the highest print numbers to this day.
In other words: I can barely comprehend why anyone would use the above argumentation at all - all it achieves with me is that I'm less inclined to give any other arguments put forward by the same speaker any thought.
IKEA-ism not your thing? Unconfirmed reports (Guinness World Records) mention that the Bible is the most sold book (the IKEA catalogue is free!) and somewhere else is mentioned that the Red book comes in second. Where the Qu'ran and other scriptures fit in, I don't know... As for believing the 'old and wise', I don't know which is referenced first, the Bible, or the Kama Sutra.

Back from the UK

So the quick-ish trip to the UK is over. Taking the bus from Canterbury to Oxford to Utrecht is perhaps not the quickest of routes, and means you don't get much sleep in the two days that you spread the journey over. Anyway, Oxford was still pretty much the same except for the fact that smoking is banned pretty much everywhere (good) and that I finally managed to run into the animal rights activists. The latter (about twenty people) take up position opposite of the building site (3m high walls, fortified) of a new lab every thursday and, whatched by police, stand there, occasionally chanting and mostly trying to peddle flyers to people who aren't interested whilst reading from experiment reports to people who aren't interested. Bonus points for preseverance, though serious deductions for making the whole movement look ab-so-lutely pathetic. That, combined with the result of a law case, has classified them as 'mostly harmless, although they can sometimes get a bit loud' by the locals.

Meanwhile, back in Utrecht: the project I hope to work on is being tweaked a little, a process that I get to have influence on. With the UU computer system now showing me that apparently I passed my Master's (I think the terminology can still be tweaked), things are getting underway. More later.

New "Other Blogs" addition

New in the links: The Garden of Live Flowers, which succeeds the mad teaparty. As this blog does not have a feed, no recent articles preview is available. For your convenience all titles are now clickable (linked to the main page of the respective blog). To ensure that the list of articles is recent (if desired) hit Ctrl+F5 to refresh the page.

TV when I was young pt 1.

Okay, I'm back from the summer school so now there's time to get started on the TV shows that I used to watch when I was in England (1990-1993). Warning: I was between the age of 5 and 9, so this contains a lot of awful stuff. First off: (Game)shows.

• Perhaps the weirdest gameshow that I can remember was Channel 4's crystal maze. A bunch of contestants would run around a large set and complete quests/puzzles in rooms created on set in order to win crystals. For each crystal collected time was earned in the crystal dome, a transparent chamber with high wind speeds that kept a bunch of banknotes flying around. Any money that was caught could be kept. Random compilation clip here.
• A more traditional gameshow was ITV's Blockbusters, in which the object is to build a bridge (as far as I can remember) across a field of hexagons by answering a question correctly for each hexagon. The intro is up on youtube here.
• Though I can't find a clip of it to show how bad it was, I did occasionally watch Bob's your uncle, which is a gameshow in which newly weds would compete against each other. Probably it was popular because of Bob Monkhouse. Some info about the format is here.
• I also watched the Generation Game (which restarted in 1990 and ran until 2002, though started in 1971-1982) with the at that time popular Bruce Forsyth. Apparently the concept is Dutch, or so Wikipedia says here. The idea is that someone shows something (usually requiring training) and then unprepared contestants try to do the same. Also had some shows in between, such as this example here.
• And then there's Noel's houseparty, which showed al kinds of things, but will be remembered most for the creation of Mr. Blobby. Example from the show here. They even managed to get a Christmas No.1 hit with this terrible thing here.
  

Hoax of the week: Reverse PIN code

There's a (Dutch) e-mail going around that states that when you are forced by someone to withdraw cash from your account you should enter your pincode in reverse order. This supposedly alerts the police whilst still giving you your cash to avoid nastiness. NOT TRUE, it's a hoax. When even the NVB (Dutch banking association) denies it (here), you can be certain that it isn't so.

UPDATE Jan 2009: If wikipedia is to be believed, this could be based on a proposed system that hasn't been implemented. More info at wikipedia's ATM Safety PIN Software article.

Random links...

In the first link list in ages:

• One brilliant prank here.
• One YouTube account (stupid game show answers) here.
• One of those annoying 'did you know...' films here, and the excellent parody here.
• Boring geek stuff... laptops with the Intel PM965 express chipset are listed with 2GB and 4GB max RAM. Which one is it? The chipset supports 4GB, windows 32 Bit supports 4GB (here), no wait, it doesn't it kind of supports 4GB, but only 3GB really, though hardware can use the rest, kind off (here). Erm... Now there's room for misleading advertising...

Soon to come: what I used to watch on TV as a 5-8 year old (as it differs from the list by H., who e-mailed the Dutch version some time ago.

Amsterdam-Dakar, €500

The latter being the maximum price to be paid for the car that should be used. The challenge is to then spend only €150 on repairs and then drive the thing to Dakar to sell it off for charity. Always wondered about the people who do that. I met one of them today, and I think the things that shone through were enthusiasm, optimism and the drive to get things done. Anyway, good luck to them! Details about the challenge and the charities at www.amsterdamdakar.com, details about the team the person I spoke to belongs to here.

Blogger feed widget not updating..

Or it least it seemed that way, only hitting ctrl-F5 displayed the newer posts for the other blogs in the sidebar. That's why I've set this page to not be cached, though I haven't tested whether this works. The implementation I use is the tag 'meta equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache"/' in the html header (between the 'head' tags) (single quotation marks used in the text in stead of brackets as I'm too lazy to format this post correctly). Complaints via the comments below...

UPDATE: it seems to work, for now...

The Quick Summary...

Starting off in the Black Forest (Schwarzwald) (forests, hills, cake)...

...with some cities for good measure...

...and ending up in the mountains (and the rain later set in).

A small dose of... Limburgian history

One of the more noticeable features of the province of Limburg is the small & narrow section linking the area around Maastricht to the rest of the province. This apparently has its roots in the formation of the province of Limburg from former Prussian lands (Some forms of Limburgian refer to Germany and Germans as Prussia and Prussians) in the convention of Vienna in 1815. At this convention land was allocated to the Netherlands in order to keep the French surrounded by strong nations [yeah..., right]. At the time, Belgium was still part of the Netherlands (until the rebellion in 1830, in which Limburg tried to become Belgian, but ultimately failed). This explains why the Dutch border has such a shape, but the thin part already existed before the belgian rebellion. Though the area has always been kind of a mess (interactive map in the left frame here), there is no logical reason for this. The reason that is mentioned, however, is that the width of the province was determined by the width of a canon shot. How this fits into everything I have yet to find out.

The other thing is the German region of Selfkant, which is now the most western german municipality. Some people may know it as the (former) Dutch municipality of Tudderen, which it was for a limited amount of time. After the second world war the Dutch wanted compensation for damages from the Germans. The way this was organised was by transferral of German land to the Netherlands, Selfkant being one such area. This happened in 1949 and stayed that way until 1963 when Germany paid 280 million DM to get the area back. In the meantime, however, the Netherlands had built a main road linking Roermond and Heerlen through the area. This road wasn't handed back until 2002. As the road had no level crossings with German roads, the road could be used without the necessity of carrying a passport. In fact, if you look at the satellite images in google maps (here) there are now still only two level crossings in the stretch of 'Niederländische Durchgangstrasse'.

Progress...

...with cleaning up the site. Though I've lost my list of blogs. So if you feel you should be mentioned , let me know. I've removed some of the non-active blogs (the teaparty and nican nicuica), yet these will be replaced with the newer blogs of the respective authors as soon as I find out where they can be found. I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't been able to add the recently closed blog of Olivier (...wo man sein Herz verliert...), but here's a mention anyway.

For the technical details: the site template was updated to be compatible with the new blogger templates and then rebuilt. I.e. the java scripts and corresponding CSS that were in the old template were added back in and I've used the widgets to rebuild the sidebar. Of course, the widgets aren't formatted the way I want them out of the box, so the CSS part of the site was modified along with some of the widget code that resides in the template. The dead links have also been removed from the sidebar. I'm leaving the old posts alone, though the re-addition of the scripts mean that they will function normally with the exception of the imageshack images, of which a number have randomly been lost over at imageshack.

Site maintenance scheduled...

For the lone (or so) visitor who sometimes strays onto this near-abandoned site:
Site maintenance and overhaul is planned for this month. Content maybe to resume thereafter.

Time for.... paperwork!

So, quick update time:
The internship that I've been doing is now grossly over-time, though that can be explained by: taking about two month's of courses during the internship, writing a thesis (1.5 months) somewhere in that period as well, and, as usual, report-hell. Still finalising the report. Did find a summer job to keep me busy at the same time. Yup, it's in the same lab. Just did the paperwork, (been working there for a week), now need to do the paperwork to graduate, and the paperwork to get my degree, which will be in... November, I guess. Though I will graduate in August (as my current contract depends on me being a student). I have some *minor* issues with regulations in this regard, so let's leave well enough alone.

Just one of those days...

Need I say more?

Even more Random Links

Nowadays on the web: Youtube, Wikipedia, Porn and Myspace. Will limit myself to linking to the first two.

Youtube: Pablo Francisco - All about preview guy (apparently, the rest is good too, though I haven't checked.
Wikipedia: Also available in Limburgs: li.wikipedia.org (straight to the page explaining Limburgs)
Oh, and for the person wondering what that game with the weird bridges was, it was this. Actively maintained and available for download here.

Bright shiny new service thingy!

There's now the 'servicemeldpunt beta' for the science faculty. Yes, it is also called that in the English version of the mail and yes, I do think they mean beta in the 'testing' sense as opposed to the natural sciences sense, though they intended otherwise. Anyway, on day one someone wrecked the blinds (dark room quality), leaving six people in a dark office. Apart from the automated reply from the desk, no word yet. We also have a strictly climate controlled room where the experiments involving pathogen infections of the plants are performed. Climate control is critical, if it fails, the lights in the room will heat the room rapidly. Technical services performed fire safety repairs around that area today, having filed all the requests and permits, and had been told that we would be notified. Funilly enough, the latter never happened. Result: the 16 degree C. room was above 40 degrees by the time we found out, all alarm systems also being shut down. There goes up to three weeks of research...

Anyway, on the lighter note:

• After the previous, how it should have ended, movie links (do check out lord of the rings if you haven't already), time to remind everyone of the 30 seconds bunny re-enactments over at angryalien.com.
• The 'Mike en Thomas show' has also restarted and is available at uitzendinggemist here.
• There's an excellent science meeting bingo form here.

Quick YouTube post

As I rarely find time to post anything, I'll start doing so hit-and-run style, i.e. type something short, forget to check the spelling and grammar, and hit 'publish'. Also means I'm limited to redirecting you to content somewhere else, such as:

• This is how it should have ended, which is watched easiest on you tube (though the site has better quality, it asks for installing DivX webviewer...), via the HISHEdotcom profile.
• And, introducing the book.
• By the way, Hebe says to check out the storyteller as well.

Biochem...

And once again I find myself trying to compose a (hopefully) sensible methods section in a research proposal. 'Sensible' meaning that throwing liposomes at it just won't do (thankfully I wasn't in that group at UC). The proposal is a little risky though, so the trick will be to write it optimistically. But then again, and I'm willing to wager that this comes as a shock to some, I've been told that I'm a bit optimistic in these things.
The one thing that the UC flashbacks do make me wonder, is how I ended up where I am. When I left, I was up for starting something a bit more chemical. I even had an internship offer at a reasonably hardcore biochem department. Turned it down. Somehow I've now ended up in a situation where my activities seem to be more related to genetics, and shock horror, phytopathology. Which incidentally are covered by two different Master's programmes, two that I'm both not enrolled in. Oops.
Anyway, back to the biochemistry, the fun thing is always finding out what the real name is of the compound you need. And then to work out how much of it you need. And then to find out what it costs... So here's a nice one for those that like to draw molecules from the systematic name: Dexamethasone (which is also used in a number of drugs (the non-hallucinogenic ones) is actually: (11β,16α)-9-Fluoro-11,17,21-trihydroxy-16-methylpregna-1,4-diene-3,20-dione or
9α-Fluoro-16α-methyl-11β,17α,21-trihydroxy-1,4-pregnadiene-3,20-dione or
9α-Fluoro-16α-methylprednisolone. (Estimated, haven't checked more than a few suppliers) Price range: €400-450/g. Now to find out how much I need...

Quick update

As it's been a long time, just an 'I'm still alive' post.

• What I'm up to: putting the internship report on hold until I finish my Master's thesis, which will be a research proposal rather than a literature review. It seems more usefull than yet another larger paper (9 ECTS, six weeks full time).
• What Anna's up to: preparing to go to Oxford (MPhil Modern European History) for two years starting September.
• My plans: To stay in science a little bit longer if I can find a nice project. This most likely will be here in the Netherlands, as I have greater trust in the average quality of the education here (4 years, Master's required), than compared to, say, the UK (three years, straight from (good) Bachelor's). That, and I'd get paid here, whereas the UK options can only get me a scholarship for college fees (and not living expenses, travel expenses, bench fees (10k p.a.) etc.).

And if you're bored:

• The angry video game nerd: especially the 'Chronologically confused...' one.
• And dutch voiceovers for well-known TV-series: Mastermovies
• K. got published, Nature Immunology. It's indexed on pubmed, so search against the name as first author.
  

Whoops

...time flies (like an arrow, fruitflies like a banana; I know). And hence there's been no word here for a long, long time. Not that there is that much to actually write about - the internship is continuing at the usual pace, I'm not finding out what it really is that I want to do at the same pace (though there are a couple of place where I'm considering to apply) and hence most of it isn't to interesting.

In the same manner, I've not been on the net for that much time either. Though I have set IM to auto-login... Anyway, the only thing that I have found is the dubious practice of windows live search promoting itself by contributing an unspecified amount of money to chartity (help refugees learn) per search. All in all, it's a poorly hidden advertising campaign for live search - with the obvious inspiration from the 'forward this e-mail to everyone you will ever know as some company will give cash to orphaned refugee cancer patients with no legs and no arms as well as give you a new phone, and by the way if you don't your house will burn down due to a computer virus that gives you breast cancer if you also use deodrant with aluminium oxide...' Did I miss any?
Anyway, if you do want to 'donate' via live search, go here.

And the world didn't end... again.

First of all, happy New Year to anyone who may read this that I haven't spoken to yet. This post will mainly be about the FnF trip to the middle of nowhere - and hence feature sand, drunk people and things that don't work unless you actually were there.

The whole event took place in a holiday park in Renesse, Zeeland in two 7-person houses. Of course we booked two adjacent houses, and of course that went wrong. We ended up with two houses at the opposite end of park (360m by air, 420m by road), but had fun nonetheless. House 35 was designated the main house, and, due to varying day/night rythms, had quiet hours from 04:00 to 08:00, as opposed to the slackers in the other house who rarely got up before 11:30 :P.

If you're ever there, this is a 'nice walk' to a lighthouse (debate still raging on whether this one is closest):
Although it does involve a lot of sand, takes over 4 hours, as it is actually 21km, and made me, Sanne and Stefan late for dinner by 15 minutes + time to change clothes. I think Sanne won't ever go walking with Stephan and me ever again. Though maybe with Stephan - well, he did carry her for a bit:

As we left late, we did the last 7km in the dark, whilst attempting to keep the pace up as not to be late. Britt did cook a wonderful meal - and then it was time for New Year's eve, which started off with drinking on every mention of Verdonk, which then led to some brilliant performances of which a few sound bites exist (though poor recordings, they're available...). The words 'star spangled banner' can almost be made out above the din, as can the comment at the very end about a p*ring around someone's head, which makes this one the adult version. For the children there is (though not tested) this battle between the mushrooms and the Zeppelins.