Liegerad

Today I got to try a recument bike. It took a few tries until I was able to balance, but once I got going it was easier than I had imagined. I rode it for about half an hour in the fields (paved roads without car traffic) and was quite confident on it after that. I even managed to take a u-turn on the road without falling off. Fortunately, it had above seat steering – I hear that getting used to under seat steering is much more difficult. It felt a bit strange at first because the wheel you’re steering with is below you instead of in front, and you don’t see the direction of the wheel while turning – it looks like the bike keeps going straight forward because the front of the bike always points in that direction. Looking ahead instead of at the bike itself is key here, I found out.

And of course I now want my own recumbent – I think the Grasshopper (auch auf deutsch) by HPVelotechnik is cool.

And for future reference, here are two Ask MetaFilter threads about recumbent bikes: one, two.

Yeah, I would like to keep it. (Photos taken by my lovely husband, of course.)

P.S.: I can already feel the muscles that I used while riding the recumbent – they’re different from the ones you use while riding an upright bike. In German we call this Muskelkater, literally muscle tomcat.

Don’t try this at home, kids!

André and I are moving in a couple of days. Our new flat is going to have a much nicer kitchen than the old one, and it will have more room, so we’re considering buying a microwave oven. I guess you can use it for cooking, but the child physics teacher in me also wants to do some experiments… here are a few links:

• unwise microwave oven experiments by William Beaty
• Fun with grapes – a case study. By Patrick Michaud.
• Physics inside a microwave oven (link to page in frameset), by Maarten Rutgers.
• Microwave experiments by Hans Hochwald.
• Funny things to do with your microwave oven by We-Man/Stefan.

I don’t remember if the experiment is even on one of the pages, but I want to start by showing the “hot spots” of the oven by placing a sheet of heat-sensitive paper (like fax paper) in the oven. I’m told it also works with a bunch of marshmallows – that’s probably more fun than fax paper.

Wow!

… or rather, Math that makes you go Wow, “a multi-disciplinary exploration of non-orientable surfaces”. It’s too late now, so I’ll have to read it tomorrow.

Link via MetaFilter.

Travel

Travelcoupons.com is a “source for lodging discounts across the eastern United States”. You can either print the coupons directly from the web site or order the coupon leaflets to be sent via mail.

Link via Ask MeFi.

Kultur

Ägypten kommt nach Bonn – oder jedenfalls Grabschätze aus dem Tal der Könige in die Kunst- und Austellungshalle Bonn, und zwar vom 4. November 2004 bis zum 1. Mai 2005. Dafür wird sich auch locker der Wegn von unserem neuen Zuhause zurück nach Bonn lohnen.

Danke für den Tipp, Iris!

Jede Menge Physik-Links

Ich habe gerade auf meiner Festplatte eine Sammlung von Physik-Links gefunden. Keine Ahnung, woher ich sie habe, aber im Weblog habe ich sie bisher offenbar noch nicht gepostet, nur einige vereinzelte Links konnte ich im Archiv finden. (Interessanterweise habe ich diese Sammlung bereits im Februar gefunden, mich um die HTML-Aufbereitung gekümmert und das ganze dann doch vergessen zu posten. Hier sind die Links also für alle, die nach vier Tagen Ferien schon Entzugserscheinungen haben.)

Physik-Infos für alle Neugierigen

Pro Physik nennt sich selbst die Findemaschine: Forschungsnachrichten, Tagungskalender, Stellenbörse…

Wissenschaftsfestival der DPG

Kworkquark – Teilchenphysik einfach erklärt.

Cern, die European Organisation for Nuclear Research in der Schweiz.

Rund um Albert Einstein: Einstein Archives Online, Albert Einstein im WWW

Jenseits von Bits und Bytes: Quantencomputer. “Diese Seite basiert im Großen und Ganzen auf meiner Facharbeit, die über das Thema Quantencomputer ging. Diese Einführung soll allerdings nicht wissenschaftlich sein, sondern so, daß sie jeder verstehen kann. Deshalb verwende ich auch keine Formeln. Teilweise ist der Stoff aber natürlich schon etwas theoretisch.”

Physik 2000 (IAP Uni Bonn), deutsche Fassung von Physics 2000 (University of Colorado, Boulder).

Usenet Physics FAQ

Schulphysik.de ist eine umfangreiche Linkliste – nicht nur für den Schulgebrauch.

Nobel Laureates in Physics, 1901 – present (maintained by SLAC library).

NASA’s Hubblesite.

European Southern Observatory, die europäische Südsternwarte in Chile.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (CalTech, NASA)

Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy

Wissenschaft im Dialog (gefördert vom BmBF)

Forschungseinrichtungen und -gesellschaften in Deutschland…

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Leibnitz-Gemeinschaft

… und in Europa:

European Physical Society, Physicsweb by the Institute of Physics, UK

I wanna be an astronaut when I grow up

Thirty-five years ago yesterday, Apollo 11 launched, and man landed on the moon for the first time a few days later. There is a good post with several interesting links at MetaFilter: Apollo 11 (+35).

Science is fun

Here’s one for the science teachers and geeks out there: Howtoons “are one-page cartoons showing 5-to-15 year-old kids ‘How To’ build things. […] Our Howtoons are designed to encourage children to be active participants in discovering the world through Play-that-Matters — fun, creative, and inventive — and to rely a lot less on mass-consumable entertainment.”

Link via MetaFilter.

In case you’ve been wondering how I’m spending my holidays…

Meanwhile, you’ll find me in the kitchen, preparing Seehk kefta. (And yes, I sent André to the supermarket to do the shopping, lest any of my students see me there. )

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Tomorrow is the last day of school before the summer holidays. On the one hand, I’m looking forward to six weeks without school, but I really can’t complain like some of my colleagues because I only had half a job for the last couple of months and thus only half the work and half the stress.

On the other hand, I will be unemployed as of Saturday, but fortunately only for six weeks because it looks like I will be employed full-time after the holidays. If everything goes according to plan (and there doesn’t seem to be much that can go wrong at this stage) I will have a full-time job at the school I started working for in February (got the job only a few days earlier). It is in another state (Rhineland Palantinate instead of North-Rhine Westphalia) and about 85km (55 miles) south of Bonn, so the (not so) new job means moving as well.

André will continue to work in Bonn, so we compromised and looked for a new flat about halfway between Bonn and Koblenz. We found out that it can be much easier to find a new flat in a small town than in a city like Bonn, and rents are cheaper, too. We were very lucky and found a nice flat after looking at three or four others, so it took only one afternoon (plus some research beforehand). We’re going to move in a couple of weeks, and while I’m a little sad about leaving Bonn, I’m also looking forward to the new beginning.

Indian Cooking, part two

Meanwhile, I’ve tried all the recipes I linked to the other day. I liked the Murg Jalfraizee best, but the other two were really good as well. A kind reader sent me a link to his Indian recipes via e-mail: The Aardvark cooks. I’m going to try Seekh kefta and/or Murgh dopiaza this weekend. I’ve never heard of some of the spices mentioned in the recipes, but Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages (auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar) are a vauable source of information.

Physic(ist)s

Feynman is one of the coolest physicists, so of course I have to link to this essay: Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine by W. Daniel Hillis for Physics Today.

Link via Schockwellenreiter und Physikalische Kleinigkeiten.

Photos from around the World

Terra Galleria offers “galleries of travel, adventure, landscape, and nature photography by Quang-Tuan Luong. The browsable image bank contains more than 8000 pictures from around the world (including many large format images), available not only as fine art prints or for commercial image licencing, but also for personal use. […] New material is added monthly, so come back often!”

Link via Ingi.

International Cooking

I wanted to try some new reicpes this weekend and decided to try some Indian cuisine – despite my low tolerance of spicy food.

I did a Google search for Indian dishes with chicken in them and came up with Murg Jalfraizee (Chicken with Green Bell Peppers). In fact, I substituted the green peppers for yellow and red ones because I had them on hand, and used onions, garlic and ginger instead of pastes, but the meal turned out very tasty – much better than I had anticipated.

It’s not that I’m a bad cook, I’m able to pull of, say, Italian dishes quite well, but I usually need some practice with a new cuisine until I understand how the spices work or how a certain way of preparing food works.

In fact, it was so yummy that I’m going to try another new recipe tomorrow: Chicken Kundapuri. The Murg Korma (Cashew Chicken) also sounds great – maybe next weekend?

Unfortunately, there are very few Indian restaurants in Germany (maybe because most Germans don’t like hot food?), so I have only tasted real Indian food once or twice and can’t really tell if my concoction comes close to real Indian food, but it sure was fun to cook and a new kind of taste in our daily fare. If you’ve got a tried ‘n true Indian recipe you think I should try, feel free to post the recipe (or a link) in the comments! I’m also keen on trying some Thai or Indonesian dishes.

I also did some research on Indian Cuisine (and cooking in general) this afternoon and found some useful questions – and answers – at Ask MetaFilter:

• A thread on how to start cooking Indian style
• Another on how to cook papapds/pappadams
• Because I also like Mexican food: Looking for an extraordinary guacamole recipe
• A herb that is common in both cuisines is coriander or cilantro. I didn’t know that it tastes differently to different people.