Thanks to every single guest we welcomed at SO2012 - you really made this night awesome to all of us.
Thanks to all the helpers big and small. I hope you had fun, and recovered well from 31 hours of strain.
As I announced previously, this was the last Semester Opening with me. Those three years really meant much to me.
Heute ist der Tag,
Kaiserslautern ist der Ort
Es ist wirklich eine Ehre zum dritten Mal jetzt dabei sein zu dürfen.
Wir haben selten eine so positive Stimmung erlebt.
I guess you guys know the experience: the moon seems far bigger when being in a city compared to looking at it from a lone county lane. Indeed, in my course "Perception" we all reported that the moon is really big when being close to the horizon and seems rather small when on zenith.
In the course the students tried to come up with all sorts of explanations e.g. that is has something to do with some diffraction effect as it is known that people can see the sun even some time after it is already set (also, compare this for example to catching fish in water which is quite hard when not looking at the water from straight above).
Our professor didn't resolve the issue. She told us to wait till the course made some progress. Well, I didn't. The next night I took my camera and took the following four pictures of the moon with a steady 10x zoom
Hence, this is indeed another illusion and not measurable with a camera. To me it seems like trees and houses create some form of the Ebbinghaus Illusion which makes it a quite common illusion in nature. Some more explanation on the moon illision can be found at the Dark Sky Diary.
If the universe is finite in extent and the cosmological principle (not to be confused with the cosmological constant) does not apply, and the expansion speed does not exceed the escape velocity, then the mutual gravitational attraction of all its matter will eventually cause it to contract. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Crunch]
Well, sometimes you feel the big bang, the expansion and acceleration in your life, and, sometimes, there's the big crunch, too. And so it went these last two days. First, most parts of my research crunched, questioned in relevance and completeness. Second, application #114 just came back from U of T with the short note:
Your application for admission to the graduate program in ComputerScience, University of Toronto, has been given careful consideration. I regret to advise you that we are unable to offer you admission and realize this news will be a disappointment to you.
So, that leaves me few to say but "I am not giving up" and get along with it. That's a moment to cite words by Pendulum (3rd altered):
Somewhere out there in the vast nothingness of space...
Somewhere far away in space and time..
Staring upwards at the gleaming stars in the obsidian sky
We're marooned on a small island,
In an endless sea,
Confined to a tiny spit of sand,
Unable to escape
But some night ..
on a small planet
On earth
We're going to rock civilisation
It might just take a little longer...
It's one thing to see those heavy US Army planes flying right over your house day and night as if we were at war again (e.g. Iraq/Afghanistan was pretty intense), but it's another to see some pilots chose weird routes right above your head.
(Yes, probably due to recent strikes in Frankfurt... )
As some might have guessed already I skipped school to jump right into the snow of the Swiss and French Alps with my brother.
After days of powder we were not able to lift a finger in the evenings and thus it took until now to share some photos.
As usual all started with a waxing and fixing session to prepare our boards. I guess the next thing really was rushing through the night towards the Swiss border and seeing the first real snow this winter.
Arriving early we directly put on the boots and swam up the hills as it was literally raining snow from above.
I guess we did right as I survived the first day without hospital - great progress compared to last year.
The day brought sun and one of the most amazing pow session to date. We went down into the woods until we found a lake with a perfect kicker alley which we had to shape for the rest of the day. Although several >chutes< the pow saved us from serious injuries.
Falling in love with the "monster's theme" (soundtrack by Jon Hobkins). Right then I found this:
Herausgeber: Daniel Berger
Versucht dem aktuellen HTML5 Standard zu entsprechen
