A reminder

I have spent the last few weeks back in the United States. The visit has reminded me a lot of what I’m missing by moving overseas—conversations with friends and families, direct contact with collaborators, and the familiar sights and sounds of home.

At the same time, I realize that there’s a lot that I really don’t mind missing out on—urban sprawl, McMansions, the American media corps, the “convenience” lifestyle, and so on. It’s definitely a struggle at times to get by as a stranger in a strange land, but it’s a tradeoff that I’ve been willing to make, and even more so now that I’ve had a chance to compare what I’m missing firsthand.

Seen and heard

Some random things encountered yesterday, that I doubt I would have seen back home:

• A young child—certainly not more than 10 years old, and probably not even that old—walking around the neighborhood without any parental supervision. While not common in the US, it’s certainly quite common here; children barely bigger than their backpacks appear to walk to elementary school on their own (either individually or in gaggles) with startling regularity.
• Outside a store here, a dog was attached to a leash and sitting quite peacefully. However, what was bizarre about it was that the leash was not attached to anything; it was merely lying on the ground. It was an incredibly well-behaved dog not to react to its surroundings and all the passers-by.
• A Hungarian Mormon missionary. This I found to be incredibly amusing, although I can’t really say why. I guess I just find the concept intriguing. It’s not really a shock that there are Mormon missionaries going to Hungary (after all, I don’t think a Hungarian would spontaneously convert to Mormonism). On the other hand, what actually prompted such a conversion, and how it would lead to a Hungarian learning fairly passable English and German and tromping around the streets of Aachen to extol the virtues of the LDS is certainly worth considering. (The whole encounter was rather thought-provoking, actually; I’ll post more about it some other time.)

On finding good help

One of the challenges of academia in Europe appears to be the inverse of the problem in the US: how to support an army of minions graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. In the US, finding good help is relatively easy compared to finding means of paying for them; in Europe, it appears it’s much easier to find the funding than to find the employees.

Or maybe I shouldn’t say it’s hard to find people—it’s just hard to find the right people. For a recent position I advertised, I’ve received applications from all sorts of people, including a bunch who would, on paper, appear to be entirely unsuitable for such a position. (For instance, why would someone working for more than two decades as a staff scientist want to accept a temporary post-doctoral position?) It rather boggles the mind.

As for who I ended up hiring, I’ve decided to take one post-doctoral fellow and one student. The search for a postdoc was fortunately quite easy; an extremely qualified candidate whose “degrees of separation” was only 1 applied relatively quickly, and no one else really compared well with that. (Experience as an experimentalist, and familiarity with the MD software we’re using, also helped.)

The graduate student search was much more involved, surprisingly. Most of the candidates came in with essentially no experience in the field. This is true of all the finalists, too, but they all had experience with computational science. Unfortunately, two of the candidates unintentionally hurt their chances during the application process, in rather different ways. leaving only one candidate without a serious black mark left in the running. It’s rather unfortunate that I had to make a decision through elimination rather than through a positive selection, but sometimes, you have to take what’s handed to you and make the most of it.

Oy. A long time it's been

Since last I gave this blog some attention. I have to admit that time has a way of sneaking by when I’m not paying active attention to what I’m doing; I definitely have a nasty tendency to let things slip by, and that’s not really my intention here. On the other hand, there is always the concern of sharing too much information: when exactly does my desire to share the details with my life interfere with my desire for privacy, as well as the rights of others to privacy? It’s a fine line to walk, but I figure I will find a way to bridge the gap.

The start of a very long day.

Writing from on-board an ICE train from Aachen to Frankfurt (original source Brussels), I am currently beginning the first leg of a trip to San Francisco. What surprises me is that even though there’s a nine-hour time difference, the flight is only eleven hours long. This means that, by the clock, I will get to San Francisco just two hours after taking off from Frankfurt. The downside of this is that today will be a 33-hour day. (This also leaves me wondering two more things:

• exactly how far north the great circle route between Frankfurt and San Francisco really is, and
• when everybody jokes about wishing for a longer day, would this be an approved way of getting it?)

As for the ICE trains, they’re a rather interesting way to travel between cities in Germany. They’re the equivalent of the Amtrak and Acela trains in the US, but with better customer service and reliability. The “reservation system” is a little different as well. You can get a reserved seat, but it’s not reserved by name--only by starting and ending points. You get a seat designation with your ticket, but there’s no guarantee that someone else won’t have taken your seat by the time you find it!

Just attended my first faculty meeting

To say it was a bizarre experience is putting it mildly. Three hours of technical (administrative) conversations and discussions. And did I mention it was all “auf Deutsch?” To say that I only got a fraction of it is puting it mildly. I seemed to get a sense of the major theme of the discussion, but to say I got all the ins and outs would be a flat-out lie. I recognized many words in isolation, but absorbing whole sentences in context? Not so much.

I suspect that this will be what I will need to use as my yardstick for determining my progress with the German language. The more of that meeting I understand, the better off I’ll be. (No real surprise there, I suppose.)

It's not every day

That you get to take part in a workshop held in a fortress. I recently attended a workshop in a town called Würzburg; the workshop was held in the Festung Marianberg. The facility is the site of what used to be a fortress; the outsides of the buildings--as well as the cobblestone paving--clearly have the well-worn look of structures that have been around for centuries; on the other hand, the insides look like they’ve been recently renovated, and the furniture thankfully was a far cry from that of medieval times.