"The Owl's Nest"

I have to make a confession. Although I am a scientist, which implies (in a zero-order approximation) that I should be a no-nonsense person with utmost dedication to my profession (in other words, a textbook stereotypical German), I love to play around. I like many different computer games, and in particular I have been for years a fan of the games created by Pastel Games. The name of this company is a reference to its founder, Mateusz Skutnik, who not only holds a degree in architecture, but is also a very gifted artist, photographer, narrator, and game designer. His signature game series is Submachine, which I am truly addicted to. The games fall into the point-and-click category, where the player shares the first-person view with his in-game character (see attached image). Navigation and interaction with the in-game environment is done by mouse-over and click, provided the selected item or adjacent location are available for that. One makes progress in the game by picking up items (maybe combining some in the inventory) and solving riddles. For instance, in some of the Submachine games new locations can be reached by teleporting, which in some cases is done by entering a three-digit code. However, only a few out of the potential 1,000 combinations will actually activate the teleporter, so tasks must be carried out to learn the coordinates that work. Also, sometimes a door must be opened to access the teleporter itself, which may be done by cooking up a corrosive chemical from inventory items and then spilling the fluid into the door locking mechanism. Some of the riddles are hard, which is probably why the games have such a loyal fan base. The often dystopic ambient (demonstrating the artistic talent of Mr. Skutnik) adds an extra thrill (for me, that is).
A recent release from Pastel Games, and here comes the punchline, has been named The Owl's Nest. I think the identity of the names is purely coincidental, since this blog has been around since long before the inception of the game, and I have a hard time believing that the Pastel Games crew actually reads my blog (although I would be quite flattered, of course). This particular game takes you inside a Nazi German bunker that must be explored, in order to find out what happened there. (Don't worry, the Nazi aspect is only for extra creeps, as they are the antagonists, much like in the Indiana Jones movies #1 and 3.)
If you would like to give The Owl's Nest a try, please click here. Oh, and don't be depressed if you get stuck - that happens to the best of us, frequently! There is also a walkthrough ... I never finished any of their games without peeking at least once ...

Women in Science (xkcd)

This cartoon is hotlinked from cartoonist xkcd's web site. It struck a chord with me, because it made me think (again) about the abundance (or the lack thereof) of female scientists. I would like to share just a few facts from my own scientific career.
First of all, we must define a starting point for my becoming a scientist. I suggest we pick the time when I entered the final two years in secondary school (Gymnasium), because that was the first time I was allowed to choose a slant in my class schedule toward science and mathematics.
Specifically I picked Physics and Chemistry as two topics in which I took the written Abitur exam. There was only one female student in the Physics class, but I would say that in Chemistry it was almost even. In fact, there was another Chemistry class at other times of the week, so as to ensure all students get their favorite combinations of classes, and thus we should look at both Chemistry classes combined. I don't remember everyone after 15 years, especially since the second class took place at our partner school, but my feeling is that the percentage of female students in the combined classes ranked between 30 and 50%.
Then I went on to do my civilian service, a military service substitute, which I did in a kindergarten. There, the staff consisted of four female full-time employees, a female trainee, and myself. The principal was also female, but since she was in charge of multiple institutions, she had her office somewhere else, and she showed up only once a week.
College was next, which I started as an Electrical Engineering major. Slightly more than 50 people started with me, of which only 3 were women. One actually quit after the first term, but another one, who is from an Arabic country, later went all the way to her PhD, and in the process she kicked everyone's behind whenever it came to do math.
In fact, I also quit doing EE, to pursue a Chemistry degree instead. Again, the gender distribution was about balanced, actually with a slight excess of women (due to that fraction of students who specialized in Food Chemistry). Eventually I graduated, after a year-long final research project, and when I left for Berlin, the three graduate students who were in that group at that time for their own doctorates were all female.
I don't have comprehensive information on the gender composition of the CP department of the FHI Berlin, because not only was the group too big to assess something like this in retrospect only - there was also a significant fluctuation of staff, so this variation makes it impossible for me to correctly remember everyone. Yet I can offer a survey on the people who worked directly with me: four females and two males.
In Chicago I was in charge of providing training to the students who were assigned to work on the same equipment: three females and one male (even though the male student overlapped with me only for a few weeks, after which he went to Berlin, where he worked on "my" old experiment, and he actually taught me more about the Chicago chamber than I taught him about science in general).
To sum up, there is much female talent in science, and the fact that that there are only few female professors is most likely due to the "glass ceiling" effect. - Other explanations are welcome, especially from female scientists!

First Things First, or What?

The original idea behind this little blog of mine was to keep all of my friends posted during my American adventure from 2008 - 2010. However, a fact I haven't addressed too often here is that Chicago wasn't the first foreign place I have lived in, and today I would like to report a little bit on that. The reason for this is that earlier on today I got word from my former advisor, Dr. David Lennon, (who is a "supervisor" in British English, actually an Englishman, and anyways someone I look up to as a scientist and a person alike) that the work I was involved in finally got accepted for publication. By a funny coincidence, some of the people I later worked with in Berlin are co-authors of this paper as well. So, Chicago didn't mark my first stay in an anglophonic country, even though the accents from Chicago and Glasgow couldn't probably be any more different from each other ... the latter being by far the thickest I have encountered so far. (But in a sense the two cities share being rooted in working class culture.)
I am particularly fond of my Glaswegian experience, because it was there that for the first time I was treated like a real researcher. Ten years back the Anglo-American and the German educational systems were distinctly different from each other, as only more recently Germany and the rest of the EU introduced the three-tier Bachelor / Master / Doctor degrees; formerly the German undergraduate level ended with a Diploma, a Magister, or a Federal Exam, all being almost peers to a Master's degree, and also taking respecively more time. As a student of Chemistry at the TU Kaiserslautern, I was required to do three six-week research projects, one in each of the principal topics of Inorganic, Organic, and Physical Chemistry. I was pleased to learn that my alma mater had signed collaboration treaties with various other universities across Europe to facilitate the mutual exchange of students. (Foreign experience is a much-cherished value over here.) In the Sciences this is particularly easy, as it isn't so important where the lab is located that the student is working in; and the core of the deal was that Kaiserslautern students could substitute one of their three domestic research projects with the one abroad. There were two major benefits for me: I got to gain for the first time some international work experience, and it was handed to me on a silver platter: while it is usually a bureaucratic mess to temporarily leave one's home university to attend another one, this agreement was specifically designed to encourage just that. Oh, and there was even a little bit of money involved to cover my travel expenses. A triple Hooray to the "Erasmus program"!
As a result of this wonderful invention I could go to Glasgow from early April to mid July 2002. As I have hinted above, people from where I completed my doctorate were also involved in the Glasgow project - it so happened that the day I introduced myself to David Lennon in his office, Hajo Freund from Berlin called him to talk about the results ... and since they were confidential, I, as the new guy, actually had to leave the room for the time of their conversation. Still, I added my little share to the progress, and at the end of the day I even earned the second spot on the authors' list. (The person in front of me is Alastair, Scottish for Alexander.) And due to the longer duration of this assignment I got involved more in the science than I could have ever been in the other two undergraduate projects in Germany, which gave me much satisfaction. (Sadly, the other two didn't give me much satisfaction at all, for different reasons.)
However, the highlight of this time clearly was a meeting of all research groups from Scotland that work in the field of heterogeneous catalysis. This meeting has a tradition and takes place every year in May, in a youth-hostel style cabin on the shores of Lake Tay in the Southern Highlands. I retrieved a representative photograph from the depths of the Internet to share with you the beauty of the place. The meeting consumed four days, of which only half were dedicated to science, and the other half to outdoor activities. So it came to pass that I engaged in the Scottish national sport called hillwalking, which is a euphemism for serious uphill hiking in the Highlands. My legs felt like jelly, but I did make it all the way to the peak of the hill, where I saw patches of snow as big as 10x10 m^2 even in late spring. I am a fan of eating, so to speak, but the little snack we had there was especially delicious! - The next day my legs were incredibly sore, but I went on a little bike ride with another student participant, and at night I managed to win the ping-pong tournament. (In the final game I beat David, my boss.) But I guess the fact that we had a ping-pong table in our garage when I was a kid probably gave me a head start ...
By the way, there are two reasons why I had to download someone else's picture to illustrate Lake Tay. Digital cameras were the exception rather than the rule, and hence way beyond my tiny student's budget. And I also relied on my then-girlfriend, a hobby photographer, to take the pictures for me when she came to visit me for two weeks; but we broke up shortly after my return to Germany, so all the pictures stayed with her. As sad as I was at the time, being single granted me the freedom to fully dedicate myself to science ever since. You might say, that ever since this break-up I have been in league, but not in bed, with science ...