Busses wait for trains. Busses don’t wait for other busses. Local trains (mostly) wait for interregional trains. This is my understanding of the hierarchy of Swiss transportation rules. When everything is on time, which happens most of the time the system works flawlessly. However when you have a couple of connections to catch, there can be problems.
So today I was dropping some of my bags off at a room I’m taking in a co-worker’s apartment, and I had a few connections. On the second connection, I lugged my bags onto a bus which was supposed to take me to the final bus I needed to take. At this point everything was going smoothly, and then the bus didn’t leave when it was supposed to. I waited on the bus for a few more minutes, and then another train pulls into the station. A few minutes later we finally left. At this point I had already missed my next connection because we waited 5 minutes for the late train coming into the station. Luckily I only had to wait an extra 15 minutes to catch my final bus to the apartment.
Due to the extra 15 minute wait on the trip to the apartment, my return journey to the PSI guesthouse was postponed by an hour, which may have been a good thing as this weekend in Baden the town is celebrating Fastnacht. It was a fairly small celebration, but there were some incredible costumes, and some of the most elaborate facepainting I’ve seen.
All in all the transportation system here is great (I love the simplicity of the website), but I now know to take the trips with the fewest connections, even if they’re supposed to take a few minutes longer.
Perhaps I picked the wrong day to make a trip to Berne. The weather was great, the old town has beautiful architecture, and great streets to wander down and window shop. The problem with yesterday was that there was an “illegal” protest scheduled. The World Economic Forum is meeting in Eastern Switzerland this coming week, and that usually spells trouble where ever the meeting occurs. The protests yesterday were no different, I had left hours before they began, but the police were on every corner in Altstadt (old town), and their presence certainly made the day less pleasant.
Almost 7 days have passed since my arrival in Switzerland. I’m adjusting. There is quite a bit of paperwork to complete for a foreigner like myself, and housing is not as easy to find as I’m used to. That means I’m still staying in the guesthouse at PSI while I look for a place. The biggest downside to that is that I’m a slave to the train/bus schedules for the area…
While there is excellent transportation here, and everything is on time, the schedules for transportation to and from the lab are geared towards working hours and not towards “playing” hours. That means 8PM is about the latest I can “stay out” if I want to get back to my room.
For the last week, I haven’t had a lot of time to do much work, but hopefully this week will be a little bit calmer and I can sit down and focus on the list of things to do that is piling up on me.
I’ve posted a few random pictures of Switzerland on my flickr account for people to peruse.
It’s been too long since I wrote on this blog last…hopefully I’ll be better about writing with my recent change of scenery.
The first snowfall of year up Fourmile Canyon. Boulder is still rainy and wet, but up here it’s all about the white stuff. People are firing up their wood stoves, and the smell of wood burning adds a nice homely feel to the weather.
MapMyRide.com is one of the coolest sites I’ve used in awhile. Perhaps, because I’m just getting into biking, and it is coming along at a good time…Anyway, the site uses google to map your bike ride. If you’re into running there is a mapmyrun site as well
If you sign-up (it’s free) you get a few more features. Things I’ve used so far besides mapping ride include:
- Export to Google Earth
- Share/Email with Friends
- Calorie counter
- Training log
As for mapping rides, it’s pretty straightforward. One thing I really like about it is the ability to or not to follow roads. This can be turned on and off as you trace out your ride, so your not stuck with one or the other (especially handy when I am mapping out things on bike paths which don’t show up on the map.) Here’s an example of a map…a ride I just did this morning:
There are some places where the site can be improved, for example the navigation bar at the top is really small and can easily get lost when scrolling around pages. Overall the site is pretty sweet, and I’m looking forward to using it more to keep track of my rides this summer.
Scientists, for the most part have agreed that greenhouse gases are responsible for the increase in global mean surface temperatures. There were/are still a handful of scientists out there who say the sun is to blame for the majority of the warming. The figure below is from the IPCC report which just came out in 2007. It describes the major radiative forcings of the climate system on earth. Towards the bottom is the solar forcing. Small. This diagram represent the vast majority opinion of the world community of climate scientists.
As with anything there are people who disagree with the figure, and one of the larger minorities points at the sun as the cause of the increasing temperature. Well, a recent study in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy appears to destroy the claims that the sun is responsible for the recent climatic warming. Excerpts from a editorial on these findings from Nature.
Solar activity peaked between 1985 and 1987. Since then, trends in solar irradiance, sunspot number and cosmic-ray intensity have all been in the opposite direction to that required to explain global warming.
A second quote, puts it into a little more perspective
[Solar effects] might have acted to cool the climate in recent decades, but been overwhelmed. If so, the climate could be more sensitive to greenhouse gases than is generally thought, and future temperature increases might be greater than expected if a countervailing solar effect comes to an end.
No solar hiding place for greenhouse skeptics : Article : Nature
I’ve posted the article from Nature here for those of you who don’t have access to the contents.
So my trip to Mexico City went very well. We had a meeting to discuss the status of the data analysis for the MILAGRO field campaign. This marked the 3rd time I’ve been to the second largest city in the world. Unlike my first 2 trips to the city of pollution, I did not get sick. This is a very good thing. I attribute it to the location and more “upscale” eateries we went to. Here’s a quick mention of the places I remember:
Restaurants
Cafe Tacuba - Great little place (I think there may be multiple locations - we went to the one in the Centro Historico). The chili rellenos are some of the best I’ve had outside of New Mexico. Price was good for how close it is to the historic district and the Zocalo. In addition there is a wandering mariachi band that is more than happy to accept money to play at the table of your advisor who just happened to walk into the restaurant a half an hour after you did.
Los Girasoles- This place was pretty dead when we went there, but the food was good, and we went at a gringo dinner time. Despite being overcharged on the tip, I think the experience was pretty good. It was also rumored that Nobel Laureate Mario Molina had taken a big group of people from the meeting we were at to this restaurant a few days before. I think that’s a pretty good endorsement of the restaurant. The blue corn quesadillas are deliciously unique.
Hotel
Sheraton Centro Historico is a beautiful hotel that I only stayed in because our travel grant was paying for it. The were filming a commercial in the entrance for a few days. If anyone finds this on YouTube or sees it on Mexican television anytime, I’d be interested to see it…
Things (we had time) to do:
Walk around the Zocalo at night.
Hang out in a Mercado. Drink a coke (no high fructose corn syrup here!). See a protest, or another one (mild nudity).
More Pictures here.
If your US passport expires soon or if you haven’t gone through the ordeal that is getting a passport here are some helpful suggestions/pointers:
- Even if you mail you application / renewal with 10 weeks to spare before you travel you will likely not have your passport in time.
- The phone system you call is not user friendly. Here is how you skip the 5 minutes of talking so you can talk to someone (after another long wait)
Number: 1-877-487-2778, then 1-3-1 gets you through the menu, so you may get to talk to a person. Granted what happens 9 out of 10 times is that you get a recording saying that they are busy, your call is important, and then it hangs up on you. Don’t be discouraged, keep calling back, and eventually you’ll get through.
- Calling when you are traveling within 2 weeks and asking them to expedite is not enough. You need to keep calling and reminding them to expedite. I was told that my passport would be expedited, when I called back a week later, they told me that there was a note on my file to expedite, but that no one had done anything.
- Passport offices are your best bet when it comes to getting your passport in hand and before your trip. They are open Saturdays (in the morning), and although they say you need an appointment, you really don’t. I went to the Denver office on a Saturday morning and had my passport 3 hours later. Considerably less time than I spent on the phone system. I lucked out since Denver is close to where I live, but there are only a few passport offices in the US. If worst comes to worst, book a flight to the nearest office if it’s too far to drive.
Currently (as of 5/20/07) the passport website keeps updating the processing time. When I applied it was 8 weeks, now it’s 10-12 weeks for non-expedited passports.
How much coal does it take to convert bread to toast? Assuming you’re using a toaster, and the electricity produced is from coal, one can calculate the weight of coal needed to convert bread into toast.
Here’s the relevant info (some of these are approximate):
1 minute in the toaster
10 Amps at 100 Volts = 1kW
1 ton of coal gives 6150 kW hours (Source)
25% efficiency in production and transport of electricity
So it takes 1/60 kW hours to toast bread * 2000 lbs coal / 6150 kW hours * 4 (efficiency factor) * 16 oz / pound
= 0.35 oz of coal
= 10 grams of coal / piece of toast
= 36 grams of CO2 produced per piece of toast
Lets scale that up to the US, and say that 1 / 10 people in the US make toast in the morning. We then multiply those figures by 30 million to get the approximate mass of coal burned and the CO2 release from a morning of toast eating in the US.
= 328 tons of coal burned / day for toast
= 1200 tons of CO2 released / day for toast
= 439 kTons CO2 released / year for toast
So just for fun I also calculated the equivalent number of pieces of toast in gasoline it takes for me to drive to and from campus. It’s a 6 mile roundtrip which is approximately 10 km. With my car getting approximately 28 mpg, it releases 198 g of CO2 per kilometer (Source). So for a 10 km round trip, that is 1980 g of CO2. If each piece of toast releases 36 grams of CO2, then driving to school is the equivalent of toasting 55 pieces of bread.
That was my fun calculation for the day. I think I’ll stick to public transportation, and stop toasting my bread.
So I spent the last few days in Virginia Beach at a NASA meeting discussing data analysis and the like with collaborators. The meeting went well, and I have some more good ideas of things to pursue in my dataset. I got a few more job offers and hints of offers, but I’ve committed to the group in Switzerland, and I’m pretty happy with that decision, so no looking back at this point. Anyway, back to the original reason I’m posting this…
Ed (a postdoc in our group who is working on similar projects as me) and I travelled to Virginia Beach together, with our first flight on United to Charlotte. The second leg of the trip out was a code share with US Airways who operated that flight. United was good US Air was kinda cramped and the plane was crappy…I suppose the fact the plane was a little puddle jumper would explain the crappiness of the plane. What really sucked on the last leg of the trip out was that apparently US Air didn’t communicate the fact that we were on the flight to Norfolk to United. We didn’t find out about this little part of the story until today when we attemped to check in for our United flight from Norfolk to Chicago…
So from what I gathered today. If you don’t complete (or if the airline doesn’t think you completed it) your ticketed trip in one direction, airlines cancel the second half of your trip, and don’t tell you about it. Well the ticket had been paid for and that was how I was getting home, so the reissued us our ticket. Well…kind of reissued our tickets. We got to fly standby on the first flight from Norfolk to Chicago, which wasn’t a problem because the flight wasn’t overbooked. The second flight, Chicago to Denver, posed somewhat of a problem. Since our ticket was cancelled and reissued today, the flight had been overbooked, and we were number 54 and 55 on the waitlist to be put on the flight. With those kind of odds we decided a trip to customer service was a good idea. Luckily there are about 15 flights between Chicago and Denver a day since they are the 2 main hubs for United, so we got a ticket for 3 hours later, and another standby voucher for an earlier flight if there was room. Turns out there was room, but there wasn’t a plane…mechanical problems grounded the plane that was supposed to fly. Long story short, we took the flight we got ticketed for, and left before the flight we were standby on. I’m writing this as I ride the public bus back to Boulder, and my warm bed…
I blame US Air for this whole fiasco. I blame United too, but not as much because I like United, and the customer service were very helpful, and bumped me up to economy plus even though I lost my Premier status…
