Today the last two blue tit youngsters left the birdhouse on our balcony.
After a somewhat depressing first attempt last year, with all eight youngsters dying, this time around the parent(s) managed to get at least two of initially eight youngsters till the end.
Today at around 8am and 11am they finally left our balcony house their parents have been setting up since the very end of March.
For those of you interested, there’s a more time-lapse and motion-detection clips in a YouTube playlist.
After more than sixteen years at the ATLAS experiment it seems to be time for a change, and for me that change is going from quarks to qubits, and from a mix of fundamental research, teaching and science communication to a full-time job working on public engagement and didactics for the recently founded Munich Quantum Valley.
“Locked Out” is the title for a piece I created in memory of the 19 hours we’ve been locked out of our apartment last week, due to a material defect in our apartment-door lock.
A broken piece inside the locking mechanism of the door caused the key to turn inside the lock cylinder without actually moving the bolt in the lock (obviously this we only learned after all the hassle). After informing the janitor at about 8pm, him calling two somewhat suspicious ‘locksmith’ services, quite a bit of waiting time and both failing on the door after trying out all their arsenal on the lock, we called it a night at about 12:30am and joined our kids at some friends’ place.
After sending the kids to school on borrowed clothes, food and school equipment, we got back to the action with another locksmith who at least didn’t even try and just recommended a dedicated expert. Around around lunch time the forth (well, maybe the first real) locksmith arrived and took about two more hours to open the door with heavy machinery (and brain).
As of today I can call myself “Privatdozent” at LMU Munich, giving me the ability to officially take on and take exams of my own master and PhD students at the department :)
Given the certainly very unique situation caused by the current corona pandemic, I decided to set up a little live blog to document the next couple of weeks representing a mixtures of home office, home schooling, home day care and whatever is yet to come …
First of all, for those of you that are still wondering about the why, here is two interesting reads: Tomas Pueyo at Medium.com and Harry Stevens at WashingtonPost.com.
In the following live life blog, I’ll focus on a few specific, mostly non-work, activities whenever something comes up …
