Category Archives: Hobbies

ESO Supernova

‘A New Supernova over Munich’, that’s the slogan of the ESO planetarium and visitor centre that opened recently. It’s not exactly above Munich, as Garching is a bit of a subway ride outside of town, but it’s certainly worth the trip!

They have a very nice permanent exhibition called “The Living Universe” which covers about everything from where we are to what we know about our Universe. There’s temporary exhibitions as well as a fantastic planetarium, with lots of different shows, on top of that. I’ve seen the “Phantom of the Universe” as well as “Two Small Pieces of Glass — The Amazing Telescope“, and they are both great movies. Obviously the former of the two has to be, as it features the ATLAS experiment and was in part done by ATLAS people (thanks for that).

The best part is, that both the exhibitions and the planetarium shows are (still) free of charge. So there’s really no excuse for not passing by!!

Honour & Glory

It’s time for this year’s (major) Honour & Glory event – FIFA2018 is starting in a few days!

Remember to check your account and place your bets before the matches start!
The bets and some stats and plots (match board, score board) will be visible right after kickoff and I’ll do my best to put in results quickly.

Looking forwards to another exiting (betting) event!
Let’s see who’s going to make this time … newbie or someone with history ;)

Scientific aliens

taken from https://doi.org/10.1080/09297049.2018.1470611

I finally got my name on a peer-reviewed psychology publication … check on bucket list :)
Orthographic learning in children with isolated and combined reading and spelling deficits” by Heike Mehlhase, Sarolta Bakos, Karin Landerl, Gerd Schulte-Körne & Kristina Moll

To be fair, it’s only in the Acknowledgments section of one of Heike’s recent papers …
but you gonna have to start somewhere!

Thanks to Sascha Mehlhase for designing the aliens for the associate learning phase […].

Open Day & Fotohalbmarathon

Wow … what a weekend. After returning from the LHC LLP Workshop in Trieste at 7am on Saturday, I went straight to Garching to set up the scene for our 2017 Garching Open Day event starting at 11am. After getting home at 10pm I got started on the final preparations for Sunday’s 2017 Fotohalbmarathon. But one after the other …

Once again, and thanks to a great team, we had an exemplary Open Day event on Saturday … ATLAS live-info screens and posters, a button machine, a BYOPD competition, a large ATLAS LEGO model, short-film screenings throughout the day, a screening of “BBC Horizon – Inside CERN” in the evening, and several hundred people passing by (47 participants in the BYOPD competition) and chatting/discussing with us. The final QnA after the movie took longer than the movie itself :)

On Sunday I organised the ninth (my fifth) edition of our little version of a photo marathon, called Fotohalbmarathon. This year’s twelve topics followed the theme ‘Urban Globetrotter‘.

For both events the juries are still busy working out the best contributions ;)