Snowmageddon Reloaded

As of Tuesday 27 January, 9pm Eastern Time, at Cambridge/MA, we have:

• 60 cm of snowfall in 24h (and more is coming down)
• a travel ban for the entire state of Massachusetts: no trains, buses, subway, no permission to drive your car (most of them are buried in snow anyway)
• virtually all shops, cafes, etc. shut down, even in the hyper-urban areas of Boston and Cambridge
• power outage in some areas of the state (brrrrrr........)
• a lot of relief that I decided to take my thermo underwear to the States
• uncertainty about whether my train to NYC tomorrow will run :)

But there are also nice aspects about the shutdown. Busy avenues are empty and quiet, you may actually run in the middle of a street. Pay attention not to be caught by a snow dredger. And friends of mine were so friendly to invite me for joint cooking and cake afterwards. With -10 to -15° C outside, it feels especially cosy inside, and the Bulgarian veggie/sausage stew tastes especially good! Thanks a lot, Tasho and Corinna!

Snowmageddon Approaching

This was Chicago in 2011. What is is going to be like in Massachusetts in 2015?

This is what the media say.

And this is what our favorite encyclopedia says.

Falling in Love, reloaded. (Boston, MA)

Boston and Cambridge may be called the cities of contradiction: at the same time modern and old-fashioned, cosmopolitan and traditional, avantgarde and laid back. What an enchanting mix. And what a wonderful mix of snow, sea and sunlight.

It should be added that I may enjoy the pleasure of being here for quite some more time. After all, with the state of emergency declared and a travel ban imposed, it is not clear when I will be able to leave.

Musical Digressions (I)

After a full week of discussing philosophy in Pittsburgh, it was time for something else. For all the clever and friendly colleagues, Pittsburgh may be called the American Wuppertal. A hilly, but relatively unappealing profile, a river which is somehow hidden from the citizens, a glorious past in the days of industrialization (some impressive structures can still be found), and a slow and steady decline afterwards. As visible in industrial ruins and empty spaces here and there.

You may object that the comparison is unfair: Pittsburgh has not only one, but two rivers which join forces in the middle of the city. Correct. Unfortunately, American hedge all sort of water building four-lane highways right next to the water, so that no citizen can inadvertently fall into the river when strolling along the riverbanks. A noble idea. However, for those who are able to swim, it seriously compromises quality of life. So I might prefer Wuppertal after all.

A bit more substantial is the objection that Pittsburgh has two first-rate universities (University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University) whereas the most famous achievement of the Bergische Universität Wuppertal is to host the first German winner of “Who wants to be a millionaire?”, Professor Eckhard Freise.

Finally, both cities score unexpectedly high in the culture domain. Wuppertal has Pina Bausch and her dance company. Pittsburgh has one of the best symphony orchestras of the United States and a splendid concert venue, the Heinz Hall, whose interior mirrors seems to mirror the Golden Age of the steel barons. See below. However, the building originally served as a cinema, and was only renovated in 1967-1971, whereupon it became as a concert hall.

On my last night in Pittsburgh, I headed downtown for a concert, only to discover that I had mixed up the starting time (8pm and 7.30pm). So I was actually ten minutes late! I thanked God for not sticking to my habit of arriving two minutes before the beginning, bought a ticket and was just in time for the Ravel Piano Concerto which was the major treat in the first half of the concert.

The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO) was conducted by the young James Gaffigan, by whom I was very much impressed some five years ago, when he conducted the Gürzenich Orchestra in its home venue Cologne. Fortunately, Gaffigan was again in form, the soloist Gabriela Montero matched sensibility with technical mastery, and the night became a great success. After the intermission, they played an orchestral arrangement of the Good Friday Spell from Wagner's “Parsifal”, where the full, warm sound of the PSO was a perfect match for Wagner's tenderly flowing meditations.

Finally, I even reduced some of my prejudices about Felix Mendelssohn after listening to his Fifth Symphony in d minor (“Reformation”). I used to think of Mendelssohn as a somewhat light-weighted composer, whose Allegro con brio and Presto were flamboyant, sweeping and thrilling, but whose other writings were often affectionate vanities. Well, I shall keep my mouth shut from now on. This d minor symphony must not be scared of comparison with Schumann or Brahms, neither in terms of musical expression nor in terms of stringency. Thanks to the PSO for sharing this fantastic piece with me!

Another thing that I noted was that the average age of the audience was much younger than in Germany or the Netherlands. Also in the university community, there seems to be a much larger interest in such concerts than in Europe. Is it just to the fact that the US are less of an ageing society than most European countries? Or does it reveal some substantial differences in terms of attitude toward high culture?

At Carnegie Mellon University

There are not many graduate student lounges in the world where you see, upon entering it for the first time, a whiteboard full of complicated calculations: two grad students figuring out the log-likelihood gradient of the entropy of an unrestricted Boltzmann machine. (If you have never heard of a single non-connective word in this expression, no, you are not necessarily a moron. I had to make several inquiries and even afterwards, I was not sure I fully understood what it was about.)

I guess philosophy lounges, including the one in Tilburg, are even less likely to host such cutting-edge intellectual activities. At Pittsburgh, however, you find them. And lots of cool people who inhabit them.

A Submarine Story

I met a grad student who had just showed his new invention to famous Professor X. “Look what a nice car I have construed!”

“Fine”, replied Professor X, “but why isn't also a submarine?”

Fortunately, I work on submarines myself. So I had the opportunity to talk to Professor X in more detail about his pet topic.

“Did you hear of the new type of submarine that Dr. Y developed? What do you think?”, I began.

Probably there was a bit too much appreciation for Y's work in my voice, because Professor X suddenly looked a bit grim.

“It is not a real submarine. Dr. Y claims that it is superior to existing boats because it has all these nice features and frills. But a submarine is a submarine because it is diving. And Y's submarine needs to get to the surface in shorter intervals than existing types.”

“True, this is a disadvantage”, I replied, “but it may be more than compensated by its advantages in terms of mobility, firepower, and so on.”

Professor X was a principled person, however. “How are you ever going to convince the commander of a destroyer that submarines are a superior weapon if you surface as often as the captain goes for a pee? Aren't you just incoherent?” And he looked at me with a fiery stare.

Then he switched on one of the big screens in his office, which broadcast the launching of a submarine in a dockyard.

“Dr. Y's submarine is no submarine”, he shouted. “THIS is a submarine”, he said and proudly pointed toward the screen.

I felt I had heard these words before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv3fcwx2TUY

The submarine which I saw---evidently Professor X's newest invention---was as big as a medium-sized battleship. It reminded me of the spaceship “Götterdämmerung” in the legendary Finnish-German trash Nazi comedy “Iron Sky”.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziVpqh9UXmI

When the submarine was released into the water, Professor X beamed with delight. “Constructed according to the principles I have developed in 30 years of fundamental research.”

At some point, the submarine suddenly stopped moving. Slowly, very slowly, it started to sink on the ground, out of control of the crew.

“Did you make sure that your submarine can actually swim?”, I dared to ask.

“Who are you to ask such things!”, Professor X yelled at me. “My submarine possesses in theory the optimal submarining properties! This is just bad luck, sloppy engineers, whatever!”

I made sure I quickly left the office and pondered upon naval warfare, Nazis on the back side of the moon, and a new career in rocket science.

Safety First

Having to wait for the bus is a frequent, but mostly uneventful exercise. This time, I had missed the bus from Pittsburgh Int'l Airport to the city by a couple of minutes. I decided to wait outside. The sun was shining, and temperatures were less chilly than I had expected. A couple of meters away from the airport building, I sat down on a small piece of lawn, stared into the sun and studied a Pittsburgh city map. It was surprisingly quiet. Just one or another shuttle bus passed by occasionally.

Then a gruff voice interrupted my daydreaming.

“Excuse me, Sir, what are you doing here?”

In front of me, a police car had stopped. Judging from the huge letters on its side, it came from Allegheny County. Nice name. However, a short-haired officer with big sunglasses was leaning over the passenger seat and addressing me in a stern and intimidating manner.

“I am waiting for the bus to downtown.”, I replied.

“The bus stop is over there!”, he exclaimed, pointing towards the bus stop signpost, which was some 30 meters away.

I could not deny that he was right about this.

“I have to wait anwyay, and I thought I could as well sit in the sun.”

Beckett's tramps Vladimir and Estragon in "En attendant Godot" would have been proud of me. The police officer wasn't. True, his voice got a bit less harsh, but he compensated for this by his audible amazement.

“Where in the world are you from?”, he asked me with an incredulous air.

“Germany.”

“Ah, Germany.”, he repeated, probably uncertain whether he should hold that for or against me. The stereotype of Germans as lawful and rule-loving creatures might have counted in my favor, the association with bizarre porn movies and nude sunbathing not.

“In Germany, sitting in the sun is considered acceptable”, I said, trying to give myself an innocent and somewhat naïve air.

“Well, you are not doing anything illegal... but I must watch out for anything suspicious... and there are you, sitting on the lawn without an apparent reason, looking at a map...!”

He left it to me to complete the inference.

The thing was getting tricky. Not because I had done anything wrong, but because I was close to start laughing. Already, I could hardly conceal the grin on my face. Lesson #1: never make fun of an American police officer.

“I understand”, I said, trying to look as composed and serious as possible. “You are only doing your job.”

Probably, this was a clever answer. Every police officer likes to defer responsibilities to rules and superiors. Making clear that I was not bearing a grudge against him personally would bring me closer to my goal.

“Yeah, indeed, that's it. Now, Sir, you may continue to sit there.”

“Thank you very much, Sir.”

“Okay. Bye.”

“Bye.”

And off he went, protecting the security of American citizens.

Falling in Love

The State of North Carolina is usually not your first association when it comes to falling in love with a particular region. But one of the exciting things about traveling is that such things can happen in unexpected places. After two days in chilly Philadelphia, the Tar Heel State welcomed me with a scenery of rolling hills with pine forests, mild 10° C, blue skies and glaring sun. I could have soaked it forever. On the day of my talk at Duke, I used every free minute to wander across a campus full of Georgian architecture and enchanting Botanic gardens. And I regretted to have opted for such a short stay.

(Apologies for the bad composition of the pictures---I find this difficult when using my mobile phone.)

Protecting the Environment

Upon planning my stay at Duke University, North Carolina, I decided to move from the airport to the campus by public transport. The connections for the 25 km ride looked fine: one smooth changes, one hour total travel time. And with a fee of $ 2,25, it was incredibly cheap.

When leaving the ultra-modern arrival hall at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport, I was facing a long, long line of bus stops. Each one painted in a different color and lit from inside. Buses passed pretty much every second in high speed, unless they suddenly braked for dropping and receiving passengers. Wow. This looked like Mumbai, Hong Kong or New York on a busy night. In the middle of Republican stronghold North Carolina!

Alas, the first impression was deceptive.

What looked like myriads of public transport buses that would bring passengers to the surrounding cities of Raleigh and Durham, or to the many university campuses, were buses owned by rental car companies. They would pick up the passenger at the exit of the airport building and bring them in no time to their offices some 500m away. Unfortunately, the Raleigh-Durham Int'l Airport has not as many passengers as Heathrow, Schiphol, or Frankfurt, and so, most of them were quite empty. But of course, one cannot expect a customer to wait two minutes for the bus.

The Alamo buses displayed another stunning feature: the slogan “Sharing buses to protect the environment” was printed on each bus. Probably they meant that the sole passenger would share the bus with the driver. Once, even two of these buses stopped next to each other.

I asked one of the airport stewards about the bus stop.

“The rental car buses?”

“No, the regular buses.” The proverbial question mark emerged in his face. “Public transport”, I added.

And he showed me where, under the innumerable neon-lit stops for rental car buses, taxis and special pick-up services, the tiny, modest and not at all fancy bus stop of line #100 could be found.

I was the only person waiting for the bus.

After a couple of minutes, an attractive lady joined me. Cool, I thought, at least one fellow passenger. She even started a conversation: “Are you also going downtown?” I denied and added that I was heading to Durham. “Ah, okay”, she said. The conversation silenced and one minute later, she joined a rental car bus that must have been late. I was thrown back into solitude and started to reflect on what made me look so pitiable that complete strangers would offer me a ride to town.

When I entered the bus, I found out that it was not about me. It was just that I was the only White person on board of the bus. Almost 50 years after Martin Luther King's death, there still seems to be some form of segregation. It was not that the Black people on the bus looked particularly poor---it just seems to be a cultural thing that Whites don't take the bus. And this impression was confirmed on each single ride.

The buses were fantastic, by the way. Comfortable, clean, with modern ticket machines, free schedules, free wifi, free bike racks at the back, etc. And the schedules were well tuned to each other. Some clever people in the Research Triangle (the region containing Durham and Raleigh) had done their job well.

Driving through Mediterranean woodlands in the fading light of the day, I relaxed a bit and wondered how much a cab would have cost me.

Then we approached the Regional Transit Center. For a transit center on a Thursday evening, it looked a bit empty. Actually, it was just a big parking lot in an industrial area in the middle of nowhere. No sales kiosk, no snacks/drinks booth, no human being visible.

“It is not exactly the Gare de Lyon”, a guy next to me with a big “New York” cap said to me.

I wouldn't have mistaken it for Etten-Leur on a rainy Monday night.

A couple of minutes after we left the bus, more buses came in. They waited for each other to make sure everybody got his connection. The system worked. Some 30 minutes later, I left the bus in front of the apartment where I was staying and asked myself how much money all the people in the cabs must earn.