Catching up

Spring cleaning at the fietsenstalling

They cleaned out the bike garage at Leiden Central Station two weeks ago.  The result was open walkways and a few free spaces at the racks.   It was like a little piece of serenity.  Like the five minutes after we've cleaned the house and before the boys are turned loose.  

By today the crosswalk was full again and the aisles were starting to get a bit cluttered  There is more than one bike per person in the NL.  They are not all well-loved.

Ah well. 

The Americans are coming, the Americans are coming

Our friends Peggy and Brad and their little girl, Maggy Lou came to visit two weeks ago and stayed for a week.  

They arrived at Schipol Airport (Schipol Luchthaven).  We took the train to Leiden Lammenschans where I then took their bags in the Bakfiets and we walked five minutes to our house.  Easy.  No cars.  

The impact of easy, low-stress, public transport and safe and easy biking  on quality of life is really very significant.  

Caged children

 

One day we all went to Amsterdam.  Brad and I took the kids to TunFun while Deborah and Peggy went to the Van Gogh museum where they currently have a special exhibit called the color of the night.  The center piece is Starry Night.

TunFun is basically a hamster house for kids built in an abandoned subway tunnel.

They had stuff for Leif and Maggy Lou.

Cage match.

Ethan has a way with the ladies.

Scheveningen

The next day we went to Delft and then Deborah and I took the kids to Scheveningen, 

the beach near the Hague.  Brad and Peggy tour the Hague for a bit.

Scheveningen is really great.  They build little beach bars with wood decking and tenting.  You can sit and let the kids play ing the sand while some nice person brings you beer by the fire.  We'll be spending more time there. 

At Scheveningen there is a nice aquarium called Sea Life.

Leif at the beach.

Back to the NEMO

The next day Deborah and Peggy kept the little ones (Leif and Maggy Lou) and Brad and Ethan and I went to Amsterdam.  We hit the NEMO and then went to the van Gogh Museum ourselves.  I got some better pictures at the NEMO this time.

There is a good exhibit on body image.  It includes a mirror that warps ones width.  The participant is meant to push a button when the mirror is flat, representing one's true size.   A voice then announces, "You are thinner than you think," or, "You are fatter than you think,." 

Body image 

I got a nice shot of the IR imaging exhibit which sits in front of the sex exhibit.

This is one of those bits that definitely would not fly in the US.  Then again, an Indian friend of mine here says that in India they would just burn it down, so maybe the US isn't the most repressed place on earth.

And, finally, my favorite:

French kissing display at the NEMO.

Word of the day:

slaperig: sleepy.   's Morgen, ik slaperig was omdat de weekend een uur minderer had.

Ethansapien sapien to Homo Neanderthalensis

Naturalis
Ethan went to the Naturalis here in Leiden a week ago with Deborah and today I got to go with him.   Spectacular.   This is by far the best natural history museum I've been to and possibly the best science museum overall.

As a kids science museum it blows the NEMO out of the water (har har, see the NEMO looks like a boat on the waterfront in Amsterdam. Blows it out of the water. It's a doubly nautical reference, that's why it's funny...) It's a ton of fun and dense with science.

Lots of those bones the devil put in the rocks to make us question the creation story along with pickled and stuffed specimens less than six thousand years old. They're currently running a special Darwin exhibit.  He would have been 200.  If he had been a sea turtle.  Instead he's dead.  If you hadn't heard.

Like the NEMO, the museum itself is a very nice piece of architecture.  Unlike NEMO, it's not particularly stunning from the outside (not terrible either) but a really remarkably nicely thought out interior.  

Bikes of the day

These cargo bikes were parked outside the museum. They are fairly standard examples of commonly seen cargo bikes. The first is actually a trike, the second a bakfiets. They are both doubly long compared to our base model bakfiets ( a double bak ??) and I imagine when fully loaded with kids, the trike is a lot easier on the upper body.  When not loaded with kids, they can haul a lot of stuff.   

People talk about traditional Dutch bikes with a lot of enthusiasm. I'm not so keen on them.  Traditonal Dutch bikes don't offer any improved functionality over better handling examples from England or Italy, they're just easier to sit on in ergonomically poor positions.  

These cargo bikes are the real gems of the Dutch cycling culture.  You really don't need a car in a country this dense and in fact a car is just a burden to park and maintain.  The biggest version of these bikes offer the hauling capacity of a small pick-up truck.  Sure, you may get where you're going at 10 kph, but in the city you're not going to manage more than 25 kph in a petrol powered truck anyway.  

Perhaps the cargo bikes are not quite as much a piece of the national identity because they are actually not that old in the NL and the Danes were building similar things commonly decades earlier. I'm also quite interested in the mass-produced version by Gazelle.  

Anyway, if you don't currently have a high capacity bike like an xtracycle these are a good option and can now be had in the US either imported or homegrown.  If you already have an xtracycle, it's prbably not worth the cost of switching.  Even starting from scratch, I would consider the xtracycle superior for many, many applications.  Of course, if you have the means, have them all. 

Trainspotting

Trains, trains, trains

Today we took the train to Utrecht and visited the Spoorwegmuseum

The museum is very impressive. I would make it a high priority if you have kids 4-14 who are at all interested in trains. Our boys had a great time. The Dutch train system is spectacular and the train museum is a match to that system.

The museum was interesting for me and educational, but there were also lots of opportunities for running around and playing.  

Word of the day

bezoeken: to visit.  Wij bezochten vandaag Utrecht.

zoeken: to search.  Wij zochten naar het spoorwegmuseum. 

Lecture series fin

Our long international nightmare is over

The lecture series at the VU wrapped up monday.  I think it went well.  We wound up with 7 students and three faculty.  I got through diffraction tomography and the ISAM stuff and have at least one active collaboration now and possibly a second.  

Word of the day

scheepsbouwkunde  ship building studies (aka maritime engineering).  De scheepbouwkunde is niet net als zo de schaapsbouwkunde.

Suffer the little children...

Best audience ever

On Wednesday I went to Ethan's school to tell them what I do for a living.  One of the moms had come the week before.  She's a florist and sent the kids home with flowers.  Pretty tough to top.  Not that it's a competition or anything...

Anyway I thought about just telling then that I'm a chocolatier:  instant popularity for Ethan.  He doesn't seem to be having any trouble in that area though.  So, thanks to Taco, I took the OSA optics discovery kit.  It has a hologram and diffraction grating, a bunch of lenses and color filters and two polarizers.  

I told them that I teach just like their teacher, Pia, does, only to older kids, and that I study light.  They liked adding the color filters together and wanted to know how to make a hologram.  We played around with the diffraction grating and my laser pointer.  

I decided that I could explain polarization to kindergarteners. Anyone who has been through one of my late-semester lectures knows that I can sometimes overreach.   I told them that light is a wave and I got a big rope (you can see it on the ground in one of the photos) from the facilities guy, Hari.  We held it out and made waves on it, oscillating in one plane then another.  I showed then how to block one kind of wave but not the other.  They mostly just liked playing with the rope.  Then I passed the polarizers around.  They seemed to like the magic of going from transparent to black by rotating one of the plates.  I'm not sure they really got the connection to the rope, but maybe.  Ethan seems to get it.

Anyway, I pulled it all off in Dutch, so I have now given a lecture in Dutch.

Here Pia gets the kids  ready for recess

Here is Ethan out at recess in the sandbox.

The entourage I always wanted


I am now apparently ``in.'' The next day, all the kids whose parents couldn't stay to read to them (this is what they do at the start of school here) came to me and Ethan for me to read to all of them. Cool. I have an entourage.

Word of the day
veiligheid safety. De laserveiligheid is voor gerechtelijke landen.

Wind power

I biked to Amsterdam this morning. 45km in 1:25. Big tail wind.

The wind picked up this afternoon even more. The ride home took 2:05.

Yikes.  

For days like this, one should really have one of these.  I saw one today.  Older guys doing 30-35 into the headwind while I was really struggling to make 23.

Word of the day

Windkracht: Wind force. They give the forcast here not with wind speed but wind force. This makes sense as the actual energy content varies greatly depending on temperature, pressure, and humidity.