Blog

Expect posts about science, nonsense, brewing, and other interests.

2021-06-10   CRIRES remote commissioning

Together with colleages in Uppsala and Germany, Italy, Chile, we’ve been building the CRIRES+ instrument for the Very Large Telescope in Chile. The project has been around a decade in the making.

But finally, we are “commissioning” the instrument now. This means we test all the functions, make sure the instrument works as it should, and check that performances are good. If all works well, then we can happily offer the instrument to the community.

Normally for this kind of work, our team would travel to the observatory and help with the observations. With the Covid situation, most of us are now doing this work remotely, from home. The people at the observatory simply share their screens with us so that we can see what they observe in real time!

2021-06-09   Swim season

With the warm days, swim season is upon us in Stockholm! I went swimming every day since last Saturday, it is glorious. The water in the sea was still quite cold, around 13-14 degrees. In Brunnsviken though, it is perfect at around 18-19 degrees !

2021-06-04   Hops growing

The hops planted early May are growing fast and seriously climbing that pole.

2021-06-03   Travailler

Today it was difficult to get into the mood for efficient work. Lots of things happening, 1+ year of Covid, and a bright warm sunny day in Stockholm.

My mood took me into listening to some “summer tunes”, which for me are ska/reggae/punk songs. I particularly listened to these two gems about working (travailler in French) less.

• Tryo - Travailler plus. Tryo is a staple of French music, particularly among (hippie) people in my generation, with some great hit songs [1, 2, 3]. Travailler plus is an echo to sleazy ex-president Sarkozy motto: “Travailler plus pour gagner plus” (“Work more to earn more”).
• Irie Révoltés - Travailler. Heidelberg-based Irie Révoltés is a good French-German friendship symbol. Here they sing in French about how working is not that nice.

The French “travail” (“work”) is commonly thought to come for the Latin Tripalium, a torture instrument, Motivational ;-)

2021-06-02   Bookmark clean-up II

I have recently gone through my bookmarks and cleaned them up. In the process I found some hidden gems, here is a second short collection of links, with a music theme (and even some Eurovision).

• 🇱🇻 Latvia - Babite Mixed Choir Maska, great performance at Eurovision choir 2019
• 🇸🇮 zalagasper - S teboi, a band who performed another song at Eurovision 2019
• 🇳🇴 Aurora - Full Performance (Live on KEXP), some fresh music live on the great radio KEXP
• 🇮🇸 amiina - Full Performance (Live on KEXP), a relaxing performance, also live on KEXP
• Dvorak : “New World” Symphony No. 9 (Marzena Diakun), wonderful music from the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France conducted by Marzen Diakun

2021-06-01   A year of records

Around a year ago, I defended my PhD thesis 🥳! To celebrate, my kind colleagues offered me a record player. Since then, I bought quite some records, second-hand when possible, discogs has been a great source in these pandemics time.

When I was younger, I had cassettes, then CDs. When I got access to internet, I started using P2P, torrents, and streaming services such as Grooveshark, Spotify, or Deezer. Having now this record player is a welcomed return to playing music on a physical medium.

Sure you can’t listen to your favourite playlist, but I always liked to listen to entire records, and it is just great to have a small device that only plays the music. Listening to music is now a nice ritual, not just a click.