Theobromine... Who knew?

Ok, well, an update every 10-14 days makes me a good absentee landlord of this, my digital domain, right? If you are saying no, you are probably right.

Just about finished with this semester and don't have any plans for break. I might head up to the 'top end' if I can work the money end, convince myself that this is a good way to find a job, and maybe find someone dumb enough to travel with me. It looks like travel plans to the red (as in Oklahoma, not communism) center will have to wait until later this year, but have no fear, I will get to The Rock eventually.

Oh, and some pictures for those anti-intellectuals among you who dispise the squigilies.

Went to a Vietnamese place today. This was my drink.
You guess the name and secret ingredient.

English side of the can if you didn't get it.

Oh and it wasn't all that bad.
For a bird's nest made of fungus anyway.

Note: If you order bamboo duck noodle soup in a
Vietnamese restaurant, it includes almost a whole duck.
Really.

Ok. That about does it. If you are just aching for more pictures of me, you can always check the flickr account. And how come no one bothered to tell me that the methylxanthine in chocolate is not caffine!!

Indian Food, Danish Parties and Aussie Rules.

Ok, so it has been almost two weeks, but I swear, nothing is really going on here right now. Well, maybe a few things, but you don't want dialogue, you want pictures. So once again, we will roll the beautiful bean footage.

At the best Indian place in town, I had this ginormous Masala Dosa.

Went to Thorb the friendly Dane's 25^th birthday party.
So if you turn 25 in Denmark and are still single you get cinnamoned,
which as you can see, is awesome.

See the guy in the background? The one with the beard?
Yeah, he is on exchange, from UNO... and a Scott Scholar...
and remembers me from the Scott Scholar party I threw 1.5 years ago.
Ran in to him randomly at Thorb's birthday party.
World.size(setEqual(small));
Leave comments on how bad my syntax is.

Mayur suited up to go in to the (not so) clean room on campus.
In other news, the preceding sentence has way too many prepositions.

Went to my first 'footy' (Aussie Rules) game last night. It was a BLAST.

This man was there to cheer on his favorite team: Gryffindor.

Oh and at half time, these volunteers in lab coats come out,
set up, and ref like a billion simultaneous kid's footy games.
It is almost like they still actively promote and support
kids participating in sport down here.
Weird.

Tiff evinces the proper meat pie eating etiquette.

Outrageous Headware

Ok this one will be short, essentially I just wanted to put up some pictures of Nick's Outrageous Headware theme party (full set on flickr) of last night. So on with the wacky, weird, and wild - roll that beautiful bean footage.

Trish always looks like this.

Damien and Annita; he has part of a gum tree, she has a tomato.

Nationalaties from left to right: Swedish, Swedish, German and Peter.
In other news, I am moving to Denmark;
is right where I would like to be.
Ba dum ching!

Another German, Helmut, shows some love to
Marvin the Martian with a very clever homemade...
no, no, it is just too obvious.

Billy rocks out his functional, head-mounted flashing traffic light.

Kathryn gives us a chuckle with the
tin-foil pope hat guy laying it down in the background.

My Mongolian twin, Stavros and Timo drinking
something flamable out of lemons because we were
silly enough to listen to the Goonah (also pictured).

//Come on, the Denmark joke was kinda funny.

I'll give you negative refraction and raise you a squeaky beach.

Ok, so nothing much going on. Did get to a public lecture on left handed materials today. For those of you who don't really want to get in to it, left handed materials are materials that simultaneously have negative electrical permittivity (ε) and negative magnetic permeability (µ) for a given wavelength. These materials are not found in nature (because that would be too handy) and we have to mimic them as metamaterials. One of the curious properties of these materials is that they should have a negative refractive index. This is a direct consequence of the fact that when ε and µ are both less than zero EM wave energy (of a proper wavelength) in the material travels in the opposite direction of the wave propogation! This is where the materials get their name-they don't follow the 'right hand rule.'

But anyway, if you are still reading, you probably care enough to look some of this stuff up on your own. And if you have stopped reading, well, you will miss out on another mind-bending natural phenomenon but this one in video form: Squeaky Beach.

Some studley dude demos Squeaky Beach.

Squeaky Beach is a fine white sand beach found in Wilson's Promontory in the south of Victoria and I was lucky enough to visit there a week or two before the advent of this blog. I had forgotten about this short clip, which Thorb, a friendly Dane also on the trip, was nice enough to film and send along.