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What with the end of the decent weather fast approaching, I have been doing my best to get outside and enjoy the natural beauty of Switzerland (at least when I'm not doing laundry). As the forecast for Sunday didn't look too bad, Jens (my officemate) and I decided to embark on an impromptu hike. Armed with only my (up-to-this-point) trustworthy "Walking in Switzerland" guidebook, we met at the train station Sunday morning and chose a hiking destination on the spot. As neither of us were feeling like a huge adventure, we decided on a hike in the nearby Jura mountains. A quick glance through the guide found us a 5-6 hour hike that featured both a gorge and a long crest with "splendid vistas of the main Alpine massifs." At this point, it was only 9:45 and according to the book, the last bus from the end-town left at 7 PM, so we figured that we were in good shape. Just to start things off on the wrong foot, we made sure to get on the wrong train. Now, it s...

I think it's time to coin a new phrase and seeing as how this blog reaches literally handfuls of people each week, I can't think of a better place to do it. I propose the phrase "Swiss victory" with the following definition: Swiss victory, n., something achieved only in the barest possible terms; an undeniably positive result which still leaves much to be desired. Recent examples of Swiss victories: my apartment search, buying a bike, being overcharged by the cable company, and now ... Laundry! Ah, laundry. The white whale to my Captain Ahab; the Captain Kirk to my Khan. My quest to achieve a minimally acceptable laundry situation started the first day I moved into this apartment, and honestly, I would have bet on it outlasting me and leaving me a bitter, destroyed man. Instead, due to a small bit of luck and a bold move on my part, I can now declare victory -- or at least Swiss victory. Last week, I was doing my laundry in the usual way: I waited until 10 o'c...

As the weather has been ideal, I have been doing my best to do as much hiking as possible lately. Switzerland, as I have mentioned many times before, is really a hiker's paradise: not only are there mountains, hills, lakes, and natural wonders aplenty, but they are easily accessible to anyone with a Swiss Railway half-fare card. Aside: the half-fare card (aka the halbtax or demi-tarif) costs a scant 150 CHF a year and gives you a 50% discount on virtually all forms of transportation in the country -- trains, boats, buses, trams, funiculars, etc. A quick calculation reveals that it only takes about a half-dozen trips between Geneva and Lausanne a year before one earns back their money, thus the card is generally cost-effective for nearly everyone who lives in the country. Now, you ask, what if you don't live in the country? What do you do? Well, if you've come and visited me, you know that the answer to this is: you pay -- a lot! A half-fare card for a single month c...

There are two things that I don't want this blog to become: 1) a collection of links to things I find interesting and 2) a largely empty blog whose only posts consist of, "sorry it's been so long since my last post." I've certainly had a lot of temptation toward the former impulse and I'll admit that lately this blog has skidded perilously close to the latter. But, in the grand European tradition of taking an entire month off during the summer, let's just call the last month my "vacation" and move on. What better way to re-start than a new take on a classic post. Here are 10 more things to like about Switzerland. 1. Health Care Oh, man am I glad that I'm not in the US right now. The current health care "debate" has really put a spotlight on what the American political system is all about: store-bought, industry-controlled tools on one side arguing against store-bought, industry-controlled lunatics on the other. If even a ...

I'm sure this will come as somewhat of a shock to my regular readers, but curiously enough, I actually manage to get some work done here in Switzerland, every so often. Today was one of those days. As some of you have probably heard, the project I'm working on here is a micro-MRI system. Basically, we want to take microscopic MRI's of interesting chemical or biological samples. My job was to build the "gradient" imaging system which is responsible for making the "pictures" -- if you've ever been in an MRI, you'll also recognize it as the thing making the horrible, loud noises that you hear. Although there have been a lot of ups and downs -- mainly downs -- I finally have the prototype system up and mostly working. Last night I took an image, and this morning I did some very, very basic analysis of the data. Here is the result: Fig. 1: MRI image of PDMS sample. The x and y scales are in microns (0.001 mm), thus the total range of the image...

In theory, the focus of this blog isn't "what I did while my parents were in town," but rather "let's make fun of Switzerland," so with that in mind, this will (for the most part) be my last post about my parents visit. Fortunately, it involves a good deal of Swiss oddity, so I think everyone will be happy. Let's see, last we left off we were watching community musical theater in Rennes. After that, we drove down to the Loire Valley, checked out a troglodyte community, went to a couple of castles, and saw a huge swath of the French countryside. Our final stop in France was the former Roman town of Autun. If you are in Burgundy, I recommend stopping in Autun: it's a neat little town which still has it's original Roman wall, an awesome Romanesque cathedral, and ruins of an impressive Roman temple outside the walls. Although the most famous part of the cathedral -- the tympanum -- was closed off for restoration, you could still see the awesome ...

After leaving Paris, we headed north toward Normandy and Brittany. As none of us had ever been, we decided that our first big stop should be the mystical Mont Saint Michel. As it is one of the most touristed destinations in France, we decided to book a hotel room on the opposite side of its famous bay. Our first view, therefore, was quite impressive: Fig. 1: "A shoreless bay stretched before me, as far as eye could see: it lay between opposing coasts that vanished in distant mist; and in the midst of this vast tawny bay, under a gleaming golden sky, a strange hill, somber and peaked, thrust up from the sands at its feet. The sun had just sunk, and on a horizon still riotous with color was etched the outline of this fantastic rock that bore on its summit a fantastic monument." -- Guy de Maupassant, "The Horla". As awesome as it looks from across the bay, Mont Saint Michel is even more impressive from close up. Fig. 2: The dynamic duo, almost totally occluding the...