Camp

At the moment I live at the university. I sleep, eat and work at the university. There is a reason for that, and it's not my thesis. (Thank God!)
I'm teaching at the UNF Chemistry Camp for high school students. 40 students voluntarily spend one week of their summer holiday doing chemistry at the university. They are incredibly committed and ask tons of questions, which is quite cool but also quite exhausting.
At the moment I'm working on developing and printing 20 NMR-spectra, all of the same compound.
The biggest downside is that I have now spent five nights in a gym hall with 40 high school students thus reducing my sleeping time to a minimum. The only reason I'm still awake is loads of coffe and chocolate bisquits. :-)

Dreams

I was looking through some pictures and came across an album from my first and only time in Paris. And I really want to go back! :-)

Spill

Got a phone call this sunday after a great night on the town. The phone call was from a labpartner that told me the cooling fluid from the cryostat I've used in a reaction had spilt all over the lab floor, leaving my reaction uncooled and the cryostat beeping.
So I turn up in the lab today at about 7.30 and start cleaning the mess up. Also my reaction hasn't worked but that was to be expected.
Another great monday to start the week.

Link update

A new link has emerged on my important stuff list. This homepage was recommended by a laboratory technician at the university. It can supply you with anything a geek heart will ever need. I'm especially fond of the periodic table shower curtain and the LED faucet lights. :-)

Failure

Don't you just hate those days?? Where everything goes wrong, you miss the dustbin andthings spontaneously fall out of your hands?? Now imagine having an entire week like that.
This friday afternoon things just don't look bright. Not one reaction I've started this week has worked. Not even the simple ones, that have been done a million times before, seem to like me. On top of that my equipment hates me too. Flasks brake when I look at them, machines stop working the second I touch them and for some reason every fluid containing vessel is leaky....
At least I had cake today. :-)

Beach

Just spent three days at my friends beach house in Nyborg. Lovely place, everybody wants to be there, espacially moskitos. They also liked me and accepted me as their breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Still I went there in my fathers cute little Alfa romeo spider sportscar which really does boost your mood and selfconfidence. I can only recommend driving in a sportscar as a terapy for....well anything!
And cold water for the moskito bites. ;-)

Surveillance

We all need structure; rules that define how far we can go, how loud we can yell before we break the rules of society. Rules are necessary for us to find our feet as citizens in the society. You have to know where the boundaries are to avoid overstepping them.
This conviction unfortunately has not been prevailing among politicians in Denmark during the Cold War. PET (police intelligence service) was given a carte blanche to monitor people that according to PET were “interesting”. Apart from it being a problem to define what interesting implies, nowhere in the law it says that “interesting” people automatically run the risk of surveillance.
The Constitution should secure the inviolability of your private life, but in this case some of the highest ranking people in the country, elected on the basis of their credibility, have disregarded the constitution and decided which boundaries and rules people should know about. They even appointed a committee, the Wamberg-committee, that, with the benefit of hindsight, only served the purpose of creating false security.
As a young person, who has never experienced war or been threatened on my existence, I can still relate to the decision to monitor and register certain people. The only problem was that these people weren’t doing anything illegal. Many of the people registered, acted in good faith and were moving on a thin line without knowing whether it was there.
If you wished to register people or political parties, that worked to overthrow society, you should have made a law. It would have been fully acceptable to submit a law protecting the country against revolution or coup d’etat. This has been done in many countries and it works.
Unfortunately this whole problem is not just something that belongs to the past. As a citizen in Denmark you can still be registered or monitored without actually having broken any laws except the unwritten ones. I don’t want to live in a society where I’m not sure if I’m going to be registered for a critical opinion.
A law is just as relevant now as it was during the Cold War, especially in these days where terrorist threats are part of the daily news. This report must have consequences besides: “Ja, but we knew already knew that.” The electors and politicians must learn from this new insight. It shouldn’t be possible to trick the citizens of the country at one’s pleasure. The politicians are here for our sake, not the other way around.

This post can also be found in danish on jp.dk