Alea iacta erat

My sub-lease ran out today, while my new lease for my own, permanent room starts tomorrow. To save myself the trouble of moving twice, I shook a few trees and got the key to the new room yesterday, 11:00. The janitors wanted to fix something minor in the cupboard, so I agreed to stay out of the room til lunch. Walked to the cantine, got a phone call. Turns out the sub-lease terminated yesterday, i.e., I’d have to move out of the room by evening. There wasn’t a lot of stuff in it, and the other room was only 100 m away, but I only had a few hours to do so. Worse, my “sub-landlady” wanted to come by in the evening and check the room. But I’d already planned to go to the sauna with friends that evening, and I really didn’t want to reschedule yet again. So… think think think… “can you come by earlier, say, 18:00?” “Sure. Have the room empty and clean by then.” That was 12:40, and the die was cast.

I got a quick lunch, and then started moving. I had a backpack and a big plastic basket, as well as a few cardboard boxes to carry stuff. Every round trip, I’d go down with the elevator, walk across the courtyard, go up three sets of stairs (no elevator in the new building), down the corridor and dump the load. The worst thing were the four doors on the trip that needed to be unlocked with a key. I ended up taking until 17:20, and about twenty-five roundtrips. I moved the stuff in the kitchen, my clothes, the computer, books, random junk. Lots of random junk. My keyboard, my drawing stuff, papers and folders… if you’ve ever moved as a student, you know the drill.  Then I said hello to my new neighbors, and managed to borrow a mattress from one of them. Cleaned up the old room, dropped the key off, went food shopping (urgent!) and then went to pick up my friends for sauna.

We had a great three hours there; Aachen has a pretty luxurious thermal bath. It’s not cheap by any means, but once every few months, it’s the ultimate in relaxation. I’d invited my brother and two friends, one from my university grade, another from the choir. We alternated sauna and pool, and towards the end, we even managed to catch a “pour-on” – whatever the english word for that is. Then some final drifting in the warm pool, some playing around with the more creative features – ice machine and a programmed “experience shower”. That was just the right thing to take the edge of the day. Today there’ll be a meeting for all “newly moved-in” people at the dorm, which will progress into the Halloween party. Well, sort of Halloween party – not going to be many costumes. To those who are horrified by thath, remember that Halloween in Germany is a pretty new thing, and has mostly caught on as another excuse to get smashed.

Powers of perspective

I went to my weekly drawing course again, only to find out that we were progressing to a new topic. Joy! Don’t get me wrong, I like shading, but after drawing various shaded objects for three lessons and then draped cloth for another one, I was getting slightly enough of it. Today, we instead covered perspective. Since we’re limited to 90 minutes and we still wanted to do some drawing, the teacher just gave a basic overview… escape points, horizon line, forshortening, you know. I already knew most of this; not because of my recent interest in art, but because I’d tried programming 3D graphics a few years ago, and that was very big on formal perspective. Viewport, clipping planes and stuff like that.

Even before that, I’d already had some experiences with perspective in school. We once had a few lessons to draw an A3 pencil image of some object in central perspective. Back then, I made a bad mistake and selected something horrendously complicated. Then, I drew with a ruler, because I didn’t know better. The end result wasn’t so hot, but if I can find it again, I’ll scan it and put it into “Shareables” on my art page. What was the accursed object? Simply a 2nd order Menger sponge. A what, you say? Well.. simply one of these. As if that wasn’t crazy enough, I decided to put the cut-out beside it, and that turned out to be a lot worse. But ever since, I have the rules of basic escape point perspective down pat.

Once the explainations were finished, it was getting dark outside, so drawing buildings wouldn’t be possible. Instead, we spread out inside the building. Some people picked a corridor, others windows and walls. I went to the bottom of the stair case and started drawing the view straight up, along all the stairs to the roof. Only having about 30 minutes, I didn’t get very far. But I laid down the main lines on my A3 sheet. I’m not very good at drawing straight lines, and here, it really shows. A few degrees slant make a huge difference in perspective perception. The stairs were slightly skewed, but not as badly as in my picture. We’ll be continuing on our pictures next week, so maybe by next wednesday I’ll have the image ready to scan. That would be the first time one of the in-class works made it into finished state, though. Beyond in-class work, I don’t really plan to practice perspective that much. Classical perspective is only really useful for orthogonal objects, and I’ve had quite enough practice with that. I’d rather get better at drawing hands and posture.

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Dumb luck triumphs against adversity

This is another post concerning my thesis and the organizational stuff I’m doing for it. As I wrote yesterday, if I want to do the textile topic, I’ll have to find a co-grader, or, to translate the official term, a secondary assessor. Most physic professors in Aachen do their research either in the realm of solid state physics (microelectronics, magnetism and photonics) or particle physics. Finding someone accustomed to acoustics and fluid mechanics would be difficult. After having my lectures today, I talked to a theoretical professor first. He was the only one I knew that had ever held a lecture of fluid mechanics for physics students. However, he said he was tremendously overworked – believable, since he looked like freshly resurrected – and would only supervise my thesis in the direst need. Also, he would not be able to give significant input. So that was not very good, and I didn’t really want to give him the final push into a breakdown.

I changed into shotgun technique and gathered the consultation hours of all the experimental solid state professors. None of them were today, so I chatted with some of my friends who are working there now, and left. Or wanted to leave, when I remembered that I’d forgotten one professor, who’d held our solid state physics I lecture. As far as I knew, he was mostly working on x-ray crystallography. So I talked to his secretary, and instead of giving me the hours, she said he was in at the moment and asked him if he had a few minutes for me. He did. I told him a little bit about the situation, the topic, the requirement for a co-grader, what I was planning to do, how much I didn’t know yet… and he said “well, we are doing something similar at the moment ourselves.” Say what? The topic is acoustic emissions in a supersonic nozzle. One of his PhD students, however, is doing acoustic emissions in solid phase changes. When magnetic or similar domains re-orient in a solid, they set off something like a tiny earthquake: A burst of high-frequency sound waves. My sound waves are caused by a gas flow with yarn inside, theirs by an electric current, but the experimental techniques are not that different. So yes, he’d be my co-grader, provided I consented to show up at the physics center once in a while and share my advances. No problem at all, that. I’d get an opportunity to meet that PhD student tomorrow, when he’s holding a small presentation on his recent advances to the rest of the institute.

Now I’ll have to get some of the bureaucracy on the road, notify all people involved (currently about 6) and work it all out. Time is not pressing and I have both a topic offer and the necessary co-grader. Life was very good today.

Who dares, wins – hopefully

I have spent the last week mostly checking out stuff concerning my diploma thesis, due to start sometime next spring. I have two topic proposals so far:

1. From the institute for textile technology Aachen (ITA), there is the gig about process control in airflow nozzles using acoustic emissions.
2. From the institute for laser technology (ILT), I got an offer to work on efficiency of frequency-doubled solid state lasers

Both offers are cool in their own ways. The ILT was the institute I wanted to go to originally; more so when the professor offered me a place there directly after the oral exam. The topic is nothing particularly new; they have a certain type of laser, and they want to improve its performance by first simulating and then experimenting on it. The particular issues are probably new and unexplored, but the setup as such is quite common. Several other physicists have done theses like this before me. I spoke to the physics professor responsible for theses not done in the main physical institutes, and he said there shouldn’t be a problem with going to the ILT. I’d have to find a physicist to co-grade the work in the end, but for something like solid-state optical systems, that would be extremely easy.

The first topic would be more of a risk to take. I don’t have as much fore-knowledge of the topic, the people I’d be working with have quite different training and abilities and the complexity of the task is difficult to evaluate. I’d also have to do substantial legwork to find a co-grader, as the topic involves mainly classical physics like gas dynamics and acoustics. Not many people are still working on research in those fields, as they are considered “mostly finished.” I do have one professor in mind who still deals with stuff like that, but he’s a theoretical physicist. I do hope he knows someone who’d take the responsibility, or even do it himself. Although, the thought of seeing my mechanical engineering supervisor deal with a very laid-back theoretical physicist professor sounds extremely amusing. That might drastically increase the mathematical standards my thesis would be held to, though.

Since about a week ago, I have the report from a student research project from 2004 from my potential supervisor at the ITA. I spent the last two days reading it, and have gotten a basic understanding of the situation. Less pleasingly, the report places rather little emphasis on signal analysis and makes a few unfortunate choices for the sake of saving time, in my opinion. Of course, projects like that only go for about three months, and he had to test out a lot of parameter sets, analyze them quickly and then write up a fourty-page report about it. As a result, the project will not be as useful as a basis as I’d hoped. The raw data ought to be good, but the interpretation was focused exclusively on deriving as many statistical indexes as possible, then inducing faults and checking if the indexes moved in a meaningful way. That’s good if you merely want to determine that you are seeing something, but not really enough to ascertain what you are seeing from the signal alone.

So, to sum up: The laser thing would probably be cushy but unexceptional. I’d work at a respected institute, do some typical minor research – it wouldn’t be easy for me, mostly for lack of experience, and it would probably add some new understanding to a certain situation. The textile thesis would be much more into the unknown. I’d have to put up a data analysis from the ground (and acquire the skills necessary for that, first), as well as running experiments to improve the transmission of sound from the nozzle to the sensor. On the other hand, with the risk comes the potential. This could be a big success, and get me a foot in the door for the application industry. The ITA certainly is extremely well connected and doing some very interesting stuff. I’ll have a week to think about it before the ILT guy gets back, and in the meantime I’ll keep looking for a co-grader for the acoustic emission thing.

Artistic advances

I have spent a considerable part of the weekend on a new drawing, one that I feel marks a significant step up from prior works. I employed a different workflow to arrive at the final concept, and implemented it using new stroke and drawing techniques. The changes are inspired by the book “Colored Pencils for the Serious Beginner,” which I’ve had for a while and has helped me more in dealing with my color pencils than all the other books I have together. Websites have proven virtually useless, so I was particularly grateful that I had at least one book that bothered to explain different stroke patterns, concept drawings, techniques of color layering or patterning and how to darken certain colors.

First, I had to know what I wanted to draw at all. I was listening to a song I rather like, “Boy in the Bubble” by Paul Simon. It has a part that goes

And the dead sand
Falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers
And the automatic earth
These are the days of miracle and wonder

and when I heard it, I made a connection to a story element from Inhuman, that webcomic I like to draw for. Desert planet (well, more dust steppe), near-adult children orphaned in military intervention and a lot of technology, since it’s sci-fi. For imagery, maybe a dust storm coming up while they’re waiting at the spaceport? Yes, something like that would work. So I made an initial sketch to get a feeling for what I wanted where. I ended up with a small spaceship standing on tarmac at the edge of the spaceport with the two crew members crawling around it somehow. In the distance, there was a city with clouds overhead and a sand storm moving in from the side. Now, to plan out the colors. For this purpose, I drew an outline-only thumbnail in A5 size and transferred it to tracing paper. Now I could repeatedly color stuff and see how it worked, roughly. Of course, some colors are pre-determined: Clouds are white, the color of the crew members is known from the comic, tarmac is gray. But there’s a lot of wiggle room, especially when it comes to stuff like sky, sand or spaceships.

Once I had the concept clear, I drew the lineart in pencil on A3. After completion, I inked the lines with a thin black marker. I let it dry overnight and erased the pencil lines. Then I slowly started to color. I put in the big spaces first: Land in the background, spaceship hull, tarmac, sky. I used very different stroke patterns here, which can mostly be seen from up close. Then I filled in the smaller stuff. Now that everything had its base layer of color, it was time for layering, shading and plugging the holes. Some colors were too bright, too saturated, too yellowish, too something. So I searched for the right color to lay on top to fix the problem. This can be rather counter-intuitive due to color pencils’ weird blending properties. For example, the spaceship hull was too brightly yellow. I wanted it to be muted and a little dirty. First I tried grey – that just made it look horribly ugly. Then I tried a dark brown – that didn’t actually make the yellow any less bright, it just put brown in between. Next, complementary color: Dark blue. That looked like yellow and blue beside each other. In the end I discovered that a very light violet created exactly the effect I wanted: The yellow turned darker and grayish, but with no indication that there was another color in there. Sweet victory.

Another challenge was drawing the sandstorm, to indicate the amounts of dust and turbulence in it. I tried swirly mixes of dust colors on gray gradient, but the effect is not quite what I desired. It is quite alright, though. The end result is very much something I’m proud of, but it took a really long time, more than any other single drawing I’ve done. I’ll look into streamlining the process. Starting with the thumbnail, then checking color scheme, drawing the lineart but not inking ought to speed everything up quite a bit. I’m also considering trying water colors for the backgrounds. Filling large spaces with pencils is quite a pain.

And here is the fruit of my labors:

Assessment Fun

Welcome once again, esteemed readers. Yesterday has been a most interesting day for myself, given that I participated in something hitherto completely irrelevant to my life: Assessment training. What does that mean? I wasn’t entirely sure myself. From what I understood beforehand, it was one day of preparations and information on how to deal with job interviews and similar things. The idea to go to this training originated with my mother, who saw it advertised in the newspaper and somehow thought that this was just what I needed in my life – I cannot agree with that estimate at all, but it has certainly been an interesting experience. So I decided to fork over the 35€ and just go for it, with only a very vague idea of what to expect. I like surprises, after all. However,after mentioning it to several people, I was strongly advised to wear my very best suit. I only own one suit, which is mostly intended for funerals and weddings, and is thus a very formal black three-piece. I last wore it eighteen months and three moves ago, so I had some trouble locating it. I did manage though, and yesterday morning, I appeared at the place in black pants, black shirt, black jacket and a yellow-blue tie (I looked up the Windsor knot on Wikipedia).

The group comprised about 16 people, and there were two instructors doing the entire thing. Not counting the instructors, there was only one other guy in a suit. Everybody else had come in shirt or even casual. Could have saved me the trouble. After a little bit of organizational stuff, we got a little info on what the day was supposed to be about. Companies are increasingly using so-called assessment centers (ACs) to evaluate the social and managerial compentence of their qualified applicants for management position. ACs are normally conducted by shipping a group of roughly ten people somewhere for 1-3 days and letting them solve certain exercises. The most common exercises are group discussions, presentations, in-tray and role play. We’d cover these one by one during the day, just to get an idea what the common challenges are and what is important during each of them.

We’d start with a short self-introduction: Everybody talks about themselves for three minutes maximum; job history, hobbies, personal motto and why they’re here. We had far fewer business students than I had anticipated; instead, there were some engineers, a few older, already-employed people, a few people about to finish high school and enter the training market, and some generic students. I was the only “science” student present, and my reason for being there was basically “I was curious, and this is an experiment. We shall see.”

After the self-introduction, we had the group discussion. Seventeen people are too much to have a discussion with, so we had eight people discuss, and the rest role-play one of the observers, tasked to evaluate one of the discutants. I decided to go for it and volunteered for the discussion itself. We had 20 minutes to discuss the economic issues of the german social state, particularly unemployment. This is a tremendously well-known and complicated topic, so everybody had ready-made opinions and solutions. Basically everybody said their part and we got no synergy, amalgamation or any kind of consensus from it. Thus, at the end of the twenty minutes, the group had no agreed-on statement, no matter how vague it was. Of course, the topic is completely unmanageable, which led me to state that “we could fail in the width or in the depth, but we had to fail.” Not that failure in an unaccomplishable task is in any way negative. The feedback I got from my observer was that I could have used gestures and body language more to liven up my contributions, but was otherwise very calm, attentive and rational. That’s a B in my book.

We proceeded to exercise #2, which was presentations. Only having an hour or two, we were given ten minutes to prepare a three minute talk on one of the offered topics. We were instructed to use the media present, which were an overhead projector, a pin wall with cardboard cards provided and a flipchart. I particularly like blackboards and the flipchart was the closest thing around, so I decided on that. The topics offered included such genius question as “are the olympic games still timely” or “is the internet the medium of the future?” I liked neither very much, so I decided to deal with the car-free sunday. This is the idea that maybe driving cars for no good reason ought to be banned on sundays to promote quiet and environmental consciousness. I don’t like the idea, and we had explicitly been told that rhethoric and appearance were to be practiced here – content was tertiary. So I prepared something a little bit more polemic than usual. I’m not good enough to hold a real burn speech, but I did try. According to me, car-free sundays are arbitrary, illiberal, a serious impairment to those removed from public transport, and cause of congestion on saturday and monday. Therefore, the idea is appalingly bad and only deserves rejection. How’s that for a balanced and open presentation? Other people defended Olympia, proclaimed that the internet would be the medium of the future but was in their opinion too insecure for that to be a good thing, or said that certain taxes were certainly injust, but what’s just in life?

Exercise #3 was the in-tray, which we only covered very shortly. The premise is that you’re a middle-level manager returning from a business trip. You’re going to leave again for some time tomorrow, and have a few hours to deal with the accumulated stuff in your in-tray. By using a calendar and an organigram, you’re supposed to make a plan on how to deal with the stuff. This includes prioritizing, delegating, dropping useless appointments, postponing others, combining several into one when the opportunity presents itself… it’s all pretty basic stuff, in fact. We didn’t actually run the exercise, as that takes time we didn’t have anymore.

Last and fourth was the role play. Since I already participated in the discussion and the presentation, I kept to the observer ranks here. We selected two people to play out a certain situation. You’re a minor boss in a local bank, and you’ve received a customer complaint that one of your tellers is discurteous. There have been a handful of similar complaints about him in the months before, but until then, he’d been a satisfactory employee. You want to know the problem and find a solution, while keeping a good relationship with your subordinate. The entire thing was an exercise in impartiality and sublety. The subordinate ought to feel that your interest in his concerns is genuine, that you are on his side and quite willing to listen to his view of things. Suggestions that his behaviour is endangering his usefulness to the employer should only be uttered in the subtlest of terms, unless he’s making real trouble. And so forth, and so on. If I was a boss (I hope I won’t be), I’d try to show a lot of understanding for my employees and be very honest and cooperative towards them. With most people, even when they’re not performing perfectly it’s unproductive to be confrontational about it. Of course, being the boss, you can apply pressure if you want to. Actually firing people is difficult. But with most people, just beating them over the head with your authority will gain you little love and dedication.

That was the day in assessment training. All of this took a good eight hours and was only slightly stressful. The experiment was a success in so far as it was rather interesting to see how ACs evaluate people. It’s unlikely that I will have to participate in an AC in the next five years, but the advice on presentations and discussions is widely applicable. The role play also illuminated some of the facettes of being a superior – and not screwing up completely. I’m not going to do something like that again without further motivation, but I’d consider it a learning experience for most people.

If you have any questions concerning the assessment training, feel free to leave a comment.

A room to move out of, a room to move into

While I’ve spent the last five weeks in a room I sub-rented from somebody else, this arrangement will only last until 30th of october. Then it’s time to move out. I’d already applied to three student dorms, but wasn’t hearing anything from them. It would be possibly to sub-rent again for a few months, but always moving again so soon isn’t cool at all. I was already considering private housing, when I got a call on tuesday, telling me that Kullen, the dormitory I’m currently living in and which I had applied for only in the beginning of september, had a possible room for me. The question was if I was still interested, which I was. My potential neighbors wanted to meet me and have a look-see before saying aye or nay.

They contacted me about two hours afterwards, which is blazingly fast considering tuesday was a holiday (reunification day, for all who didn’t know). We agreed to meet up in the dormitory bar that evening for a few beers and some chit-chat, which we did. Turns out there were only two from the floor there. Apparently, half the floor is currently moving out, and they are in the middle of really swapping out the inhabitants. They seemed to like me quite alright, and had some promising tails to tell of the floors past exploits. I like places where people actually do something together. It doesn’t have to party 24/7, but cooking together once in a while or going somewhere in a group, that’s nice.

Today, I was contacted once more by the people responsible for the actual lease contract, and asked when I wanted to sign. I said I’d like to see the room before moving in if possible, which seemed to cause them some difficulty. It’s not really common; normally, you just take on blind faith. But since I’m living less than 50 m from the room, I thought I ought to be able to check it out. If the guy who’s living in it has already moved out, the janitor should have the keys. Or maybe I could ask someone on the floor who has a room with similar cut. The base condition of the room is pretty much guaranteed by the housing office, so things like windows size, default inventory and room dimensions are the significant characteristics. I’ll have to see what can be done. But unless something drastic happens, I’m taking the room, and staying right here at the western edge of Aachen. It’s nice here.

Translations too bad to exist

I chatted with somebody staying Japan today, and after some questions about the mechanisms of wishing shrines in Shinto, they advised that I check a book called the Kojiki. Said book is an old royal transcript of a set of oral traditions concerning creation and the early adventures of the kami, tracing a lineage down to the then-current royal family.  In fact, even emperors of later dynasties are considered kami and thus eligible targets for wishes or requests. Personally, I won’t be adapting the pratice anytime soon. “Dear Bismarck…” is all I have to say on the matter.

However, my curiousity had been roused and after a short search I managed to locate an english online translation of the Kojiki, apparently made in 1919 by one Basil Hall Chamberlain. The text can be accessed here. I started to read, and soon realized that Shinto had gods being born left, right and center. The tale focused on a pair who created Japan, and their most important progeny. It was mostly a story about being going hither or thither, marrying, fighting… nothing extradordinary. A concept of the underworld doesn’t exist so much, and there are rather few moral appeals in the text so far.

One thing, however, become obvious pretty soon: The translation sucked. Translating from japanese can’t be simple, and the footnotes that were three times as long as the paragraph they were for are reasonable. However, the names of the gods are always something like “the Deity His-Impetuous-Male-Augustness”, and sometimes the translation goes horribly wrong. Best example, the deity “Erect-Thrust-Come-Not.” Innuendo? Actually, no. The deity is a staff come to life that was stuck into the earth so it stood up straight and prevented a goddess from approaching the place where it stood. But really, erect-thrust-come-not? There must have been better ways to phrase that. The second, and completely unintelligible way in which the translation sucks is that it sometimes breaks into latin for a few sentences. Yes, latin. The transition happens fluently in the middle of a sentence, then a few sentences pure latin and then back to english. I can read some latin, and as far as I can tell, the latin is gramatically correct and perfectly in context. It is the natural continuation of the phrase, only not in english. What is going on? No clue. But I’ll continue reading it tomorrow. So far, I’ve recognized a few of the common anime fairy tale things, like the kusanagi sword or the divine trinity Amaterasu, Tsukiyomi, Susanoo. It feels weird when you read a text as cultural education and the main effect is to help you understand Naruto better.

Graphite is the new wood

Your average pencil is a thin rod of graphite encased in wood. Cheap, easy to use, works well. Except for two things: The softer ones tend to break easily, because the rod is so thin, and the tip gets very sharp, which produces very heavy lines when drawing. There is a solution to both problems: All-graphite pencils. A pencil-shaped piece of pressed graphite, covered in plastic to keep it off the user’s fingers. I got myself four a few days ago on recommendation from my drawing instructor, and I do like them. They’re heavier and feel slightly more massive and solid. They produce lines of medium strength, are easily controlled and do not even think about breaking. There is only one issue: Sharpening them produces very fine graphite dust – lots of it. I clean my desk after every time I use them. Nevertheless, they were definitely worth it, and it’s not like they were actually expensive.

I’ve done two art pieces with them so far, both in A3, with motives taken from Inhuman, a sci-fi online comic I like to read. The links will take you to Sheezy Art, where I host my pictures:

I somehow like the first one much better than the last one; I had this nice dramatic image of her strutting out of the sunrise, but my lack of ability at drawing dramatic poses foiled this. But the sky did turn out well. After doing these two pictures and comparing them to works from a while ago, I think that my shading ability has improved quite a bit. I might be ready for color pencils in a month or two, if this continues.

Oh, and I spend a minimal amount of money to acquire a small easel on Ebay. The reason for this is simply that drawing on a table top while sitting in a chair introduces a certain perspective distortion that can really mess up your picture. An easel presents the entire picture straight-on and thus solves the problem. Besides, it might be cool to work standing. Ought to arrive soon.

Tomorrow is unity day (reunification happened 3.10.1990), and I’ve been thinking about whether to draw something  on the occasion – flags and eagles are right out. Maybe I’ll have a nice idea.

To boldly go where everyboy else was too lazy to go

All physicists studying in Aachen know of The Mystery. The Red Unknown. What is it? Nobody knows. But on the top of the building all the physical institutes are in, there stands perched a red turret of indeterminate purpose, mysterious yet obvious. The picture is bad, but you can see how prominent it is:

The strange thing is that nobody, and I do mean nobody I have ever spoken to, has a clear idea what it is used for. The building is divided into two parts: The larger one is used by the physicists, and the smaller by some of the electric engineers. The Red Unknown sits at the end of their part of the building, so our janitors and professors are ignorant. Of course, one could presumably walk over and at least see if there is maybe a sign indicating its purpose – after all, it’s at the top of a stair case. There’ll probably be a locked door or hatch, but maybe there’s a door label or something. However, since the two parts of the building have all connecting doors locked, that requires you to leave the building, walk in the other main entrance, all through the building, up four sets of stairs and then look around for a hatch. Idle curiousity has never been enough to motivate anyone I know to do so. So people speculated: Maybe it was a vantage point to inspect for roof damage? Maybe it had something to do with the nearby fire department? It could an anechoic chamber used by the acoustics people; after all, it would be easy to isolate from the rest of the building. Or maybe it was the professors ultra-secret coffee break room, hidden in plain sight.

For me, however, satisfying idle curiousity is a major motivator. It has led me to ask all sorts of weird questions, do all sorts of weird things and generally go to some lengths. Today, I decided, the Mystery would be investigated. On the way back from meeting a friend at the cafeteria, I entered the Walter Schottky building, the electric engineering part, and tried to get to that stair case on the left of the picture. That required some search, since several of the hallways are blocked, either because there’s a workshop in it, a clean room, or they simply locked the door at the very end of the hallway. In the end, however, I found an open door, went up the stairs to the top and discovered at the very top of a narrow stairway a locked door with the label “Meteosat equipment room. Antenna measurement chamber”. A-ha!

In other words: That thing is a separate test chamber for satellite antennas. It makes sense for it to separated from both the building and the ground. I assume the the antennas are placed in the chamber and run through a sample broadcast sequence, while nearby sensors (most likely in the chamber as well) analyse its broadcast properties. It’s not a break room after all! One more victory for curiousity.