Abstracts, Serendipitious Poetry, A Harrowing Bus Boarding, Roquefort Rejected

(Lately I've been titling my blogs in a style Stephen King uses; see The Mist, The Little Sisters of Eluria. I like its summarizing fragmentary MO.)

Today dawned in New York as the deadline for abstracts concerning the 17th Conference on Solid State Ionics. This biannual grand palaver between a bunch of the world's solid state chemists, physicists, ceramicists et al. will be held this year in Toronto, Canada. Turns out both my advisor at Mines (Nigel) and my boss here at Risø (Mogens) are members of the organizing committee. Nigel told me late yesterday evening (my time) to submit an abstract, angling for a chance to present my work. Trouble is, I don't have any even barely scientifically rigorous 'work' to show for it (I just started in August for heaven's sake)! This fact doesn't phase Nigel in the slightest and Mogens calmly agrees. They told me to write up a proposal of sorts, conforming to the SSI organizers' guidelines, talking about what I will be doing in the next 6 months. These conferences work by amassing results people have obtained far in advance of the actual gathering, giving them time to refine, add, subtract, and work out professional presentations. Should my abstract be accepted (I'm proud of it), I will be doing all those things in tandem with the actual research needed to legitimize it all! What fun!

shift

I subscribe to the podcast "Poetry Off the Shelf," which updates once a week with a 10 - 15 minute program covering various news, tributes, history, and language in the universe of this wonderfully undefinable human art. I hadn't listened in since before Christmas 08, and when I updated the feed, the first cast was all about Inger Christensen, the recently late Danish poet. How uncanny that I should first hear it while in Denmark!

Two Danish-born poets living in New York (where the show's produced) were guests on the program. One of them actually traveled and gave readings alongside Inger, and reminisced fondly on those days. They played several soundbites of Christensen reciting her work. Her background fascinates me too. She grew up interested in mathematics and enjoyed playing with numbers as much as words. She incorporated math into some of her poems. Check out "Alphabet," where she crafts verses in groupings to mirror the Fibonacci sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8...), assigning A to '1,' B to '1,' C to '2,' and so on, going all the way to O.

shift

Tonight I left my building late (the abstract's to blame), looking for one of the public Risø bikes to make the ride up to the guardhouse and adjoining bus stop, hoping to catch the 7pm line to Roskilde station and on out to København and home. But, to my slight frustration, the only remaining such cycle was broken (hence its presence half a kilometer out from the main gate at this hour). So, I walked the tree-lined lane expecting to wait for the 7:18 ride. As I stood at the stop eight or so minutes later, I saw the northbound 600S arriving at the Risø stop on the opposite side of the bridge carrying Frederiksborgvej over the entrance road to the lab. I hesitated maybe 10 seconds before running full tilt towards its idling bulk, hoping the driver would wait a half minute longer! I was able to see the bus would take me to Ølstykke station (another way to get to København, via the S-tog train system, a not-quite-metro-not-quite-regional-train network) and just as I confirmed this fact on the curbside time table, the bus began to pull away. I lunged forward and tapped (well, banged) the door with my hand and the driver (a middle-aged woman) slammed on the brakes while jumping half out of her seat in surprise. She clearly hadn't seen me sprinting to catch the 7:08 departure. The whole vehicle followed her movement and audibly protested the abrupt change in momentum. As I boarded and showed her my pass, she rebuked me in Danish and gave me the stink eye, two of them actually, complete with a frown/sneer. I didn't understand a word, except "nej," meaning "no," so the embarrassment was diminished.

shift

Home now. I bought grated cheddar cheese tonight. I've only been able to find it in one grocery store so far. The purchase recalled to my mind an article I found on The Washington Post's web page, covering the recent 300 % duty applied to Roquefort cheese, the blue-veined delicacy from southern France. I liked the story so much (for its eloquent journalism; I'm not rejoicing over the plight of cheese falling victim to international political tantrums) I decided to go find some of this cheese. I found my precious shredded cheddar instead and forgot all about the Roquefort till just now. Check out the article. The history of the cheese makers in Roquefort is fascinating.

Godnat, Dear Reader...

Breaking News!

I interrupt the usual string of bulky and long-winded posts to bring you this mercifully short announcement (complete with picture for those who find reading dull and maybe even harmful):

I am now Fish, Bespectacled! Behold!


I can see so much better at distance now. Mange tak (many thanks) to Micki, my Love, for airmailing them! Now I can actually read the Danish street signs from across the road.

That is all.

A Treatise on Cake

Cake: a multitudinous class of comestibles that carries significant weight here at Risø. Success in this national laboratory is measured by credible publications, healthy research grants, favorable press releases, and cake.

Cake is scheduled, often days or a even a week in advance. Everyone syncs their Outlook calendars, Gmail calendars, notifiers, and Entourage agendas with cake. E-mails are sent. Phone calls are made. Planners are marked. Kitchens are busy! Cake is good.

In snynonymity with 'party' or 'informal meeting,' a cake will be "thrown" for several reasons (that I know of so far). The obvious birthday cakes, wedding announcements, and anniversaries (of employment). Successful experiments, tests, arrival of new colleagues and equipment alike, and the 'christening' of lab stations. This last category was the reason for today's cake, given for the official naming of test rig 32 and declaration that it is ready for operation (meaning mostly debugged). It's new name is "Lichen" (after the plant), given by Chris, the American PhD student from Columbia University whom I am working closely with in my tenure here. He said he chose the name because all the other rigs and machines in the lab are either named after Norse deities or Earthly bodies of water, except for one, called Flower. He reasoned that 'flora' needed more representation.

The cake was good, a confection resembling chocolate brownies (after squaring it in its rectangular pan) with orange-flavored frosting and two slices of clementine cuties per piece. There was also a side dish of coconut balls layered with chocolate and sugar. Delicious!

Cake has the added feature of sparking technical discussions amongst us nerds, geeks, and engineers.* Today's topics included a thorough discussion of using gadolinium-doped ceria to absorb unwanted silica from the working atmosphere of a solid oxide fuel cell and solid oxide electrolysis cell test chamber, leak testing on "Lichen," the explosive tendencies of a custom-designed glycine-nitrate wet chemistry powder synthesis process, and the precise workings of an isostatic press machine in the context of fabricating dense ceramic electrodes from powders. One of the older researchers present, a Greek named Nikos, took us on a tangent about how he could float his ceramic powder down to the bottom of a trench in the Aegaen Sea on a nylon string and isostatically press it that way. Being nerds, geeks, and engineers,* we of course discussed (and joked) about the specifics of this pragmatically ludicrous suggestion.

Cake is good.


*redundant, but I included it for completeness' sake.

A train, a bus, a winter morning, (a bit of) procrastination

I'm on the 7:34 Regionaltog (regional train) out of København Hovedbanegård (Copenhagen Main Station), bound for Kalundborg.



On the way, about 20 minutes into the nearly two-hour journey is Roskilde, and I will be getting off soon (we just pulled out of Hedehusene station). From there I get on the 600S bus that has a stop right at Risø. Frederiksborgvej, one of the main roads running through Roskilde, winds north of downtown along the fjord that butts up against the city's northern border. Risø sits on a small peninsula jutting out west from the eastern shore and the main entrance is 60 meters or so from the two-lane blacktop. So, it's quite nice to be dropped off at the bottom of the exit ramp and then a minute's worth of walking beneath the highway and onto the lab's property, and to work!

Here's my stop..."næste station, Roskilde!" Thank you charming Danish female recording voice.

Fog and mist are close on the land, a typical Danish morning. The heavy moisture will probably become a little lighter as day goes on, but the scant few peeks and wisps of blue sky come and go just long enough to notice and too short to cherish. The tether-tied radio tower (I assume that's what it is) a few hundred meters south of my office window is topless, its blunt triangular peak lost in the clinging weather. Outside is not quite what I would call cold, certainly not the harsh freshness of Rocky Mountain winter nights, but cool enough for jackets and hats, and to numb fingertips. The absence of wind in the insulating vapor is a welcome reprieve from the usually vigilant north-bound gusting.

I picked out one of the Risø public bikes and rolled off on a rust-tinged frame with a loose right pedal. The cycles are sturdy, but maintenance is not top priority among the many machines here, and even the Danish cannot make an invincible bike. But it serves just fine, though I wish they hadn't bolted this one's seat; I feel like one of those slouching, surly BMX riders, knees pumping nearly to my chest each revolution, and without a neighborhood skate park to show off my two-wheeled talent. Instead, I make use of static friction lean muscle to traverse the well-worn half kilometer roadway between the guardhouse and building 778, where I now sit at half past 9. The trip down that stretch of pitted pavement is a daily highlight for me, and I'll have to take pictures when the light's not so perfectly flat; maybe a sunny day will happen upon us soon? Trees (haven't figured what kind yet), old and tall trees, line either side, down its full length. Spaced a few meters, they form an airy wooden tunnel. The site is beautiful now and I wonder how much more stunning it will look in a few months. Nature's awesome.

Just south of the road is the fjord, petering out and ending in dozens of niches, coves, and ponds, grabbing every last bit of space it can, and coming within 10 meters of the trees. If you see pictures of fjords in books or online where they show inlet ocean channels surrounded by steep, rocky shores (I know I have), this isn't one of those fjords. Like the rest of Denmark, the landscape is mostly flat, rolling and jutting here and there a bit to show some spirit, but not much. As with every winter morning I've been here for, there's a layer of ice close to shore and it mixes in with the mud and grasses to look like a smooth beach in the soft gray light. Ducks and gulls strut and slide on its glassy surface, and I roll on by, to work and (a bit of) procrastination. By the latter, Dear Reader, this post is brought to you.

Tilbage arbejde (back to work)!!

Danish First Floors, Bicycle Streets, Moving Again

I imagine once my stream-of-consciousness peters out here tonight, this post won't qualify as short, but if you hate long blog posts, just take comfort in this, Dear Reader: it could be a lot longer if I wasn't so lazy!

Some interesting features I have found in Denmark (I call them 'features' because I have no better word for them, and, to write 'things' is terribly trite):

The Danes count building floors starting with 'ground' or 'zero' as what Americans would think of as the 'first' floor. So, the 'second' floor in an U.S. building would be the 'first' floor in Denmark. Perhaps this is true elsewhere in Europe and the world? I'd not be surprised to find out America is the only country with a system like it has (e.g. holding to the Imperial (British) system of units and measures as opposed to metric). Cogitation aside, this change caused me some confusion the first time I got directions to find an office on the first floor of a building last week.

Secondly, the fact there are raised bicycle lanes running between the pedestrian walks and streets in nearly all parts of the Danish cities (the ones I've been in anyway: Roskilde, København, Århus) is really very awesome. It's like a cyclist's own street. These bike paths are set at a height greater than the road, but less than the sidewalk. The elevated plane with its well-weathered borders actually makes me feel safer, more contained than I feel riding on the same level as cars or people. I suppose this feeling comes out of my desires to see order and neatness in a lot of life, and to have thorough organization. I don't think it's OCD (I'm quite uninformed on that condition), but maybe it's my equally inherent laziness that combats true obsessiveness. Simply put: if I don't find order and organization quickly or relatively easily, I usually just give up and stop caring, perhaps to return and tackle the task later.

Anyway...I moved into a spare room in a downtown København flat owned by a Danish doctor and lived in by his son Laurids (say it: Laord-ss and swallow the 'd') and Peter, Laurids' friend. I took my stuff down from Risø in a couple trips. The room has a backwards 'L' shape, enclosed with white-painted concrete walls, a wood panel floor and a plaster ceiling with an obscure rectangular hole shooting upwards into darkness and the fourth through sixth floors. A floor-to-ceiling window that opens two different ways depending on the handle's position overlooks a triangular courtyard where the residents' bikes and the trash bins sit. I'm living on the third floor (Danish third) of a good-sized apartment building on Christianshavn, the small oblong island that rides up alongside København central with a couple hundred meters of water between. My street is Voldgården if you'd like to look it up (the zip code, which goes before the city, is 1412; Google Maps'll pick it out right quick).

I'd say to mail me some letters telling me how much you miss me, Dear Reader, but, alas, after two nights living in my island-bound room, I heard back on another apartment lead. This one's in Nørrebro, a region of København to the northwest of center, about 10 minutes' bike ride from the main train station, Hovedbanegård (meaning roughly 'main station'). I hadn't expected to get contacted by this other landlord. In the variable sieve of my memory I didn't pay enough attention to the detail that he'd be telling me by Tuesday (20 January) if he found me the best choice for the room. I had thought it was to be Monday (19) at the latest. So! I am moving again! I lose my deposit to my current roommates, and I'm paying 1000 kroner/month more, but I gain some nice benefits.

First off, my Nørrebro room is three times larger! The L-room I'm in now; it's a mere 6 square meters. if I lie down across the widest portion, I can't stretch out fully. For the visual learner (like me), imagine a letter 'L' whose base is thicker than it is long. This geometry leaves only one place to put the bed, running parallel to the 'L's vertical spine, nestled in the corner of that 'thickened base.' As for the bed itself, we found the frame on a dumpster dive. It's a single-person rig that's just wide enough to let me lie on my back and long enough that my toes come to rest on the wooden footboard as my scalp touches the head piece. No mattress. When I arrived with my belongings, it was the only piece of furniture. Why would I even take this small, bare room? All my other leads hadn't contacted me back (not including the one that did two days later), and Svaleholm charges about double my rent for this place. I decided to wing it. It happened that my roommates are kind Danish guys, and they lent me a mattress, pillow, and sleeping bag to cover me during the cold København nights. One of them (Peter) even gave me a lamp to plug into the lone socket. All together, it was quite a shift from the well-furnished farmhouse near Risø. To make matters even better, when I reassembled the refuse bed frame, I found some of the screws missing. While I was able to get it into a whole piece of work, I had to use screws from the foot and head boards. Even then, I may have discovered why it was all trashed in the first place--it wobbles, even with the transplanted screws. Definitely not a bed to be used roughly! I have slept on it now for a week and it hasn't fallen down. Oh, what fun!

Second, third, and fourth real quick. The new room is furnished with bed, couch, and desk. The apartment has its own washing facilities (I pay 17.5 kroner per wash here at Voldgården). Finally, it's closer to the train depot (Nørrebro station) where I need to get to classes at DTU (they start next week), and a connection down to Hovedbanegård (often abbreviated to København H) for my ride out to Risø.

To make this long post not so long, I am moving Saturday, another adventure to close out an action-packed January. What a way to spend the first days of 2009!

For those of you I relayed my Vodgården address to, I'll let you know my new-new address soon, and the rest of you will get a (hopefully) more permanent one.

That's enough for tonight.

Until some undetermined future time! Hej og godnat.

At work, clean water, House of the Swallows

I've begun the workweek on a Friday. How incredible! After three days of workshops and conferences that I had no inkling I would be participating in beforehand, I am in my new office here at Risø. I share half a room, back-to-back with Janet Jonna Bentzen, a Danish scientist who has been here for some years. Our office is about 8 feet wide by 15 feet long; the upper half of its southern wall taken up by a three-pane window looking out onto a narrow parking lot between some of the buildings. It's quite cozy, but doesn't feel cramped. Janet, conversely, has filled nearly every inch of storage space. I have half a shelf along my wall, out of six shelves. The storage landscape is dominated by red binders containing a myriad of proposals, papers, research plans, student projects, conference material, and the like.

My desk is mechanized! By pushing a button near the right front end, I can raise or lower the top to a good height. This is a common workspace type (at least at Risø) and as I walk the office halls, I see a variety of configurations, from low to accommodate the shorter person, to stomach-high for the worker who desires to actually stand rather than sit during the day.

The day went well. I will be spending most of the next week in a lot of introductions to this machine and that co-worker, and this administrative procedure and that instruction manual. I have lab safety training sessions Tuesday and Wednesday. The facilities are so much more well-endowed than the ones at Mines (at least the ones in the Ceramics Center). No doubt this comes out of a sizeable bit more cash, but for my purposes as a visiting PhD student, I'm working in a gold-mine of furnaces, mass-flow controllers, soldering irons, and test stands, among many other tools, not to even mention the large chemical/powder inventory!

ø ø ø ø ø

I've moved from Anne and Klaus' house into a renovated farmhouse near the lab. It's called Svaleholm (Home of the Swallows), and the sign over the main stable door says it was built in 1868. On a bit of a tangent, in any conversation I've had involving the term "old" when applied to architecture, customs, or ideas, the Danish don't consider anything younger than 500 years to fall into this category. I tell them the School of Mines was founded in 1874 (already younger than the farm I'm living at), and they tell me, "Oh, well DTU was built in 1822," or, "København University was started in 1479," or they just smile and say something like "that's nice." It's quite alien to me to see buildings that have been around since before the Crusades, and still quite well-preserved and open to the public; some are even still used.

Anyway, Svaleholm's interior feels more like a medium-priced hotel. I've got my own room and am sharing a bathroom and kitchen. All the appliances are new, the furniture is new, and the heat stays on in the night. It's nice.

I think the most incredible discovery to me recently has been about the tap water. I've been told Denmark has really strict guidelines and enforcement policies for clean water everywhere, so anyone can drink right from their bathroom sink with no worries. In fact, some of the Danes have told me the tap water is often safer to drink than the bottled water from France.

I've already started looking for alternate housing. I want to live down in København if I can find something. After asking lots of questions and heavily relying on Google Translator (a nifty tool!), I found some good "classifides" websites, mostly in Danish. There are some good deals on here, so I'm going to check 'em out.

To that end, I've planned a trip into København for the weekend days. I've been using a really great public transportation site called "Rejseplanen," meaning "trip planner." You put in your start, end, time of arrival or departure, and it calculates all the possible routes to get you there the fastest. It includes the Metro, all trains, buses, and walking routes, even giving prices and detailed maps. It's quite handy for me and my poor Danish pronunciation skills (asking for directions without a map can be a real hard time).

Adios and hej and goodbye for now!

A Conference, Good Science, A Fifth Force

I've spent the last two days far away from Risø. Many of us from the Fuel Cells division are out here in Lyngby, a municipality north of København, at the DTU campus. The university is hosting a conference on sustainable energy technologies this week, and many scientists and students have come from across Denmark, Europe, and the world to participate.

This conference is really more of a workshop. Rather than listening to lectures and presentations (no poster sessions) all the time, the schedule has been split between this 'conference-style' and a 'think-tank' process in smaller groups. I estimate there are several hundred people here at the event, and the small group I'm in is numbered at 14. Our task is to discuss and present a developmental road map for synthetic fuels as chemical energy storage. It's a fascinating experience, because I feel so useless around these people. For any readers who've gone to Mines, this working group like an EPICS team involving your parents and grandparents. What I mean is, we have a few students (my age), a bulk of professionals and post-doctoral researchers, and a few (politely) older gentlemen from the university and research institutes (i.e. Risø). Basically, us students are sitting here while the 'big guys' quote us their publications, their numbers, and their knowledge, and we write it down and put it all in a report. Later this afternoon, our group will present our conclusions to a panel of sustainable energy big shots from around the world, though most of them come from Denmark and Sweden.

I wasn't required to come along to this conference/workshop, but, since registration was free, and Anne, the woman in whose house I am staying and who I depend on for transport, was going; so I came too. I actually got to contribute to the group discussion yesterday and today, so I feel much less like a broken vacuum cleaner, sitting in the corner and looking ridiculous!

Not wanting to be too boring and technical, I'll briefly say our group's goals, and then go on in more detail about the more interesting implications. We're comparing the energy value (Joules per kg or liter), efficiency of storage (euro-cents per liter), and production cost for various synthetic chemical fuels. Specifically we're considering hydrogen, ammonia, and hydrocarbons (methanol and DME). We've also thrown in an environmental comparison, looking at the cost of carbon and carbon-free fuels, and, if we use carbon based fuels, how best to recover the waste.

On this last note, one of our group members is a professor and scientist from Columbia University, Klaus Lackner. He is personally credited with the development of 'artificial trees' for scrubbing carbon-dioxide out of the atmosphere and processing it back into usable fuel (e.g. electrolysis). Check out his work here in a post on The Breakthrough Institute's website. Dr. Lackner is an amazing guy with a lot of experience in tackling the enormous complexity of renewable and sustainable energy technologies. I know a major criticism of renewable energy proponents is that they don't consider the vast number of hurdles (technical, economic, social, political, etc...). Lackner eloquently acknowledges these problems and constantly produces data and new ideas on how to solve them. For example, in his artificial tree project, he told the group about how his research has extensively looked for the best absorbent agent to capture the CO2 from the air--not just the cheapest or most efficient, but the cleanest, the least-harmful to the environment, and the most sustainable. It's this multi-faceted approach to everything in his work that impresses me the most. When we go around the table, everyone has made this ideology part of their scientific method. It seems to be a commonplace trend here. In fact, at the keynote speech for this whole conference, the director-general of the Swedish Energy Agency stated this: "In America, wind power is patriotic, in the Europe it's just good for the environment." Quite an inciting diction, and, though I don't believe for a second that European sustainable energy is solely 'fueled' by morality and environmental conscience, this attitude of sustainability in every aspect of life (technology, society, politics, and economics) is much more applied than it is in America. In the good old Red, White, and Blue, I feel we do more talking and excuse-making than actually doing anything. Here, everyone from the politicians to the assistant professors is producing real plans, objectives, and 'road maps' that can (will I believe) be realized in the next few decades.

The highlighting statement at this conference came from the same keynote speech by the Swedish energy administrator: "Don't ask: 'why go for 100 % renewable energy?' Ask: 'why less?' They believe it, and they back it up. A tactic of debate my dad wields very well (and I, unfortunately, often lose control and get overly excited when he does this) is to point out all the downfalls, the drawbacks, the shortcomings of an optimistic proposal, such as 100 % renewable energy. The Swedes, Danes, Germans, and all the rest, the companies, universities, and whole governments, are not, I repeat, not, negating the obstacles and the difficulties of achieving this goal. They've been 'pointed out' ad nauseam. Now is the time to focus on solutions, to plan out the paths, and re-plan, and re-evaluate, and retry when the proposals fail. It's time to stop talking and start doing. To shoot for anything less than 100 % is not only environmentally negligent, its economically moronic.

Of course, a nice bonus (to me it's saintly) is that none of these arguments and goals for renewable and sustainable energy need the 'Al Gore fever' at all. They stand plenty fine all on their own. As everyone in my small group here today agrees, fossil fuels have the edge. They are cheaper. The technology is cheaper. The companies, organizations, and governments controlling them can be very flexible to compete with renewables (see the impossible-to-predict price of crude over the last 30 years).

(In my humble opinion) it is clear there is a fifth fundamental force in today's globalizing world, one we can add to gravitation, electromagnetic, strong, and weak: money. It drives, pulls, pushes, tempts, motivates, creates, and destroys, and to a large extent, deaf to any moral outcry. Money has gone far beyond simple barter and trade, supply and demand. It has become a form of identity, raising up empires (i.e. corporations) to power, and in the same moment crushing them down into oblivion. My point is that instead of resisting this force and bogging down the quest for renewable energy with pointless pessimistic drivel, the job of the scientist is to make his technical solution more economically, socially, and politically attractive than the status-quo.

Bah! This post turned out to be much longer than I wanted. There's a whole other argument I want to make about the impatience of today's world regarding scientific, technological, and cultural progress, but I think I'll leave it for a later date. I am passionate about renewable and sustainable energy technologies. I believe if each member of the global scientific and engineering community starts every project with the ambition to address all aspects of our interconnected reality, the policy, economics, social impact, etc... we can silence the radicals, please the politicians, fill the banks with cash, give the stocks their green arrows, and become more responsible human beings. I will dispute the extent of human impact on the Earth's well-being with anyone, even the infamous and be-shamed Mr. Gore, but that's all irrelevant anyway.

The major notion to take to the lab each day and home each night can be summed up in this statement by Dr. Robert E.D. Woolsey, a co-founder of the McBride Honors Program in Public Affairs at my School o' Mines: "...pure technical problems do not exist--only those embedded in political, cultural, ethical, and moral problems."

Afsked Dear Reader

Denmark: Round 2, Jet Lag, First Full Day

Hello Dear Reader and goddag! I have returned to Denmark, and have begun blogging again after a lengthy hiatus. My writer's block (blogger-block) has been forcefully thrown aside by the need to keep you informed of my adventures! So, with some introduction to start...

I flew from Denver to Frankfurt non-stop, and non-sleep, starting Sunday, January 11, and ending up in Germany about lunchtime January 12. I estimate my total REM time aboard the two-deck jumbo to have been no more than two hours total. Credit goes to the (Indian?) family with two toddlers in the row behind mine. Ah, what a true test of patience and good manners!

Blearily navigating my way through Customs, and explaining the presence of my alarm clock and flashlight to German security, I caught my connecting flight into Copenhagen (I like the look of "København" better, personally) without any hassle. I had to get on a bus that shuttled a load of us Denmark-bound passengers out onto the tarmac, where our plane waited, and we climbed the set of rolling stairs to board. The briskness of the foggy German Monday was refreshing after the hot and cramped plane-ride.

The plane arrived on time in a clear-skyed Copenhagen. As I disembarked, I thought about the service I've received while flying throughout my life, and I've concluded Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) provides the best. These people are very polite, observant, and seem to have unshakable cheer and uncrackable patience. Lufthansa (my carrier from Denver to Frankfurt) comes in a close second.

After picking up my checked bag I made my way into the airport's main building to find the train ticket office. The Copenhagen airport is very beautiful, full of glass and color and winding, swirling designs in everything from staircases to chairs. There are reclining armchairs lining some of the concourse walls for the weary traveler to rest in between or after flights, a feature my jet-lagged body sorely wished to enjoy, but declined in favor of getting to my final destination with all haste.

I found the train ticket booth and bought a ride to Roskilde, the city where I am living (for now), and where Risø, Denmark's National Sustainable Energy Laboratory, is located. I am glad nearly every Dane speaks or understands English, for while I can read it in fair fashion, I cannot pronounce it correct enough to be useful, yet. I made it to the correct platform, looking for "Roskilde" on the view screen and boarded. I thought I would be fine all the way to Roskilde, but it turned out the train first stopped in Copenhagen Train Station. Here it stopped and everyone who did not want to go right back to the airport had to get off and transfer. By the time I found someone to ask, I had two minutes and had to be two platforms over. I think I looked like an overburdened Sherpa with my bags slung across my back and front, running up one escalator and (carefully) running down the other one, getting onto the right train connection 30 seconds before departure. Phew! A good thing too as the next one would come an hour later. The station is very nice, but I was anxious to get to Roskilde before it got too late.

Upon arrival in the mid-island town, I grabbed some cash and a cab to the home of Anne and Klaus Hauch, about 1 mile from the train station. They are a very nice, young couple, with a 9 month-old son, Jacob. This little tot is real easy to like. He has to touch and eat everything within reach, and he stares curiously at any new object (i.e. me), but he's also very pleasant and he loves his Lego bricks! I'm staying with them till January 16, and then I'll move into the Risø-DTU Guest House. My new home will be closer to work, but I'll have to cook for myself and I won't get to learn as much about Danish culture and family life, so I'm a bit sad be leaving so soon. Free meals and lodging is great!

I had not originally intended to spend any time with a Danish family, but when there was a scheduling mix-up with the Guest House people, I found myself homeless in Denmark for four days and nights. My boss, Mogens Mogensen, put me in touch with Anne, a post-doc researcher at Risø, and she agreed to put me up in a guest room for the week--very nice of her indeed. I have learned a lot from them about Danish customs, history, and language. I'm still real rubbish when it comes to remembering pronunciations (a real hindrance is that, like most native speakers, the Danish don't enunciate very well), but I'm getting there.

So far at this house, I've accompanied Anne on a grocery run, using bicycles (I rode Klaus') and towing the food home in a small trailer bin attached to my seat by a bar, running behind me on wheels. Klaus' birthday was today (January 13), and I heard, though I cannot remember, the Danish version of "Happy Birthday." Klaus' parents are visiting today also, having driven the 130 km from the city of Odense (say: 'Ooln-suh' while swallowing the 'l' a bit). They speak very little English, but are happy to trade expressions and learn new ones. Klaus is quite a cook, and we've had several great meals. When they don't know the English word for a vegetable, food, dish, etc..., they look it up in their Dansk-Engelsk dictionary and tell me. I've never had 'jordskok' before, but it's called 'Jerusalem artichoke' in English, looks somewhat like a mushroom, and has the consistency of a radish, though it tastes like a potato. Yes, very good food! In our dinner conversations we've been over Danish driving laws, what Americans eat on New Year's Eve (Klaus' father thought maybe we all ate 'Big Macs'), Danish history, food, a bit of politics, and all sorts of descriptions about the Rocky Mountains, Denver, and Colorado. Klaus works as a math teacher at a university that trains teachers, so we talked about the Danish education system and its comparison to those in America. Jacob is perpetually either at the dinner table or playing on a toy-filled blanket next to it. He cannot yet walk or talk, but he scoots himself between our legs, tries to eat our toes (or slippers), and often grabs the attention of one or more of us. Cute kid.

Ø Ø Ø Ø Ø

I went into work with Anne today. We rode the bicycles the 6 km (~4 miles) to Risø. Even though we left at 7:45 am, it was still predawn. At least, I think so, for I never saw the sky today. Fog and low-hanging clouds was the forecast and it held. I don't mind, really, the countryside is still quite beautiful and the town is very nice. Bike paths are built like separate, miniature highways running along the car roads. Except for the small side streets, every roadway has them. In town, cyclists even have their own set of traffic lights to obey at intersections. While it had rained during the night, the air was merely damp on our way up to Risø. It felt about as cold as a Colorado winter, and I'm glad I came plenty prepared for winter weather. Anne tells me ice and snow are rare; mostly it's wet, windy, and dim during Denmark winters. I've been told the worst part of the cold season has passed, and the days are about seven hours long now.

We arrived at Risø around 8:15 and I got my guest badge. I'll soon have a more permanent ID with a picture, and access will be easier. Anne showed me around some of the facilities (I'd been given much the same tour when I visited back in August 08), and I met some of the other 'early birds' (it's typical to arrive around 9am). Mogens was already there though, and we talked briefly about my initial duties here at Risø, i.e. getting safety and liability paperwork, lab tours, my office set up, a network password, and so on.

The rest of the day was occupied with a workshop on hydrocarbon fuels. This event consisted of nine half-hour presentations by scientists and PhD students working at Risø, all within the Fuel Cells and Solid State Chemistry department. We heard about hydrocarbon and hydrogen fuel production, systems integration, economic considerations, modeling, electrochemistry, and materials research. Much of it directly related to my work here, so I kept fairly good notes throughout the day. As with everything Risø-DTU is involve in, sustainability is a major factor, from basic design to system and market integration. This idea gets a lot of attention in Demark, coming out in mandates from their government, initiatives in companies (e.g. Vestas, DONG Energy, Haldor Topsoe), and all over academia. If you, Dear Reader, are not informed, Risø was originally founded by Physicist Niels Bohr in 1958, as a nuclear power research facility. It has long since shifted track to renewable and sustainable energy technologies, and the fuel cells division (where I am) is only a small part. Researchers here also work on fusion, wind, biomass, and solar, among others. So, yes, sustainability and renewability are two buzz words going around everywhere.

The talks were spread out by several coffee breaks (the Danish are religious about this custom) and a catered lunch in the cafeteria. The food was much the same as the fare I ate back in August, at Fulgsøcentret, and I made acquaintances over bites of fish and bread with several other people in the workshop group. Most of us are Danish, though there is another American, Chris, whom I met last time, a few Asian-looking fellows, and an Indian man named Shital. In all we numbered about 20 or so, I didn't count.

Tomorrow I will go with Anne in a Risø-rented car to DTU (Technical University of Denmark, the academic institution financially and legally linked to the government lab Risø). Many of the people from today's workshop will be there. The occasion is a two-day conference on renewable energy, and there will be more intensive and longer presentations on solar, wind, biomass, and energy storage. People are coming from around the world to attend and talk. A woman from NREL is scheduled to speak about the Colorado lab's wind program. I may attend that one. The schedule is largely a free-for-all in the reservation department, so I guess it's just "show up and listen."

That's enough for one day! I'll write more soon, so take care Dear Reader.

Afsked og godnat! (meaning farewell and goodnight. I had typed it as 'Afskend' back in August, but I was wrong, so, AFSKED!)