Of anthropological interest

[fivemack]

I write from the palatial lobby of the Diamond Light Source administrative building, on day three of the meeting of the BIOXHIT project. This is a four-year project on bioinformatics and improved software and hardware for handling synchrotron radiation; it's my first exposure to EU project management. Rather over a hundred people here, among whom I'm very junior; something like fifteen million Euros over four years coming from the project.

There's a large contingent from EMBL Hamburg here, so on every other coffee-table the language of conversation is German ... a German-speaking Englishman is unthinkable, so the North Germans assume I'm Swiss and the South Germans assume I'm Dutch. This pleases me.

The food's very good, which always makes me feel slightly guilty for an EU project; there is one EU budget, every eurocent we spend on too much wine is a eurocent not available to the Plovdiv-to-Ploesti motorway project. And whilst understanding ammonium metabolism in E.Coli or running three parallel projects to design crystallisation robots and two parallel software packages to recognise crystals in images is clearly useful, I'm not sure I'd wish to justify this over the motorway project to Mr Alexandrescu in his broken-down van on the Bulgarian border.

Comments

[redbird]

I doubt that the bureaucrats responsible for that Plovdiv-to-Ploesti motorway are worrying about justifying their excellent meals to Mr. Alexandrescu.

Americans have an (unfortunately often justified) reputation for monolingualism. Are the English viewed similarly, or would it be unremarkable that you speak French?

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

The people from Grenoble seemed a little surprised that I tried chatting to them in French ... I think all the people here from my company can get by in French, though not all in German. It's more monolingual than some places; Germans talk to Germans in German, whilst I think I once encountered a software conference in Holland when even that conversation would have been in English.

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that splashig out on good food really costs money in the long term. Yes, it's something that accountants can point at and say could be cut back, but penny pinching in that sort of area annoys people so much that I think you lose all your savings in reduced productivity

[redbird]

There's a wide range between penny pinching and splurging. You can serve sandwiches instead of a three-course meal, but make them good sandwiches: good bread isn't much more expensive than crap bread, use decent sandwich fillings and enough of them, and most people aren't going to feel put-upon. (Some will, but if you do that three-course meal someone else is going to be annoyed because they really wanted a sandwich, or a great big salad and a couple of cookies.)

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I don't mind that the food is good; the issue is that it's grotesquely over-catered, there's about half a table of good sandwiches thrown away at each lunch, and all the restaurant meals seem to have been over-booked by about 30% ... presumably this means that 25% of the invited attendees said they'd come but didn't, against which it's difficult to plan.

The site (near Harwell, in a remarkably isolated bit of Oxfordshire) has a canteen, and I think I'd be happy to be told to eat three meals a day at the canteen and pay for them out of my wages, but I am a Puritan at heart. I guess if you want to compensate visiting speakers from California and New Zealand with decent food, and want to have lots of useful scientific conversation over the meals, you end up having to feed everybody.

The building is not conspicuously gold-plated except in such places as gold-plating is needed to make the synchrotron work; the beamline labs are cramped, but this is because lead walls capable of stopping 300mA of X-rays are unavoidably rather costly and you want to use as few of them as possible. I'm not quite sure why the vacuum piping all seems to be wrapped in baking foil; it's shiny on the outside so I doubt it's to avoid heat radiating in.

I'm always surprised how heavy the engineering has to be to maintain even quite light items in positions accurate to a thousandth of a millimetre - there was a whole talk on how it was best to place each bit of equipment on its own granite block glued with special vibration-damping glue to the huge single, polished to the point of slipperiness, concrete pouring that forms the floor of the beam hall. And quite how many nuts, bolts and gaskets you need to connect bits of vacuum piping together without providing a chance for the vacuum to leak out.

[janetmk.livejournal.com]

I'm about to spend a week in Bavaria. I hope to manage a little German while I'm there and confound expectations.

However my German is awfully rusty and I expect my mushy pronunciation will result in Germans switching quickly to English when talking to me.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, if I'm talking to an individual German she will switch to English immediately unless I ask her nicely in German not to ... at a table of Germans chatting in German I can start in German and people don't switch immediately.