On a different note, I've decided that nothing can bar me from creating a website about music, even if I'm the only staff. This blog was intended to be more autobiographic, so I created a separate one called Soniscope and transferred all the old music posts there. It'll be regularly updated with themed features, so follow along if you're interested. I promise a symphony of satisfaction!
Regarding this blog, updates have been painfully slow recently because there honestly haven't been many newsworthy incidents. The job search still has me puzzled, but plenty of this semester's pieces were altogether enjoyable. Here's a brief list:
-Snellen: This Austrian card game was introduced to me by two countrymen in early January. The learning curve is alp-grade, due in large part to the cards used to play.
You'll notice there are 4 suits (hearts, bells, shades, and acorns) and that a 2-6 straight is very tough to come by. Gameplay is a wrinkled, competitive, and fiercely addicting version of spades. Everyone I know is hooked, and I've wiled away many nights scheming behind a spielkarten facade.
-The Beatsteaks: The Soniscope will soon cast its gaze on this German band, who recently electrified my favorite Copenhagen music venue. Despite it being sold out, I was drug to this show by the same group of wily Austrians responsible for my raging Snellen addiction and somehow procured a pass. Excellent concert, but I seriously feared for my safety on multiple occasions.
-Sensation White: Some men get grill sets or cuff links for their birthdays. Forget them, I got a ticket to a rave in Norway. That's another story for Soniscope, but the weekend in Oslo was memorable in its own rite, both for the beautiful bus ride and the battered bank account that inevitably follows $18 Big Mac meals.
-The Opera: Copenhagen's Opera is simply stunning. Opened in 2000, "Operæn," as the Danes call it, was donated by the A.P. Møller Foundation funded by the Mærsk founder who bears its name. Total costs exceeded $500 million, and the project was tried at length in the court of public opinion. The A.P. Møller Foundation existed at least partially to take advantage of Danish tax law that exempted corporations from tax on charitable donations. In essence, the city was purchasing most of the building that would serve as Møller's monument to himself and be placed in geographic line with the Queen (Amalienborg Palace) and God (Marble Church, the country's largest). Three semesters went by before I ever set foot inside, but I finally saw a Danish ballet, Et Folkesang, and was blown away by the interior. They truly spared no expense.
The Wind Industry: My semester's objective has been my master's thesis, a 120-page behemoth research assignment counting for a third of my grad school GPA. Working on it is like boxing a four ton amoeba with a Mr. T mohawk. Where do you even start? Does it pity the fool who challenges it? We're writing with a company called Vestas, the world's largest manufacturer of industrial wind turbines. I've learned a tremendous amount about an extraordinary industry, and with any luck I'll be able to put that knowledge to further use working for them or one of their competitors. To put extraordinary in perspective, Vestas released specifications for their newest prototype, an offshore turbine that produces 7 megawatts. Its wingspan is 164 meters in diameter. If the area of a circle is pi*r^2 like your geometry teacher insisted, the swept area of this machine's rotors could fit Yankee Field...twice. Here's one of the blades to visual scale:
So that's the semester in a hodgepodge nutshell. Tomorrow's Soniscape feature will be a similar recap with dissimilar emphasis. Check back then!
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