Krees goes Dutch!

Pregnancy, birth and child care in the Netherlands

A colleague sent out an email to those of us at the office who have recently had kids, asking for information and input for a friend about living in the Netherlands, especially with regard to having a baby and raising a child here. In true Krees fashion, I sent her a treatise. Then I realized that all the information (with a little opinion) might be useful to others. So here it is.

Dutch vs. American workdays

There will be some construction work at our office next week requiring the use of the majority of our parking lot. Staff have been asked to park their cars at a lot a half-kilometer away, and a small shuttle bus has been hired to drive us to and from the office. This shuttle will be available from 8-9:30 am and 3:30-5:00pm.

It is expected that one will leave the office by 5pm. (Or maybe that's when the shuttle bus company requires its driver to clock out!)

Can you imagine if the Google shuttle bus only ran during these hours? If most Americans were expected to do their work between the hours of 8:15 and 4:45, plus take a scheduled mid-morning coffee break and (more-or-less) required 30 minute lunch break, nothing would be accomplished!

Then again, maybe we'd be a little better at actually working at the office and keeping personal time free from work. Maybe these crazy Dutch are on to something...

Astronomers are funny

And just so you don't think that astronomers are all a bunch of fuddy-duddies, check out the Jodrell Bank Song from YouTube. The song has been stuck in my head for two days.

The context is that the UK needs to make some major budget cuts in their science programs, and the e-MERLIN project (similar to our own EXPReS project, but only with the telescopes at the Jodrell Bank Observatory) is/was up on the chopping block. There was a HUGE outcry from the astronomy community and from Britain as a whole, so it looks as though things are safe over there.

(Sir Bernard Lovell, referred to in the song, was a radio astronomer and director of Jodrell Bank for 35 years. JBO's beloved Lovell telescope is named after him. Jodrell Bank itself was named the UK's greatest "unsung landmark" in 2007.)

It's what we do

EuroNews actually came to JIVE a couple years ago to film a program for the European Space Agency. It gives a nice little introduction to the method of astronomy "we" do here, called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI).

The short version: building a telescope the size of the planet would be REALLY expensive. Instead, use a bunch of little telescopes at the same time to simulate a great big telescope. Here's the video:

Traditional/current VLBI methodology has each of the telescopes record data onto many many many disks and ship them to us here to be correlated. But that takes a loooooooong time. And if there was something wrong with the telescope settings or there was something interesting happening in the sky, the operators and the astronomers wouldn't realize it until it was too late.

Our project, EXPReS, is connecting the telescopes via fiber optic network so that the data can be sent electronically and correlated in real-time. Voila! The astronomer gets his (and occasionally her) data in a matter of hours instead of weeks or months. If something interesting and short-lived is happening (like the flaring of a microquasar), follow-on observations (such as this one by a different telescope) might be scheduled to further study said interesting thing. We conducted just such an observation yesterday morning and hope to have something interesting to share soon!

Up close and personal with the WSRT

It's been a busy week, due in part to the filming at work of a EuroNews program, Futuris. I played host to the producer and his film crew yesterday, ushering them around the office for interviews with various JIVE staff, and then Charles and I took them out to the Westerbork telescope (about, ASTRON photos) to do some filming and an interview with Charles there.

Much to our delight, they let us use lift that was on-site to film the interview and some close-up shots of one of the antennas.

I took some photos of my own while we were up there. This is looking east at dishes 7-12:

Looking west at dishes 1-5 (we were positioned in front of #6):

The producer even volunteered to take our photo while we were up there.

But I was especially pleased that Charles chose to wear his pig tie for the interview:

International House of Yuns

Congratulations to my father-in-law who just accepted a job that will take him back to Korea for up to two years. That's right! There's no stopping this man. This must be at least the third time he's come out of retirement (un-retired? de-retired?), and it's the fourth time that my in-laws have moved back or forth between Korea and the U.S.

I don't think my parents think we're crazy for moving overseas, but maybe they think we're a little crazy for considering not returning. Maybe now they'll think we're merely following in the footsteps of crazy.

Apparently it's Valentine's Day?

One of the nice things about living here is the ability to escape a lot of the marketing craziness we were subjected to in the States. (I'm talking to you, Hallmark!) So with the exception of a card from my mom to Aldus, the approach of Valentine's Day pretty much went unnoticed by both Charles and I. I can't be offended that Charles forgot it if I forgot it myself, right?

Regardless, an email from Charles pretty much just made my day, much less my Valentine's Day.

For a little context, yesterday I sent a very carefully worded email to a project partner about their (unintentional?) misrepresentation of our project to highlight their own contribution in an article they wrote. I forwarded their reply (including my email) to Charles for his information. His response:

>>> "T. Charles Yun"  2/14/2008 1:14 PM >>>
ok, that was a rock-star email you sent to her.

This makes going into my performance review this afternoon so much easier!

Working girl

I took the day off today. Yes, I did start maternity leave on Monday. But I feel like I've been working harder this week than I have in a while. There's so much to do before the baby comes! Or rather, there's so much to do before the kraamzorg (the maternity care worker) comes and decides that Americans live like filthy pigs!

I've been sweeping and vacuuming and dusting and getting rid of cobwebs and cleaning the bathrooms and picking up clutter. Trying to rid the house of spiders and cobwebs has been the biggest chore. I just did this a few weeks ago and already the house looked like it was decorated for Halloween. The ground floor of the house looks pretty good now. There's still a lot of weeding to do in the garden, the guest room and bathroom to be cleaned out and the upstairs to be organized. But my feet have been so sore since yesterday evening that I decided to try and spend as little time on my feet today as possible.

I still had to take the dog for a walk (a shorter walk than usual) and run to the bank and grocery store (I drove instead of walking or riding my bike this time). But I also put my feet up out in the yard and did some knitting. Woo hoo! And today wasn't all play and no work; I started on the paperwork to renew our residency permits so that they don't throw us and the baby out of the country in July.

Tomorrow it's back to mucking about in the garden.

Question of the day

I got my bike Friday. WOO HOO!!! Pics soon -- I don't want to post anything until I get just the right ones. Shes' a Sparta Stilio, (better photo here) . I think I'm going to call her "Harriet," as in My Chariot.

Seven speeds, front and rear shocks, headlamp (required), back light (required), and a bell (required - but fun!). And in Zwolle I picked up a set of soft-sided panniers for trekking stuff to work and home from the store.

Anyway, on my ride into work today I was debating with myself whether it's better to go to work in the morning on a bike through the Dutch countryside or on a San Francisco cable car into the Financial District.

And yes, I realized how completely spoiled I've been by my "commutes." They both have their drawbacks, namely manure and tourists respectively, but they both beat the heck out of an hour-long drive to Detroit!

Be the Public in my Public Outreach!

A lot of my job has to do with educating the general public about e-VLBI and radio astronomy.

(Skip this paragraph if you already know what those last two terms are. Theoretically if you connect a 32-meter dish in Italy to a 6-meter dish in Chile, you've just created a 12,360 kilometer wide telescope! With an instrument that large, you can get great resolution. That's the VLBI part. The e-VLBI part is using high-speed fiber optic networks to connect radio telescopes together. That way astronomers can receive the data in real-time and make any necessary adjustments during the observation period itself. These observations are often scheduled months in advance, so you lose an entire observation if you don't have everything just right.)

JIVE and ASTRON are having an Open Day in October, and part of my job is to put together posters and materials to educate the public about what we do here and get them interested in radio astronomy, computer networking and developing the software that combines all the data from the different telescopes.

So my questions to you are:

• What would YOU want to know about what we do here?
• If you have a child (or if you are a child), what does he or she (or you) want to know about what astronomers really do? Or network engineers? Or software developers?
• If you're a professional, were you interested in your profession as a child or as a student? And what got you interested in it?

Feel free to leave comments here at the site or email me privately (kyun at jive dot nl). I'd love to get your feedback! (Please also let me know whether or not you are actually interested in what we do here. That will help me gauge the level of interest I can expect from the general public!)

Many thanks in advance,
Kristine

p.s. Follow these links to Wikipedia to learn more about VLBI and e-VLBI.

My first press release

After lots of editing and unwarranted frustration, I've issued my first press release. Tolstoy it's not. In fact there are so many credits and parentheticals that it may not even be comprehensible to the general public, but I'm sure future releases will be much better.

The good news (?) is that SMART-1 crashed into the moon at 07:42:22 CEST (05:42:22 UT) and that we're getting good data from it.

The other good news is that Radio Drenthe should be running a news brief or something in a half-hour.

Work permits!

Woo hoo! Marjon says our work permits have arrived!