Very nice weather!

Dear Diary,

in the last couple of days, the weather was very nice. It was pretty cold but sunny and dry. There was a little bit of snow last night and and it’s cold enough for ice now.

Hope the weather stays like this for a little longer!

Possible trip to Malaga

Dear Diary,

I am planning to go on a short vacation in the end of January. Maybe for a week or ten days (max.). If all goes well, I’ll go with my buddy GP. The destination we are currently considering is Malaga, in southern Spain. There are Ryanair flights from London (for GP) and Bremen (for me) that are ridiculously cheap (48€ and 62€, respectively). A rental car for a week (or ten days) is also very cheap: less than 80€. We might try and find a place to stay through AirBnB.

We’ve been told that Malaga itself isn’t very exciting. But there are a bunch of interesting places (both cities and hiking areas) throughout Andalusia and the entire area is pretty small. So we were thinking that we might just find a place in/around Córdoba and then just plan day-trips from there. If we can find a cheap place that has wifi and a kitchen, we can work a bit as well and cook our own food which should make the trip very cheap.

That’s the preliminary plan. :)

Last preparation for Denmark

Dear Diary,

tomorrow morning, we’ll drive to Denmark. Today, I made the last couple of preparations. Did some laundry, bought some things and will buy some more beer in a moment. Then I’ll fill up the tank and we should be good to go tomorrow. Really looking forward to spending the rest of the year in a comfortable and quiet house with a bunch of old friends!

A long but light badminton session

Dear Diary,

this morning, I went to play badminton with three friends of mine. It was quite fun. To my surprise, we ended up playing for around two and a half hours. We played doubles the whole time, mixing up the teams but it wasn’t particularly exhausting or anything. But it was fun! It was good to move around a bit after all the sitting and eating and maybe it wasn’t too bad that it wasn’t too exhausting. :)

Merry Christmas!

Dear Diary,

I haven’t been posting in the last couple of days because I’ve been very lazy. During Christmas, I saw my family and went from one table filled with food to the next. I’ve just been chilling on a couch or eating for the last couple of days. It has been great! But now it’s enough – I’m getting a little nervous and twitchy from doing nothing for so long.

Now I am looking forward to the trip to Denmark with my friends.

Hobbyturnier in Bremen

Dear Diary,

today, I participated in a hobby tournament in the squash center Sportwelt in Bremen. It was pretty fun and I finished third. I ended up winning a Bundesliga jersey from the Bremen team which is pretty cool!

One of the coolest things was that there were also some Bundesliga players and some pros from England. Emma Beddoes (world #18) and her boyfriend Eddie Charlton (world #54) played some show matches against Bundesliga players which was really cool to see. Really, really nice people as well! Very nice day. :)

Good bye Groningen

Dear Diary,

I spend the day cleaning up my apartment a bit and revising some code. I now have to figure out a good way to make the code publicly available. I have some ideas regarding the “outlier exclusion algorithm project” I’ve been thinking about lately. We’ll see.

But for now, I’ll pack my stuff and head to Bremen. I am meeting some friends there tonight. Good bye Groningen – I’ll see you next year!

Last day of work this year

Dear Diary,

today was my last day of work this year. I had to teach again from 1 to 3 but today’s class was optional because we knew that many people would already be out of town (and it’s silly to let 2/3 of the class miss a mandatory meeting :D ). Other than that, I didn’t really do that much. I finished up some thing, handed in some paperwork (among others: the form to request ethical approval for the study we want to run for the Memrise Prize).

The faculty felt very deserted because many people have left already. I think I was one of the last people leaving at around 5 – there were like 10 bikes left outside. I’ll be relaxing the rest of the day. I need to do some laundry before I leave Groningen tomorrow and will try to make some dinner to use up some things I have left here. And then I’ll start packing, I guess. Looking forward to the holidays!

Second week without yoga

Dear Diary,

when I came back from Leiden yesterday, I had to give another presentation in Groningen (on data visualisation)  and then had to do some more things for work. I couldn’t go to my yoga class because I was still busy and first thought I might just go to the class after that. But by that time, I was very tired and had a bit of a headache. I felt like 8 hours of sleep would be better than 6 hours of sleep and an hour of yoga.

I might try and go to the class on Saturday morning before I leave Groningen over Christmas later that day. I’ll have to see how many things still need to be done before I leave. But I’d like that because I can feel that my body wouldn’t mind some serious stretching and mindful relaxation. As a compromise, I’ll pack up my stuff at work now and go an play squash. :)

Possible collaboration on the Memrise Prize

Dear Diary,

the company Memrise has posed a challenge that is open to everyone. You can win a prize ($10k) if you win. The procedure is as follows: people have to spend one hour learning 80 Lithuanian word (in English). Then they have to come back one week later and are tested: how many of the 80 words do they still know?

Memrise provides a “control condition” which you have to test about 20 people with. They learn the words by just looking at them over and over again for an hour. (I think, I haven’t looked at the details, yet.) You can come up with whatever method you think will make people learn the words the best. Whatever you can do in that hour can be done. The only restriction is that it should be a method that could be applied to other/similar types of material (next to ethical concerns etc. of course).

So while I was having breakfast with GK in Leiden yesterday, we were talking about this. We brain-stormed different possible ideas and how we could develop a method that might work. Now we’ve come up with a couple of ideas and we might try and do this. We’d have to collect data from 40 people. I’d do that here in Groningen while he’d program the experiment because he’s done similar stuff before and can re-use a lot of the code he’s used previously.

Then we have to do some very basic data analysis and send it to Memrise. If we win, we get ten thousand US dollars. That’d be pretty sweet. If not, we might still be able to spin this into a publication somehow. Even though it won’t be a high-impact study, it might still give us some interesting result. (We’d probably focus our story on whether the effects of well-established findings are additive and/or to which extent they interact. We can’t answer any of those questions with this setup, but it might spark a discussion.)