Rainforest

Visiting Randers Regnskov in the middle of Winter in Denamark can be a real treatment to your mood and soul.Temperatures between 25C and 30C, green and colorful, blooming plants and animals running free around you... Veeerrry relaxing... Especially in a company of my Brother!

.

Trial lecture - one step closer...

Done!!!

The last step before a PhD defense in Norway is a trial lecture. And I passed it yesterday :-)

The idea of the trial lecture is to check candidate's scientific maturity and therefore the topic of the lecture, given 10 working days before the lecture, is from outside of the candidate's main field of research.

My topic was actually completely new for me "Image smoothing with anisotropic diffusion" ... no, nothing ringed the bell when I read it for the first time :-D 

Just to give you a taste of what I felt, have a look at the Wikipedia site about anisotropic diffusion and focus on equations... They are pretty scary, aren't they ?

Well, it took me quite a while to understand that the topic as such is very interesting and could be very useful in my future work. Nonetheless the two weeks I had were definitely not enough to refresh my mathematics/physics knowledge, learn new things about image processing and prepare myself to talk about all that for 45 minutes... Needless to say how "uncomfortable" I felt when the audience started to ask questions... 

All in all, it was an interesting experience and the evaluation committee was very friendly in their assessments :-) 

It was also good to realize how tiny piece of science my brain is able to learn/remember/comprehend...

.

Happy 2013!!!

I tried to restore a list of my resolutions for 2012 and although I haven't learned to play guitar (yet), most of the bullets are ticked off the list!!!
The big plan for 2013 is to go back to regular working hours after the last months spent on wrapping up my PhD and to travel more, much more!!!

While looking for an inspiration for detailed travel planning I found 40 Creative Remakes of World Map.
Some of them are really interesting, have a look in spare time.



.