Author: kenritley

Amazing how time flies

kenritley

It‘s fair to say I stopped being an employed, practicing physicist in the year 2000, when I left the Max-Plack-Institute for Metals Research and joined Hewlett Packard Consulting & Integration.

According to Google Scholar I have published 45 „things“ that Google records in their list, most of them scientific papers but a few of them other things, such as proceedings of scientific conferences.

Nowadays, even more important than the number of articles that a scientist publishes is often the „citation index“ – or, the number of times another scientist has cited their work.  According to Google Scholar, here‘s what my citation index looks like over time:

The graph shows how many papers written by other scientists cited my work.

If you ask me, it‘s pretty incredible. Even though I have been publishing papers since the mid-1990‘s, and even though I stopped doing scientific research in the year 2000 – it seems the peak of my citations only occurred some years afterwards. There are lots of reasons for that – you have to pick things apart at the level of individual papers and collaborators – but I find it interesting nonetheless: if true more broadly, it means that scientists are not famous for what they do right now, but for what their work will lead to in a few years‘ time!

I am a goose, not a number

kenritley

While enjoying the famous Unterer Schlossgarten deep, deep within the bowels of Stuttgart I happened across about a zillion migrating geese, and almost all of them were wearing bands like this one:

I think hardly a goose – except maybe a crazy goose – would be inclined to wear a bracelet, but an absurd question remains: who would invest time putting bracelets on the legs of around a zillion migrating geese?  And for what purpose?

Zombie Readiness in France

kenritley

I’m quite shocked that the prevalence of Covid-19 is as high as it is, because there is no other country in the world that is so well prepared for a zombie apocalypse as France. I’ve written about the robo-hotels, the robo-food, the robo-stores – as well as the zombie-proof outside laundry machines.

Here’s another snap to continue the series, showing not only an outdoor laundry but also robo-bread and robo-pizza capabilities!

Donzenac – an incredible medieval French village – 2

kenritley

Continuing the series, as everyone knows France is filled with incredible villages dating back to the Middle Ages.  Many of them are famous and they get lots of tourists.

But . . . some of them are so remote that tourists have never visited. When small children in these villagers happen to see an “outsider” (in French: étrange éetranger) they recoil in fear because they think they are the only people on the planet – and some of them later need professional counseling.

Donzenac is one of these villages. You probably won’t find it on Apple Map or Google Earth – it is located so deep within France that – even if you knew what you were looking for – it would take you many hours and a lot of luck to come across this place, and of course any locals you might stop to ask would refuse to acknowledge that this place even exists!

As you can see, even the signs are written 100% in French, because they assume that no étranges étrangers would ever come here:

Well, OK, maybe 1-2 Germans have been here – but certainly no more than that!

Bordeaux Man

kenritley

I took this snap in front of some kind of big monument in Bordeaux. I never stopped to read who this was – nor do I particularly care – what is the sense of trying to show a historical figure who is wearing a rain coat?

Anyway, I liked the way the light bounced off his face so I am quite happy with how this snap turned out!

Giant Swiss Spider

kenritley

Well, I actually suspect this fellow is NOT Swiss!

Last weekend I stopped at the Zurich Airport (ZRH) for grocery shopping, and I had a coffee in a café in Terminal 2. Located in this café were two pallets filled with dozens of huge bags of ground flour – the writing on the bags was foreign but I never stopped to look at which languageg.

And directly above this palettes I captured this fellow – yes, he was as big as he looked, I’d say at least 4 centimeters long:

Unbelievable bus battery booster

kenritley

I saw this electric charging station for buses in the North Central Swiss village of Schaffhausen – but sadly, there were not any of the buses around.

It looks as if a bus can just drive up to one of these stations:

Here is the sign on the charging station, which basically warns you that the batteries in the station have enough juice to electrocute you for a full five minutes if you touch them:

And here is a snap from a different angle:

Le Verdun-sur-Mer Flowers

kenritley

Probably my favorite aspect of travelling is visiting places that no other tourists are likely to go. Recently, I had to chance to visit a very remote section of western France, a tiny (almost microscopic) village of Le Verdun-sur-Mer, where the confluence of the Dordogne and Caronne Rivers form a delta with the Atlantic Ocean,

Interestingly, it reminded me very much of the delta where the Mississippi River in the U.S. empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

Those amazing Ritley’s: the world’s first panoramic photograph!

kenritley

Continuing the series, I am always surprised when I encounter someone who has not heard the name Ritley.

OK, maybe I am an exception – I have not yet made my mark. But . . .

Hardly a man, woman or child anywhere on the face of the planet has not heard of their stunning accomplishments. They are a family steeped in the tradition of excellence, whose capacity for profound intellectual thought is exceeded only by their talent to affect meaningful changes (which often border on the revolutionary) to the fundamental problems of global significance they selflessly tackle.

This snap is not just any snap. Now hanging in the world famous Smithsonian Institution (Record Number SIA Acc. 11-006 [MAH-3002]), in its very own case in its very own room, it is in fact what most historians universally agree is the world’s first selfie, taken during the 1990’s by Ken Ritley, using a real camera with real film, while visiting the Experimental Aircraft Association meeting in Osh-Kosh, Wisconsin:

And with this Ritley contribution, many decades ago, the panoramic photograph was born.

If you happen to one day make it to Washington DC, and if you have a bit of spare time to visit the Smithsonian Institution, just ask any docent to point you to the Ritley Room – a tiny room to be sure, but the only room in the entire museum to house just one artefact, the world’s first panoramic photograph!