Later this month, a new tunnel will be opened on the outer ring road around Paris, the Volkskrant reports. At a cost of 2.4 billion euros, it is France’s most expensive tunnel ever, and supposedly also its safest ever. The full tunnel will be 10 km long; initially, only the first stretch of 4.5 km will be put to use. In order to make the tunnel as safe as possible, it will be closed for motorcycles and trucks.

Okay, so how can you only open a tunnel for half of its length? I’m not gonna drive into a 10-km tunnel if I get stuck after 4.5 km. I’m sure the tunnel actually consists of separate segments, but the newspaper article was specifically talking about “a tunnel”, not “one of two tunnels”.

On a more serious note, what’s with denying entrance to motorcycles and trucks? You know what would make this tunnel even safer? Close it for all motorized traffic! I can see how it might be a good idea to make separate lanes for cars and trucks, and to keep out trucks with highly inflammable cargo, but it seems ridiculous to just close it for all trucks.

There are certain eternal truths in baseball. Third out ends the inning, third strike is an out, and third time is a charm. After rain spoiled my debut in the Rookie League/First Division on Sunday and Wednesday, the skies remained clear tonight and I got to work my first Rookie League game. And a charm it was, even if I do say so myself. I had half a dozen or so close calls on the bases, but I was in the right position each time to see the play and make the right decision. My calls were loud and clear, and only resulted in some minor chirping, if that. Given how close some of the plays were, I’ll take that as a good sign that I came across looking as if I knew what I was doing.

In one of the early innings, I made a call at third base that got the base coach going a bit—but it turned out to be a very short discussion. With one out and a runner on third, the batter hit a hot shot right at the third baseman. He caught it on the fly for the second out, than dove to tag the bag to double up the runner. The coach immediately started yelling that the fielder had only tagged the base, and not the runner. He was right about that, but of course it didn’t matter. Runners have to return to their base when a batted ball is caught, and they’re out if the base is tagged before they return. A gentle reminder that this was a catch was all it took for the coach to quickly retreat to his dugout.

Wednesday’s game has been rescheduled for next week and I’m still assigned to work the bases. Let’s see if my First Division debut goes as smoothly as today’s game.

The third paper for my PhD thesis just got accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics. The initial referee report we received last month was pretty hostile and recommended “eventual publication but only after some substantial revisions.” Basically, the referee felt we had ignored some recent experimental results in constructing our model. We had strong reservations about the validity of those results, so we deliberately didn’t include them.

We reran some of our models with the new experimental data included, and fortunately our conclusions didn’t change. That allowed us to send in a new manuscript that only contained some small changes relative to the original one. The referee now felt we had done a good job discussing the experimental data in question, and had made a good case for not including them throughout the paper. That was enough for him or her to recommend publication.

So, that means three of the five science chapters of my thesis are now finished. The fourth one is approaching a first full draft, and the fifth one is still entirely to be written. That still leaves a lot of writing to do before the end of August, but with the CO paper now accepted, I’m an important step closer to my graduation.

For about three years now, I’ve been umpiring baseball games in the Dutch leagues. So far this has been in the Third and Second Divisions, as well as the top level of the 16-18 age group. People generally tell me I’m doing a good job, and my efforts were rewarded last week with an assignment to work a game in the Rookie League. This league is sort of what AAA is to MLB in the States. It consists of the rookie teams from the eight Hoofdklasse (the Dutch Major League) clubs. It’s a springboard for players in their late teens or early twenties to get to the highest level. In many ways, it serves the same purpose for young umpires.

My excitement over being assigned my first Rookie League game last until a few hours before game time on Sunday, when it became clear the weather was going to be a problem. I did make my way to the field, but I might as well have stayed at home. My Rookie League debut turned into a rain-out. By the time the skies cleared, the field looked like a swimming pool. No way we could play the game that night.

But not to worry… I had another debut pending. Tonight, I was supposed to work my first game in the First Division. The level of play there is similar to that in the Rookie League, being only one step below the Hoofdklasse, but it consists of teams from clubs that don’t play at the highest level. For umpires, it serves much the same purpose as the Rookie League: it’s an important step on the way to the top.

Well, the “supposed” from the previous paragraph already gave it away: my First Division debut also became a rain-out. The weather and the field conditions were as bad as on Sunday, except they were even worse tonight.

I’ve got another Rookie League assignment on Friday. It looks like it’s going to be a bit drier by then, but there’s still a fifty percent chance of rain for the day. I sure hope we’ll stay on the dry side of that 50/50 prediction, because I don’t want to go 3-for-3 in rained-out debuts.

On the plus side, I’m completely error-free so far in the Rookie League and the First Division.

[Update: The First Division game has been rescheduled for next week, and I'm again assigned as base umpire. Good weather that day would be much appreciated.]

Everything is looking good so far on the launch of the Herschel Space Observatory together with Planck. Lift-off occurred at 15:12 (Dutch time) and the module is currently at 170 km above Earth’s surface and still climbing fast. There’s still a long time to go before we know if Herschel will actually work correctly, but the first couple of minutes at least went very well.

The end of my four-year PhD contract is approaching rapidly. I hope to submit my thesis to the printer at the end of August and defend it in the second half of October. As these dates are getting closer, I thought it’d be nice to maintain some sort of progress indicator on my website. So, as of today, “thesis stats” are visible at the top of the menu bar. Yesterday was the first time I compiled all available stuff into one PDF file. Spread across 126 pages are some front matter, a table of contents, three science chapters, a list of references, and a list of my own publications. Still missing are the figures in these three chapters, two additional science chapters, an introduction, a Dutch summary, and some minor other things. It looks like the final product will be around 200 pages. I wonder who’s gonna read all of that…

Some maintenance will be performed on the server hosting my website next week. The server will get a new IP address, which may cause it to be unreachable for up to 24 hours on or around Thursday April 23.

Leiden Observatory is the world’s oldest university observatory. It’s currently located on the university’s science campus at the edge of the city, but for over a hundred years it occupied a building downtown. This building, called the Old Observatory, dates from 1861 (the Observatory itself was founded in 1633) and is suffering from many years of poor maintenance. Last year, our Minister of Education, Culture and Science, Ronald Plasterk, allocated 2.8 million euros to restore the Old Observatory to its former glory. Today the minister was invited to start the restoration works by lifting one of the telescope domes off the roof.

I needed a break from my uncooperative collapse model, so I went to have a look. Also, I didn’t want to miss any possible mishaps. You never know what might happen when you let a secretary of state operate a mobile crane. They’re used to running the country, not a heavy piece of construction equipment.

As it turned out, not quite surprisingly, everything went just fine. The dome did swing about a bit during its descent, but it didn’t knock into the building or against any astronomers. The dome landed safely on the right spot. A local newspaper, the Leidsch Dagblad, was on scene to film the occasion. Pictures by myself and others are gathered here.

Because I didn’t want to sit through half an hour of speeches before the main event, I arrived later than most guests. Now I had to watch from behind a fence, but this turned out to have its virtues. After Plasterk put the dome on the ground, he led the party back to the Old Observatory building. He looked around before stepping through the door and noticed a bunch of people watching (and photographing) him from behind a fence a few metres away. Of course, those people were me and a few other students.

Plasterk turned around and headed straight for us. He must have heard us talk English, because he asked (in English) whether we were tourists. When we said we were students at the university, he told us he used to study there as well. In fact, as a biology student, he spent a lot of time at the Old Observatory. (For some reason, the biology faculty held classes there for many years.) We talked briefly about the difficulty of astronomical observations in Leiden nowadays, what with the generally poor weather, and we agreed this wasn’t such a bad thing, as it means we get to go to Chile every now and then to use much bigger telescopes. He then wished us a nice day and went back inside to finish the official programme.

This impromptu chat didn’t go unnoticed by the gathered journalists, who seemed to think that anyone talking to the minister must also be noteworthy. I’ve never had so many cameras pointed at me. Now let’s see if those journalists can find out why Plasterk displayed such interest in us.

The Netherlands’ amazing run at the World Baseball Classic has come to an end. We gave Venezuela a hard time in yesterday’s first game in round two, eventually losing 3-1. Interestingly, we outhit them 6-3; in the first round, the Dominican Republic got more hits than we did, but lost twice. In case of Venezuela, it did of course help that their hits were a triple and two homeruns.

The US lost their first second-round game against Puerto Rico, so they met us today in the losers bracket. The winner would get another chance to reach the semi-finals, while the loser would head home. We did what we could, not even giving up down 8-0 in the seventh inning, but it wasn’t enough. Team USA overpowered us early on and kept that lead with some solid pitching. Nevertheless, we still produced twelve hits—by far our most offensive game yet. The US also got twelve hits, but that total included more extra base hits.

There was a curious moment in the top of the eighth. Brian Engelhardt hammered the first pitch from reliever Matt Lindstrom for the first Dutch homerun of the tournament. Lindstrom threw his next pitch behind the batter, bringing some of our players out of the dugout. Not even the American commentators understood why Lindstrom did that.

Order was restored and the game finished without any further incidents. Congratulations to the US on a good game and good luck the rest of the way.

[Update: Lindstrom admitted he intentionally threw behind Vince Rooi, because he felt Engelhardt spent too much time admiring his homerun before starting around the bases. Lindstrom is catching a lot of heat from American fans for that message pitch. Readers commenting on MLB.com's article call him arrogant, classless, a loser, a cry baby, and more. They also note Adam Dunn stood much longer admiring his homer than Engelhardt did. Tom Verducci, of Sports Illustrated, also severely questions what Lindstrom did. Additionally, he takes a stance against Team USA manager Davey Johnson for trying to cover for Lindstrom by saying the pitch got away from him, and against home plate umpire Bruce Dreckman for not ejecting Lindstrom. I'll just say it feels good to have pretty much the entire US on our side in this matter.]