I’m still writing on the book. After not much happened for almost a year, my publisher now rather suddenly asked for the final version of the manuscript. Until that’s done not much will be happening on this blog.

We do seem to have settled on a title though: “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.” The title is my doing, the subtitle isn’t. I just hope it won’t lead too many readers astray.

The book is supposed to be published in the USA/Canada by Basic Books next year in the Spring, and in Germany by Fischer half a year later. I’ll tell you more about the content at some point but right now I’m pretty sick of the whole book-thing.

In the meantime I have edited another book, this one on “Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity” which you can now preoder on amazon. It’s a, probably rather hard to digest, collection of essays about topics covered at a conference I organized last year. I merely wrote the preface.

Yesterday the twins had their first day in school. As is unfortunately still common in Germany, classes go only until noon. And so, we’re now trying a new arrangement to keep the kids occupied throughout the working day.

My first international physics conference was in Turkey. It was memorable not only because smoking was still allowed on the plane. The conference was attended by many of the local students, and almost all of them were women.

I went out one evening with the Turkish students, a group of ten with only one man who sucked away on his waterpipe while one of the women read my future from tea leaves (she read that I was going to fly through the air in the soon future). I asked the guy how come there are so few male students in this group. It’s because theoretical physics isn’t manly, it’s not considered a guy thing in Turkey, he said. Real men work outdoors or with heavy machinery, they drive, they swing tools, they hunt bears, they do men’s stuff. They don’t wipe blackboards or spend their day in the library.

I’m not sure how much of his explanation was sarcasm, but I find it odd indeed that theoretical physics is so man-dominated when it’s mostly scribbling on paper, trying to coordinate collaborations and meetings, and staring out of the window waiting for an insight. It seems mostly a historical accident that the majority of physicists today are male.

From the desk in my home office I have a view onto our downstairs neighbor’s garden. Every couple of weeks a man trims her trees and bushes. He has a key to the gate and normally comes when she is away. He uses the smoking break to tan his tattoos in her recliner and to scratch his breast hair. Then he pees on the roses. The most disturbing thing about his behavior though isn’t the peeing, it’s that he knows I’m watching. He has to cut the bushes from the outside too, facing the house, so he can see me scribbling away on my desk. He’ll stand there on his ladder and swing the chainsaw to greet me. He’s a real man, oh yeah.

After I finished high school, I went to the employment center which offered a skill- and interest-questionnaire, based on which one then was recommended a profession. I came out as landscape architect. It made sense – when asked, I said I would like to do something creative that allows me to spend time outdoors and that wouldn’t require many interpersonal skills. I also really like trees.

Then I went and studied math because what the questionnaire didn’t take into account is that I get bored incredibly quickly. I wanted a job that wouldn’t run out of novelty any time soon. Math and theoretical physics sounded just right. I never spent much time thinking about gender stereotypes, it just wasn’t something I regarded relevant. Yes, I knew the numbers, but I honestly didn’t care. Every once in a while I would realize how oddly my voice stood out, look around and realize I was the only women in the room, or one of a few. I still find it an unnatural and slightly creepy situation. But no, I never thought about gender stereotypes.

Now I’m a mother of two daughters and I realized the other day I’ve gone pink-blind. Before I had children, I’d look at little girls thinking I’d never dress my daughters all in pink. But, needless to say, most of the twin’s wardrobe today is pink because it’s either racing cars and soccer players on blue, or flowers and butterflies on pink. Unless you want to spend a ridiculous amount of money on designer clothes your kids will wear maybe once.

The internet is full with upset about girl’s toys that discourage an interest in engineering, unrealistic female body images, the objectification of women in ads and video games, the lack of strong female characters in books and movies. The internet is full with sites encouraging women to accept their bodies, the bodies of mothers with the floppy bellies and the stretch marks, the bodies of real women with the big breasts and the small breasts and the freckles and the pimples – every inch of you is perfect from the bottom to the top. It’s full with Emma Watson and He for She. It’s full of high pitched voices.

But it isn’t only women who are confronted with stereotypical gender roles and social pressure. Somebody I think must stand up and tell the boys it’s totally okay to become a string theorist, even though they don’t get to swing a chainsaw - let that somebody be me. Science is neither a boy thing nor a girl thing.

So this one is for the boys. Be what you want to be, rise like a phoenix, and witness me discovering the awesomeness of multiband compression. Happy Halloween :)

Lara

I'll be traveling the next three weeks, so please be prepared for little or unsubstantial action on this blog. Next week I'm in Reykjavik for a network meeting on "Holographic Methods and Applications". August 27-29 I'm running the Science Writers Workshop in Stockholm together with George, this year on the topic "Quantum Theory." The first week of September then I'm in Trieste for the 2014 conference on Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity, where I'll be speaking about space-time defects.

Unfortunately, this traveling happens just during the time when our Kindergarten is closed, and so it's quite some stress-test for my dear husband. Since you last heard from Lara and Gloria, they have learned to count, use the swing, and are finally potty trained. They can dress themselves, have given up requesting being carried up the stairs, and we mostly get around without taking along the stroller. Yes, life has become much easier. Gloria however still gets motion sick in the car, so we either have to drug her or pull over every 5 minutes. By and large we try to avoid long road trips.

The girls have now more of a social life than me, and we basically can't leave the house without meeting other children that they know and that they have to discuss with whether Friday comes before or after Wednesday. That Lara and Gloria are twins apparently contributes greatly to their popularity. Every once in a while, when I drop off the kids at Kindergarten, some four foot dwarf will request to know if it's really true that they were together in mommy's tummy and inspect me with a skeptic view. The older children tell me that the sisters are so cute, and then try to pad Gloria's head, which she hates.

Gloria

Gloria is still a little ahead of Lara when it comes to developing new skills. She learned to speak a little earlier, to count a little earlier, was potty trained a little earlier and learned to dress herself a little earlier. Then she goes on to explain Lara what to do. She also "reads" books to Lara, basically by memorizing the stories.

Lara on the other hand is still a little ahead in her physical development. She is still a bit taller and more often than not, when I come to pick them up at Kindergarten, Lara will be kicking or throwing some ball while Gloria plays in the sandbox - and afterwards Gloria will insist on taking off her shoes, pouring out the sand and cleaning her socks before she gets into the car. Lara takes off the shoes in the car and pours the sand into the seat pocket. Lara uses her physical advantage over Gloria greatly to take away toys. Gloria takes revenge by telling everybody what Lara did wrong again, like putting her shoe on the wrong foot.

The best recent development is that the girls have finally, after a quite difficult phase, stopped kicking and hitting me and telling me to go away. They now call me "my little mommy" and want me to bake cookies for them. Yes, my popularity has greatly increased with them figuring out that I'm not too bad with cakes and cookies. They don't particularly like my cooking but that's okay, because I don't like it either.

On an entirely different note, as some of you have noticed already, I agreed to write for Ethan Siegel at Starts With A Bang. So far there's two pieces from me over there: How the experiment that claimed to detect dark matter fooled itself and The Smallest Possible Scale in the Universe. The deal is that I can repost what gets published there on this blog after 30 days, which I will do. So if you're only interested in my writing, you're well off here, but check out his site because it's full with interesting physics writing.

I’ll be traveling for the rest of the week, so be warned of a period of silence.

Wednesday I’m giving a seminar in Nottingham, and after that I’m attending a workshop in Oxford. The workshop topic is “The Structure of Gravity and Space-time” and it’s part of the project “Establishing the Philosophy of Cosmology”. Sound more ominous than it is: They’ll have a session on the question whether there exists a “fundamental length”, which is what brought me on their invitation list. There will also be sessions on bi-metric gravity, massive gravity and strings and space-time structure, which sounds very promising to me. We’ll see how much philosophy infiltrates the physics. A preliminary program is here.

The girls are doing well, now attending Kindergarten. Our pediatrician didn’t raise any concerns at the 3-year checkup, except for Lara’s vision problems. She’ll get new glasses next week. The ones she has now always slip down and hang on the very tip of her nose, so we hope that the new ones will stay put better.

Lara and Gloria can open and remove all our children safety locks now and I’ve put away the door keys because I’m afraid they’ll lock themselves in. They also picked up lots of swear words since they attend Kindergarten. They don’t really know how to use them properly, which is often unwillingly funny. We’ve made a little progress with the potty training, but unfortunately the kids declare plainly they’re “too lazy” to go without diaper. It is similarly unfortunate that several older children at the Kindergarten still use binkies. Gloria told me the other day she will learn to use the toilet when she can “reach the ceiling”. She also declared that since Gloria came out of mommy’s belly, Lara must have come out of daddy’s belly. Everything far away is “Stockholm” and that’s a magical place where mommy goes and brings back gifts. They’re getting more entertaining by the day.

I finally replaced my old digital camera because some of the buttons were broken, and now have a Canon DSLR (EOS 1100D) which I am so far very happy with, though the learning curve is steep. I used to have a SLR Camera 15 years ago. You know, one of these things were you had to wind back the film and carry it to some store and wait a week just to see how badly you did. Remember that? The DSLR looks and feels quite different from that, as with all the menus that I keep getting lost in. Maybe reading the manual would help. In any case, I spent some weeks hunting after the kids. Below are some of my favorite photos.

Mamasonnenbrille.

It’s not like nothing happened, I just haven’t had the time to keep you updated on our four-body problems.

Earlier this year, we had handed over the stalled case on our child benefits to an EU institution called “SOLVIT” that takes on problems with national institutions under EU regulations. Amazingly, they indeed solved our problem efficiently and quickly. And so, after more than two and a half years and an inch of paperwork, Stefan finally gets child benefits. Yoo-hoo! If you have any institutional problem with a family distributed over several EU countries, I can recommend you check out the SOLVIT website. I really wish though the Germans and the Swedes could converge on one paper punch pattern, then I wouldn’t have to keep two different types of folders.

She knows the numbers from 1 to 10, but not their order.

Lara and Gloria will turn 3 in December and so we are about to switch from daycare to Kindergarten. They both speak more or less in full sentences now and come up with questions like "Where do clouds go at night?" and "Mommy, are you wearing underwear?" They still refer to themselves by first name though rather than using “I”, and are struggling with German grammar. At daycare the kids sing a lot, which feeds them weird vocabulary that may be delivered spontaneously in unexpected situations, Butzemann! Tschingderassabum! Wo ist meine Zie-har-mo-ni-ka? The girls both love puzzles and Lego and the wooden railway. On occasion they now demand to sit on their potty, though the timing isn’t quite working yet.

Lara can't let go of the binky, but is okay as long as it's in the vicinity.

I meanwhile have decided, after a long back and forth, that I’ll not attend next year’s FQXi conference. The primary reason is that I looked up the flight connections and the inconvenience of getting to Vieques Island exceeds my pain tolerance. I am very reluctant these days to attend any meeting that requires me to be away on weekends and that isn’t located in vicinity of a major international airport, thus adding to my travel time. Secondary reason is that I’m not particularly interested in the topic ("The Physics of Information"), and I can just see it degenerating into yet another black hole firewall discussion. At the same time I’m sorry to miss the meeting, because from all the conferences that I’ve attended the FQXi conferences were undoubtedly the most inspiring ones.

Speaking of pain tolerance, I ran a marathon last weekend. I’ve always wondered why people run marathons. Now that I have a finisher medal, I am still wondering why people do this to themselves. I really like running, but there were too many people and too much noise on these 42 km for me.

I admit I plainly didn’t know before my first 10k about a year ago that these races tend to have typically only 20% or so of female participants. (The Frankfurt marathon had 15%, though the recent numbers from the USA look better). I find this surprising given that most of the people I meet jogging in the fields tend to be women. Neither did I know until some months ago that women weren’t even allowed in marathons until the mid 1970s, for somewhat mysterious reasons that seem to go back to the (unpublished) beliefs of some (unnamed) physicians that the female body isn’t meant for long-distance running – a claim that nobody bothered to check until some women stood up and disproved it. It’s an interesting tale, about which you can read here.

In entirely different news, Nordita now spreads word about the wonders of theoretical physics on Twitter and on Facebook. These feeds are fed by Apostolos Vasileiadis, creator of the recently mentioned short film located at Nordita. If you share our love of physics, check it out and I hope we’ll not disappoint.

Also keep in mind this year’s deadline for program proposals is Nov 15. The Stockholm weather can’t compete with Santa Barbara, but I’m told our programs are better funded :o) Instructions for the application can be found on the Nordita homepage.

Last month I gave a seminar in Bielefeld on models with a minimal length scale. This seminar was part of a series organized within the framework of the new research training group "Models of Quantum Gravity". The initiative is funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG), and several universities in Northern Germany take part in it. I find this a very interesting development. The Germans seem to finally have recognized the need to support research in quantum gravity generally, rather than singling out specific approaches, and this initiative looks promising to me. Let's hope it is fruitful.

My trip to Bielefeld was interesting also in another aspect. When I was about to get on the way back to Heidelberg, the car wouldn't start. After some cursing and fruitless attempts to decode the erratic blinking of the panel lights, I called the closest Renault dealer. (Actually, I first called my husband to yell at him, just because that was the first thing that came to my mind.) The Renault guy said, Guten Tag and tough luck, we'll have to tow the car, but it's five to five now so please call back tomorrow morning.

So I unexpectedly had to spend the night out of town, which I took as an excuse to buy really expensive underwear. They towed the car the next morning, figured out that the battery had died in a short-circuit that blew up some wiring, and I made it back home with 24 hours delay. The irony in this was that I had taken Stefan's car because I was afraid mine would break down and I'd get stranded in Bielefeld.

Tomorrow I'm giving a seminar in Aachen and I hope that this time the car won't break down... Later this month I will try to listen in at a black hole conference in Frankfurt. Unfortunately, this happens to be during the week when our daycare place has summer break, so the logistics is nontrivial. In September I'll be in Helsinki for another seminar. In October I'm on a conference in Vienna. In November I'm attending a workshop in the UK, which for all I can tell doesn't have a webpage and I'm not entirely sure what it is about either.

There's been some discussion in the blogosphere lately about the difficulty of combining the necessary travel to seminars and conferences with family demands. And yeah, what do you expect, it's not easy and it's not fun.

Sometime when I'm writing these Internas about work-family issues, I feel like a case study in the making.

The girls are doing fine and have adjusted well to the new daycare place. So far, we're very happy with it. It's a nice and fairly large place with a playground and much space to run around. They're very well organized and it's not exceedingly costly either.

Some weeks ago the kids were ill, and I called in at the daycare place to say we're not coming. When somebody picked up the phone and I heard a male voice, my first thought was that I must have dialed a wrong number. Needless to say, I then felt bad for my own stereotyping, and that I was apparently surprised the childcare business is not exclusively run by women. If you Google for the job description "Kindererzieher" in German, auto-complete gives you as first hit the female ending of the word.

To be fair to myself though, the guy hadn't been there previously. He was only there as a temporary replacement, and normally a woman called Stephanie would answer the phone. In any case, I later had an interesting conversation with him about gender imbalance in education. His explanation for why there are so few men in his profession was simply that it's badly paid. "You can't feed a family from this." I'm not sure that really explains much though.

Lara and Gloria's vocabulary has exponentially grown in the last month. No day passes without them trying out new words. At this point we actually have to be careful what we tell them because they'll go around and tell everybody who'll listen that the mommycar is broken and will shamelessly repeat my complaints that the neighbors don't separate their garbage. They have meanwhile pretty much taken over the whole apartment. There doesn't seem to be any place that's not occupied with toys or other child paraphernalia. And I, I spend a considerable amount of time collecting building blocks and lego pieces, a genuinely sisyphean activity.

In summary, life is busy.

Bedtime!

Lara, putting on her shoes.

May 1st is a national holiday both in Sweden and in Germany. A good opportunity, I thought, to update you on our attempts at normal family life.

Lara and Gloria are now talking basically non-stop. Half of the time we have no idea what they are trying to say, the other half are refusals. Gloria literally wakes up in the morning yelling "Nein-nein-nein". Saying it's difficult to get her dressed, fed, and to daycare makes quantizing gravity sound like an easy task. Yesterday she insisted on going in her pajamas. Good mother that I am, I thought that was a brilliant idea.

Gloria is proud of her new hat.

Lara isn't quite as difficult as Gloria, but she is very easily distracted. If I ask her to get into the stroller, she'll first spend five minutes inspecting the stones by the road or take off her shoes and put them back on, just because.Time clearly flows very differently when you're two years old than when you're forty. I try to use the occasions to check my email. Time flows through my iPhone, I'm sure it does.

We finally made progress on our daycare issue, which is presently only half a solution. A new daycare place opened in the area, and due to my time spent on the phone last year, asking people to please write down my name and call me back if the situation unexpectedly changes, somebody indeed recalled my name and we made it top of the list for the new place. So there'll be another adaption phase at another place, but this time it's a full-day care that will indeed cover our working hours. It is also, I should add, considerably less expensive than the present solution with a self-employed nanny. This, I hope, will make my commuting easier for Stefan to cope with.

I'm really excited about the workshop for science writers that I'm organizing with George. We now have an (almost) complete schedule, I've ordered food and drinks and sorted out the lab visit, and I'm very much looking forward to the meeting. Directly after this workshop, I'll attend another workshop in Munich, "Quantum Gravity in Perspective", where I'll be speaking about the phenomenology of quantum gravity. I have some more trips upcoming this summer, to Bielefeld and Aachen and, in fall, to Vienna to speak at a conference on "Emergent Quantum Mechanics."

I was invited to take part in this KITP workshop on black hole firewalls but I eventually decided not to go. Partly because I'm trying to keep my travels limited to not burden Stefan too much with the childcare. But primarily because I don't believe that anything insightful will come out of this debate. It seems to me there are more fruitful research topics to explore, and this discussion is a waste of time. I also never liked SoCal in late summer; too dry for my central-European genes.

Lara and Gloria, eating cookies at a visit to the zoo.

We'll be away for the next couple of days because Stefan's brother is getting married. This means a several-hours long road trip with two toddlers who don't want to sit still for a minute; we're all looking forward to it...

Lara with her new glasses.

When you last heard from Lara and Gloria, they could utter a few single words. Within a couple of weeks, they have transitioned to speaking full sentences, answer to questions with "yes" and "no", and are very clear in expressing themselves. "Jacke an, Bagger gucke" (Jacket on, watch digger), they might say when they want to go for a walk. They still refer to each other as Gaakie and Gookie though. And they are struggling with German grammar, especially finding the right articles.

Lara now has glasses that are meant to help correct her squinting. She wears them without complaint. It probably helps for her acceptance that I too wear glasses.

The half-day daycare solution is working reasonably well, except that it's prohibitively expensive. The nanny has taught the kids to drink from a cup, to wash their hands, to paint and to jump. I'm sure our downstairs neighbors are as excited about the jumping as the kids. My commuting to Stockholm is not working quite so well. It leaves all of us terribly exhausted and is a huge waste of time, not to mention money. The time that I gain by having the kids in daycare is mostly spent on catching up on life's overhead, paperwork, the household, piles of unread papers and unanswered emails that wait for me upon return.

That having been said, I have a bunch of trips coming up. March 15 I'm in Bergen giving a seminar, apparently on the topic "Siste nytt om kvantegravitasjon". On April 12 I'm in Reykjavik. I haven't been able to find anything resembling a seminar schedule on the department website, but it's the same seminar as in Bergen. In May George and I are running the previously mentioned Workshop for Science Writers in Stockholm, and at the end of May I'll be attending a workshop on "Quantum Gravity in Perspective" in Munich. I have some more trips coming up, but plans haven't proceeded further than that. If you're located in any of these places and feel like  meeting up, send me a note.

Besides this, I've been told that the current issue of the Finnish magazine Tähdet ja avaruus ("Stars and Space") has an article by Laura Koponen about quantum gravity, featuring Renate Loll, Robert Brandenberger, and me. It's in Finnish so I have no clue what it says, but the photos look nice. Though... something about the photo of me didn't feel quite right, and after some forehead frowning it occurred to me that the NorthFace logo on my shirt fell victim to Finnish photoshopping. I actually like it better this way; I prefer my clothes without logos if possible. In any case, should you by any chance speak Finnish and have read the article, let me know what you think.

January has been busy, as you can probably tell from the frequency of my posts. Lara and Gloria are now in half-daycare for 4 hours weekdays. The transition went fairly well, and I think they like it there. The nanny clearly has more time and patience to play with the kids than I, and the place is also better suited than our apartment where computers, books, pens, and other stuff that you don't want in your toddlers' hands, are lying in every corner. The nanny is from Spain and so the kids learn some Spanish along the way. They seem to understand a few words, but don't yet speak any.

We now replaced the baby cribs with larger beds that the kids can get in and out on their own. This took some getting used to. They wake up in the night now considerably more often than previously, and sometimes wander around, so recently we haven't been getting as much sleep as we would like to. That explains half of my silence. The other big change this month was that, now that the kids are two years old and we have to pay for their flight tickets, we've given up commuting to Stockholm together, and this is the first month of me trying to commute alone. Stefan has support from the babysitter and the grandparents while I'm away, but we're still trying to find the best way to arrange things. It's proved difficult to find a good solution for our issues with non-locality.

I have a case of recurring sinus infection which puts me in a generally grumpy mood, and the kids have a permanently runny nose, for which I partly blame myself and partly the daycare. Besides this, I am in the process of writing a proposal for what the European Research Council calls the "Consolidator Grant" and it's taking up a lot of time I'd rather spend on something else. My review on the minimal length scale got now published in Living Reviews in Relativity. I have been very impressed by how smoothly and well-organized their review and publication process went. Needless to say, now every time I see a paper on the arXiv on a topic covered by the review, I'm dreading the day I have to update this thing.

The girls are finally beginning to actually convey information with what they say. They ask for things they are looking for, they say "mit" (with) to tell us what we should take along, they complain if they're hungry and have learned the all-important word "put" (kaputt, broken). We haven't made much progress with the potty training though, unless naming the diaper content counts.

Today our two beautiful girls are two years old! We have two cakes with two candles each and the apartment is full of balloons, awaiting the grandparents for a visit.



During the last year, Lara and Gloria have learned to walk and to run and to jump, to dance and to climb. Since a few weeks, they can climb out of their cribs, so time has come to upgrade the beds. We're browsing the IKEA catalog as I type, so to speak.  In their explorations, they have also suffered the occasional bruise or scratch, but luckily no major injuries. We too have gotten our share of bruises and scratches, mostly due to being hit with toys in a moment of inattentiveness.

For us, this year has been much more work than the first, because for most of the time we couldn't leave the kids unattended for even a second; they would inevitably tear something down, break something, spill something or topple over with the chair. It has gotten better during the last months. They know now fairly well what they can do safely, and they are careful not to touch anything that might be glass. We can let them walk around in the apartment now, so long as we recall to lock away the detergents and knives.

The girls are slow with learning to talk, though our pediatrician says this isn't so uncommon with twins. Gloria refers to herself as "Goo-kie" and to Lara as "Gah-kie" for reasons we don't know. They can now both eat by themselves, though one better doesn't leave them alone with the spaghetti.

When I contemplate the human brain, I am always torn between frustration about its shortcomings and amazement about how well it works. Watching the kids, what astonishes me most is how quickly and flawlessly they learn to identify objects. If you look at some picture book, the drawings are not usually too precise. Yet the kids have no problem to identify items from the books with our household items. And many items, such as most animals or large vehicles, they have never seen in reality, yet if they glimpse as much as a part of a tiger in an illustration, they'll announce "tee-ga". They also find Stefan's and my photos in the tiniest thumbnail versions from among dozens, instantly.

A source of amusement for us is how they construct causal and temporal relations. If they want to watch the washing machine for example, they sometimes pile laundry in front of it, not necessarily laundry that actually needs washing. If I forget to close the blinds for their afternoon nap, they'll scream and point at the window. When I come back from my morning run and the kids are already up, Lara will come and say "Mama. Ouh." and point to the shower. If they want Stefan to read them a book, they'll put a pillow on the floor where he usually sits.

The next year will bring many changes for the kids and for us, not only because of the new beds but also because they will spend more time with other adults and other children. We haven't yet completely solved our daycare problem, but it looks like it will resolve soon. Now it's time to light the candles :o)

Gloria trying out my running shoes.

Fall has come to Germany and with it a bunch of bad news. The grant application that I had written in spring didn't go through, and the Swedes want EUR 1,500 additional taxes for the calendar year 2011. My last grandparent died, so now another generation of my family is on the cemetery "watching radish from below" as the Germans say so aptly. Also our landlord died, unexpectedly, last month. Now his wife owns the building but she isn't up to dealing with the details and handed over responsibility to an apartment management company. We're awaiting the changes this might bring, and I for once am glad I insisted on writing down every little detail into the lease, thinking to myself: what if he dies and his wife can't recall what we agreed upon.

We're also fighting again with the German "Familenkasse" for our child benefits. They had informed us at the beginning of the year (after a full year of struggle with them) that Stefan would finally get the usual monthly rate, and that retroactive back to the girls' birth. Alas, after a few months they stopped paying and he never saw a cent for the first year. They didn't give any reason for this.

After we waited for some while to see if any information would trickle down our direction, I finally lost patience and spent an hour or so trying to get somebody on the phone. Amazingly enough, they have no waiting loop, but just disconnect you if all lines are busy. Yes, that's right, I actually had to call their number over and over again. And then all I got was a call-center where they evidently had no information in Stefan's files about what was going on. So much about German efficiency.

Upon my question if they could maybe connect me to the local office that was actually responsible for this nonsense they said, no they can't connect me and there's no way to reach them by phone, I can only appear there in person if I really want. Or my husband, respectively, as it's actually his application.

As much as I like my iPhone, it's a serious disadvantage that you can't slam down the receiver.

By coincidence I then came across a website of the European Union where they offer a service called SOLVIT whose sole purpose seems to be to help with this type of communication problem between national institutions of the European Union. So now I submitted our case. I heard from them within 24 hours and they promised they'll take on the problem. I'm curious if they'll manage to sort this out, stay tuned.

The kids meanwhile are having fun taking apart the furniture and pushing all buttons that they can get their hands on. Everything that beeps is particularly interesting, for example the microwave and the babyphone. To help align Lara's gaze she now has to wear an eye patch a few hours a day. We were expecting protest, but she doesn't seem to mind. The biggest problem is that it hurts when torn off. Needless to say, Gloria will cry and scream until she also gets an eye patch, which we put on her cheek. Stefan and I also sometimes wear one. Lara probably meanwhile thinks it's a strange kind of fashion.

Our November program on "Perspectives of Fundamental Cosmology" is starting on Monday, and the next weeks will be very busy for us. After that I hope things slow down towards the end of the year.

Lara with her eye patch.

Seems I've been too busy to even give you the family update last month, so here's to catch up.

Lara and Gloria can meanwhile climb up and down chairs quite well, which makes life easier for me, except that they often attempt to climb upwards from there. They can now reach the light switches, and last week they learned to open doors so it's difficult now to keep them in a room. Their favorite pastime is presently hitting me with empty plastic bottles, which seems to be infinitely entertaining. They also have developed the unfortunate habit of throwing their toys in direction of my laptop screen.

The girls have increased their vocabulary with various nouns and can identify images in their picture books. They still haven't learned a single verb, though Stefan insists "cookie" means "look."

Gloria is inseparable from her plush moose, Bo. She takes him everywhere and sleeps with him. Since I'd really like to wash it on occasion, I've now bought a second one and we're doing our best to avoid she sees both at once. (We also have to maneuver carefully around the Arlanda Duty Free shop, where there sits a whole pile of them.) Gloria has developed a bad case of motion sickness in which she'll be sick after ten minutes on the road. We now got some medication from our pediatrician that seems to help, so our mobility radius has expanded again. Lara meanwhile is squinting and we'll have to do something about this.

Right now, they're sitting behind me with their Swedish-English picture book. I am often amazed how well they understand what we say, especially because Stefan and I don't speak the same accent and we both mumble one way or the other. I guess it's because I judge their progress by my lack of progress in learning Swedish. Last week I took a taxi in Stockholm, and this was the first time I had a taxi driver who was actually Swedish. Ironically I noticed that because he spoke British English that was at least to my ears basically accent free. He didn't even try to address me in Swedish. When I asked him about it he said, well, there's so few people on the planet for whom Swedish is useful that they don't expect others to speak it. The Swedes are just so damned nice to immigrants.

We were lucky to get two daycare places starting in January. It's a half-day place, but this will be quite a change for all of us.

The organization of the PI conference on Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity is going very well, thanks to Astrid Eichhorn who has done a great job. We now have a schedule that should appear on the website within the next days. We'll probably have most of the talks recorded, so it's something for all of you. The organization of the November program on Perspectives of Fundamental Cosmology is running a little behind, but it seems everything is slowly falling into place there too.

Besides this, I have been trying to convince my colleagues at Nordita to engage more in public outreach, as I think we're behind in making use of the communication channels the online world has to offer. I'm happy to report that we did get some funding approved by the board last week. Part of this will go into a few videos, another part will go to a workshop for science writers - an idea that goes back to a discussion I had with George Musser earlier this year. I'll let you know how this goes, and I'm open to suggestions for what else we could do. I think I don't have to explain you my motivation for doing this - I'd be preaching to the choir. So let me instead say that it can be difficult to get scientists to make a time commitment to anything that's not research, so the biggest constraint on the matter is personnel.

Gloria at 2 months, crying.

Two weeks after delivery, when the husband went back to work and my hemoglobin level had recovered enough to let me think about anything besides breathing, I seemed to be spending a lot of time on The One Question: Why does the baby cry? We had been drowned in baby books that all had something helpful to say. Or so I believe, not having read them. But what really is the evolutional origin of all that crying to begin with? That’s what I was wondering. Is there a reason to begin with?

You don’t need a degree to know that baby cries if she’s unhappy. After a few weeks I had developed a trouble-shooting procedure roughly like this: Does she have a visible reason to be unhappy? Does she stop crying if I pick her up? New diaper? Clothes comfortable? Too warm? Too cold? Is she bored? Is it possible to distract her? Hungry? When I had reached the end of my list I’d start singing. The singing almost always helped. After that, there’s the stroller and white noise and earplugs.

Yes, the baby cries when she’s unhappy, no doubt about that. But both Lara and Gloria would sometimes cry for no apparent reason, or at least no reason that Stefan and I were able to figure out. The crying is distressing for the parents and costs the baby energy. So why, if it’s such an inefficient communication channel, does the baby cry so much? If the baby is trying to tell us something, why haven't hundred thousands of years of evolution been sufficient to teach caregivers what it is that she wants? I came up with the following hypotheses:

A) She doesn’t cry for any reason, it’s just what babies do. I wasn’t very convinced of this because it doesn’t actually explain anything.

B) She cries so I don’t misplace or forget about her. I wasn’t very convinced of this either because after two months or so, my brain had classified the crying as normal background noise. Also, babies seem to cry so much it overshoots the target: It doesn’t only remind the caregivers, it frustrates them.

C) It’s a stress-test. If the family can’t cope well, it’s of advantage for future reproductive success of the child if the family breaks up sooner rather than later.

D) It’s an adaption delay. The baby is evolutionary trained to expect something else than what it gets in modern western societies. If I’d just treat the baby like my ancestors did, she wouldn’t cry so much.

So I went and looked what the scientific literature has to say. I found a good review by Joseph Soltis from the year 2004 which you can download here. The below is my summary of these 48 pages.

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First, let us clarify what we’re talking about. The crying of human infants changes after about 3 months because the baby learns to make more complex sounds and also becomes more interactive. In the following we’ll only consider the first three months that are most likely to be nature rather than nurture.

Here are some facts about the first three months of baby’s crying that seem to be established pretty well. All references can be found in Soltis’ paper.

• Crying increases until about 6 weeks after birth, followed by a gradual decrease in crying until 3 or 4 months, after which it remains relatively stable. Crying is more frequent in the later afternoon and early evening hours. These crying patterns have been found in studies of very different cultures, from the Netherlands, from South African hunter-gatherers, from the UK, Manilia, Denmark, and North America.
• Chimpanzees too have a peak in crying frequency at approximately 6 weeks of life, and a substantial decline in crying frequency by 12 weeks.
• The cries of healthy, non-stressed infants last on the average 0.5-1.5 seconds with a fundamental pitch in the range of 200-600 Hz. The melody is either falling or rising/falling (as opposed to rising, falling/rising or flat).
• Serious illness, both genetic and acquired, is often accompanied by abnormal crying. The most common cry characteristic indicating serious pathology is an unusually high pitched cry, in one case study above 2000 Hz, and in many other studies exceeding 1500 Hz. (That’s higher than most sopranos can sing.) Examples are: bacterial meningitis 750-1000 Hz, Krabbe’s disease up to 1120 Hz, hypoglycemia up to 1600 Hz. Other abnormal cry patters that have been found in illness is biphonation (the simultaneous production of two fundamental frequencies), too low pitch, and deviations from the normal cry melodies.
• Various studies have been conducted to find out how well adults are able to tell the reason for a baby’s cry by playing them previously recorded cries. These studies show mothers are a little bit better than random chance when given a predefined selection of choices (eg pain, anger, other, in one study), but by and large mothers as well as other adults are pretty bad at figuring out the reason for a baby’s cry. Without being given categories, participants tend to attribute all cries to hunger.
• It has been reported in several papers that parents described a baby’s crying as the most proximate cause triggering abuse and infanticide. It has also been shown that especially the high pitched baby cries produce a response of the autonomic nervous system, measureable for example by the heart rate or skin conductance (the response is higher than for smiling babies). It has also been shown that abusers exhibit higher autonomic responses to high-pitched cries than non-abusers.
• Excessive infant crying is the most common clinical complaint of mothers with infants under three months of age.
• Excessive infant crying that begins and ends without warning is called “colic.” It is often attributed to organic disorders, but if the baby has no other symptoms it is estimated that only 5-10% of “colic” go back to an organic disorder, the most common one being lactose intolerance. If the baby has other symptoms (flexed legs, spasm, bloating, diarrhea), the ratio of organic disorder goes up to 45%. The rest cries for unknown reasons. Colic usually improves by 4 months, or so they tell you. (Lara’s didn’t improve until she was 6 months. Gloria never had any.)
• Colic is correlated with postpartum depression which is in turn robustly associated with reduced maternal care.
• Records and media reports kept by the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome implicate crying as the most common trigger.
• In a survey among US mothers, more infant crying was associated with lower levels of perceived infant health, more worry about baby’s health, and less positive emotion towards the infant.
• Some crying bouts are demonstrably unsoothable to typical caregiving responses in the first three months. Well, somebody has to do these studies.
• In studies of nurses judging infant pain, the audible cry was mostly redundant to facial activity in the judgment of pain.

Now let us look at the hypotheses researchers have put forward and how well they are supported by the facts. Again, let me mention that everybody agrees the baby cries when in distress, the question is if that’s the entire reason.

1. Honest signal of need. The baby cries if and only if she needs or wants something, and she cries to alert the caregivers of that need. This hypothesis is not well supported by the facts. Baby’s cries are demonstrably inefficient of bringing the baby the care it allegedly needs because caregivers don’t know what she wants and in many cases there doesn’t seem to be anything they can do about it. This is the scientific equivalent of my hypothesis D which I found not so convincing.
2. Signal of vigor. This hypothesis says that the baby cries to show she’s healthy. The more the baby cries (in the “healthy” pitch and melody range), the stronger she is and the more the mother should care because it’s a good investment of her attention to raise offspring that’s likely to reproduce successfully. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence linking a high amount of crying to good health of the child. In contrast, as mentioned above, parents perceive children as more sickly if they cry more, which is exactly the opposite of what the baby allegedly “wants” to signal. Also, lots of crying is apparently maladaptive according to the evidence listed above, because it can cause violence against the child. It’s also unclear why, if the baby isn’t seriously sick and too weak to cry, a not-so-vigorous child should alert the caregivers to his lack of vigor and trigger neglect. It doesn’t seem to make much sense. This is the scientific equivalent of my hypothesis B which I didn’t find very convincing either.
3. Graded signal of distress. The baby cries if she’s in distress, and the more distress the more she cries. This hypothesis is, at least for what pain is concerned, supported by evidence. Pretty much everybody seems to agree on that. As mentioned above however, while distress leads to crying, this leaves open the question why the baby is in distress to begin with and why it cries if caregivers can’t do anything about it. Thus, while this hypothesis is the least controversial one, it’s also the one with the smallest explanatory value.
4. Manipulation: The baby cries so mommy feeds her as often as possible. Breastfeeding stimulates the production of the hormone prolactin; prolactin inhibits estrogen production, which often (though not always) keeps the estrogen level below the threshold necessary for the menstrual cycle to set it. This is called lactational amenorrhea. In other words, the more the baby gets mommy to feed her, the smaller the probability that a younger sibling will compete for resources, thus improving the baby’s own well-being. The problem with this hypothesis is that it would predict the crying to increase when the mother’s body has recovered, some months after birth, and is in shape to carry another child. Instead however, at this time the babies cry less rather than more. (It also seems to say that having siblings is a disadvantage to one’s own reproductive success, which is quite a bold statement in my opinion.)
5. Thermoregulatory assistance. An infant’s thermoregulation is not very well developed, which is why you have to be so careful to wrap them warm when it’s cold and to keep them in the shade when it’s hot. According to this hypothesis the baby cries to make herself warm and also to alert the mother that it needs assistance with thermoregulation. It’s an interesting hypothesis that I hadn’t heard of before and it doesn’t seem to have been much studied. I would expect however that in this case the amount of crying depends on the external temperature, and I haven’t come across any evidence for that.
6. Inadequacy of central arousal. The infant’s brain needs a certain level of arousal for proper development. Baby starts crying if not enough is going on, to upset herself and her parents. If there’s any factual evidence speaking for this I don’t know of it. It seems to be a very young hypothesis. I’m not sure how this is compatible with my finding that the Lara after excessive crying would usually fall asleep, frequently in the middle of a cry, and that excitement (people, travel, noise) were a cause for crying too.
7. Underdeveloped circadian rhythm. The infant’s sleep-wake cycle is very different from an adult’s. Young babies basically don’t differentiate night from day. It’s only at around two to three months that they start sleeping through the night and develop a daily rhythm. According to this hypothesis it’s the underdeveloped circadian rhythm that causes the baby distress, probably because certain brain areas are not well synched with other daily variations. This makes a certain sense because it offers a possible explanation for the daily return of crying bouts in the late afternoon, and also for why they fade when the babies sleep through the night. This too is a very young hypothesis that is waiting for good evidence.
8. Behavioral state. The baby’s mind knows three states: Sleep, awake, and crying. It’s a very minimalistic hypothesis, but I’m not sure it explains anything. This is the scientific equivalent of my hypothesis A, the baby just cries.

Apparently nobody ever considered my hypothesis D, that baby cries to move herself into an optimally stable social environment which would have developmental payoffs. It’s probably very difficult a case to make. The theoretical physicist in me is admittedly most attracted to one of the neat and tidy explanations in which the crying is a side-effect of a physical development.

So if your baby is crying and you don’t know why, don’t worry. Even scientists who have spent their whole career on this question don’t actually know why the baby cries.

Lara and Gloria are presently very difficult. They have learned to climb the chairs and upwards from there; I constantly have to pick them off the furniture. Yesterday, I turned my back on them for a second, and when I looked again Lara was sitting on the table, happily pulling a string of Kleenex out of the box, while Gloria was moving away the chair Lara had used to climb up.

During the last month, the girls have added a few more words to their vocabulary. The one that's most obvious to understand is "lallelalle," which is supposed to mean "empty", and usually a message to me to refill the apple juice. Gloria also has found a liking in the word "Haar" (hair), and she's been saying "Goya" for a while, which I believe means "Gloria". Or maybe yogurt. They both can identify most body parts if you name them. Saying "feet" will make them grab their feet, "nose" will have them point at their nose, and so on. If Gloria wants to make a joke, she'll go and grab her sister's nose instead. Gloria also announces that she needs a new diaper by padding her behind, alas after the fact.

I meanwhile am stuck in proposal writing again. The organization for the conference in October and the program in November is going nicely, and I'm very much looking forward to both events. My recent paper was accepted for publication in Foundations of Physics, and I've wrapped up another project that had been in my drawer for a while. Besides this, I've spent some time reading up the history of Nordita, which is quite interesting actually, maybe I'll have a post on this at some point.

I finally said good bye to my BlackBerry and now have an iPhone, which works so amazingly smoothly I'm deeply impressed.

Below a little video of the girls that I took the other day. YouTube is offering a fix for shaky videos, which is why you might see the borders moving around.


I hope your summer is going nicely and that you have some time to relax!

The past month has been very busy for us, and it will unfortunately remain that way for some more weeks, after which I hope time pressure will ease off.

Our two lovely ladies are still not willing to speak to us. They have however developed other communication channels, or maybe I've just become good at guessing what they want. They now both have four molars and Gloria finally gets her missing front teeth (the outer ones on the bottom, nicely visible in the photo to the right).

The developing brain of the human infant is a mystery as well as a miracle, and one of the least well understood properties of this development is childhood amnesia, the fact that adults' earliest memories normally dates back to the age of 2-4 years, but not before that. We do learn many things before that age of course which remain with us, but they do not come in the form of episodic memory, in which we realize our self being in a certain situation. What exactly is the reason for childhood amnesia, and what are the functions necessary for the formation of episodic memory, nobody really knows. It is generally believed that it is connected to self-awareness and also language development, which comes with the ability to conceive of and understand narratives.

There is, interestingly, some research showing that the onset of memories differs between cultures and also between genders, see eg this pdf (women tend to recall more details). There is a line of research in which it has been suggested that early autobiographical memory formation depends on of the way in which parents talk about the past and encourage their children to do the same. It is also well known that emotionally intense events can be recalled back to very early age. Generally, high emotional impact is conductive to memory formation.

My earliest memory, I believe, is being bitten by a hamster. (I also recall having been told repeatedly to not stick my fingers into the cage, but, well.) I must have been roughly 3 years or so at that time. I also recall falling down the stairs, but that must have been later. I have a bunch of memories of my younger brother when he was old enough to walk, but not old enough to talk, which also dates me at about 3 years. Interestingly enough, I have absolutely no memory of my parents till past the age of 4. Which fits well with my perception that the girls do not so much take note of me as a person, but as a freely available service that's just around, like the air to breathe, but nothing that really requires attention.

Needless to say, I am wondering what one day will be Lara and Gloria's earliest memory.

Stefan brought a cold from work. My immune system wasn't very impressed, but the girls went down with a fever. During the night they wake up every other hour, crying because their noses are clogged. After some of these nights, we're all cranky. I'm thinking the English word "cranky" might have the same root as the German word "krank" which means "sick." Luckily, the fever is gone now and we're on the way to recovery.

Lara and Gloria have enriched their vocabulary with the word "baby." Baby might be everything from small children over dolls and plush toys to pets. Gloria has developed an amusing body language in which she'll slap her palms to the sides of her head if she's uncertain what to do next. The other day, we were at the playground and a girl, somewhat older than ours, insisted on greeting Gloria with a series of hello's. When no reply came, the girl hugged and kissed Gloria on the cheek, which sent our blondie running away slapping her head.


We're still trying to teach them to eat with a spoon. They've understood that the spoon goes into the food first and then into the mouth, but the finer details of spoon orientation and aiming are still somewhat rough.

The girls are enjoying the summer, which means time out in the green with many things to see. For me it means recurring child-themed conversations with strangers. A common topic is the complaint of women my mother's age that their own offspring hasn't yet shown intentions of producing grandchildren. I find it a very awkward conversation to have with a stranger; I don't even know their children, so what can I possibly say? I usually settle on some vaguely sympathetic sounds and nodding.

Besides this, everything is moving forward and onward, slowly but persistently. The workshop I'm organizing is taking shape with the schedule about to be made next week. I'm preparing two talks for the Marcel Grossmann  meeting next month. I'm thinking of writing a larger grant application for the ERC later this year, which will need some preparation time. To accompany my efforts in songwriting, I bought a book on music theory, "Harmony and Voice Leading" (don't freak out over the price tag, I bought it used for $15), from which I learned words like "diminished 7th" and which gave completely new meaning to "scalar motion." I'm struggling with the dissonances though, they somehow refuse to make sense. I'm thinking I'll have to actually get some classical sheet music.

Spring came late to Germany, but it seems it finally has arrived. The 2012 Riesling has the first leaves and the wheat is a foot high.

Lara and Gloria are now 16 months old, almost old enough so we should start counting their age in fraction of years. This month's news is Lara's first molar, and Gloria's first word:



I have been busy writing a proposal for the Swedish Research Council, which is luckily submitted now, and I also had a paper accepted for publication. Ironically, from all the papers that I wrote in the last years, it's the one that is the least original and cost me the least amount of time, yet it's the only one that smoothly went through peer review.



Besides this, I'm spending my time with the organization of a workshop, a conference, and a four-week long program. I'm also battling a recurring ant infection of our apartment, which is complicated by my hesitation to distribute toxins where the children play.

In the past month, Lara and Gloria have learned to learn. They try to copy and repeat everything we do. Lara surprised me by grabbing a brush and pulling it through her hair and Gloria, still short on hair, tries to put on her shoes. They haven't yet learned to eat with a spoon, but they've tried to feed us.

They both understand simple sentences. If I ask where the second shoe is, they'll go and get it. If I tell them lunch is ready, they'll both come running and try to push the high chairs towards the table. If we tell them we'll go for a walk, they run to the door. If we do as much as mention cookies, they'll point at the bag and insist on having one.

Lara is still the more reserved one of the two. Faced with something new, she'll first watch from a distance. Gloria has no such hesitations. Last week, I childproofed the balcony. Lara, who was up first, saw the open door and froze. She stood motionless, staring at the balcony for a full 10 minutes. Then Gloria woke up, came running while yelling "Da,da" - and stumbled over the door sill, landing on her belly. Lara then followed her, very carefully.

Now that spring is coming and the girls are walking well, we've been to the playground several times. Initially Lara and Gloria just sat there, staring at the other children. But meanwhile they have both made some contacts with other children, though not without looking at me every other minute to see if I approve. Gloria, as you can guess, is the more social one. She'll walk around with her big red bucket and offer it to others, smiling brightly. She's 15 months and has at least 3 admirers already, all older boys who give her toys, help her to walk, or even carry her around. (The boys too look at me every other minute to see if I approve.) Lara and I, we watch our little social butterfly, and build sand castles.

From my perspective, the playground is a new arena too. Weekdays, the adult population is exclusively female and comes in two layers of generations, either the mothers or the grandmothers. They talk about their children and pretty much nothing but their children, unless you want to count pregnancies separately. After some initial mistakes, I now bring a book, paper, or a magazine with me to hide behind.

Another piece of news from the past month is that I finally finished the review on the minimal length in quantum gravity that I've been working on since last year. It's now on the arXiv. The first 10 pages should be understandable for pretty much everybody, and the first half should be accessible also for undergraduates. So if you were wondering what I'm doing these days besides running after my daughters, have a look at my review.

Lara and Gloria are now walking well, and have learned to run too. We have bought them their first pair of shoes, size 21, and took them for a first walk outside. This month has brought more firsts. The girls have been swimming the first time, they have been to a playground the first time, and they have made their first encounter with salt, which they didn't seem to mind.

Confronted with new information, environments, or people, Lara is generally more reserved than Gloria. Lara will watch from a safe distance for a while before she splashes in the water, stomps on the sand, or pulls on grandma's necklace. Gloria is faster to warm up. On the other hand, Lara falls noticeably less often and if she does, is less likely to hurt herself.

Teeth-wise the girls are still months behind. On the average, I read, babies have their first tooth between 4 and 7 months. Ours had their first tooth in their 12th month. Now at 14 months, they have both 6 front teeth that are half out, and still no molars. They can bite off cookies, but they can't chew.

The most remarkable development this month has been the communication. Lara and Gloria both have learned how to work well with pointing and a single word, "Da", which might mean "lift me up", "put me down", "give me this" or "make this work". Gloria is especially expressive. If she sees as much as a spoonful of vegetables come into her direction, she hits the spoon and sends it flying, then points at the dessert and commands "Da." Lara often comes to me with a scarf and wants me to wrap it around her head.

Most of the time, the girls are playing with each other nicely. They do sometimes steal each other's toys, but they also offer toys to each other. When Gloria cries, Lara tries to give her a pacifier. If that doesn't work, Lara begins to cry too.

Their parents have meanwhile reason to celebrate. After more than a year of fight, the German authorities have finally revised their decision that we're not eligible for child benefits, and now we receive the standard rate. Since we're paying rent for two apartments, one in Germany and one in Sweden, this has come as much of a relief for us.

Our two lovely girls have learned to walk!



Gloria has fallen in love with a plush moose that I bought at the Stockholm airport. When I was pregnant, I gave it to Stefan "for practice," and since then the moose has patiently waited for its cue. It came when Gloria learned to point with her index finger. If her Swedish friend is in sight, she excitedly points and says "Da! Da! Da!" and, if one lets her, she takes the plush moose everywhere.

Lara has learned to drink with a straw, but my efforts to teach Gloria the same have so far been futile. Gloria is generally more picky with things that go into her mouth; she clearly doesn't like vegetables, and every other day refuses to drink juice. On the upside, she has learned that cardboard isn't edible, a lesson that I hope Lara learns before she has eaten up all picture books. We upgraded Lara to the next cloths size; she is now noticeably taller than her sister.

Next week, the babies are scheduled for the meningococcal vaccination, and then we're through with the first round of all the standard vaccinations: diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, streptococcus pneumoniae, haemophilus influenzae type b, hepatitis b, measles, mumps, rubella and varicella.

I am always shocked when I read about parents who aren't vaccinating their children. I thought that's a problem which exists only in the USA, but our pediatrician puzzled me last year by beginning our first appointment with a forward defense against arguments we hadn't intended to lead.

After some reading, I learned that about 3-5% of Germans believe vaccinations are unnecessary or harmful. UNICEF estimates that in 2009 in Germany the national coverage with the first measles vaccination was 96%. In the USA it was 92%. The basic reproduction number R of measles is estimated to be 12-18. Measles are one of the most contagious diseases known. The percentage of people that have to be immune to prevent a spread of the infection is roughly 1-1/R, for measles that's more than 93%; for mumps and rubella about 80%. However, not everybody who is vaccinated becomes immune.

Too few people know that the reason why the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination is repeated at least once is not that an individual's immunization is improved, but that in at least 5% of all cases the vaccination fails entirely. Our pediatrician said, 5% is what the vaccine producers are claiming, what he sees in practice is 20-30%. One of the probable reasons is that the MMR vaccine has to be kept cold, and any mistake along the delivery line makes the vaccine ineffective. The follow-up vaccination is supposed to bring down the failure rate, 1-(5/100)(5/100) > 0.99, or so the idea. But more realistically 0.96 (1-(20/100)(20/100)) ≈ 92% in Germany, or ≈ 88% in the USA.

And so, measles are far from going extinct and smaller outbreaks still happen. Sadly enough, even in Germany, people still die from measles. The case reported in the article is particularly tragic: A young boy, whose parents refused vaccination, fell sick with measles and, in the doctor's waiting room, infected 6 children, some too young to have been vaccinated; one died.

Ah, I am lecturing again, even though this was supposed to be a family-update post, sorry ;o)

So back on topic, Gloria and Lara had only mild side-effects from the vaccinations. We have exchanged the backward facing baby car seats with forward facing seats, and the girls can now enjoy watching the cars go by, while we can enjoy watching the babies watching. I didn't know how much I hated the backward facing seats till they were gone.

And I should stop referring to Lara and Gloria as "the babies" because they are now officially toddlers.