yesterday, we visited the pizol. getting up was quite an adventure, though; we first travelled via train to bad ragaz, from where sbb.ch claimed bus 456 (a postauto) proceeds to the cable car station. unfortunately, as it turned out, the bus is only going during winter season. as we were waiting where it should leave, we noticed another small bus with “pizol” largely printed on it leaving at the designated time. the bus was hidden behind another postauto when we got out of the train station, so we only noticed it when it was leaving. since we weren’t the only ones standing at the postauto stop waiting for bus 456, we were a bit confused, and finally went to ask in the train station. turns out, they knew that the bus was still written on incorrectly and already passed the message on several times, but nothing happened. so we waited one hour for the next bus (walking would have taken around 40 minutes, but that’s not too much fun at over 30 degrees in the sun). well, when the (private) pizol bus finally came back, we also tried to inform the driver, who apparently never before heard about this problem. he also mentioned that from next year on, there will be a postauto also during summer… well, we hope that maybe now someone will put up a sign at the postauto stop that the bus is currently departing from somewhere else…

anyway, we finally took up the cable cars to laufböden, from where we wanted to walk the panorama trail (should be around 60 minutes). interestingly, the only sign up there pointing to the destination of the panorama trail said it would take 20 minutes. with no real different choice, we started walking that direction, until after 50 meters or so we found another sign, splitting up between the direct route (“standart-weg”) and the panorama trail. we continued the panoramic trail, though in the end we noticed we apparently screwed something up, as when we arrived at a lake inbetween, we saw that the panoramic trail leaving from there to our starting point left in another direction… whatever… anyway, we had a nice view, and up there the temperature was really nice and bearable. we also were able to put our feet into the lake, which was very refreshing. after circling the lake, we continued the trail to the pizolhütte where we had lunch, and finally proceeded down.

overall it was a very nice excursion, except that getting there (and also getting back to the train station) via public transport is apparently somewhat more complicated…

on friday evening, we had a really amazing sky over hinwil:

yesterday we visited the bernese oberland, to mürren. we first spontaneously took the cablecar up the schilthorn, known to many from the james bond movie on her majesty’s secret service. in fact, one terrace up there was built specifically for the film to allow a helicopter to land there. from the top of the schilthorn, one has a great view on the surrounding mountains, most prominently eiger, mönch and jungfrau. (a couple of years ago i was up there, visiting the jungfraujoch.)

afterwards, we took the cablecar back down to mürren, and took the funicular up to the allmendhubel. from there, we enjoyed the mountain view trail to the grütschalp train station. from the trail we had a great view on the big three mountains (eiger, mönch, jungfrau). it was a really nice hike with some diversion, from moorlands to ski slopes, forests to dry-stone walls and even some cows.

one and a half weeks ago, we visited the naturzentrum thurauen near flaach. the weather was wonderful, and after exploring the nature trail, enjoying all the frogs there and finally having a picnic, we continued to the rhine and continued via boat to eglisau.

yesterday, i was in our garden, doing a bit of work. namely, planting some lavender. two of the plants you can see here:

i haven’t planted anything (nor did any serious garden work, in fact) for quite some years now, but it was fun. (and i wasn’t forced to do it, either.)

the main purpose of the lavender is although not to just be a nice view – that’s only the secondary motive – but to make people realize that they shouldn’t walk through our garden and treat it as a kind of short-cut to get onto the hill. i hope this helps, and that not at some point some idiot just stamps my lavender to death.

(well, currently it also looks a bit broken; that was thanks to the heavy rain this night. i hope it will recover from it and hopefully start growing soon.)

yesterday, we were in winterthur, watching cyclope, a wonderful show combining tinguely-like apparatuses with acrobatics and music. it was really amazing! the show, inspired by jean tinguely’s le cyclop, is performed in an old industrial hall, which creates a wonderful atmosphere. the stage, which begins directly in front of the persons sitting in the first row, is a broken up amusement park, which seems to be only inhabited by a (involuntary?) clown. when he’s eventually fed up by his surroundings and wants to leave, suddenly hell breaks loose. it was just amazing! a wide range of acrobatics, acting and music blending perfectly in the huge metal colossus, which turns more and more into a face with, well, only one eye. a pretty heavy piece of metal, so to say.

we were lucky, and our friends, who arrived very early, were offered an upgrade to sit more in the front, and so we ended up in row 9 (instead of something much higher). it looks like it wasn’t exactly sold out, and they tried to at least fill the first rows so that it doesn’t look too sad. which is really, really shameful, since such a great show deserves a much larger audience! so in case you’re somewhat close to winterthur, be sure to watch cyclope while it is still shown! (until end of may, apparently.) after that, it apparently will be shown in july in basel as well (though outdoors there). it is really something which should be seen live, and not on video or tv or anything similar.

today i was in bad säckingen to give a talk at the kinderuni (children university) hochrhein, a eu-funded joint project between the two cities bad säckingen in germany and stein (ag) in switzerland. in the talk, i tried to explain kids, age 8 to 12, a bit about cryptography.

starting with caesar-type ciphers and more general substitution ciphers, i then continued to explained how to crack such ciphers using frequency analysis. this included a live demonstration, which was quite fun thanks to all the contributions from the audience. after shortly giving hints on how to improve on ciphers, i quickly presented the advanced encryption standard before continuing with the second part of the presentation: public key cryptography.

i began by explaining the situation: two cats want to communicate / exchange something (like cat food :-) ), while a third cat is watching / able to intercept (eat). after mentioning diffie and hellman, i continued with a more practical example: a simple massey-omura three-pass protocol type exchange using a box and two padlocks. this was another great thing, asking the kids how they think this could work after presenting the box and the padlocks. and the sudden murmur of understanding when the second lock got added to the box and the box was sent back.
afterwards i asked the kids how they think this system could be attacked, and they both came up with the bruteforce (crack the box open) and the more tricky (man-in-the-middle attack) variant. great!

the last slides on factoring-based crypto and elliptic curves were quite hard to comprehend, as i knew beforehand, but at least they now know that there’s more out there for which they have to learn more about mathematics :-)

if you’re interested, you can download the slides here.

last week, we visited the säntis, one of the highest landmarks in northeastern switzerland. despite being quite crowded – after all, it was on a sunday with good weather – it didn’t feel too crowded on the top, and we caught some great views onto germany, lake constance, liechtenstein and austria. (i’m not sure whether we also saw france or italy due to haze. but in theory, we could have.) enjoy some of the views and panoramas:

two and a half weeks ago, we visited the zolli, the zoo in basel. equipped with my camera and perfect weather (i.e. not too good, so the animals won’t hide from the sun, and not too bad as well), we had a good time and saw many interesting animals.