I spent most of my day today working on my own in the lab. If you're only interested in reading about my travels, then I guess you can skip to the next paragraph, but I'll discuss my lab work a little bit for anyone who's interested. The room I was working in usually has several people working in it, and believe it or not I was the first one in there this morning. I continued reading some articles about BCIs, including one about Dr. Schwartz's research at Pitt that first got me interested in the subject. This video from the online appendix to that paper was shown to me sophomore year, and directly led to my interest in neural engineering. Yes, that's a monkey controlling a prosthetic arm with its mind, and no, my research isn't quite as cool as that (but I wish it was). However, I find it hard to stay awake just reading papers, so I continued messing with the Arduino and flex sensors. I found out how to interface the Arduino with Matlab, which I'm generally much more comfortable with, and I was able to quickly write code to graph the sensor output in real time. This proved that a single sensor works well, but for some reason my circuit breaks when I try to include multiple. I'm planning to make a flex sensing glove with 15 of these sensors, but my circuit stops working with only two. So far, I haven't been able to figure this out (after troubleshooting all afternoon), but hopefully I will soon, as I thought this project would be pretty easy and wouldn't take too long.
After leaving lab I did some more grocery shopping so I would have food for dinner, and hopefully enough for the weekend (stores are closed on Sundays). I tried the third of the four grocery stores near campus. This one is called Norma, and it has a sign in front of it with a picture of Marilyn Monroe that reads "Ich heiße Norma" ("My name is Norma"). All of these stores are very similar to each other (and pretty similar to Aldi in the U.S.). You have to buy or bring your own bags, and the selection is limited. While I still refuse to believe they don't carry it, I have failed to find milk at any of these stores! However, when I got back, I decided I could hold off on cooking for a while and go out again. I considered going to the fourth store, but I knew it would probably close soon (I believe they all close at 8 PM). However, I had been told there was a store called Real that was similar to Walmart and was open until midnight. I found my way there (near the other end of campus), and found that there was a whole little mall I didn't know about. I found Real, which was really kind of like a Super Walmart, it was a large supermarket that also sold things like electronics and clothes. Real seemed to be a little bit more expensive than the other stores, but with a much greater selection. I finally found milk (they have the non-refrigerated kind here), as well as plenty of easy things to make like ramen and chili. I also realized that Heinz seems to sell more of their "57 varieties" here than in Pittsburgh. Next time I go I'll have to take my camera and take a picture of the condiments I've never seen before (things like curry ketchup).
I finally made some pasta for dinner, and met someone else living at the Gasthause in the kitchen. He was a Russian bioinformatics PhD student staying here for a month. He also could not speak German, but spoke pretty good English. I got the impression that he didn't know many people here, but we talked for a while as I made dinner. He was enjoying a bottle of wine by himself, so he offered me a glass (although the glass I was given here is very tiny). We talked about bikes, and since he's only here for another two weeks, I offered to possibly buy his bike when he leaves if I don't get one before then. Most people bike here, and it's easier than waiting and paying for buses all the time.
Tomorrow I'm getting up early to go to Shwerin (a city I never heard of until today) with the other RISE interns in Lübeck, and on Sunday I might go to Kiel with them too.
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