Red-shifted E-mails

Ghazal, Dear,

For the delay of your e-mails relative of the ones I send to you, there is this easy explanation. If I send you about one message per day, and receive from you only one in response per 2 weeks, it must have to do with your own location getting further and further away. The great astrophysicist Edwin Hubble was the first to relate the observation of a redshift (i.e. the elongation of wavelengths of the star light) with the proposed expansion of the entire universe The long intervalls of your response e-mails are an equivalent to this redshift, but maybe as a passionate car driver you are more familiar with the Doppler-Effect that is used by the traffic police to measure the speed of vehicles. In essence, its the same physical phenomenon.

In our case, the observation that daily send E-mails from me to you experience a dilation of their responses to only one every two weeks results in a calculated escape velocity of your location relative to Munich by 1440 km/h. (Woh, thats more than the speed of sound !!).

The calculation please find below.

This once again convinces me that you are an angel, which accidentally had to do an emergency stop in Munich 2 years ago, but now you are again in your other world where Angels rule and drive cars with chocolate engines.

Take Care
Michael

Cryptic Message

Hi Ghazal, my Dear,

While waiting for an answer from you, I tried to de-crypt (or decode) a peculiar sequence of numbers to find out if there is a meaningful message hidden in it. The sequence reads as following:

5 2 6 0 2 0 4 2 2 4 1 2 0 1 2 1 5 1 3 3 8 1 4 3 2 4 0 1 4 2 1 2 0 1 2 4 1 2 1 3 3 2 3

Each digit is the number of messages that I wrote to you before I received an answer (during the last 4 month). Therefore, this sequence was virtually generated by you.
On average, you answered after receiving 2.3 mails from me, what is not too bad, considering that you have been very busy writing your thesis. I already thought how to bring the ratio closer to 1 (i.e. that one mail from you is followed by only one from me). This would mean I have to write less frequently, but this unfortunately  would result in much longer messages - a nightmare for you. On the other side, asking you to write more often would prompt you to shorten your e-mails to an SMS format again. And these very short mails too often lack any opportunity to say something important (although you are much more experienced in saying a lot with a view words only).

To decipher a hidden message in the above sequence of numbers, one can group them pair-wises (i.e. 52 60 20 42 24 .....). Using any text that is only known to you and me (i.e. to the sender and to the recipeint of the hidden message) one can re-derive this cryptic messsage by considering each of these two-digit numbers as the position of the next character within the key-text (method is called book-cipher)  (as above:
1. character at position 52
2. character at position 52+60 = 112
3. character at position 52+60+20 = 132 and so on).

With the introduction of your MSc-thesis as the key-text, the hidden message reads :

n matti nfecatskedatt
On the first glance it might still look very cryptic, but by re-positioning the empty spaces and with some fantasy one might read it like:

inmate at infected cats kedat

Ghazal, you have to help me further. Although I can read each single word now, I have no clue what you want to tell me. 

Take Care, my Dear
Michael
............................................................................................................

Hi michael, 

Oh, I"m surprised how far you got with decrypting this hidden massage. To be honest, I was not aware that there was some "meaning" behind the frequencies of my e-mails to you. The more I am surprised that the words make a lot of sense to me: 


"KEDAT"  is the name of my  "INMATE" at the university, with whom I share an office. She was sick ("INFECTED") with flue the last time we met. And now it might be that I ("CAT") caught the infection from her.

I have one general question about the decryption you did: You put the code (the sequence of numbers above) onto your blog, so everybody can read them. Even though the introduction to my MSc thesis is only known to you and me (unless I"m going to publish it in NATURE, ha ha)  I guess with some computing power the hidden message can be deciphered by anybody else, right ?  So how safe is it then ?


Seeing forward to hear you opinion.


take care
/ghazal



......................................................................

Ghazal, my Dear,

Sorry to read that you got cold. I hope it was not provoked by my intense search for a meaning behind the numbers (like a self-fulfilling prophecy). For myself, I try to "ban" the flue-bugs by going swimming in the cold once a week. Up to now, it seems to work.

Take Care, get better
Michael

Anna Karenina

hi michael,

how are you ? Yesterday night I found my mom watching a movie on TV, but the first scenes showed a rather cold winter atmosphere and I already wanted to zap over to another program (cause we have enough snow and frost in reality here in Sweden). My mom, however, insisted to watch this movie so I also stayed. After a few minutes there was a scene on a railway-platform, and a young lady leaving a train through a cloud of steam. It reminded me of a short youtube video you send some days ago, showing Greta Garbo as "Anna Karenina" in an 1934 movie. Now it appeared that we were watching a modern version of the movie, featuring Sophie Marceau as the main character. I think I probably would not have carried on watching it, unless my mom promissed that it is a great movie. She likes romances, and at the end of the film when Anna Karenina committed suicide, I realized that her eyes were full of tears. But this was very likely a sort of planned eruption of emotions, since for sure she knew before how sadly the film will finish. You know, woman can exploite emotions in a very useful way: breaking out in tears can relieve one of a lot of stress. It therefore should not be considered as a sole loss-of-control or as a sign of weakness. It can really help you to feel better later on. So in this sense, "Anna Karenina" is a very helpful movie for woman.
But except for this final scene, we had an argument with my mom, whether Anna did right leaving her husband and son for Vronski, to whom she had suddenly fallen in love with. My mom insisted that Anna did right, and that for such a great love, everything else in the world can be given up. In her opinion, a family relation that is based only on joint wealth, or material interest, or even on joint children, is a weak foundation and is not worth to sacrifice a really strong love for.
I don"t have this idea of a unique value of an ideal love, and that it represents something so extraordinary to neglect material wealth and a social status for. I could not understand how Anna Karenina left behind her easy and convenient life in the upper society and the material safety provided by her rich husband and his aristocratic family. For me it was hard to understand that she gave it all up to follow Vronski into an unknown future, only for the sake of love. Therefore, I consider Anna Karenina a males phantasy. And it is now surprise that Leo Tolstoj wrote it while he had lots of hussle with his wife. Sure, he dreamed of woman following only the voice of love, and not the temptation of material safety when they choose a partner. But thats not how woman usually feel. In the first instance, we are looking for somebody who can provide us with a safe haven for a long time. Love is optional, and might grow later. Therefore, the hype and the mystery around Anna Karenina became so long-lasting because what she did was against normal femal behaviour, whatever sociologists and femal-right activists want to tell us.

But there are exceptions, of course. And for me the best example is my mom. At least now, after her own experiences with husbands and lovers, she would clearly opt for an unconditioned love.

take care
/ghazal

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Hi Ghazal my Dear,

Thanks a lot for your long mail, which is a clear proof that you can write not only in SMS-format. I have never considered before that Anna Karenina might be a pure males phantasy, as you suggested. There is nothing I can really contribute to the debate between you and your mom.
For sure, what you wrote about the female quest for material safety is more in agreement with sociologists theories, but also what is known from animal behaviour. So traditionally and in a large scale in society, woman do perhaps always look for a partner that provides best guarantee for a secure life. But there are also many famous examples where woman following an unconditioned love became very happy. Or do you think that this hunt for the supreme love will never end ?
But so will the hunt for material wealth. I think the fairy-tale about the fisher and his wife is known not just in Germany, but in Sweden as well. Like therein, hunting the whole life for nothing more than wealth will leave you at the end unsatisfied.

I liked your observations about the benefical effect of crying, that it will relieve you of stress. I have not tried it on myself, but very well remember when our son was still a baby, sometimes he had stress at the evening, was somehow unhappy about something, and did not want to sleep. I than use to slap him very gentle, not to hurt him, just to make him cry. It appeared, that after crying for some minutes, he became very calm and sleepy. A pediatrician later explained me that through the tears the body can get rid of stress hormones like adrenalin or cortison.
Thats probably what your mom knew instinctively, when she insisted to view the Anna Karenina movie. Ghazal, I hope so much that you don"t need tears to get rid of stress hormones. I remember that during your MSc project you have been very good of managing stress by other means.

Take Care, my Dear

Michael

Format of Live

Hi Ghazal, Yes you are absolutely right and I have to apologize for this.
But to be honest, I did it intentionally to provoke an reaction from you.
You remember, it already worked ones, when I started to call you Miss F. You then stoped right away calling me Dr. something.

Don"t worry, I don"t want to distract too much of your attention from the lab-work. I can imagine, its all quite new stuff. I just believe, that we are not just slaves of our work, but should try to stay human.

Take care, enjoy the evening Michael



on 09.06.2010 15:46, Ghazal F. wrote:
> Hi Michael,
>
> Thank you for all the primers! I will check more
> and try to do PCR next week or on friday.
>
> I think the last email you sent me was an SMS format???
>
> regards
> Ghazal F.
>
>
> on 09.06.2010 15:19, Michael R. wrote:
>
>> Sorry Ghazal, but I forgot to attache the list of the markers that I
>> mentioned. Here it comes.
>>
>> Greetings Michael
>>
>>
>> PS: Please no answer in SMS format any more. There is an
>> e-mail filter in my computer, which considers every message
>> as spam if it is shorter than 30 words or 5 sentences and
>> if it doesn"t contain a personal phrase.