Over the weekend starting on Saturday, the 8th of February 2025, the Baltic states’ electricity grid is switching from being synchronized with the Russian electric grid to being synchronized with the continental European electrical grid. This involves first disconnecting from the Russian grid, then operating a while as an island system, regulating the frequency alone and doing various tests, and finally, synchronizing frequency and phase with the EU grid and throwing the breaker. Which made me wonder earlier today: How hard would it be to watch the frequency changing?

I like Perry Rhodan a lot.

If you’re not German, and even if you are German, you might not have heard of Perry Rhodan, so here is a quick high level summary. Perry Rhodan is a German pulp magazine sci-fi series. It has, somehow, been in continous publication since 1961. It is still very much published as pulp issues - at time of writing, we’re on issue #3226. This makes it probably the longest continuous story ever written. The series is written collaboratively by many authors taking turns with overarching guidance from a core team.

If you are a university student, you’ll sometimes have to give presentations about research, mostly in seminars, but also for a thesis. I’ve supervised a lot of those as a PhD student, and I’ve seen people Do A Presentation Badly in all kinds of ways. Since, as an advisor, it’s much more fun to say “Wow! what a great presentation! we’re giving you the best grade!” than “we’re passing you, but only because we don’t want to be put through this again next year.”, I eventually started writing the ones that I think are most easy to dodge down so I wouldn’t forget anything when talking to students and giving feedback.

I think that this helped me a bit, so maybe it can help you? So here are, in no particular order, some things that I think would be good for students to keep in mind when doing a seminar or thesis presentation.