Still Here

... still here.

Bon Mots

My sister thinks that I should drop a bon mot on my blog. So I chose a particularly big one---100 megatons of yeild---that I bought from the Russians. So now I'm droping it... we'll see what's left of the blog when its over.

Tornado in Prague

Recently I've been hoping to see a tornado in Prague. A few weeks ago there was a springtime storm and the wind was really fast, must've been 50 mph. I was in my office---the widows were shaking and there was all sorts of detritus flying in the air. It was rainy too. I ran between windows in hopes of spotting a vicious, cycling funnel. It would have been cool to see it tear through the panelaky. But I didn't see any. Last night there was another storm and it was a little windy and rainy. But no tornado there either. The end.

11 day anniversary

This post is to celebrate the 11th day anniversary of my blog. Many thanks to my devoted readers!

High Blood Pressure in Moscow

I was recently at a conference in Moscow. There was some Russian guy there giving a talk about noncommutative field theory. I could tell he was a mathematician, since he became very tense about precisely answering my questions. I got confused, and at one point I asked about the relation between his version of noncommutative field theory and the one most us physicists are familiar with. He said he was using the Hamiltonian formalism and couldn't comment on its relation to the Lagrangian. When he saw that this answer left me unsatisfied, he became more upset and at one point had to sit down and stop talking. He then collapsed and started shaking, looked like a seizure. The conference organizers tried to help him out, but eventually he had to be taken to the hospital. He never finished giving his talk, and I felt upset and guilty. The end.

Flaming trash in Moscow

I was walking down the Arbat street with my girl when we found a trashcan in flames. It was nice, because it was pretty cold outside and I could warm my hands. The melting plastic bottles made a bad smell though. I threw in one of my receipts so that the fire would have a more natural burning paper smell. But it didn't help much. The end.

No more Hindi

Sorry for the Hindi interruption. I enabled Hindi transliteration for my Indian readers, but then I realized I couldn't read my own posts.