I.
I'm in Venice - I met a colleague at the airport who suggested to take a direct taxi boat to the city instead of the bus + boat combo that my guesthouse suggested. We had to wait in line for half an hour (being too loudly upset about politics, but that's what happens when you put together an
Iranian-born Swiss-American and an Eastern-Europe born Jewish German) but otherwise it was the best decision ever. I got a bit of sightseeing that I do not expect to manage for the rest of the week.

3x mobile photos )


I am regretting that I did not take my camera with me. But on the other hand: I don't think I'll gave time to look around much, anyway.

II.
That said: that review talk on Tuesday? Still not done. Ugh. And tomorrow will be a busy day. (Expect very exciting science results to hit the news; not mine, but it will still be full of excitement.) And I know, I am procrastinating now again, but there is only so much talk I can write given how tired I am by now.

III.
I know that I shop when I am stressed. I lost my black shawl while in Slovenia and it's such a staple that I needed a new one immediately. Also those new skinny dress pants I bought when changing airports in Paris really need different tops that the ones I own, so I now own a wide lightweight wooly sweater in grey and a black popover blouse. And since I was at it, also a set of rose-plated triangle earring (I mean, it happens so often that I find earrings that I live that are silver I had to buy them, right? … On the other hand, wtf my new fascination with gold-colored jewellry? Am I getting old?)

IV.
Also, new phone. Because my old one decided that I abused it too much. It's not fully dead but there was a pattern of guest-touch behavior that made it crash several times and I am not risking being without a phone with all the current and upcoming travel. Unfortunately, I missed that the successor model is half an inch larger when I ordered it. The old one wasn't small, but this one is giant. Well. I am trying to convince myself that whatever phone I would have gotten it would have been the wrong one because it's not my old one. (And I could not have just bought the old one again, I considered, but I ordered it using motomaker in a configuration that was only available from Motorolla USA, not from any resellers D:)

V.
Voltron really isn't a good series. But I keep watching. Because Lotor. And we are at the point when he actually becomes really interesting. (I even tried to go fanfiction, but ugh, nothing along the lines that would interest me D:)

VI.
I complained to [livejournal.com profile] sophiawestern (through whom I have one of my current favorite soup recipes) that there is no Kabocha squash in the Netherlands - I only found two sad kabochas at one market stall a few weeks ago. But now my local supermarket has them! Yeah! Take bets on who is going to eat all the Kabocha & chicken & pear salads!
I still have a ton of roasted kabocha and carrot soup in the freezer (the aforementioned favorite soup made from the aforementioned two sad kabochas), otherwise there would be some soup cooking forthcoming next weekend.

VII.
I'm not sure I agree with everything in this blog entry (I often find myself disagreeing with xykademiqz, the blog author), but the last paragraph is important (to realize for both kinds of people) and I absolutely loved the last sentence: I need to emit into the world, hoping the world receives some of it.

Now: bed. And finish that talk tomorrow.
Heh, so I guess I can now officially say that I've been to a dinner with a nobel prize winner? One with four people on a small table in a nice place in Cambridge (Boston), MA, that has since been damaged in a fire but hopefully re-opened (I really should ask my former colleagues about it).

Anyway, all the articles you read about Rai Weiss (who got half of this year's physics prize for his contributions to LIGO and the detection of gravitational waves) portraying him as the nicest person ever are true.

There is this article on Weiss in Science (from more than a year before the Nobel Prize and thus from around the time of my dinner) "Meet the college dropout who invented the gravitational wave detector" where it says: "As a junior faculty member, he says, he published little and didn’t worry about advancing his career. MIT’s Shoemaker says Weiss probably got tenure only for his teaching—and wouldn’t get it today." (He likely would indeed not. I've seen too many people go down this way. Great people who do not fit a certain pattern that is definitely not good for science as a whole.)

So here is my bit of the story: when we've been running a seminar series (with another postdoc who is now faculty there, huh ...), there would be the usual pattern: when the speaker was a big name, faculty would turn up. If they were not but a mere early-career researcher, they would not. Except Rai, who would often be there regardless of the seniority of the speaker and ask amazing question and generally be awesome.

I guess what I want to say is this: there are amazing people in science and I am honored to be able to have met some of them and glad that the right person won the Nobel Prize.
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