Skulls in the Stars

So I’ve been posting a little light this week because I’ve been in San Antonio on business.  Now that the work is done, and I’m heading home, I thought I’d post just a few pictures of the highlights…

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I’m in Chicago, visiting family for the holidays with my girlfriend, and we decided to hit the Field Museum of Natural History, one of my childhood haunts. I thought I’d do a little ‘photo highlights’ post about the things that I found most intriguing this time around…

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I’ve been in a ‘magnet mood’ since I did my big post on the physics Nobel winners a week ago, and I thought it would be nice to show one of the most spectacular applications of magnetism - magnetic levitation (maglev) trains. China opened the first high-speed commercial maglev train line in the world in 2004 in Shanghai. I was there this January and my colleague set it up for us to take the train to the airport on departure.

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There was a nice article in the Washington Post today (h/t to Americablog) about the conventional wisdom view that ‘Old Europe’, i.e. the European Union, is stagnant and decadent. One hears this most from conservatives, who tout the transcendence of the free market system over those ’socialist’ systems. The article, by Steven Hill, points out that many of these views are unjustified myth:

The European economy was never as bad as the Europessimists made it out to be. From 2000 to 2005, when the much-heralded U.S. economic recovery was being fueled by easy credit and a speculative housing market, the 15 core nations of the European Union had per capita economic growth rates equal to that of the United States. In late 2006, they surpassed us. Europe added jobs at a faster rate, had a much lower budget deficit than the United States and is now posting higher productivity gains and a $3 billion trade surplus.

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I’m going to wrap up my discussion of the Ukraine with a collection of pictures, some panoramas, from its capital and largest city, Kiev. Lots of big pictures below the fold… (Note: some of the pics have been ’squashed’ to fit the frame.  You can right-click on the pic to view it in its original form!)

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One thing that strikes you about traveling in Eastern Europe is that everything seems BIG. Buildings, monuments, and other things are not only built large, but somehow conspicuously large. For instance, here’s a photograph of one of the government buildings in Kiev:

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So I was sitting in my Kiev hotel, watching local television, and I came across the following television show:

This is undoubtedly a Ukrainian/Russian television show. Does it look familiar at all?

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So I forgot the cable which powers my battery charger. I’m wandering the Ukraine, I’m low on power, and there’s lots of stuff to take pictures of that I’ll likely never see again.

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Well, I’m back in Amsterdam, having finally gotten out of the Ukraine. I thought I’d post a number of random observations about the country, the people, and the culture, in addition to posting a bunch of pictures.

Overall, I had a very good trip. The meeting in Chernivtsi, Ukraine went extremely well, and I developed a number of important new contacts, planned new collaborations, and made new friends. I was even surprised to have one of the ‘distinguished founding fathers’ of singular optics, who was presiding the session in which I spoke, stand up and declare that my talk was ‘the best of the conference’ (I was tempted to immediately point at a friend of mine who had spoken before me and shout, “In your face!”, but I didn’t think people would realize I was kidding).

The Ukraine is an interesting country in that it is one that is struggling with modernity and what you might call ‘civil society’. Though of course many people there are good, civilized sorts, there is also below the surface for many people an attitude of ‘every man for himself’ which doubtless comes from a society which has been poor and oppressed for a long, long time.

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Hi everyone (anyone?)! I just thought I’d write and say ‘hi’ from Kiev. I have to pay for a half-hour of internet anyway, so I’m filling the time!

Kiev is a magnificent city, and I’ll have many pictures to put up when I get back. I walked pretty much the entire central downtown area, which means my legs and back are extremely sore.

I was pleasantly surprised that I could find my way around easily. Once I got going, I only had to glance at the map every once in a while to make sure I was on the right track, and I never made a wrong turn. I even found a particular metro station that I wanted to write about! (More later.) I guess my previous time in Kiev stayed in my memory.

(To my girlfriend: see, I DO have good direction sense!)