the world has turned and left me here

the mother network

Guess I've been having too much fun recently to write it all down--but that's the way it should be, eh?

Last night I decided to tag along with Mark. He was meeting an old friend at a pub whom he hadn't seen in 5 years. The guy's name was Jan and he was a biophysicist who spoke astonishing English, a lot of fun to listen to. He just finished at Urbana-Champaign and will be doing his Phd at Stanford next. Mark was under the impression that Jan was still in economics, but in fact Jan chose between physics and economics a while back--it was just that all of Mark's information, including the news that Jan was doing consulting work in Munich for the summer, came from his mother, who heard from someone else's mother, and so on...who heard from Jan's mother. The joke was that this "mother network" was faster than any 10 megabit network in existence, perhaps achieved through some special quantum entanglement of their mother brains, but that the information was often inaccurate since the process of observing it introduced randomness, a la Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. But we also talked about the differences between America and Germany (naturally), on which Jan was strangely reluctant to generalize (for a physicist that is), except to say that perhaps Americans tended to more extremes--"there's a wider Gaussian," as he put it. And it was also funny to hear him talk about what's currently "in" in physics. Apparently high-energy particle physics is "out," and the way he said it was exactly the way you would say last summer's fashions are "so last year," or something.

Despite having a bit too much to drink and having to get up with the working world this morning, I felt energetic. There was a pseudo-deadline at work today so I stayed extra late working with my project partner, and after that we went to have a beer together. When I finally got back to the Siemen's parking lot it was 11:30 pm and the bike shed was locked up. No problem, I thought, shrugging off my backpack and climbing over the chain link fence, I'll just hoist the old infertilizer over the top and be on my way. This proved more difficult than I thought, as straddling the top of the fence in the dark and lifting the bike over from one side was a balancing act that I wasn't quite up to at the time. I was just about to give up and throw the hunk of metal over by hand when the gate quietly swung open--it had been open the whole time, even when I was straddling it and reaching down for the bike. Sometimes the solution is the obvious one.

And this weekend is going to be a Weekend, a weekend with a capital "W" that is. Tomorrow Mark, his visiting friends, Norman, and I are going to shop around in Munich by day and party in Kunstpark Ost by night. Then Sunday, Sunday with a capital "S" that is, is the World Cup Final match between Germany and Brazil. We're going to watch it on a bigscreen in the streets of Munich with all the other frenzied German fans. (At this point I expect that a "frenzied German fan" will be a normal German with a silly hat or something, but with an otherwise stolid demeanor.)