This German lady totally ate it on her bicycle right in front of me.

Thump.

In related news, it is extremely hot in Munich, and the Deutches Museum doesn't have air-conditioning. Tomorrow we take the train to Frankfurt, and then it's back to Berkeley! I'm rather looking forward to my terriaki chicken.

Highlights one week in:
-discussing the calculus of variations for hours
-staying up all night preparing a presentation on virtual work
-hiking the austrian alps: breathtaking scenes in every direction
-hairy cows are so cute!!
-swarms of flies that materialize from nowhere and attack from every diretion.
-german food, german deserts, and german soft-drinks
-mein lieber schwan
-talking about pseudospectra three days early with only five minutes notice
-getting grilled by Oleg and subsequently fixing my naive conception of normality
-finally getting the 'big picture' behind hamilton-jacobi theory
-impromptu derivation of Lagrange's equations from Newton's law
-Martin's design of a novel piezo-electric actuator
-i need to get my act together and write a freaken thesis!!
-more than anything else discovering that people half-way around the world enjoy doing what i do

This morning I took the train to Munchen, and this afternoon I wandered around the Deutches Museum. This evening I'll take a long stroll around the city, and ponder tangles by streetlight. More highlights to follow.

Deutschland here I come!

What could Zidane have been thinking? And why did he even bother arguing with the ref? Delibrate self destruction. Ugly and human.

Asymmetry vanquished! For an entire YEAR my unicycle had been mysteriously listing to the left; that beautiful rhythmic pumping nirvana that usually sets in after about half an hour was constantly interrupted by a nagging twist. I checked alignment, I checked dimensions, but my unicycle was entirely even! Totally symmetric. Perfectly balanced. I began to suspect it was me. That one leg was stronger than the other, perhaps that I was somehow imagining everything. My mistake was that I never checked the unicycle in motion. It turns out that one of my pedals was slightly easier to turn than the other, and that this was enough to throw everything out of whack. The crank arms and pedal axes were well aligned, but bearing A was ever so slightly harder to turn than bearing B. I put in new pedals, and all my problems went away.

In celebration I cycled all the way to Hunter's art exhibit in Oakland. Thankfully I wasn't shot.

Darwin and Bryan have died and gone to heaven. They met their maker in flesh and full technicolor. I'm not religious, but I feel so moved- I imagine the ecstatic convulsions of the possessed, the raw spirituality of the encounter: according to Bryan, they could even see her sweat!