Great picture - it reminds me this 15 years ago: http://airandspace.si.edu/ceps/etp/mars/pathfinder/MPF3D.html

Don't tell a scientist something about deadlines ;-) But was it on purpose to write about a sort of panic on Towel Day? (I have to deliver a short presentation/film about Gamma Astronomy by Friday - but it's fun :-)

This reminds me the famous answer Michael Okuda gave in a 1994 TIME interview: "And how does the Heisenberg compensator work?" - "It works very well, thank you". http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,981892,00.html

Many thanks for this wonderful text. To be honest, I know LA only as a visitor for three days (about a year ago - see my blog) and never lived there. But it's one of the most impressive urban areas I've ever seen - and I enjoyed your comparison to a circuit board very much! My first trip to the USA went to an atomic physics conference in Chicago in 1999 - and I was just overwhelmed (the conf. was held in the great old Drake Hotel). Later, in 2002/3 I was living in Manhattan (KS) for 13 months (as a postdoc at KSU). It may sound silly - but if I had to attribute a specific sound to that time it's just a train horn (something I was not used to in Germany). To some extent this sound makes me a little homesick though I enjoy living in Germany very much (your remark on the sound of a far-off diesel locomotive just reminds me that). I wonder what fascinates me about LA so much - is it all the stereotypes, vista points, landmarks, film industry etc.? One particular somehow hidden aspect may be the fact that I grew up in the Ruhr metropolitan area http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhine-Ruhr (Düsseldorf btw is part of it) and despite many differences in its urban structure its size and population is similar to the LA metro area. A landmark of LA which I liked very much is the Griffith Observatory with it's planetarium. I know this sounds geeky but the planetarium of Bochum (the city where I grew up*) was some kind of my second home - but that's another story ;-) *) Ready for another coincidence? The district "Langendreer" of Bochum where I was living is nicknamed "LA" (which is quite ridiculous since it has a population of only 30000).

What you missed by not learning German: "Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth." (Mark Twain)

Thanks again for your great performance yesterday. You didn't give any impression of being out of your comfort zone. Btw - I had the honor to interview David Saltzberg during my USA trip http://tinyurl.com/6flqn5a last year. You can check it out here: http://tinyurl.com/26coze5