We got some new furniture yesterday. It is all inspected and kitty-approved.

We originally went to buy a dresser off craigslist, but when we arrived at the apartment, the girl said, "I'm moving and I don't want to take all this with me. Here, would you like a bed frame? How about a mirror? How about... " and we came away with a full truck load.

In Berlin there is a thing called "möbeltaxi" which is a taxi service with moving vans instead of cars. When you have a load, you call and they will come pick you up in about 15 minutes. Then you load your stuff, pay them 40 euros, and they take you anywhere in the city.

Now we have a guest bed, so you can come to visit us.

Botanischer Garten!

M was quite popular, 

especially with the coots.

The plants were fantastic, of course:

the cinquecento

Here is the smallest and cutest car ever manufactured. It is the Fiat 500 (or, if you are italian, cinquecento). In principle it has four seats, but the front seats are so close together that you can only fit two if they are touching, and the back ones only have legroom for a barbie doll. Also, it appears to be made out of aluminum cans and it probably has a go-kart engine. But look, it's a convertible!

Life with no car is super easy in Berlin. You can walk from one subway stop to the next in ten minutes so anywhere is five minutes or less from transit. And even though you're not supposed to, people bring all kinds of ridiculous stuff with them on the subway. Furniture, building materials, exotic animals... I saw an entire band of musicians, with drum kit, performing on a train!

suuuper creepy

Perhaps the creepiest thing I have seen in Germany. Perhaps, dare I say it, one of the creepiest things I have ever seen? It ranks high in any case.

This is in front of a Greek restaurant near our house. It seems Germans think Greeks are waiting to touch you inappropriately when you turn your back. Or maybe there is a Greek owner, and he thinks this is what his German clientelle wants to see?

He's watching you.

schwimmen

Today we went swimming after work. Actually it was our 4th time swimming in 6 days. It's so hot! We went to Krumme Lanke, which apparently is where all the naked people go. That was fine; it's nice that you don't need to hike around looking for a changing room. Here is a picture of the lake that someone posted on the internet (we forgot our camera).

You have to be a crazy person to be comfortable right now. The lady at the bank said that people were coming in on their days off so that they could sit in the air conditioning. And I have never seen so many adults eating popsicles.

We played beach volleyball yesterday! That was super fun. There is a place in Prenzlauerberg called BeachMitte. It's a tiki bar surrounded by about 50 sand volleyball courts. How many dumptruck loads of sand they had to move, I don't know. Anyway, it's like a pool hall, you just pay for your hour or two and they give you a ball. There were some Americans setting up a game for expats over the internet, so we went. They were really nice and we will probably play again next week.

Next to the volleyball courts they have the raddest parkour course I have ever seen:

In America this is one giant lawsuit (or lots of small lawsuits?) waiting to happen. But in Germany? Maybe they can get away with having no safety of any kind. Or maybe before you go up they give you a parachute.

Here is a commercial that is playing on German TV right now. I feel the reciprocal

way about my German.

More on the world cup later. Maybe.

4th of July!

Happy belated 4th of July!

M and I looked online for a group of Americans to celebrate with and found some people were hosting "Amerika Camp" and there would be games and costumes.  We went, all excited to meet some people, and it was...not like we'd imagined.  Even though people there were our age, they somehow made us feel 100.  Then another scientist, and his scientist wife, and her German parents, showed up and we hung out with them.  They were super nice and we had an awesome time.  They had also come for the games, which never happened, but we ate a lot of meat and were introduced to the Zuckermelone (Santa Claus melon), which is one of the best 3 melons I've ever tasted.  I bought one the next day at the Turkish market.

On our way home, we found that some things don't need translating:

I hope that you all had a great 4th as well, and if you have any pictures of fireworks, send them my way. It was very sad not to see any.

renting an apartment in germany

So, I'm not at all clear on what the longest word in the world actually means! Mieten is to rent, but that's all I can figure out. That is a little like what it was like to actually rent an apartment here... even though our landlords speak english, and I know a little german, there are a lot of special german words and special english words that defy translation. So we all just did a lot of smiling and nodding and laughing at each other and ourselves and then we signed some papers. Really that's all I know.

my work

Some people have been asking about my job. I think this is flattering but maybe they don't know how long I can talk about it. I will try to keep it short and not go on tangents.

Here is my machine.

It looks like my old machine but smaller. In some ways it is a lot more sophisticated, mostly because I didn't build it! It's a vacuum chamber with a jet source on one end. The source is called a jet because when molecules spray out, they get accelerated to supersonic speed.

The middle of the chamber has this glass chip in it. The chip has electrodes all along it in a little stripe pattern. When we put a charge on the electrodes, little traps form for the molecules. Molecules get stuck hovering 20 microns above the chip and sit there.

What we want to do is image the molecules one by one using a camera. This sounds impossible, but it's really quite simple--at least in principle! The way we plan to do it is to use a laser to make the molecules absorb energy. The molecule would rather give up that energy, so it spits the light back out. We just wait until after the laser fires, then turn on our camera!

So why do it? My boss says, "I don't know what it's good for, but it's fun." But I think there is a lot of potential for this kind of work. You never know when something will come in handy. When the guys built the first laser in the 60s everyone thought is was nice, but a little unnecessary. A curiosity. Now you can use it to get your eye fixed or that ugly tattoo removed.

I think trapped molecules on a chip can make a quantum-mechanical computer, or measure whether the fundamental constants of the universe change with time, or help people understand general relativity. We are just laying the groundwork now, figuring out the more mundane stuff before people can make the really exciting things work. That's what I hope anyway. We will see.

But in the meanwhile the whole thing is a bit of a kludge. See what I mean? These are how we make a magnetic field:

Bike wheels! They are wrapped in wire. When charged particles go in a circle, they make a magnetic field that points out of the circle's plane. Instead of a bike wheel, imagine a clock. When a positive charge goes clockwise the field points into the clock face. Why not out of the clock? This is one of the mysteries of nature.

Speaking of mysteries of nature, did you know that no one has ever found a magnetic monopole? On the surface this seems like a tedious thing to bring up, but I think it's fascinating. Here's why.

Electric charges moving in a circle make magnetic fields. These fields always have crazy shapes. The simplest shape anyone has ever seen is a dipole, like the field of the bike wheel. It points out of the clock face if you sit in the middle of the ring, but it reverses direction when you go outside the ring. Why no monopole fields? These are fields that point outward from the center, like a pincushion. Electricity has monopoles. Gravity has monopoles. Even nuclear forces have monopoles. Only magnetism doesn't.

But, it gets weirder.

It turns out that only one magnetic monopole, anywhere in the universe, forces all the electric charges to come in neat little integer bundles. Turns out they do come in integer bundles--multiples of e, the electron's charge. And that totally strange, totally implausible fact about electricity is exactly what experiments tell us. So, is there one magnetic monopole somewhere out there, quietly quantizing all our electric charges? No one knows. I hope there is. I hope it's in our house.

Lack of T posts - more than made up for

Some people have asked what things immediately strike a person upon moving to Germany from America. I have been compiling a list, as many things are more similar than one might think, and others things are inexplicably different.  I will add photos as I gather discreet ones.

1. There are a lot of very tall people here.  It's not uncommon for men to be 6'4" and women to be over 6'.  That's not to say that there aren't American-height people here, but M is frequently towered over.  Doors, however, are the same height, and people are always ducking under them.  

2. Women of all ages wear skirts or dresses, which hit at the knee or right above, but rarely pants, unless they are tailored ladies slacks.  It is not an exaggeration to say that I am the only women around to be wearing "man-pants".  And yet, no low-cut shirts.  A good proportion of women have short hair - basically, men's cuts.  The women look really good with them, so I cut my hair really short, too, and it's never felt better.  Also, in case anyone remembers how ugly the 2004 short haircut was, this time it looks nothing like that.  

3. While riding on a full train, people sit very close together, but when a stop comes and many people get off, people don't slide over into the empty seats.  Sometimes on a really hot train, I will get sandwiched between two people and I can't help but stare at all the empty seats across from me and wish I could move, but I am sure that would be considered quite rude.  This closeness happens everywhere.  While waiting at a crosswalk, another person might come up and stand half an inch behind you.  It makes me feel a little claustrophobic, but I'm sure I'll get used to it.

4. Some teenagers and adults dress like hoodlums, but aren't at all.  They stand there with gold chains, baggy shorts, low-riding baseball caps...and fanny packs, and will politely move for you to get past and give you directions if you are lost.  

5. People don't wait in lines very well, especially when going through doors.  You can be standing four inches from the door, but once you open it, a flood of people might trample you trying to get through.  It doesn't matter if it's just a door to the bank, and there's no reason to hurry, as soon as people get near a door, it's as though there's a fire and I have no idea why.

6. Walking down the sidewalk is done at the slowest pace on earth.  I cannot force myself to walk that slowly.  I don't know how they get to the doors so fast.

7. People can drink beer all the time, in all venues.  It's allowed in public, so people are drinking on trains, hanging out in the park, walking down the sidewalk...but it's always beer, never anything harder, and not in brown paper bags. 

8. Speedos on men - no...trimming...of the hairs sprouting out of the speedos.  My favorite look is the black socks, sandals, speedo and t-shirt over beer gut.  Really, tho, I do appreciate the relaxed attitude about body parts.

Kitty is Angry

Kitty hates the new apartment:

Actually, she really likes it.  She likes to hang out on the top stair and see all the goings-on below her.  She enjoys running up and down them and swiping at people that walk too close.

One day she woke up and there were pads on the windowsills:

She pretended to relax, but was still a little unsure.  Until the next day, when she realized they were harmless:

If she had any idea that we made them just for her, she'd never even look at them.  We put them up early enough that she seems to think they just grew there.  They are the same color as her to hide her shedding, but even though she looks black and white, all of her hairs that come out are grey.

She loves the balconies

because birds sing in the trees below.  The one weird thing is that since moving her over here, now when she smells eggs cooking, she runs into the kitchen and meows up a storm.  I don't know what's gotten into her, but who ever knows with cats.  That's it for kitty updates.  I know this is a lot of kitty, but she's the only thing at home all day that moves, so we hang out a lot.

See our beautiful apartment

I took some pictures of our apartment for you. Here is one!

That is our basil plant on our new balcony. You can see our little yard that we share with the other people who live here.

The cat wishes she could get down into the yard because there is another kitty down there. He's all black with a puffy tail. She saw him from the balcony and sat there meowing down. Here she is next to our new chair.

Our landlord is a very nice older man. His english is quite good. His son taught him that if he didn't know the word, he should just say "thing" or "stuff." These are his favorite words.

He came into the apartment to turn on our oven and he saw the chair. "Beautiful!" he said. "Most people get ugly stuff first, then get beautiful stuff." We didn't tell him that we got it at the flea market.