When Science Meets Video Games

So it has been quite awhile since I have updated this. I have been mildly more busy at work, but mostly I have just been lazy about it.
So things have still been going wonderfully. I am really enjoying all of the people I have met here, the middle school like drama from earlier seems to be fading, and I have my own real project to work on at work. So unfortunately it looks as if Switzerland can only be worse than here, because I cannot envision how I could enjoy myself more than I am now. But that is neither here nor there as one of the elements that makes this wonderful is how short it is. I do not know that I could do this much longer, but perhaps a little longer wouldn't've hurt.

So the weekend of the 1st of August we went to Strasbourg in france. It was a beautiful city that happened to have some of the worst looking buildings I have ever seen. Literally the law school looked like a facility only clowns could consider training in. Also nearby the Greenhouse was a quite disgusting unkempt facility that reminds one of scenes in Lost World when they find the abandoned labs. (In reality the fact I have made it this far without a crichton reference is impressive)

Last weekend, I went to Munich to meet up with someone who went to high school with my dad. We had met the family together last summer, and they invited me to come down. It was a fantastic weekend with friday spent at Hofbrauhaus, and another bar with students in an International Literature Summer School (a good balance to the scientists I spend every waking moment with). On saturday they have a german family reunion and fantastic BBQ. The food was all great and I likely consumed too much of it. I also was able to brush up on my table tennis and german since on of the kids was 9 and thus had not begun english studies (Yea!). Sunday we went to Alledamer Lake southwest of Munich. This was also wonderful as you could easily see the alps in the background (pictures will come soon). The lake was also relatively warm and I was able to swim around in it although my attempts to swim across were thwarted by being informed it was 3km across.

This week at work has gone very well. I have been productive on my own project and hopefully we will have some very cool/useful results soon. The highlight of my week being on Thursday when we broke our last tip for the AFM instrument and still had measurements to make. I was able to call Veeco in Mannheim, arrange to get the tips and fly over on my bike to pick them up (I dream about having a job that requires clutch biking skills). I also had to cleverly stash the sensitive tips (the last 2 in the region) between my head and my helmut so they would not be vibrated too much.

This all leads to the meaning of my title. The picture on the right is an SEM (a 1.5million dollar machine that focuses electrons through gold coated) image of some polymer that my friend made today. And I was just fantastically impressed how much it looked like the ghosts from mario. (or as they thought the Scream painting from Munch, I am clearly much less cultured)