Photo 1: Dinner at the Cutty Sark again
This is the scientist-of-the-day with whom I had dinner tonight. Andy is from Birmingham England and is the world’s authority on baseball-sized foraminifera that live on the bottom of the ocean!
Wait a minute: Foraminifera are single-celled organisms. There are baseball-sized foraminifera at the bottom of the ocean? I did not know that!
This is the joy of science. The world is full of really neat things that you don’t know about. Andy, I am sure, was in turn bewildered some about the mathematics of silicoflagellate cell boundaries … (wait a minute, there is a mathematics of silico cell boundaries?)
It is a wonderful world.
Photo 2: Sign on the building
While on the subject of science, this is the sign on “my” building. The “Nauk o Ziemi” is Knowledge of the Earth; the “Nauk o Morzu” is Knowledge of the Ocean. I wear two hats, study the earth and study the oceans.
Photo 3a,b,c: Rocks in front of building
I will generally avoid repeating subject from my Fulbright blog, but here I will make an exception. This is part of a display of six big rocks in front of the building. The one rock is a pegmatitic granite, and the other a gneiss, I think. There is great education in rocks that are just sitting there. I have been asking for years if we can get some rocks in front of Folsom Hall.
Photo 4: Energy of a Coke
Here is something for my ENERGY students, and on the side of a Polish 250 ml bottle of Coke: The energy from consuming this drink, is 8400 kJ (kilojoule), or 2000 kcal.
Photo 5: Russian visitor
There is an almost constant come-and-go of international visitors. Here we are again at the Cutty Sark. On my left (your right) is Maxim Kulikovsky, a visitor from Russia who is here to work on a paper in the diatom lab. Max and I co-authored a paper (on Eocene age silicoflagellates from Russia) several years ago. He and colleague Horst Lange-Bertalot named a diatom species after me a couple of years ago.
Photo 6 More visitors to the museum
I have gone downstairs to make some coffee and find another group of kids visiting the museum. This happens every school day.
Photo 7: THE COFFEE POT
There is absolute proof of the existence of God: how else could we have coffee? (Humans of course developed from a well understood natural process, but coffee needs additional explanation!). The coffee pot here grinds the coffee just before brewing, and makes better coffee than our drip pots, unless perhaps you use freshly ground beans. The machine however takes a fair amount of maintenance. The faculty take turns each week to decalcify the innards. But a good cup of coffee is, well, a religious experience. I come to worship regularly.
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Photo 8: Jurassic Park pinball machine
This is a JURASSIC PARK pinball machine. Took my 2 zlotys very quickly. A pinball dinosaur hunter I apparently am not.
Photo 9: Groceries again
So, another grocery run. Ten eggs, ham, cheese, rolls for breakfast sandwiches, two blocks of camembert cheese (very popular in Poland), four 330 g yogurts, a good beer (7.8%, 500 ml), 2 liters of good fruit juice, bananas and some packaging tape. Total about $14.