What I Like
(this page is currently under construction)"Physics isn't a religion. If it were we'd have a much easier time raising money."
--Leon Lederman
My father's family came from Lodz, Poland. Not many of them survived the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz. This perhaps explains my mal de vivre. I like Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs de Mal", or the novels of Dostoyevsky and Camus. I also enjoy Van Gogh's paintings (like the one entitled "Iris" portrayed here). Movies in the style of classic American film noir are my favorite. I love listening to 1950s jazz. I should have been a beatnik :-). As I get older, however, my tastes have moderated to more light-hearted fare--since I've determined that I don't have to seek out pain and suffering (i.e., it manages to find everyone in the end). By the way, I attended a physics conference in Lodz in 1993, and took the following pictures.
My life isn't all existential angst. Besides requiring at least one shot of espresso every day, I also love to play Ultimate Frisbee as much as possible. Here is a picture of the gang I used to play with on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Francis Park in Washington, DC. On this particular day there was a snowstorm, but that didn't stop the gang. What stopped me from playing this particular day was that I had a stress fracture on my leg and pneumonia :-). Otherwise, I would have been out there too. Nowadays, I play mostly with another bunch of great guys near my home in Bethesda, MD almost every morning I can.
Alaska. A great place to be a guy (even though there aren't enough women there :-) Arctic skies and beautiful scenery and bears and moose and "aurora borealis". Here's a picture of me a few km from Gakona, AK. I'm on top of my truck after setting up some electromagnetic sensors for a physics experiment. Here are some more details on the ionospheric heating experiment we were conducting. I took a series of pictures of Alaska Espresso Kiosks scattered throughout Central Alaska, and uploaded them here. These pictures were invited for inclusion into Flickr's CoffeeBoxes group. Here are some more pictures I took of Alaska.
Here's a picture of me in New Mexico, aptly called "The Land of Enchantment", with a gun after some target shooting at the range. I used to work and live in Los Alamos (in Northern New Mexico), and still have a lot of good friends there. It was great living near Santa Fe and the Jemez and Sangre de Christo mountain ranges. I really like the people, the summers, and the easy-going way of life I had there. I still visit there frequently.