Our trip to Germany went very well, and we're now back in Urbana, working hard on grad student stuff. Cindy is still taking classes, working in the linguistics lab, and designing experiments of her own. I've been mostly auditing classes (3 registered, 1 not) and teaching Calc 3, which is a lot of fun, for all that I start teaching at 8am on TuTh. I've also been reading up on some physics - hopefully that'll help me steer properly towards the applied side of math.

As far as video of Germany... I now have a camera that shoots in full HD (thanks, mom & dad!) and I have about 6 hours' worth of Germany recorded. I cut this down to about an hour, and put the compressed version online. Unfortunately, the internet is not ready for 12gig/hour movies to be easily uploaded to a server, so I had to limit myself to ~1 gig of data, which really cuts down on the quality. Let me know if you want to see it in HD, and I'll mail you an SD card with the movie.

We also have lots of photos, and I'll put those up with a description within a couple of days.

Cindy and I are going off to Germany for the next two weeks, so hopefully we'll have lots of photos to post here soon. My parents also financed an HD camera as a birthday present, so I'll probably post snippets of video (unfortunately, HD takes up about 12 gb/hour, so no long hd videos will appear here).

A couple of weekends ago, Cindy and I went to the Oriental Institute at U Chicago. It's a small museum, but has quite a bit of neat objects from the middle east, especially the Mesopotamian region. Here are some pictures (click for bigger ones):

Leading up to the Gates of Babylon was a series of 100 mosaic lions. Two of them now live in Illinois: