EuroTrip09

As you may remember, a beautiful mammoth fossil was discovered in Serbia a couple of months ago. I promised I'd try to go and see it myself on my recent trip to Belgrade. And I did get to see it. But the story is more fun than just that.... ;-) First, I tried to get in touch with Dr.Miomir KoraÄ, the Director of the Archaeological park Viminacium to ask for permission to photograph the fossil as well as to interview him. After a couple of e-mail addresses bounced, I got what I think is the correct address...but got no response. Once I got to Belgrade, I asked my contacts there about this and…
A year ago, almost none of my old school friends were on Facebook. Today, many are. Facebook statistics show that this past year has seen a huge influx of people, globally, of roughly my age who are not techies or bloggers, just normal people. Over the past 5-6 years, Facebook has evolved and changed quite a lot. Some of the best and most liked functionalities on Facebook right now are blatant copies of the best aspects of FriendFeed and Twitter and Flickr and YouTube and Dopplr and LinkedIn and other services (some of which are now already dead). As us oldsters are joining in great numbers…
As you know, I gave two lectures here in Belgrade. The first one, at the University Library on Monday, and the second one at the Oncology Institute of the School of Medicine at the University of Belgrade. As the two audiences were different (mainly librarians/infoscientists at the first, mainly professors/students of medicine at the second) I geared the two talks differently. You can listen to the audio of the entire thing (the second talk) here, see some pictures (from both talks) here and read (in Serbian) a blog post here, written by incredible Ana Ivkovic who organized my entire Belgrade…
As the Universiade is happening in Belgrade right now, the city is full of young people from around the world and there is a lot of cool stuff in town, including a variety of clay figurines emerging out of asphalt:
I gave a talk about Open Access at the University Library in Belgrade yesterday (listen to the audio here and see some pictures here). I was just on TV a couple of hours ago, on Studio B - I talk fast so I had time to promote PLoS, Open Access, blogs and tomorrow's lecture at Oncology Center at the University of Belgrade in just about 5 minutes on air. This was also probably a rare mention of Twitter and likely the very first mention of FriendFeed in Serbian media. I was wearing a PLoS ONE t-shirt which one of the anchors pointed out ;-) I am about to on the radio (Radio Belgrade 1) where…
As you may already be aware I am about to embark on a trip to Europe again. I will be traveling on Sunday and arriving at Lindau, Germany on Monday for the 59th Meeting of Nobel Laureates. The list of Nobel Laureates (23 of them) and the list of about 600 young researchers from 66 countries are very impressive. Of course, not being a chemist, I'll have to do some homework before I go (I printed out the complete list of descriptions of all of them to read on the airplane), learning what these people did to get their prizes and what the younger ones are doing hoping to get a Nobel in the future…