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So, this week school began again. I was a little bit apprehensive about beginning Swedish class again, since the class takes so much time every day, but so far it's really felt good to be back. For one thing, I feel busy again, which is a nice change after doing very little for a few weeks. Also, I think my little vacation from Swedish class really helped some Swedish sink in and get sorted out in my brain, so it feels more comfortable now. I think our teacher, Thony, is good too; he's quite quick and thorough in correcting any errors we make, including in pronunciation, which ought to be quite helpful in improving our Swedish.

The first lecture of `Applied Non-commutative Analysis' was quite amusing; the class reminds me of the chaos & fractals class back at berkeley, with an enthusiastic professor eager to make his personal favorite topic interesting and useful to students from a wide variety of backgrounds. In the lecture the professor even got side-tracked into talking about his cosmological beliefs and personal theories concerning God, then brought it back onto topic through a pertinent digression on why one gets lost in rome! All this in a class on non- commutative analysis. I have high hopes and I think it will be quite exciting and interesting. I hope we come to some high-powered mathematics instead of just looking at interesting pictures, but I'm confident that we will. Hopefully the time chosen for lectures will work with my schedule!

Particle Physics ought to be an informative class as well. The class seems to be quite `descriptive,' with no calculations so far. This is, of course, a hue difference from professor Clarke's class, which was entirely based on calculation (eg, derivation of the various theories and results). The class actually has a taste of a "briefing" to it (which is to say, "need-to-know overview"), which I like. Today (I'm writing this on Monday), for example, we covered `experimental methods.' There are only approx. 10 of us in the class. The lecturer is a Russian woman who looks strangely like Jody; she works sometimes at CERN and is very much `pushing' the CERN summer student program.

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