Hi Michael,

now that I received my licentiate degree, and the days got very short in Sweden at the Yalda feast, I am frequently again spending the evenings in my moms home, watching movies. We use to select movies in alternating order, one day it’s me bringing a rather novel film, another day mom suggests one that she knows from her youth.
Yesterday she brought one that was quite popular when she was student, in the wild 70s. The title is Accident, and it is a quite complex story of students and teachers at an Oxford college. The main character, Stephen is an introvert philosophy professor contentedly married to Rosalind, but fearing emotional stultification he yearns for an affair with the enigmatic Anna, played by Jacqueline Sassard. In a typical midlife crisis situation he realises that this could either revitalise or ruin his life. Simultaneously, he is locked in a battle of duelling egos with his student William, whose youthful vitality he envies, and with his friend Charley, whose media prowess and sexual success he covets. The story probes a conflict between intellect and emotion, where an educated elite, who should at least know their own minds, seem incapable of understanding or controlling their inner passions. It is a study of materially comfortable but morally bankrupt people on an emotional collision course, culminating in an accident that will haunt the hero for the rest of his life (as its recollection at the end of the film implies).

Joseph Losey, the director and Harold Pinter, who wrote the screenplay, are graphically and beautifully detailing the things about England they loves — or, at least, those things about Oxford that they find delightful and serene.

You have the look out of the college study window of a gentle philosophy don into the courtyard below, where the green grass is kept neatly trimmed by a placid goat. You watch the main characters punting on the river, with its lazy ripples and its stately swans and see them playing tennis and cricket, lolling through a misty afternoon.

Or, going out into the country, where the don who is his moody hero lives in a pleasant house with a wife and kiddies, the director loves to show everything. He loves the way the light falls in the morning on the wide-board, deep-grained floors. He loves the distant sounds of train whistles and the drone of jets high in the sky above the open fields. He makes everything look so mellow and lovely with his color cameras and his way of dwelling idly upon them that you’d think there’d be no fly in the ointment of this most gracious English world.

But there is a fly in the ointment—a very small one—that has been put there by the screenplay’s writer, Harold Pinter.  It has to do with the dons vagrant longing for the beautiful Austrian student Anna, to whom he is officially the tutor, but as soon as he learns that she has been the mistress of another don, feels deeply cut.

The fact that this other don is not only one of his oldest friends, but is also an aggravating rival because of his playboy allures and success as TV commentator, doesn’t help matters any. Furthermore, our fellow feels he’s getting old.

All this is moodily remembered by our hero, whom Dirk Bogarde plays, in a night just after a terrible automobile accident has happened outside his door. The girl he desires, who was driving, is safe but her companion has been killed, and this companion was another of the don’s students—a young aristocrat to whom the girl was engaged.

Does that sound a little complicated? Well, it isn’t—and it is. It isn’t because, actually, the story that Mr. Pinter and Mr. Losey have to tell is simply a frail exploration of the wistfulness and loneliness of this don. It is a conventional study of the minor anxieties of a man who has everything to make him happy, and yet he isn’t. He is sad.

But it is complicated from the viewpoint of the person watching the film, because no clues whatsoever are given to the nature of the girl. She is beautiful and quietly mysterious as played by Jacqueline Sassard, but we have no indication of why she so lightly switches men. Her function in the picture is to set up an amoral mystery and serve as an unattainable object of desire for our sad-eyed don.

What we discovered when talking with my mom about the different characters and how they developed during the plot of the movie was the discrepancy between hidden emotions and verbal communication. From the very beginning you could guess that both Anna, the student, and Stephen, the teacher have the most deep feelings for each other, but none of them speaks out. They not only hide these feelings from the other acting person (the colleagues and friends), but from each other as well. You can only tell from a particular view in their eyes and from the sound of their vioces, when they talk trivia. One scene shows this pretty clearly: During a lazy garden picknick, Anna is laying in the sun, when William, her “official” partner asks to join him for a walk. She refuses, saying she’d prefer to stay there on the sunchair, so William goes for a walk alone. After a minute she tells Steven how much she likes this afternoon in the garden. He nods, and almost casually replies that he is about to go for a walk. And suddenly, merely 5 minutes after telling William she wants to stay there on the chair, she begs Stephen to take her on the walk with him. This short dialogue might have gone unnoticed by most of the audience, but to me it was the indication that you could guess the real feelings and wishes of the characters only indirectly, never by their outspoken words.

Hope you are doing fine
Take Care
/ghazal

Two examples of speakers who permanently turn their face away from the audience, thus failing to build a good relationship with the people in the lecture hall.

 These scientists did it beter by looking most of the time towards the audience.

Dear Michael,

All the big stars, i.e. those with a mass exceeding the sun’s mass by a factor of 1.3, gain most of their energy by a hydrogen-fusion reaction that involves a catalytic cycle, known as the Bethe-Weizsäcker or CNO-cycle.

During this reaction cycle,  protons (i.e. hydrogen nuclei) are added four times into a cycling reaction that converts carbon through various nitrogen and oxygene isotopes back to carbon, while releasing helium as the net reaction product and, of course, the enormous amount of energy which fuels the star.

This cycle in its logic resembles the citric acid cycle, during which all aerobic organisms convert energy from nutrients (i.e. carbohydrates, fat, and sometimes proteins) into ATP.  Similar to the Bethe-Weizsäcker cycle, successive transfer of protons (in this case released from water) are an important feature of this energy conversion.

But beyond this similarity in the reaction cycle, the CNO-cycle (providing stars with their enormous energy) and the citric-acid cycle (providing energy to living organisms) are connected by a much more fundamental link:  The Bethe-Weizsäcker CNO cycle is the first reaction in the formation of our universe that produces Oxygene and Nitrogene from Carbon and Hydrogene (Carbon is directly produced by 3-alpha fusion of Helium nuclei).  And it is these three elements, namely Carbon, Oxygene, Nitrogene and Hydrogene, that are the basic elements of all living matter. All Carbohydrates are made of C, H and O, as are all fatty acids. All proteins are made of C, H, O, and N  (with a trace of Sulphur).  And essential element that is missing is Phosphorus, an integral constituent of DNA and RNA. But in molar amount, it is much less than C, H, N, and O.

So we have to acknowledge that the main constituents of our body (and of any other living organism as well) were a by-product of the stars engine.

Or as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young put it in their songs lyrics:

We are Stardust

Well I came upon a child of God, he was walking along the road
And I asked him tell where are you going, this he told me:
(He) said, I’m going down to Yasgur’s farm, going to join in a rock and roll band.
Got to get back to the land, and set my soul free.
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Well, then can I roam beside you? I have come to lose the smog.
And I feel myself a cog in something turning.
And maybe it’s the time of year, yes, said maybe it’s the time of man.
And I don’t know who I am but life is for learning.
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong,
And everywhere was song and celebration.
And I dreamed I saw the bomber jet planes riding shotgun in the sky,
Turning into butterflies above our nation.

We are stardust, we are golden, we are caught in the devil’s bargain,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

————————————————————————————————-

Ghazal, my Dear,  I always believed that you came from another star. What you wrote above shows that you brought from there some interesting ideas with you.

Take Care, my Dear

Michael

PS:  I think we also have something in common, in our dialogue that is going on for about 3 years now.  Whereas I always tried my best to misunderstand you, to fill the empty spaces in your messages with a meaning that perhaps was never there, you in contrast always managed to not understand anything from what I wrote. When I imagined that there are words between the empty spaces in your letters, you decided that the long sentences from me were void of any meaning.  How long can this go on ?

Nahid Persson-Sarvestani, a former activist of the student branch of the Tudeh party and in the late 70s among the demonstrators against Shah Reza Pahlevi, now lives in Sweden as a film-director. In her 3 parts documentary, she interviews Farah Diba, the last empress of Iran, who now lives in exil in Paris.

part 1

part 2

part 3

Farah Diba speaks with a broken voice, and Nahid Persson, although with a politically active background, seems to be more interested in the private life of the Shahs widow. The Shahbanou, however, is a professional when it comes to any media contacts. She only repeats the details of her life with the Shah, how they first met, how Reza Pahlevi asked her to become his wife – stories, she already told too often to be published in the yellow press. Sometimes, Farah Diba tries to shift the conversation more into a political and historical context, asking Mrs. Nahid Persson-Sarvestani on which side she was on during the 1979 revolution, the communists Tudeh people, or the peoples Mudjaheddin, or the violent islamists of the Fedajin. Persson apparently fears a clear confession at this point, since the blunt anti-Shah activities she was involved in prepared the ground for the most inhuman, hypocrite and stupid regimes ever seen in recent history: the so-called “Islamic Republic of Iran”.
So these two woman who 35 years ago were on opposite sites of the battle line in pre-revolutionary Iran, now find them self in exile, one in Paris the other in Stockholm, and both see with bitterness their lost dreams. If the two would be ready to give up their wounded pride, maybe they would find out how much in common they had in their youth. Both were dreaming of a modern and liberal society, with secular education, open to the rest of the world, liberated woman and social and economic prosperity. But each of the two, the aristocrats and the socialist, both were wrestling for leadership in this movement. And both were loosing everything. What arose after the Shah and his family had to leave in 1979, and the Tudeh for a short moment thought their triumph is in sight, was the worst nightmare of an extreme conservative, religious, anachronistic and brutal dictatorship of uneducated and corrupt Mullahs.
The people of Iran have to suffer since 34 years under a totalitarian regime, that tortures, rapes, kills everybody who is not following its islamic hypocrisis and dares to question the political regime of the mullahs with their basidj thugs.
It would have been nice to see in the documentary that both, Farah Diba and Mrs. Nahid Persson-Sarvestani would finally admit that the two blocks they belonged to, the progressive Tudeh party and the Shahs court, did a historical mistake by not finding a way to cooperate and anticipate how much their dreams had in common.

Thank you, Ninelia, for pointing me to this gem of political documentation.

If you want to read more of Comraids Concubine thoughts, go to her blog in english or in persian.

Take Care, enjoy the evening
Michael

My Dear A.,
I send you my best wishes to persian New-Year. Did you received my present that I send you by post ? When I packed the parcel I cut my fingers with the scissors and had to put bandage on and now I can only use my left hand. I went with Shava to the mountains on Saturday, because with an injured finger the only proper thing to do is to go out for a walk in nature. We would have liked to stay there till Sunday, but I have no time because I have to prepare for the lecture at college. The students of the new curse will arrive tomorrow, and they want to be entertained properly. I hope you doing well and work hard to become the next Bill Gates or J.v.Neumann.
In love, your sister ghazal

Now have a look at the answer I received instantly from his program:

“Dear Sister ghazal,
O, I did not knew there was persian New-Year. What present you send, I did not received anything. O, you cut your fingers ? Interesting, why you need the scissors for this ! Did Shava liked the mountains ? What else did you do on Saturday ? So the students will come. I hope they will have fun.

Take Care
/your brother A.”

And now, what do you think ? Do you find that the program is doing a good job ? I know my brother was never very keen sending long letters to anybody, but at least he put his own (crazy) ideas into it. But the program that he wrote virtually only repeats what I wrote in my original message. I think it is better to carry on writing down our own thoughts, even though the answers may take a bid longer.

Hope everything is fine with you, Good Night.
Ghazal

————————————————–

Ghazal my Dear,
So funny to read your experiences with your brother. Thanks god, it is just a technical project that sends you such standard and formal letters in response to a mail. The quality of a machine-based artificial intelligence was actully tested by one of the earliest and most influential computer scientist (Alan Turing) by setting up a similar device that you and your borther were using. Turing suggested, that an experimentalist should do two verbal dialogues in parallel behind two black curtains. Behind one of the curtains a human person should sit to conduct a dialogue with him, wherease behind the other curtain the artificial-intelligence machine had to be placed. If the experimentalist could not tell after a certain time where the talking machine was and where the person was, than according to A.Turing the machine has passed the criteria of having indeed artificial intelligence.
But I could imagine, that this also depends a lot on the experimentalist. Simple-minded people might get fooled very easily, they might even think that a mail-response from your brothers program comes from a real person. Other people who read and wright a lot are probably much more critical. I could imagine that you are extremely critical. I think it will not be possible for any machine to fool you. You have somethink like a seventh sense to tell what is real and what is fake.

There were several attempts among IT freaks to beat Alan Turings test. They were called Chatter-Bots and among them ELIZA was probably the most famous. ELIZA was such an artifical language dialoge program developed at MIT. The exciting thing was that it should play the role of a psychoanalyst, talking to a patient. When Weizenbaum developed ELIZA, it was the time of Flower-Power, Hippie-Music and mind-extending drugs for the young, but the elder generation discovered the healing power of psycho-therapy. I guess this was the motivation for Weizenbaum designing ELIZA as a psychatrists chatter-bot. But even though ELIZA impressed some people really a lot (they were told that the doctor has a bad flue and therefore talks to them from behind a courtain), dedicated linguists that used the Turing Test could tell that it was only a machine.

I hope you can sleep well and don”t carry on endless dialogues with a machine in your dreams.

Take Care, Ghazal,
Michael

————————————————–

Hi Michael,
a last remark before midnight: Do you know why the computer program by Weizenbaum, that could participate in seemingly meaningful dialogues, was called ELIZA ? There was the character of Eliza Dolittle, a simple, uneducated person with a very basic language in G.B.Shaws play “Pigmalion” (later in the funny musical “May Fair Lady”). Two university professors, one of them was Mr. Higgins, made a bet: Higgins promised that he will “re-educate” Eliza Dolitte with brute force, give her not just elegant clothes but also a new language. And he will guide Eliza Dolittle to a reception of the high society and nobody should recognised that before she was selling flowers on the market every day. Guess what happend ?

Take care
/ghazal

————————————————–

Hi Ghazal my Dear,

What is wrong with a girl that sells flowers all day long ?
(See, now you caught me responding to you in the answering-machine-style .
I promise I wont do it again. But don”t expect me to read G.B.Shaws “Pygmalion” now to answer your question. It is already after midnight, and I have to go for a walk with our dog.

I”ll tell you tomorrow about what I think about Eliza Dolittles qualities as a chatter-bot.

Take Care, Good Night
Michael

Ghazal my Dear,
Have a look at the gel. Are you happy with it ?
I promise I did not manipulate anything on it: no make-up, no hair dye, mascara, no plastic surgery. It is real, and therefore it is beautiful (just like you are).
M.
PS: RNA I”ll tell you in a moment. Stay tuned !!!!

——————————————————————————————————–
8:44 p.m.

thank you for the gel!!! very kind of you. still the prop1 exon2 JF1 show a lot of bands.and is a bit weak. and the first three bands being prop1 exon1, i see two bands for each sample? or is it the primer dimers? and on the last samples on the first row (being gpx3 exon1), i see many bands or is it good because of the thick band?
on the second row gpx3 exon3- some extra bands as well. or is it okay? so i can use this for the sequencing tomorrow?

i am looking forward to hear about the rna. this is exciting i have to admit!!!

good luck! i will try to look at my thesis now. so i do something useful as well.

——————————————————————————————————–
9:48 p.m.

Ghazal, my Dear

So happy to have brain RNA now (one JF1 one FVB, each high concentration).
So sad to sit here alone. Nobody to celebrate with. Its boring alone, even the results are o.k.

——————————————————————————————————–
9:54 p.m.

michael!!!! yey!!! looks really good! im happy too! you did a great job!! so are we going to kill more mice? and then do the extracation of RNA your way?

thank you michael, for putting so much time and energy for this project.

you should go home and get some rest.

——————————————————————————————————–
10:06 p.m.
Ghazal dear,

On 15.09.2010 21:54, Ghazal F wrote:
> michael!!!! yey!!! looks really good! im happy too! you did a great job!! so are we going to kill more mice?

I already have thyroids from two mice each strain. I start now with the extraction. Hope of equally good results. Lets see.

> and then do the extracation of RNA your way?

Its not my way. Its the classical way (it stinks, it is more time consuming, but you see at the end works more robust).

>
> thank you michael, for putting so much time and energy for this project.

Its our project. Don”t forget what you put in it: 5 month lonely life , the people you love so far away. Nobody here to kiss you before going to bed.

>
> you should go home and get some rest.

Where is this, home ?

Take Care, my dear (and don”t you walk around on empty streets in the darkness any more).
Ghazal, I got mad if I think that something happens to you. You remember you talked about Sweden and
that raping happens there more often. Thats in fact one of the main reasons I always got a shock when I hear or read that you are going back.

Michael

——————————————————————————————————–
10:56 p.m.

> I already have thyroids from two mice each strain. I start now with the
> extraction. Hope of equally good results. Lets see.
michael, we can continue tomorrow?
you are doing too much. i also want to be done with the labwork this week but dont want you to do all this and stay for so long in the lab.

> Where is this, home ?
your home, where your family is and your bed:)

> Take Care, my dear (and don”t you walk around on empty streets in the
> darkness any more). Ghazal, I got mad if I think that something happens to you. You remember
> you talked about Sweden and that raping happens there more often. Thats in fact one of the main
> reasons I always got a shock when I hear or read that you are going back.

i did not walk in the night,. it was light. i am scared to walk alone at night. and yes, i find munich as a safe place. safer than sweden. i need to walk sometimes, instead of taking bike i walk sometimes, its nice. nice feeling when you walk alone with your own thoughts.

hope u are doing well in lab and that u are going home soon…
——————————————————————————————————–
10:51 p.m.
On 15.09.2010 21:54, Ghazal F wrote:

> michael!!!! yey!!! looks really good! im happy too! you did a great job!! so are we going to kill more mice?
Who is going to kill mice ? You ? Maybe you first practise this on me. But be aware: You can kill me with your gun, but not the mice. If you hold a gun on me, I wont move away, cause I”ll be struck again by the glance of your eyes. Not so the mice: They can smell the danger and they run away !!

Ghazal, I got the feeling we can speak open to each other, can”t we ?

TAKE CARE

Michael
——————————————————————————————————-
10:58 p.m.
noooo i am not killing anyone.
yes we can talk open.. or how do you mean
——————————————————————————————————–
11:04 p.m.
Ghazal my Dear,
Just let me start the Reverse Transcription. (I do it in a PCR cycler, can be programmed to do it and after 1 hour cooles down automatically).
Then you have the cDNA tomorrow morning and can start with PCR right away.

On 15.09.2010 22:58, Ghazal F wrote:
> noooo i am not killing anyone.
> yes we can talk open.. or how do you mean

I”ll come around and tell you.

——————————————————————————————————–
11:09 p.m.
come around? i will sleep now also my flatmate is sleeping. so see you tomorrow. thank you again for the cdna!!!!
——————————————————————————————————–
11:24 p.m.

On 15.09.2010 23:09, Ghazal F wrotei:
> come around? i will sleep now also my flatmate is sleeping.
I”m not going to wake up your flatmate !!
And you said you are going to work on your thesis the whole night through ?
Did the thesis made you already such tired ?

> so see you tomorrow. thank you again for the cdna!!!!
This, of course was very, very open !!!
And this is what I like you for so much.

Then good night, funny dreams, and at least you can imagine that I kissed you before going to bed.

Take Care

Michael
——————————————————————————————————-
0:00 a.m.
Ghazal my dear,
Are you really already asleep ? This was a fast thesis writing !!
Hope I haven”t scared you.

Sleep well
Michael
——————————————————————————————————–
0:04 a.m.
was trying to sleep. when i saw your email of what you expected of me, to write the thesis, i couldnt sleep. will try to read a bit more now…

good night
——————————————————————————————————–
0:11 a.m.

Ghazal my Dear, please no no, shame on me, I didn”t ment it.
You do everything right. The night is yours. You work the whole day already. Please stop to spoil the best hours of the day with the thesis now. Sleep, please.
I”m also almost done. Don”t worry, I won”t pass by. Maybe another time, not today. It would be silly to first drive away, just to come back later.

I like you anyhow. I will always do.

Michael
——————————————————————————————————–
0:20 a.m.
if you get hungry i have a sandwich in the fridge.
hope u will be done soon so u can go home..

good night

——————————————————————————————————–
0:44 a.m.
Ghazal my Dear,

Sorry for the assumption that you could kill me. Your last e-mail shows how much you care about me.
I found one sandwich. Hope it is the one that you offered: It is brownish, with sliced boiled eggs on it and some letuce, right.

Please tell me it is the right one, it looks delicious.

Something I hope you are delighted (just for your intellectual satisfaction) is the next RNAs: You see they are all above 1µg and ration around 1.8.

I can only speak for myself, but I can not remember to had such a nice day as yesterday when we explored the Olympia-Area. You can call me simple-minded, because I count these few hours in an ordinary park landscape so high. But you know, Ghazal, it is not that I haven”t been to more thrilling places. I”ve seen New York and San Francisco and New Orleans and Chicago, I”ve been to Tokio and Paris and Rom and whereever one has to go. I went Skiing in the Rocky Mountains and in the Swiss Alps and had an apartment in London. I have seen the Rolling Stones and the Who and Pink Floyd and Sherley Bessey. I can say, it all was a sort of interesting and exciting perhaps. But for non of these things I could say the same as for the hours I have been together with you here in this small-town of Munich:
That my life would be so much poorer without it.

I hope that you feel the same, I”ve got the impression that you do. I think it is alright, if we both profit from it.

Sleep well, my dear

Michael

PS:: It is a great idea to do the Pecha-Kucha talk about different sleep phases. I”ll try to make a vidoe shot of our dog while she is in REM-phase.

…………………………………………………………………………………..

hi michael,

im fine. hope that u are fine as well.
yes these 2 and half more months will pass by quickly, time passes by quickly in general.

i read a bit about sleep. its interesting. if i can do it its good, or otherwise i do midsummer in sweden.

have a good night.

/ghazal

……………………………………………………………………………………
Ghazal my dear,

Do you also have the intense thunder and lightning up there in Unter-Schleissheim ? Do you like it ? I begin to enjoy this unbound release of power.
Unfortunatly, our dog fears thunderstorm a lot, and therefore she probably wont pose today as a REM-phase model. But I”m absolutely positive, I will catch her asleep untill Monday.

Are you alright ? Please send me short note.

Michael
……………………………………………………………………………………

hi,

yes we had some thunder and rain, but its over now i think.
poor dog that is afraid.

im alright and will sleep now, good night
……………………………………………………………………………………

Hi Ghazal,

I red your message only now, after 1 a.m. You are perhaps already in your first REM-phase. It must look amazing, since your long eyelashes for sure will emphasize the flickering eye-movement dramaticallyl. You should also place a video-camera on your bed, so you would probably got the most tremendous demonstration of human REM.
By the way, I told our dog that you feel sorry for her fearing the thunderstorm. She got much quieter right away. And since she felt very grateful to you, she agreed to show some dog”s REM. What is funny, a dog not just moves the eye rapidly, but also the whiskers and the ears. I recorded everything, so you might include it into your talk.

For the rest of the night, I wish you a nice ballance between REM and non-REM phases.

Take Care to wake up in the morning during a non-REM phase. It is much much better.

Yours Michael

It is always difficult for me to drop you at the end of the day in front of the guesthouse and drive away, but I think it is better for you to recover. I already exploited so much of your emotions during the evening. I hope, that it was not just me who enjoyed it (very egoistically, I have to admit), but that you also liked the few hours walking around and chatting.

I hope you sleep well, my dear

Michael

…………………………………………………………….

Hi Michael,

Thank you for showing me Munich. It was really nice. I like munich actually, but not the munich-police. thank you also for the stereo. havnt opened it yet. will open it tomorrow. take care and have a good night!

/ghazal

…………………………………………………………….

Thank you, Ghazal, for showing me the world with new eyes. It is strange, I”m always talking to much when we are together, as if I would know already everything. But in fact, later on I got the feeling that it was actually me who learnt much more from you.

If we both benefit from the time together, what can be bad about it ?

Sleep well , my dear

Michael

Why are you so silent ? Are you such busy ? Or have I done something wrong ?

Send a short mail, please, so I know you are alright. Life is too short to be angry for more than 5 minutes, you know.

Have a nice evening, a relaxing night and a bright morning.
Yours Michael

……………………………………………………………………………….

Hi Michael,

No im not angry. i say that too, u should be happy cause life is too short.

so everything is fine with me, im just relaxing at home. will try and burn some music and then sleep.

the movie seems really good and sad. know my mum would want to see it, but u said its going only this week right? maybe i ask omid, maybe he wants to see it as well.

have a good night and see you tomorrow.

……………………………………………………………………………….

My dear Ghazal,

Sorry for answering too late, you are probably already asleep (it is half one in the morning). Just want to tell you how much I was relieved reading your message. I got so much used to read a few words from you in the evening, that I have problems finding peace if you don”t write.

It”s a nice idea to ask Omid for coming with us to the movies. He is a very educated and open-minded personality, and always thinks much deeper
than the rest of the mankind. I like him a lot, he very much reminds me of student-mates I met when I was at the university. They were from Jordan or from Africa. They were the most intelligent of all of us, they knew the real hard parts of physics (like quantum-mechanics and quantum-chromo-dynamics) from dreams. But on the same time, they had the broadest horizon of other interests, philosophy, psychology, arts, history, politics. It was always a pleasure to spend hours with them, and it never became boring. It always was sport, like exercises for our minds. What was particular amazing, that we had very often completely different views (for instance about the role of Israel, or what we thought should be the relation to girls), but we remained very respectful to each other, we even sort of loved each other (at least this is how I recall it). Omid is this sort of person, whom one always can trust 100%. For instance, if I once would have to leave a beloved girl with somebody to take care of her (((((maybe while I have to go to a conference for a week or into jail again ha ha ha, don”t worry, Ghazal, nobody will accuse you that your MSc thesis was supervised by a prisoner)))), I think I would ask Omid to look after her.

Sorry, my dear, I hope the incoming mail does not wake you up now that it is already 1 a.m.

Otherways, I hope you have a nice morning and can look forward onto a bright, nice day.

Michael