- It's summer in the city again - last week saw the first really hot days in Frankfurt. One of the many nice things about Frankfurt is that it's easy to escape to the countryside - the meadows and fields at the foot of the Taunus hills for example are a great place for a after-work walk,
with the city skyline in the background...
Both photos have actually been taken from the same place, at around the same time. If you look closely, you can see the shadow of one of the towers projected onto another building, a phenomenon one can witness in Frankfurt at sunset around the summer solstice.
My time in Frankfurt is coming to an end soon, and preparations for the move and all the things involved are one of the main reasons for my sparse blogging activity lately. - The week also saw the record average price for gasoline so far, with €1.60 per litre, or $9.40 per gallon, which makes commuting to Heidelberg quite expensive. I'm quite happy that my old Twingo is content with a bit more than 5 litres per 100 km, or, eh, has a mileage of about 45 miles per gallon.
I've always found the concept of mileage a bit confusing, not just because of the conversion to strange units such as miles and gallons, but also because of the reciprocal involved. Fortunately, there are now online tools to ease the conversion, and even Google does the job.
It seems that the use of "miles per gallon" can mislead when searching for fuel efficiency - that's because the differences of inverse quantities are not very intuitive. You can check this out for yourself with an (a bit silly...) interactive quiz. But I'm still surprised that this deep insight has made it onto the pages of Science. - Speaking of Science, this week's edition of the magazine is a Special Issue with reports on results from the first MESSENGER flyby at Mercury last January (subscription required, unfortunately). Which reminds me that I owe someone a longer post about the flyby I should publish soon.
Have a nice weekend!
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