Monday, and back to work. Женя and Саша have now completed the first round of digitization, and now Sasha, our technological genius, is doing the major cleaning up of the digital images.

Zinin's book on Chemistry, written five years before the Karlsruhe Congress established atomic weights and molecular formulas for simple compounds. Note the beautiful penmanship of the scribe who wrote this (it is not Zinin's handwriting)

The two books of Butlerov's notes have been an an absolute gem of a find -- they discuss hydrocarbons and alcohols a decade after the publication of van't Hoff's theory of the tetrahedral carbon, so we have a beautiful comparison available with what he wrote in his first textbook, the "Introduction to the Complete Study of Organic Chemistry" ["Введение к полному изучению органической химии," or "Vvedenie"]. The Vvedenie was written before anyone believed that it was possible to determine the physical positions of atoms in a molecule, a full decade before van't Hoff's theory, and these notes were written just over a decade later. We now have digital copies of both to compare.

Yesterday, we found a very friendly student who happened to be walking by the statue of the great mathematician, and former Rector of Kazan University, Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevskii. Naturally, we had to get our pictures taken with this great man.

With Lobachevskii watching over us

The weather here has been crazy -- every day has been at or over 30°C (close to 90°F), so we have actually been visiting Burger King regularly. They have free refills of soda, and ICE for the drinks. The sunscreen also, has been getting a workout.

My cardiologist, and the ladies at rehab will appreciate the amount of walking I am doing -- and none of it on level ground. Our hotel is close to the top of a ridge, so going for a meal invariably involves walking downhill, and coming back afterwards involves walking back uphill with a filled stomach. I don't know that I have lost any weight yet, but I am sure that I am burning fat. Nobody may recognize the new, sveldte me! Last night was dinner in an Uzbekh restaurant just down the hill: the absolute best liver and onions that time or money could buy! Gene also took my picture in the new, paper hat. Note how the fish-eye lens distorts the photograph in the stomach and head regions!

At the Uzbekh restaurant down the hill. We dined on divans with pillows, but the close quarters have led to distortion of the image -- my stomach is smaller, and my head is actually bigger and less asymmetric!

More translating tomorrow, as well as a trip through the Museum of Kazan University.