June 17

A lazy day today. I slept in until 8:00 (wonderful!), then had breakfast with Dylan and Sergei as usual. I went back down to the mall to check out the bookstore, and came back with more books—this time Russian translations of The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas (which I have read in the French, thanks to daughter Veronica, as well as in English translation), Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott, which is basically the Robin Hood story, and A Study in Scarlet, by Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, in which he introduced Sherlock Holmes to the world. Because I have read all these books in their native languages, I expect that it will make reading them in Russian a little easier. What is weird is that I find I can read quite a bit without a dictionary!

As I have been promising over and over, here are some more photographs from Russia, with love:

From June 15:

 The cauldron in the center of this picture has great significance in the history of the city, so this building, which is based on the cauldron, is an especially popular place for weddings (it is said to possess good luck).

 Same cauldron, almost the same view

This building, we  found out, is the Ministry of Agriculture for the Republic of Tatarstan. If you check out the main gates in the central archway, you will see that it is in the form of a tree in winter (i.e., no leaves).

 A slightly closer view of the Ministry of Agriculture building

 This monastery is under the control of the Metropolitan of Moscow, not Kazan. We did not go into it, but from the outside it is quite attractive.

And from June 16:

The Lewis students in the Butlerov Museum of the Kazan School of Chemistry. The lit sign behind them carries the images of the major Kazan chemists and their academic progeny. Practically every major university in the Russian Empire by the turn of the twentieth century is represented by these portraits. This image has been photoshopped to lighten it up, because the original was way too dark to se.e anything

  Same four students, same sign. Photoshopped, also.

 The entire group in front of the sign. Note how Sergei is doing his best stoic Russian imitation. A better picture in terms of brightness. No photoshopping needed here.

And again, without photoshopping. Notice how nobody has moved! You can only tell that these are different because of Dylan's smile and my mouth being more open (and yes, I know it's hard to find a time when it is closed!).

Here is a little something from today—a translation of a small part of the Markovnikov lecture notes where the atomic weights used for carbon and oxygen are being discussed. What is interesting is that here Butlerov describes the old system of weights (C=6, O=8) and the new (C=12, O=16), and opts for the old system. Two years later, he would be using the new (modern) values.

My rough first translation is:

Having adopted the law of four volumes, we find that all the complex groups that had been considered to incorporate 1 atom of C or O do not satisfy it. However, the 2-volume law does answer it, and for strict implementation of this [4-volume] law it remains just to double these formulas. This doubling is confirmed by many other analogies. If we adopt it, we find that the smallest the amount of carbon and oxygen in the compound occur if C = 12and  O = 16; if we take C = 6, O = 8, we will have a law that C and O enter into the composition of complex bodies differently—as pairs of atoms; S and Se are analogous to O. For water and carbon monoxide, therefore, the formulas are H₂O, CO or H₂O₂, C₂O₂­. We will use these last formulas, and consider C = 6, О = 8. Further, adopting the four-volume formula for all bodies, we find that H, Cl, Br, N, and metals also follow the law of parity with only this difference: these elements are mutually complementary (that is, each pair can consist of one atom of hydrogen and chlorine or one hydrogen and a metal, etc.), whereas carbon, oxygen and its analogs must enter the compound in an even number of atoms.

I must say that this copyist has the most beautiful handwriting, which makes the translation a much easier job!