Above, last night’s amazing dessert at the 55th annual Lindau Nobel event. Topped by a hemisphere of sugar strands, this tower of alternating sorbet-and-ice cream looks like a tiny strange astronomy radar structure.
I am now in Lindau, five floors up from the beautiful Bodenzee (aka Lake Constance) in a lovely 19th century hotel-with-beach-and-boats. Frank Wilczek and 46 other Nobel laureates and more than 700 students from around the world are on Lindau Island doing scientist stuff.
Before jet lag sleepiness floors me, I got permission to share some info from my last-night dinner partner Hans Jornvall, who is head of the committee that picks Nobel laureates in medicine as well as a serious nature-lover and birder.
Hans told me something remarkable about Korea’s DMZ–a tiny strip of land with an unbroken row of North Korean soldiers pointing big guns into it from the north of it and South Korean soldiers pointing big guns into it from the south. Nobody lives there, nobody farms there, nobody hunts there–so it has gone back to wilderness, full of rare and endangered species. Nice to know there’s an upside to world non-peace.
Do not, however, go birding in Korea and then just stroll into the DMZ with your little Bushnells and Peterson’s. You will be summarily shot, by one side or the other.