Well as much as Dimitri impressed me when I met him two days ago, today I got to spend the whole day talking with him and he just blows me away. I am so inspired.

He loves to digress and tell stories to spice up otherwise dry technical material. The weirdest story he told me was about the room I work in. I work in the high-bay of the Scyllac building, which used to house a theta-pinch fusion reactor experiment. This reactor included an enormous capacitor bank for its pulsed power needs. One day, apparently, there was an accident and someone fell into the capacitor bank.

"Aah! I guess that's probably a zero percent chance of survival type of event, right?" I said.

"Oh no," he replies, "there was nothing left. He was totally vaporized."

SO... some poor guy was totally vaporized when he fell into the capacitor bank in the room where I work. That's not one you hear everyday...