news you can use

Apparently, the swine flu has hopped species again, in a rather disturbing trend from pigs to humans to poultry--just turkey for now, I think. We both are supposed to be study orphans today, but I've been thinking about catastrophy. I would not want to worry H, since he's very excited about going to the States in late September as am I. Forecasts of doom put things in perceptive, albeit a skewed one, and sort makes worrying about hotel reservations and the price of tea in China seem rather irrelevant. It does not put a damper, however, on the fun of planning.

avatar

I was saying to H the other day that perhaps I should revisit the whole idea of the travelogue--that I ought to write about what happens on a daily basis, where we go, what we do. I do not think, however, that I am ready to committ to the non-sequitir fully yet. I might reveal unintentionally dark connections: let's see, we visited the monument and camp at Buchenwald and then a co-worker surprised us with a giant (a truly industrial-sized bushell) sack of plumbs from someone's orchard. Rather, I was making an observation that some else has surely made before about designers' tendancy to royally bundle things up. It's never just a mobil telephone--but a whole suite of communication and recording devices. It's rather nice to be able to hold that much computing power in one's hand--I just dislike the move to bump everything to the top of the food-chain, to evolve everything into a personal-computer because of everything it makes redundant and what you have left over that does double-duties. I have a TomTom and a handy and a portable DVD player with a broken screen in my car that all play music files, since my radio has been busted since 2002. A lot of things tend to move in this way--beefed up to the point of super-saturation, financial markets, coffee shops, environdiscount stores. The community I work in seems a little bit like that as well--existing mostly as a make-work program. The people working to serve this small base probably out-number the population of military personnel , and their jobs are only perpetuated by staffing the services they give each other, until there are enough retirees and civilians living in this ghetto that the military side is an after-thought.

gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus

While in the background planning for a grand trip to my alma mater for my ten year class reunion, I've subscribed--friended--a strictly on-line university. Perhaps a diploma mill--ah good old DMU, but I have confidence in the operation. The only thing that has so far struck me the wrong way is how the virtual campus' open house was peopled with clever bots. The conversation strings that ran in the open house were not a lot convincing, meaning to appear like scads of energetic, bright new students, but did not pass the Turing-test. I don't care to be crowded among bots but I think on-line attendance is a part of earning credit. Maybe one of my laboratory projects could be devising a Johan Bot that could earn the degree for me.

pete and repeat

Apparently former US President Bush appealed to France's formerly leadership to join the war in Iraq (Iraqi Attacky II) on the basis of biblical prophesy--a mission to repel the apocalyptic agents Gog and Magog in the Holy Land. In this light, the backlash of the America public against all things francophone--dumping fine wines and serving Freedom Fries, is particularly disturbing. Make-believe weapons of mass destruction are almost a more compelling argument.