Linguistics, Dancing, and a Few Good Books

01 February 2003

Well, we've now had our second shuttle explosion. As I think about it, it was inevitable: they had run over a hundred missions, and the law of large numbers came up and bit them. We can only hope that this will cause a full review of procedures and such, to lower the chances of this ever happening again; that's one of two possible outcomes. The other is that the space program is essentially cancelled, or at least left to be completely underfunded (even moreso than it already is), which would amount to the same thing.

I'm actually really encouraged by Bush's little speech this afternoon. It was an excellent speech, and it made me confident that whatever else is on his scary agenda, cutting the space program is not his plan. Indeed, I got the impression that he intends to fund it even more. Perhaps he's young enough to have caught the idealistic man-reaching-for-the-stars bug that swept the youth of the nation during the 60s space race. The older generation of that time saw the space program as a lot of things---a tool, a race, a battle---but growing up with space travel as an achievable reality engenders a completely different view towards the space program, I think.

And if we use this to prod us into beefing up NASA, developing a next-generation shuttle, returning to the moon and reaching for Mars, well, then at least we can find a silver lining in the tragedy.

"Look -- Switzerland has twice as many guns as we do; Japan is far more of a pressure cooker; and Northern Ireland has been fighting a low-level civil war for the past 50 years. All of them have lower rates of homicide than the US. At some point, there's got to be a cultural difference." --Michael Kimmitt

Posted 5:26 PM [+]

31 January 2003

Just finished going through all my mail from break. (Boy howdy does a lot accumulate over a month and a half.) Two Christmas cards, a thank you, about four bills (including one past due---oops), two alumni magazines, two dance newsletters, assorted mail on my investments (doing just as bad as everyone else's, sigh), the ticket for my trip to Carleton next week, and about thirty pieces of junk mail asking me to sign up for a new credit card or some new feature from my existing credit cards. I really wish junk mail didn't exist. I mean, do they seriously make money off this? Ugh.

"How am I going to achieve my foreign policy goals with $36?" --Michael Kimmitt

Posted 8:06 PM [+]

30 January 2003

I'm tickled that when Dave "Dr Single" Singleton decided to start blogging, he decided to put quotes at the end of each entry. And he's admitted to reading this blog (Hi!), so I have to assume there was some influence there. :)

Anyway, I'm back in Providence after a month and a half of nationwide hijinks. To recap, I drove home in mid-December, did the family Xmas stuff, went to a four-day mega-party (involving gaming, sushi, and an actual New Year's Eve party) in Champaign-Urbana that I've dubbed NYEpalooza in the faint hope that the name will stick, drove back home for a few days, then to IMSA where I taught a conlang intersession for a week, then immediately flew to Honolulu to visit Mike and Tami for a week, then flew back and geared up for a couple of job interviews, from the second of which I departed directly for Providence, arriving today (well, yesterday now) at noon.

I'd also like to note that I used the grammatically correct but dreadfully awkward phrase "from the second of which" in that last paragraph, primarily so I could preserve the whole thing as a single run-on sentence. This probably has a lot to do with it being one in the morning, not that that's all that late.

Anyway, I have a lengthy summary of observations from my week at IMSA, which I do mean to post soon, and dozens of pictures from Hawaiʻi, which I hope to at least intersperse with some narrative before putting them online. We'll see, I guess. But now that I'm back at school, I'm going to try to get back to this blog's glory days of one-a-day updates.

He ʻOLE WĀWAE koʻu.

Posted 1:12 AM [+]