Oh man. I'm so miserable today. ughnnnn.... the Rockies were slaughtered. The weather sucks. I'm sick as can be. I feel like my internal organs are going to explode. I must have the worst immune system in history*. I took a midterm... that was probably the highlight of my day. My advisor sent me a half-encouraging, half-snarky email, which bounced back because my email was full, so he had his secretary print it and put it in my box. I have to do two fluid mechanics homeworks tonight in order to make up for last week, and I'm supposed to go with my friend to buy my Halloween costume, which I'll probably never get to wear...

Because I'll probably be dead by then.
Let's exchange "probably" with "hopefully".




*not counting hundreds of millions of people including people with AIDS

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I'm working.

On the way home on the airplane I sat next to a man who seemed to have a lovely wife and horrific grandchildren. He had just finished a grand tour of Europe, including several cruises around the Baltic and the Mediterranean.

He was an electrical engineer (well, he was before he retired, and he's been retired for a while). He graduated from UDubb, and then moved down to Arizona in 1965 because his wife had gotten a job there. She might have been his wife at the time but I'm not sure. She was sitting across the aisle because they both wanted aisle seats. He packed all his stuff in his car and drove down over a weekend, having no idea what he was going to do when he got there. On Monday he went and got an interview, interviewed that day, and went to his first day of work on Tuesday. The rest, as they say, is history.

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Je suis in Paris maintenant. Je travaille.

On the way over I sat next to this pencil-thin girl from Eastern Europe (not really, she and her parents moved to Connecticut when she was a little girl). Then she went to Brown University as an undergraduate (pre-med). She graduated pre-med then took a year off before medical school when she worked in a lab in Chicago. In Chicago she got into the art scene, and she ended up going to school for sculpture and media visual arts. Many of her projects have focused on the similarity between many city systems and the systems of the body. While she was getting her MFA she worked briefly on an art fair that was coming to town. That's when she met Michel, a Parisian student and lover of art and philosophy who was in town for the week visiting and whose friend also worked for the art fair. After meeting her he extended his stay a few days and then went back to Paris. She figured it was a fling, but she couldn't forget about him. He couldn't help but come to visit again and the feeling only grew stronger. She learned that her school offered a semester abroad in Paris and she took it. Turns out the school she went to was really bad, but by that time she was in love with Michel and he with her so it didn't matter. She learned french. As she was finishing her MFA he was asking her to move to Paris and she did. She found it much harder than she thought it was going to be to get a job; they got married almost immediately and then it was much easier. Now she works designing websites and art projects, and she's working on an art project on the Parisian metro and its similarities in appearance and use to a biological system. They've been married for over 6 years now.

Seth, a row behind me, sat in the window too, but next to a sweaty guy who was in the middle of requesting a seatbelt extension when we arrived.

Luckily the flight wasn't full and the fellow moved across the aisle where he snored a great, complicated snore about once every 4 minutes the whole night through.

Qu'est-ce qu'on peut faire?

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So this morning when I was having a meeting with the commander of Apollo 15 and talking to him about what it was like to do geology on the moon...

oh? what? what did I say? Yeah, I just casually mentioned that, did you see how I did that? But it's true.

I have a sweet job.

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Yesterday I went to a talk about the ethics of bioengineering. We're talking about real Gattaca stuff here. Who should decide what a child's genes should be? The parents? The government? One of the speakers began the lecture by talking about the failed social experiments of the 20th Century. Communism, socialism, fascism- these were all experiments in the 20th century in different forms of government. All of them ultimately failed, most with catastrophic consequences. Why? Because they tried to change (through re-education, gulags, and what-have-you) the fundamental essence of human nature. At the end of the century, most of the world has come to the view that democracy is the only truly stable form of government, because it works with the nature of mankind instead of trying to change it. Professor F described this as an equilibrium result.

However, the advent of bioengineering and genetic engineering has ushered in a whole new era of thought- namely that we now can change the nature of mankind. So... shall we try the whole thing over again?

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