I continue to marvel at three very common assumptions that I find being made all the time, most recently by my friend Oskar when we were talking late into the evening last evening:

1. Science has made life progressively better for us.  People in the past had things so much worse off.
2. Whatever problems we face, science can and will find a way to solve ( Read more... )

Estimate 24km today, all but the first two km and a bit at the end above treeline with strong continuous wind; really took the energy out of me. Also gave me a bad headache and, of course, despite the dry conditions and air temperature, a touch of hypothermia.  At least it seems not as bad as I'd feared.  Forgot and made my tea inside the (fairly ( Read more... )

So, to continue and expand upon that rant, a bit :-), I thought I might profile a few important figures and moments from my life ( Read more... )

So... to spill a little and explain a bit of what I was going through this summer (and am going through still as I write).... Without exception, every single person I have been physically or romantically close to in my life, and quite a few friends besides, have either walked away refusing further contact or said things that I found spectacularly ( Read more... )

The sound-and-light show was entertaining, if not especially informative, full of over-acted dramatizations and references that passed me by.  I sat with a couple, originally from Delhi, and their 100% American :-) grandchildren, who spoke not a word of Hindi -- hence the English version of the show ( Read more... )

Today was my one and only day on this trip of playing pure tourist -- and what more obvious place to do it than Agra, which is even more of a tourist trap (arguably) than Rishikesh! I snapped close to a hundred photos, bought things I wasn't intending to buy (bookends, a carved marble (?) elephant), hit the two biggest sites, and am going back for ( Read more... )

I like AC2 (2nd class AC), I decided.  You definitely see more of the ordinary people, and things are reasonably secure: my main concern.  Only problem I had was figuring out how to get food, once I figured out it was (of course) available for sale.  The Meals on Wheels folks would come through so quickly, calling out what they had... in Hindi.  It ( Read more... )

Back to writing in the notebook and transcribing later; the laptop is acting convincingly dead.  I used it as normal last evening and put it to sleep; when I woke up this morning, the eternally blinking white light was off, and nothing would rouse the machine.  I plugged it in to multiple outlets, tried removing the battery for ten seconds and ( Read more... )

Woke up this morning to the train running (officially) two-plus hours behind schedule.  Apparently it had stopped and sat, somewhere, for an hour in the middle of the night; my compartment mate did not know why.  Even though the train driver drove the train like a bat out of hell for most of the day, we still managed to arrive Kolkata... *three* ( Read more... )

A melancholy mood at the start of my final week in India:  a trip my feelings about which have been dominated by the unexpected events the evening before I left, and the job news I received shortly after arriving.  I have never been so close to settling down in or to abruptly leaving my adoptive country of the past six-and-a-half years. To steal a ( Read more... )