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Let us mourn in silence with this simply awesome gut-wrenching rendition by an American, Emmanuel Ortiz …
“Before I start this poem“
Before I start this poem,I’d like to ask you to join me ina moment of silencein honour of those who diedin the World Trade Centreand the Pentagonlast September 11th.
I would also like to ask youa moment of silencefor all of those who have beenharassed, imprisoned, disappeared,tortured, raped, or killedin retaliation for those strikes,for the victims in bothAfghanistan and the U.S.
And if I could just add one more thing …A full …

Lake View (Finland)

Originally uploaded by atanu.

Testing 1 2 3. Photo posting from flickr testing.

The phrase that comes to mind when I consider the move from movabletype to wordpress for this blog is disruptive change, that phrase so beloved of those worthies who write those content-free fat management books. I think the change is nice but it has disrupted all kinds of things. Links internal to the blog are no longer functioning and one gets the highly informative 404 error message. So I have had to spend hours manually fixing broken links and categorizing posts. While doing that I re-read bits I had …

A few days ago I wrote about an educational model involving intergenerational transfers. Now I came across this BBC story which is an example. Quote:
. . . CIDA City Campus – has become a remarkable success story, gaining blue-chip sponsors, a campus and a reputation for innovation. Five years later, it has taught 1,600 students.
Apart from only being available to poor students, who get a virtually free education, it is unique in what it expects from its intake.
Students have to help run and maintain the university buildings, and in their …

In my list of heroes, Dr. Jane Goodall appears around the top. Her work among the chimpanzees of the Gombi National Park is the stuff of legends. She is the founder of Roots and Shoots — the Jane Goodall Institute, whose goal is “to promote care and concern for animals, the environment, and the human community.”
Lessons for Hope: Activities to sustain yourself and the world around you, is the kind of work she inspires. From their website: “Lessons of Hope is produced in collaboration with the Center for …

About 36,500 days ago, the man I admire the second-most published a paper called On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. He was a patent examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in Berne. His name which I take with deep reverence was Albert Einstein. That paper introduced his theory of relativity to the world. For the record, a few lines from the introduction to the English translation of the paper:
. . . the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the “light medium,” suggest …