The Dutch are exploring ethical approaches to euthanasia. I will take the doctors’ word that the person who was Ms. Schiavo was gone never to return and no person remained in the body they cared for in hospice all those years. But when the decision was made to end the artificial life support, there must have been a more humane way to ease that organism’s passage.
Cursed Republican christian militia. I’m getting my tinfoil hat out and I’m gonna hunker in the bunker.
How might the computing and communications world be materially different in 10 to 15 years, and how might we define a research agenda that would get us to that world?
In 10 years, any physical object should be able to tag itself in a way that links it to relevant information and functions in cyberspace. A context of scanners and online viewers will allow users to see this information in a convenient and interactive manner.
That’s just one of the more accessible conclusions found in the report of the End-to-End Research Group, part of the Internet Research Task Force.
Cross posted at Sandhill Trek.
Weeks and weeks ago I hassled Ben to be sure his passport was in order. It was.
Tonight I went to the file where we keep our passports because we leave the country in a few days. Not there. No problem, thought I with a sigh, looking at the messiest desk this side of tax day.
After the winter holidays I moved five or six linear feet of loose paper off the top of my desk to the dining room table. There was a certain crude order there and the piles of paper at least had roughly squared off corners. When visitors came, we shut the dining room door. We had a house guest for a few days and fed her in the kitchen. But I’ve cherished the clear surface of my desk and credenza, so I felt righteously miffed the other day when we were forced to move the papers back in order to use the dining room for a dinner… I know the guests would have been happy to eat in the kitchen.
Tonight came the time to get our papers together ("Ausweis papieren bitte," you don’t want to fuck up when you hear that request or it’s back to Stalag 17). I’ll admit it. My desk had more papers on it than the four or five linear feet from the dining room table, because current business has a way of growing around me. And I dimly remembered pulling the passports out of that file and then I invented a memory of putting them somewhere convenient. Or I should say i transposed the memory, because I had indeed done just that in September when traveling out of Bush’s USA to Canada we thought it would be smart to bring the passports. I mean, we knew the Canadians would treat us with respect and be generally friendly and not at all uptight and basically laugh at the concept of passports, "Does this look like the third Reich, eh?" But we had to get back into the country and we figured what with that basic paranoia we’ve been living with since the chimp-faced boy took office…. well, passports would be a good thing.
Up in Beth’s office there’s a wooden box with about six inches of bills and receipts and such. Next to that is a pile of insurance adverts, old checking statements, bundles of holiday greeting cards going back to 1924. After going through everything on my desk (and removing it a pile at a time to the dining room table where it could all be sorted more easily) I figured I’d find the elusive little blue booklets with the flattering photos in Beth’s relatively short stack. No luck.
I’m thinking it’s time for the long-story-short finale. No reason to go into the darker corners of my self doubt around whether this was just avoidance behavior because I didn’t want to travel, or whose fault it was that the passports were long since shredded following a Saturday morning recycle run or any of that.
On my dresser is a cigar box, memento of the November 7, 1979 when the boys were born and I bought some of the nastiest, hugest stogies available cheap in San Francisco. The best thing about them was the box. But I got a kick out of behaving like I was in a fifties sitcom and handing out these cancer bombs to the boys at Bank of America and I still have the box.
The passports weren’t in it of course. But while I was going through it I heard the front door downstairs open and close and a few minutes later Beth was back with the prize. The damn things had been in my glove compartment since the Canada trip.
How might the computing and communications world be materially different in 10 to 15 years, and how might we define a research agenda that would get us to that world?
In 10 years, any physical object should be able to tag itself in a way that links it to relevant information and functions in cyberspace. A context of scanners and online viewers will allow users to see this information in a convenient and interactive manner.
That’s just one of the more accessible conclusions found in the report of the End-to-End Research Group, part of the Internet Research Task Force.
The pole saw is trapped in the shed or I would have finished the job. Some combination of laziness and neglect led me from the path this winter and I didn’t clear the snow away from the potting shed door. The door is on the north side of the shed. The snows were deep. A drift added to the problem. Now that we are thawing out, that door is locked shut by an inconvenient ice dam. Nothing for it but to wait for nature to take its course.
Yesterday I attacked the pear tree in the "formal garden." Formal garden is a label that signifies intention perhaps but does not actually reflect present reality. Nevertheless, there is a lawn to the south of the house bounded to the north by a bank of mature lilacs, to the west by a thick hedge of white cedars, to the south by the neighbor’s lane, and to the east by an ecletic mixed hedge of spirea, forsythia, euonymus, wygelia, and a lone blueberry with a tall habit… for a blueberry. There are rose bushes in this space, and peonies. There are two large beds – one for cut flowers, and one the remnant of a perennial bed that went bad. Near the bed is a dangerous gooseberry that the racoons – undaunted by the bush’s thorns – always manage to strip long before I get a single ripe berry. Along the neighbor’s lane are a couple of Russian olives, a redbud, and three or four flowering shrubs whose names escape me right now. There are also some fruit trees: an ornamental crab apple with a beautiful cloud of white blossoms coming soon; a sweet cherry; a sour cherry; and the pear tree in question.
The pear is probably thirteen years old. I planted it one of the first years we were here. It has a tendency to shoot huge branches straight skyward, and I have a tendency to let it. Over the last few years the weight of the fruit has lent these branches a more droopy aspect. Some of them had snapped under the burden of their fruit in a late summer storm.
Last night I put things right with the pear tree, and when the ice melts, I’ll get out the pole pruner and finish the job by heading back the tallest leaders. There is something wonderful about light yard work in the spring with the occasional cock pheasant crowing, mourning doves courting each other, red wing blackbirds trilling and a couple of dogs running this way and that while the kitty sits at a distance supervising it all.
I think a low stone wall along that southern edge beyond the pear tree would draw the whole thing together.
It’s a Heart of Darkness thing. Who will be Kurtz to my Marlow? Robert Cox quotes Ed Cone regarding the center left politics of the three WinerCons:
Why don’t political conservatives come to BloggerCon? Robert Cox noted their absence at Stanford, and at his blog. As the person who invited Glenn Reynolds to be a panelist at the first Harvard BloggerCon, I can say it’s not an absolute truth, and it’s not intentional to the degree it is true. But the lack of conservative participants is striking. So I asked Cox, why don’t they come? It’s free, you know it’s going to be interesting, it certainly doesn’t lack for publicity… We agreed that geography is one factor, with the events to date held in dark blue Cambridge and the Bay Area, but people do travel to these things… From Robert’s response: “I go into the event knowing that pretty much everyone is left and lefter. I suspect some people on the right just assume (incorrectly) that this means they won’t be welcome.â€
The idea that Dean or Kerry were voices from the left is worth challenging, but compared to the fundamentalist christians who elected Bush, I suppose they seem pretty liberal with their emphasis on choice, peaceful alternatives, environmental concerns, and individual dignity. Trust me, they are both centrists and that’s why the Democrats lost.
But that’s a story for another time.
I’m going to BlogNashville. No Hunter Thompson I, but rather a truth seeker with a spark of wit and a love for the creative. The Glen Reynoldses, the LaShawn Barbers will be there with their axes to grind. Oliver Willis intends to attend. If the game is to map web publishing to journalistic standards, then we can tack against the wind from the starboard and set a course toward objectivity.
What an opportunity to hear some new voices and meet some new people!
Lesley Winner is now Leslie Winer. She’s still a winner of course.
This is the time of year when I go crazy outdoors with the loppers and the clippers and the pruning saw. Victims since Sunday include one Amur maple, lots of red osier dogwood growth slowed (I hope – it’ll come back from the roots of course), three apple tree, one pear tree, an apple sapling treated brutally whacked back, and a bunch of low hinging locust branches that just happened to be on my way to the orchard.