italians online?

"Three-fourths of [Italians] hesitate to access the Internet because they don't know how to use a computer". (Hard to believe... unless the Italian population is quite elderly). So someone interested in making digital info physical created the Phymail Box.

I ruefully agree with the inventor that "the computer forces you to stay there because it offers you everything", but I'm not sure that having access to email anywhere I go is the solution. The upside of having even a PowerBook is that you can't sport it around in your pocket when you should be enjoying the world around you.

Another interesting tidbit: the Poste Italiane allows customers to compose an email on its website and have it delivered to the recipient like a paper letter.

Italians don't seem to mind wasting paper.

paradise

It's funny how people continue to live in their hometowns or motherlands despite the obvious drawbacks of each area--hurricanes in the southeast, blizzards in the northeast, flooding by rivers, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes in California. The majority of Californians don't even have earthquake insurance. Take a look at the aftermath of the Big One in 1906 (the Legion of Honor exhibit catalog is available at the bookstore of the Nederlands Architectuur Instituut, of all places). But is there any place in the world without major drawbacks? Can we ever be safe from mother nature?

pny oops

No wonder the crowd at PNY 2003 seemed to consist of teenagers who should have been at a hip hop party instead of old-school ravers. I was hoping the electronica scene would be much better in Europe, but it still seems difficult to find anything but mainstream parties unless you have connections.

Anyone interested in coming to STRP in Eindhoven with me?

blond and badass?

Jessica Simpson snubs Bush to the great dismay of the Republican party by refusing to meet with him at a National Republican Congressional Committee fundraising event, but nowhere does the article state what her party is. Nevertheless, I'll reconsider my low opinion of her for that show of spunk.

Robert Kenney's killer was denied parole for the thirteenth time... but his lawyer sounds even worse off: "His longtime attorney died last year after numerous failed attempts to get his client a new trial." Heartbreak can be lethal too.

There are plenty of fish in the sea, but what do we really know about big numbers?

mystery manuscript

The uncrackable Voynich manuscript (MS 408, Yale Library - Beinecke) is now available in facsimile edition! Aspiring cryptographers, get yours while supplies last!

I picked up a postcard of a dude carrying a crook with a bell in Antwerpen yesterday, and it led me to a fun website that encourages folks to "think." For example: Elvo's example of deep thinking.

So there are free wifi hotspots...in Brussels. Big help to me. And the city is looking into implementing wider access. I love the last line explaining WiMAX: "It is similar to WiFi in concept...online dictionary Wikipedia said." Either someone figured out how to interview a non-living, non-physical entity, or someone's English sucks.

miao!

Pets outnumber people in the United States by about 60 million, and they are becoming increasingly pampered. I was once horrified by a little dog being walked by a college-age girl in Los Angeles that had been shaved, except around its neck, to look like a one-foot-tall lion with a ribbon in its "mane." The poor creature can never regain its dignity. Why have comically tiny short-legged dogs that have to race just to move at a walking pace and are therefore evolutionarily impractical in the wild become such popular pets in recent years?

spiegel

Mirror mirror on the wall
Haven't I any email at all?

Furniture surfs the web. Leave it to the Japanese.

haar

Why are human beings the only animals that lack fur and yet can grow really long hair only from their heads? Other creatures must find our appearance freakish.

I admit I need more sleep, but nobody's going to buy the claim that "Sleeping only six hours a night for a week will make you as tired on that seventh night as if you'd had no sleep at all" from the CNN article To sleep, perchance to live. Sure as hell I know what it's like to not sleep a wink, and it's real different from how I feel on a regular Sunday.

eligible and successful

"It's a fast, comfortable way of meeting eligible Ivy League singles just like you.... You must sign up with a friend of the opposite sex to ensure an even number of daters" (March 2006 newsletter of the Yale Club of New York City). Wrong in so many ways, like the Yale Visa card (which I must admit I occasionally want for the Harkness Tower photo).
Not half as wrong, however, as the very existence of the book Top of the Class: How Asian Parents Raise High Achievers, and How You Can Too, a review of which well-intentioned John Bordley thought Tom and I would find interesting...with ill results. I question the credibility of authors who claim with 'egalitarian' spirit, "Every Asian American could have written this book; we were just the first ones." I doubt the Kim sisters are really so stupid as to take the "model minority" stereotype as a given fact, but they do in order to sell their money-making scheme. Most of the Asian-American students I knew weren't going anywhere fast and certainly couldn't write. And if I were willing to sell my soul and write such a book (in six months during my free time, no less!), it would argue tenets opposite to what the Kim sisters advocate (i.e. "encouraging children to pursue financially lucrative careers rather than 'whatever will make you happy'"). While co-author Jane Kim may have failed to achieve her dream of becoming a writer within just one year after graduation, her exemplary current job as a lawyer, her main qualification to write about Asian-American success, could easily suggest that she chickened out and sold her dreams for a money-making career...as she and her sister are doing now at the expense of untold numbers of American children.

I could rant forever, and I will later.

b/w

I finally figured out why I never wash my loads as "white" and "colors." No, it's not a socio-political statement. It's just that I hardly have any white clothes.

I've become so desperate for baigan bharta, which none of the Belgian Indian restaurants serve or know of even though it's a common dish in Indian, that I tried tonight for the second time in my life to cook eggplant. The first time I cooked an eggplant dish, it was so inedible that I started to feel ill, tossed out the meal, and cooked dinner anew.

My adventure tonight began with spearing the eggplant on a chopstick and roasting it over an open stove flame for seven minutes, as our kitchen has no roaster. I also mashed together my own garam masala, forgetting to roast it (not that I could). Halfway through the cooking process, I had gone from optimist to gloomy Gus, but the final result proved far more edible than expected--and decidedly hot.

funky sticker site

The Pope rocks out with an iPod nano.

babies schmabies

On the train from Zaventem Luchthaven to Mechelen, I got into a conversation with a tall German fellow living in Lyon, France, and regularly commuting 100 miles to Switzerland to work for Dupont. Occasionally, he travels to one of Dupont's largest facilities in the world--in Mechelen!

Somehow we got to talking about the state of planet. Thinking of the conversation I'd had with a woman I'd met on the train to New Haven, I commented on how puzzled I was by high school friends who were impatient to have five or more children, to which he replied that Europe was facing a baby deficit that could have severe economic consequences.

The economy is absolutely important, but it nevertheless leaves me frustrated and angry that Europe is trying to promote a new baby boom. Having a mother or father around full time is important, and when women are in the workplace, parents can't take care of that many children well. More importantly, there are uncounted numbers of unwanted children in the world. And European governments are spending their budgets on encouraging people to have babies who will consume the food that starving children and orphans will never have.

Mother earth does not need more people. Every 20 minutes, the human population grows by about 3,000. The current global population of 6 billion people exceeds the earth's capacity to sustain present standards of living by about 30%. We're going to have much larger problems on our hands than European policy revisions in a couple of decades.

I am afraid sometimes for the future in which I'm trying to carry out my plans. Will any of my hopes be relevant or practicable by then?

ceci n'est pas une pipe bombe

MODED!

Band Sticker on Bike Prompts Bomb Scare. Paranoia is a terrible thing.

Antwerpen has everything. The largest Jainist temple outside India is in outlying Wilrijk on Laarstraat.

bikes

Bruno brought my baby home today good as brand-spanking new. There are no words to describe the joy of being reunited with my other half.

Interesting adjunct to urban spelunking photography: abandoned bikes in new york.