How do you distinguish terrorism from mayhem? The cynic's answer is: when it affects you. This affected me. I might be thousands of miles awy, but I might as well have been on Frederick Street. This isn't the same as the coup - in the coup, some people got caught in the crossfire, but for most people they could get out of the way. It isn't gang warfare with innocents caught in the crossfire. It isn't even the same as throwing a grenade into a police car. This is different - the targets were just people - the watch lady outside Maraj. It wasn't strangers - thiw was real. It doesn't matter who the people were - I didn't recognise the names, but it could just as well have been names I recognised. It wasn't foreigners. It was Trinis.

There's no one to focus your anger on. There is no al Qaeda, no Jamaat to hate... Without a single focus you feel like you could strike out an anyone. Not strike in a physical sense, of course, but strike nonetheless. It's hard to have such nebulous anger - how do you focus your anger if you don't even know whether this was an assault on society or a prank.

In the grand scale of things this was trivial. No deaths yet, two seriously injured who still have the challenge of surviving the medical system. Fourteen injured, so most reports are saying. But it's such a small place. It's equivalent to 5-600 seriously injured people if it were the US. It's a small place, it's not the type of place that things like this should happen. If someone had blown up a pipeline crossing the VM I would have been less surprised - hitting Trinidad to hurt the US has strategic value. Hitting innocent people in Trinidad, hitting random Trinidadians - well, it's terrorism, I suppose. It just didn't make sense to me before. Now it does. We need familiar concepts upon which to build knowledge. Frederick and Queen Street, Maraj Jewellers, the lady selling watches (or at least the display of watches) - these things are real, far more real than the stuff that surrounds me here, exiled in a foreign country...

The idea of job hunting is getting closer. Jobs for Fall 2006 are appearing on The Chronicle. It's a little scary - on one hand, I don't feel prepared enough, on the other, I hate the fact that I have to thro wmy hat in the ring now for jobs that won't become reality for over a year. Sometimes I think that the fear of success is as great as the fear of failure - not only is there the fear that you won't get a job, there's the fear that you will accept the wrong job, and then, after you have accepted it, a much better job will come along.

There's still a part of me that would rather postdoc than take a real job. Take another year or two after this one and try to find something that will allow you to dive full-time into research. The truth is, not only am I too old for that, but I don't want to drag Linz to another town for 1 or 2 more years, only to have to relocate again. She needs stability if she is going to figure out what she is going to do with her life. Although I joke that she can be employed anywhere that there are people, if we follow my job opportunities hers will be more limited. Life, eh?

It never rains but it pours. So they say, so I seem to live. And since I am up past my bedtime with far too much work still undone - well, I will blog. Maybe this time I will get the hang of it and I will actually get into the habit. Maybe, but I suspect that's highly unlikely. One can always hope, of course.

They say that the way to your blog noticed is to develop some topic which is important to you, and become the place that people come for news about the topic. That idea would work well for people with one or three good obsessive interests, but for a dabbler like me I doubt it wouild get anywhere. What truly fascinates me? Knowledge, history, politics and community ecology. Of those, only in the latter area can I claim any level of expert knowledge. And sadly, that "expert knowledge" has me convinced that I know basically nothing. Oh well. Obviously, if I have a sense of how little I know I have the beginning of wisdom (with regards to that one area). But the "beginnings" of wisdom are to true wisdom what a single hair is to a wig factory.

So now you must blog. Write about nothing and nothingness, about the experience of attending the Fourth of July fireworks show in Norman. I found myself thinking about battlefields, mortars and shelling. I wondered what it would have been like to sit in your village and watch the front lines light up. I suppose if you were secure in your knowledge that the fighting was not going to come your way you could sit there and enjoy the show. But who is ever really sure enough about where battle will go. I was reminded of last year's footage of the first siege of Falluja, the one that the Americans were forced to lift. Sure, they came back a few months later and levelled the city. That story reminds me of Grozny...

Apologies to my legion of expectant fans, but this is not actually a blog posting, despite the fact that it looks much like one. It is simply a post to update the date on the blog. After all, it's been almost 3 months since I last updated this thing.

While I could blame that lapse on a number of things if I so chose, I can't say I have a good reason for not blogging. Nor do I have a reason for blogging. The resignation of Sandra Day O'Connor might be reason to blog, the to-be-hoped-for downfall of Karl Rove...but that's all been done before. I could complain about Tom Cruise. Yep, that would be a good one. I suppose you could say that's what happens when you realise that you have spent $360,000 to hear about "Xenu", the galactic tyrant who stacked hundreds of billions of his frozen victims around Earth's volcanoes 75 million years ago before blowing them up with hydrogen bombs and brainwashing them with a "three-D, super colossal motion picture for 36 days" (from the Wikipedia article). It was funny, in a sense, to realise that I had talked to that very same person, in different guises, so many times in bars. It was such a typical example of the fanatic...the person convinced that they have "hidden knowledge" ("You don't know about psychology Matt, I know about psychology"). Hidden knowledge is, of course, not available to use mere mortals. That's why you have to pay so much money to get it.

Perhaps that is why I am so attracted to the epistemology of science - because the tools for knowing are out in the open. If someone says X is the case, they have to back it up with evidence. Is science the only way of knowing? No. But it is one of the few ways of being certain (or rather, of being able to specify your uncertainty, which is much more interesting.

What have I done to deserve this? How did I end up with a link on my page to a creationist web site? That's what you get for selling your soul to advertise, huh? Hmm - that's probably how I end up with ads like that - "selling your soul"?

I really am curious what would bring me such a link. I don't see anything on my page which would bring me one or the other. I have ads about blogs, makes sense since I mostly write about the idea of writing a blog. Maybe that's why no one reads this thing. Yeah - no one reads this thig because they don't know it exits, I don't post often enough and I have nothing interesting to say. Where my ads go is another issue altogether.

Watching Kos on C-SPAN (online archive) - really interesting to hear him talk...the origins or Daily Kos, his politics and the world of blogging.

It's nice to flesh out your idea of the person whose site you read every day. There is some reassurance in his age - he's a year younger than me (he looks even youner than that). Good to see one's own generation making an impact, but also good to know that he isn't as young as he looks. He's making a decent living off the web site, but not a celebrity lifestyle. That has some appeal.

Which gets back to the issue of age. I was really bothered a couple days ago when I realised that I have come to the point where my options are no longer infinite. I am well on my way to being what I will be "when I grow up". I would like to have children sometime in the next few years, and that means that any travelling I want to do would have to happen before that. But more importantly, I can't just pack up and go around the world. Not only do I not have the money...there are the "career" considerations as well. To get anywhere with my desire to be an academic I need to find a tenure-track job, and then stick with it. As is I have more chance of (some day) having summers off than I would in most other fields (albeit, summers to do research) but it isn't the same as when you were a student. Somehow I have never really let go of the idea of getting your holidays off - I have never adapted to a "real world" in which you have a few weeks of holdidays a year to play with. Teaching four days a week weighs on me - a "real" job might ask more of your time, but if you needed a week off for some reason, you could take that week off. Teaching puts you in a position of being indispensible (for the course of the semester) while being highly dispensible in the grand scheme of things.

Saw a talk on Climate Change earlier this evening, and then checked back into Wikipedia to see the ongoing debate about whether it's real (or whether it's human-induced). It's amazing to see the right wing demand levels of accuracy from climate science (or other science which does not meet their narrow goals) - standards that they don't ask from drug companies (factoring in for the fundamentally different levels of uncertainty associated with the two measurements).

I got the survey analysed for Gordon. It felt really good to have it in, and done, bright and early on the morning it was due. If only I wasn't actually behind on a whole lot of other stuff...

I suppose I should "release" this site - tell Linz and Carol about it. At least I will get some readership, get some traffic to report on my page counter.

Carol pointed out an interesting site Google-Watch which talkins about the dangers of Google and Gmail. I suppose I have never assumed that my email was all the provate anyway, so if the government (whichever government) can get access to my mail, how different is it compared to the fact that the university can get access to my mail. I think privacy is important, I really do wish that there was some way I could safeguard privacy, but I have never assumed much privacy really exists. I'm not quite one of those "if you're not breaking the law you have nothing to worry about" people - there's a lot worth hiding that isn't illegal. I simply assume that privacy doesn't exist, and if you don't want the world knowing about something you shouldn't put it in writing...preferably don't say it out loud either. Of course you could post it on your blog - or mine at least, since no-one reads what I post here :)

Ok, just minutes past, I feel the need to post again. About unifying theories. Yes, that's what has been on my mind. I get the impression that people feel that Hubbell's Unified Neutral Theory isn't worth all that much. Of course, as I saw it, it wasn't meant to answer "the question", it was meant to be a beginning. It was a useful bit of information, but I feel like he was on the wrong track. A neutral theory is bound to be wrong. True, it can be helpful. It presents a null hypothesis (of neutrality) - to prove an interaction you have to disprove neutrality. The fact that a lot can be explained by a neutral theory is interesting, but I don't think it deserves to be called a "unified" theory.

It all comes from something I saw on PBS the other day - about the search for a unified theory in physics. It makes you wonder whether there is - or can be - a unifying theory in ecology. So much changes as you move from one scale to another - Rosenzweig's famous species-area curve figure shows that quite well. But there must be common drivers acting across scales. There is no one point where one scale ends and the other one starts. I think...

So everyone has a blog now - Linz, Carol, Denise. And I am lagging, this thing two months out of date.

Spring Break. Yep. Nothing too exciting there - a chance to do nothing all day and then worry about the fact that i have done nothing. Pretty exciting. But anyway, it's Wednesday now, so I do need to get going, get things done. I expect that I will be trying to get a hundred things done on Sunday night (as usual). Oh well. It's been good to have the chance to relax a bit.

Since everyone else is blogging I feel the need to tell them about this page. It wasn't a "secret" in the first place - if anything, I was a tad embarrassed to tell people how I was wasting my time. That and that fact that it was so underwhelming... How much have I posted this far? Not an awful lot. But I still feel self-conscious about it. No one knows this site exists, no one reads it. So I have nothing to worry about. If I am writing for an audience of zero, or if I am writing for an audience of total strangers, it's relatively easy to write. Writing with the knowledge that people you know are likely to read it - that's a tad more daunting.

Anyway, it's a post. Just thoughts, not something conversational and informative.

All the more reason to be upset with the right wing. Can't these people ever be honest? At Dailykos the comments from the usual liars - about how they didn't know about the fact that Markos was consulting for the Dean campaign. Ok, so maybe it is totally possible that these ultra right-wingers didn't know - after all, if they ever stepped outside of their carefully insulated worlds they might be forced to face the truth about what's going on in the world. Is it any surprise that they didn't know what was posted at Dailykos if they never visited the site? Does it even matter what they knew or didn't know about matters that almost certainly didn't interest them in the least?

It's a little like the Lewinsky scandal - the people who were most upset at the "lies" were people like my roommate who hated Clinton's guts to begin with. Yeah, sure, you were so shocked and hurt...but you believed that he was responsible for the death of Vince Foster! Whatever...

Anyway, all this crap about nothing. The right wing led by the WSJ spews lies. We should be used to that. From the deserter on down...

Always something hopeful - He's Running. Dean is running for DNC Chair. Now, if only he had gotten the nod for a Presdential campaign. On the other hand, he couldn't have done worse that Kerry did - losing is losing, at least in an election. It doesn't matter than Gore won, he still lost.

I grew up on elections that were less than fair. The PNM government in Trinidad probably rigged the elections to some extent, and also gerrymandered their way into a permanent majority. It took a total meltdown to get rid of them (and even now they keep coming back, up to their old tricks - or new ones, like using Islamist extremists for voter suppression). How long will the right-wing extremists dominate the US elections?

While little upsets me more than the right-wing noise machine, the internecine fighting by the Democrats is pretty up there too. Sure, the party establishment has every reason to fear the Reform movement in the party, but why give ammunition to the other side?

Over at Daily Kos, this piece by Markos, Zephyr's miscalculation makes a very interesting read. I my not like everyone over there, but I feel a real sense of admiration for Markos himself. Odd for someone you know only by his writing - it almost seems that you should have news coverage on a person, some sense of their persona. But reading their posts gives a lot of insight into character.

So I figured out how the whole AdSense thing works. Interesting. It turns out that I am not supposed to click on ads on my own page, but they didn't acknowledge my own clicks anyway. Which is unfortunate, since I did click through with good intentions and spent a lot of time at the Foreign Policy journal website. I didn't subscribe, I only read the free content, but still - I have always been tempted by that Journal...was looking at it just a few days ago at Borders.

So the ads keep changing. Ok, that makes sense.

I had an ad for a "ribbon" site. "Support the Troops" magnets, that kinda site. Reminds me of the thing that irks me these days. Every time I see an SUV with one of those magnets I think "liar!" If you actually did support them, you wouldn't have bought an SUV. Pick-up trucks are marginal - they are actual working vehicles for some people...you can't judge just on a glance. But SUVs are different. The majority of them are not working vehicles, especially in urban areas.

One of the major sources of funding for Islamists is donations from Saudis and other wealthy Arab countries. I think that idea is pretty well established. Income in these countries is tightly linked to oil prices. High consumption means high prices, so SUVs put money directly into the pockets of people who financially support those who wage war against the US. I'm not saying it only supports them - after all, Trinidad benefits a lot too. Nonetheless, if you "Support the Troops", then you should oppose high oil prices. If you drive an SUV your actions actually "Oppose the Troops". Hence, these people are liars. It makes matters even worse when you see them speed past you on the highway, doing 80-90 mph. Someone might be in the position where they bought this vehicle before the war, or they need their pick-up for work. But then they should keep their speed down. It isn't that difficult to keep within the speed limit - though frankly, if they really cared they would never get close to the speed limit.

So I tried Google AdSense. I was amazed at the ads I got though - pro-military. Amazing. I suppose the longest post here was dedicated to Remembrance Day. It's funny how a little thing like that can bias the way the engine reads the blog. Anyway, now all I need is some readers, right? I am a little ambivalent about the idea of being read though - I have posted things that are remarkably personal here. But that's what blogging is all about - publicly posting the minutiae of your life, often under a psuedonym, with the assumption that either no-one you know will read it, or that only people you know will read it. And then it gets you fired like that woman from Washington who posted here sexual conquests.

I wonder if I am going to sustain this. I wonder if anyone will read it. I shall see, I suppose. Google says they'll drop your ads after two months if no-one clicks through. I don't understand the whole idea of paying per click - it seems like it would be worth your while simply to clip through on your own site, over and over. Do they rule out multiple clicks in a single session? They should, I would guess. Maybe I will bother to find out sometime. But isn't the point of blogging to make random prouncements which you never follow up? Isn't all punditry about speculation instead of data collection?

So I'll actually try using this the way it's supposed to be used. Gotta give it a try some day.

Semester is about to start. Just a few more days and then it's back to teaching. I'm looking forward to the new semester, but I am not sure if my heart is really in it at this moment. Too much has happened over this Christmas break.

Things got off to a great start with the tsunami, of course. Unspeakable, but also incomprehensible. I can't fathom destruction on that scale - 160,000 people is just too big a number for me to wrap my mind around. On one hand you wonder why the media keeps showing the pictures, day after day, and then you realise that things are anything but "over". This is just the start, the dead are the ones who don't have to worry any more. It's not just a matter of feeding people for a while, it's a matter of re-building towns and cities, re-building lives. So much gone so quickly. I keep trying to put it in perspective - what would it mean if it had happened in Trinidad - but the truth is, the settlement patterns in Trinidad wouild mean that the bulk of the population would not have been exposed to the worst of the waves. Of course there is always Tobago - if you think about what it would have done to Tobago...I suppose there would be very little left there.

And then Shah died. A death in the family is always a big deal, but all the more so when it's someone you know pretty well, someone you like. And I suppose it matters when he is the senior person on both sides of the family. Well, both of my father's sides of the family, anyway. He was 85, but was doing well, last I saw him. There was something indestructible about him. I always admired that he got married for the first time after age 60 and yet he still lived to see his children grown and into (if not out of) university. He was not everyone's favourite in the family, but I did admire him, and he will be missed.

Now the latest jolt is that Winston was shot. I don't know how to wrap my mind around that one. It isn't a surprise - the way crime is in Trinidad it's only a matter of time before a business is robbed. But it's far too close to home. I have been there, in the store, many times. He's ok, apparently. It just leaves me speechless. Not good if you are trying to write about something. But speechless I am.

How do you blog when you have nothing to say? Well...it doesn't stop most people.

No one reads this, and I suspect that very few people will ever lay eyes on this page. So why do I bother? Well, to be honest, I don't. I write something once every few month, using the theory that I don't write until I have something to say.

By that standard I should not be writing. It makes me wonder what the threshold should be for me to write, and if I were to write what it would be that I would write about.

And there you have it. A post about nothing. Trivial and inconsequential - just like what all the other bloggers write.

Remembrance Day - Veterans' Day - Armistace Day

Just remembering the service of my relatives who, as it so happened, were on the other side of WWI & II. Couple these with my mother's stories of being bombed and living through WWII in Germany - and you can see, I think, how I end up profoundly anti-war.

Maternal grandfather - served in WWI, Civil defense WWII; refused to serve without a uniform when handed an armband and a rifle at the end of WWII.

Maternal Uncle - Trained paratrooper, last NCO in a unit of 40-year-olds on the Russian front - led his unit to surrender to the Americans (desertion, but kept his men out of Soviet prison camps) .

Maternal great-uncle - WWII officer, drowned when the Wilhelm Gustloff (with thousands of refugees) was torpedoed by the Russians.

Maternal great-uncle - WWII soldier, spend many years in Soviet POW camp .

Maternal grandmother's cousins - two sons died in WWI; third son (with heart condition) was pronounced fit in 1945, sent to front, promptly died on heart attack; daughter's husband, WWI pilot with Red Baron, commanded airfield in WWII - when the Americans released him from POW camp the Russians promptly arrested him, sent him to Siberia.

Another set of my grandmother's cousins - one of them had his face blown off by a mine in WWI, was one of the early successes in reconstructive surgery.

Great-grandfather - soldier in WWI; after he was conscripted, his family lost not only his income, but also company housing (he was a mining engineer).

Great-great grandfather was a musician (looks like a bugle in the one picture of him I have) in the Prussian (?) army. Don't know any stories of his service ~1860s - ?

I'm sure some of my maternal grandfather's 6 brothers were soldiers in one of the wars, but I don't know - never thought about it. Must find that out...

Just finished reading Johann Hari's interview with the former left-winger turned neocon supporter Christopher Hitchens. And some of the responses. It really got me thinking about the left, the right, and just about anyone else's moral clarity and logical consistency. After all, we all do it - we excuse/overlook the misdeeds of those we support while taking our opponents to task for their past actions. Yet while no one is 100% good, we are willing to overlook one side and not the other.

So do we strive for consistency - and end up with ideological purity, or do we try to be reasonable and end up with moral relativity?