Its 39° F outside on October 17, 2004 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. One year ago, in Austin, Texas, the low temperature was 63 with a high of 83. That is a middling temperature for October, on the low side. Halloween hit 90° (admittedly a record high). Today I saw snow flurries, something I saw once this past winter in Austin. I'm really in for it this year.
Lunch Break, Day Three at Augeo Affinity Marketing, Saint Paul, Minnesota — Things are going well at the new job. We've been in Minnesota about 7 weeks now, though I didn't re-start the job hunt in earnest till several weeks after we moved. Thus it was with some surprise that I received about phone calls and e-mails from about a dozen recruiters starting two weeks ago, and even more surprising when I received two excellent job offers last week. What a bounty to get two offers in the tech industry in this day and age!
Brief post... first one from the job I started today at Augeo Affinity Marketing. Title: Data Analyst/Programmer. More details later.
It was declared today that Russian President Vladimir Putin has at last expressed his approval of the Kyoto Protocol on Global Climage Change. If he can get this through the Duma for ratification, then the Protocol will become international law despite the US's lack of ratification. But what is really going on? And how will it effect the U.S.?
As a teenager — and perhaps beyond — I thought I might achieve some great thing in this world. I wished for recognition, aspired for greatness and some exalted place, to strive with Tennyson's gods...
Death closes all: but something ere the end
Some work of noble note, may yet be done
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.
I've been reading a great deal about ecology and conservation biology lately, and thus found the article Ecolonomics: Valuing Forests (dead link removed; SF 2025) quite timely. Of course it is an intriguing article whether or not one has been reading up on the subject, and I recommend it even more to those who haven't been doing so.
Thank God that the U.N. Security Council has chosen to act on the Darfur crisis. The internal conflict has been resolved — with Algeria, China, Pakistan, and Russia abstaining — and specific sanctions, investigations, and new legal obligations have now been imposed on Sudan. Its too bad we can't get this done elsewhere in the world, as Darfur is really just the current poster child of global conflict.
As an active Bahá'í on campus in the mid-to-late 90's, I often found myself engaged in intriguing but sometimes pointless discussions with various Christians. The Bahá'í Faith, progressing from an Islamic milieu, shares a good deal of religious worldview with that faith. Thus in "A note on Muslim-Christian dialogue" one could almost directly substitute the Bahá'í Faith for Islam.
Though historically I've not read many blogs, I've been poking around looking for good news sources to add to my news feeds in the new Mozilla Firefox pr1. My slumming has turned an interesting piece on the future of cold fusion over at Popular Science.
Just as a negotiated-peace began to take hold in southern Sudan, a new crisis arose in the western Darfur region this past winter and spring. Half a year after escalation of the atrocities, estimates of the dead range from 30,000 to 50,000, and well over a million people have been internally or externally displaced. Men and boys have been systematically murdered; worse yet, a conscious effort at genocide has once again turned to mass rape of the remaining women. International response has been harsh yet guarded, and far too slow. We must push our political leaders to appropriate action under international law. [This editorial is specifically focused on religious and interfaith communities].
