Monday, May 24, 2004
108546710939351029:: 11:00 PM

Wow. This new blogger interface is very um... Fischer-Price. Odd. Anyhow, the last couple weeks have been interesting. I was in Budapest with Lucille on the weekend that Hungary joined the European Union, and of course in Vienna for CHI2004. I got to play chess at the public baths, ride the most organized subway system in the world and eat a piece of meat that was bigger than my head.

Despite such joys I was glad to get back to Seattle, and the last couple weeks have been pretty nice. Besides amazing weather and being randomly recruited to row a dragonboat, I've been noticing more of my environment. Two weeks ago a crow flew beside my bus only inches from the glass while matching the speed of the bus perfectly. It did this for nearly a minute, and during that minute I got a close up view of a live bird in flight. It's tucked in legs... the instinctual oscillation between a sturdy flap and a smooth glide... the eddies in its flight feathers and the activity of its eyes and head. It was like seeing a fish in an aquarium, except *I* was in the box, and the fish was floating in air.

Last week was interesting as well. Among other things, I attended a Ray Kurzweil talk. His predictions are compeling, though not always scientific. He speaks with a mix of intelligence, excitement and hope that inspires one to envision and work toward an incredible future. It's all a bit heady, and a little too much to mentally process in one sitting. The talk also came at an interesting time, since that very morning, I was creating a taxonomy for all philosophies of the world. For a bit I thought I had discovered a pretty tidy way to have them all fit into a larger framework, but after the Kurzweil talk I had to reset those notions.

Anyhow, other interesting things happened, but once-a-month bloggers must abbreviate.