Stapleton

As I you know, I am am intrigued with the invisible, with thoughts and concepts that shape our lives but are so fundamental that they are completely invisible.

This page week, I have been attending board meetings for the Computer Society in an "Executive Conference Center" outside of Denver. The center was a decent but not great hotel located in a land of strip malls and low industrial buildings. Many of the attendees complained that they were far from downtown and had none of the amenities that accompany such trips: a quaint shopping area, intriguing stores, good restaurants a famous golf course. Across the street was a massive strip mall, but a WalMart is not yet an intriguing store nor is a Long John SIlver's a decent seafood place.

No one stopped to ask the obvious question. "Why is this hotel in the middle of a strip mall?" It was too tempting to complain. The strange pattern of the roadway. The large patch of flat ground behind the mall. The collection of fuel tanks a block or two away. The tall tower easily seen from the rooms with southern exposure. We were at Stapleton Airport. Denver's old airport which was closed 15 years ago.

The terminal had been torn down. The runways converted to strip malls and subdivisions. The airport hotels, which are rarely institutions of the highest quality, had been converted into Executive Conference Centers. The price was good because the the original investment had been recouped when the building was an airport hotel. The place was not that nice for the same reason. It had once been an airport hotel. It took a careful eye to see the pattern. Apparently most eyes did not.

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I will be posting links to your blogs. If you have one that you would like posted, please let me know.
DAG

Marni Karlin's Blog

Marni is a well established member of our community. As a freshman, in a land now far away, she helped me organize a special course on artistic censorship with the Bush I Director of the National Endowment for the Arts. (A controversial figure, he was eventually fired by the Bush Chief of Staff.)

Marni has since gone to law school (University of Chicago but not with Obama) and now works for a Senate Committee. Along the way she attended Ecole Cordon Bleu and started a blog on food. I think you will find it intriguing and we hope that she starts making making new contributions again.

Thoughts About Oil

The failure of the recent attempt to cap the BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico and the resultant accusations of blame has led me to think about how presidents deal with disasters. I wanted to find something in the distant near past to compare and went searching for Lyndon Johnson's response to the 1967 fire in Apollo 1. The result was surprising. Johson's entire remarks, released by his office and never spoken, were:

"THREE valiant young men have given their lives in the Nation’s service. We mourn this great loss. Our hearts go out to their families." 27 January 1967.

It was never mentioned at a Presidential press conference, never appeared in a bigger presidential speech. A quick framework analysis suggests that we considered this aspect of the space program in context that was quite different from the one that we use for the shuttles. It is also a framework from the one that we use for oil production and protecting the environment. (Remember both the start of Earth Day and the 1973/79 oil shocks are still in the future.) If you want a fuller sense of how Johnson character you can read his speech to the wonders at one of the NASA facilities, which was given at the end of 1967. Again, a simple framework analysis will show that we have a very different view of the connection between the government and technology.

Anyone have pre-1967 example of a president taking responsibility for a natural disaster or technological failure?

I hope that you had a good weekend. I saw a couple of the Memorial Day events and got a bit too much sun, though not enough to do any real damage.

DAG

The Known World

I think that all of you know that I write a column for a professional magazine that is called "The Known World." The publisher has just released the blog to support the podcasts. It is at www.computer.org/theknownworld. You will find that it is much like the podcasts that you have heard in class.

DAG

Building the Community

You will see that I have added a new Gizmo on the right for other Blogs. I am very interesting in keeping a collection of your writings and comments. At the moment, it has one entry, that of Jake Melville. Melville is in South Korea at the moment teaching English. It is, of course, a tense time on the peninsula. We hope that peace prevails not only for his sake alone but for all the residents of the region. No one needs a conflict.

I have been reading your letters and blogs from near and far for many years. I appreciate them not because they are profound, as profundity is difficult to achieve, but because they are honest. After a few postings that are filled with the excitement of a new country or a new job, they tend to stall as you look for something important to say. After some interval, long or short, when you realize that importance is oversold, you start looking for what is interesting, what is engaging, what is the part of the world that lives in you. A Thanksgiving in Siberia. A baby in California. An Internship in DC that is pretending to be a job. A store in Brooklyn that is searching for a market. All of these are good stories and all are welcome here.

The Ceremonies of Email

I spent much of the weekend sitting in ceremonies and emailing. That seems to be the tradition of modern ceremonies. We go to the events to experience them with our friends, even if we are located in different parts of the venue. I published an essay about this phenomena two years ago. I suppose that the only change has been an increased demand on bandwidth. I noticed that on the big Sunday ceremony, emails sometimes required 20 minutes to leave the outbox.

Greetings & Graduation

It is graduation season, a time of celebration for students and a period of sheer bliss for parents, who revel in the realization that their parenting theories worked. I approach the season with mixed feelings, as I will not be teaching for a full year. I'm taking a year away from the classroom to write and do the sort of scholarship that professors do.

Yesterday, was the Elliott School ceremony. Instead of spending the evening milling on the second floor and practicing their networking skills, a small group of this years graduates gathered in my office and talked about words and speeches, Mozart arias and the Dave Matthews Band. Graduation is on Sunday. A new life begins on Monday. We will see how things unfold.

For those of you who never experienced the Mozart/Dave Matthews lecture, you can find an article about it here.

DAG