A few quick things....

First, as always, a picture of Henry looking cute.


Next, a picture of the three of us.

This was taken at a Luau for the University, to celebrate a recent accreditation victory. The food, as at all events in Qatar, was bountiful, and we had a great time. It was outside by a pool area, which is why I'm sweating like Mike Tyson at a spelling bee.

Check these out!

These are from a company called Sanük, a surfer company. The idea is these are sandals, but more substantial. They are, simply put, the most comfortable pair of shoes I have ever owned, and they look like old man slippers when I wear them. The other issue is that they are surprisingly warm. Long story short, I think I have my new travel shoes, so I can take them off at the airport easily.

Side note: One of my biggest fears is that someone will figure out how to hijack a plane with a pair of pants, and they'll get banned like shoes, lighters, and bottled water. Then we'll all have to sit on the plane wearing government issue disposable paper pants. Given how everything else works in air travel, what do you bet they itch?

Fax machine musing.
I ran across something on the internet yesterday where a boss basically yelled at a worker for having a stack of papers that the boss told the worker to fax. I'd think it was untrue, except this also happened to my friend Mike. He basically had a row with a woman over the phone because the originals weren't coming out of her fax machine.

The thing I find so great about this is that the central idea the people have, namely that paper can be teleported, is so very odd that if you try to make it part of a consistent worldview, it starts to make your brain hurt. First, you have to assume that tele-transportation is possible¹ and that there are two categories of objects: those that can be teleported (like paper) and those that can't (like people, else we'd be in Star Trek land). Take a minute and try to figure out what the rules would be for this, and you'll see where the brain injury starts. The division can't be based on weight, as there are obviously things you'd like to move that weight less than a sheet of paper (like micrograms of drugs into the blood stream), but for which we don't use Super-Teleporter-Fax technology, so obviously that can't be the divider. It can't be based on size, for the same reason. It can't be based on 18th century vitalism² because paper is mostly cellulose but ink is mostly oil.

So effectively you're left with the idea that paper and only paper can be teleported, which makes me smile every time I think of it.


1) Suck it, Werner Heisenberg! (Someone will mention the Popular Mechanics article on quantum transportation. Photons don't have mass. Not the same problem.)
2) The idea that things which come from natural sources, like bone, have a fundamentally different something than things which don't come from organic sources, like a rock. This was disproven by the synthesis of urea, which created a natural product from unnatural sources and heralded the birth of organic chemistry.